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I love cloudy days. And not for the reasons one might think.
Where I live it's always sunny, never a spot in the sky. A clean, deep blue emptiness, only disturbed by the ever shining, fiery sun.
Once a year, if you're lucky twice, there's a day when light won't bathe every street, and when everything above our heads is white and infinite.
Those are the days i love the most, for those are the days when strange creatures finally appear.
A thin layer of mist surrounds the streets. It's not made, as most would believe, of condensed water and coldness, but of something different. It's what comes from afar, from places humans can't walk to and can only see, occasionally, in dreams. There are voices inside it, and if you get close enough, hands that pull hair and make you trip over. Sight ends with your nose, so that you can never see what's coming.
But I know what comes through the white sheets in the air, and it's not something your bed covers can protect you from. That's what makes it fun though.
As a detective, sometimes human cases can end up being boring, plain, repetitive, mundane. So used to the normalcy of earthly life, I usually find myself searching for something different, something upsetting or, in the best cases, exciting.
And yes, even holistic investigation can become absolutely dull. Missing people, missing animals, missing objects; unusual sounds inside the walls or paintings that appear and disappear; a strange visitor or your dead grandmother that comes for dinner from time to time. It all turns into the same old story. Under the clean blue sky, that pattern of slow life was consuming me from the insides.
But that day we woke up to a perfect, white light and a strange summer breeze that smelled of popcorn. I was beyond excited.
Todd arrived to the office singing something from his old band back in college. It was a fun tune with some jazzy chords. He was happy, of course he was. Cloudy, cold days were so rare that when the time came for one to happen, we had to celebrate
“Love that song. Does it have a name?”
“No” he said smiling and sitting at his desk.
“Doesn't need to I suppose”
“No. You want some tea?”
“Sure, with extra sugar please”
“Of course!” he was beaming. How couldn't he? There was a buzz in our ears, electricity in the air that told us something big was coming. We just had to wait.
And then, the main door opened and I almost gasped. Holding myself back, I tried to see who it was. But to my surprise, and probably Todd's too, no one was there.
“What the hell…” he walked towards the entrance, which was completely empty.
And so it began.
I smiled and left my desk. Upon further inspection, we found some footprints that ended right on the waiting room. They had something similar to mud. I tried to touch it, but Todd snapped my hand off it.
“Is anyone here?” he said, looking around.
A sigh that came from one of the chairs, and after it a laugh. A shiver climbed up my back.
“So you really can't see me?” a voice said. It appeared to come from the place the footprints ended at. I looked at Todd, and we both had the exact same thought.
“Who are you?” Todd asked.
“This is the detective agency, right?”
“Holistic detective, yes” I corrected the voice, which, without wanting to assume anything, seemed to belong to a woman.
“Well that's exactly what I need”
“A case of unwanted invisibility” I said after we had sat down and served our tea. This truly belonged to a film. We saw as the lady picked up the cup and drank it. To our eyes, it was merely a floating cup, which wasn't necessarily the strangest thing.
“When did the symptoms start to appear?” Todd asked.
“This morning I'd say. Yesterday it was, well, normal”
Like a permanent reflection of a vampire in a mirror, her invisibility was complete and perfect. She didn't even have a shadow. Like her body had disappeared, and only consciousness and thought remained. Plato would definitely be satisfied. She was still material though. You could touch her and feel the warmth in her skin, the cracks in her voice.
“I'm sure it has to do with the clouds” I said.
“The clouds?” the lady asked.
“Why of course. What else could cause this?” it was evident. But maybe not for her. I always had to remind myself this whole cloud event was only known by Todd and me. Or, as he said, it was only known cause we were the ones to actually think about it. I guess he was right, but it didn't take away the real part of it. And the real part was that there was something hiding within the mist.
“What was your name again, miss?” Todd picked a file sheet and started filling it out.
“It's Farah”
“Great” he drank the remainings of his tea “well Farah, we'll get to it right now”
“Thank you so much, really”
“Miss Farah, what was the last thing you did last night, if I may ask?”
“I was home alone, watching a movie. Then I went to sleep. And this morning I-” she stopped, and I guess she was looking at herself, or trying to think of the words. It was not easy being invisible. “I woke up like this. My roommate must think he's gone crazy”. Todd laughed at the joke and served himself more tea.
She didn't seem that upset about the whole situation. She had been calm and fun this whole time, and I thanked her for that. Outside wind started to rise and the trees looked like creatures moving by themselves, with their hundreds of arms all dancing towards the sky. It was such a vision, their leaves each moving in a different direction, as if they wanted to fly away from the bark that grounded them. I wouldn't blame them. Sometimes life gets too old, too grey and heated. I also wanted to fly away from that city I didn't even belong to. But those were thoughts I tried to bury deep, and that cold weather might have been playing tricks on my head. I snapped out of it and concentrated on the case.
“When you walked in here, we noticed some dirt on the sole of your boots. Is there a reason for that?”
“A reason for my dirty mountain boots? I guess you can blame the mud” Todd laughed again but this didn't even raise a smile in me.
“This is serious. Any little piece, as unimportant as it may seem, could be valuable to our investigation”
“Where is the mud from? Where did you walk through?” Todd asked, finally contributing to the case.
“A place near my house. I took a shortcut. Apparently it rained last night so it was kind of wet. How is the mud related to this? It happened before”
“Everything is connected, miss Farah, don't forget that” I sipped from my cup and felt satisfied with my reply, but the tea was too hot and I burned the tip of my tongue. A part of me blamed the clouds, which made me realize how obsessed we had come to be with them.
“Why don't you tell us everything you've do since you went to bed till now?” inquired Todd, now more interested in the story.
“I already told you. I went to bed, woke up to this, and came here” she stopped again, to think, I assume, and talked again after a few cold seconds “although, now that I think about it there was something” Todd looked up from his cup.
“Something?”
She stuttered, trying to find the words “I don't know, I assumed it was my imagination but in retrospective… it seemed quite real”
“What was it”
Before she could say anything, a flicker in the light made everything turn darker, like the sun had stopped shining outside. The change of hues turned things darker and out of focus, yes, but it also brought a different shadow, one that wasn't here before. Farah's invisibility was gone.
“I think I should go” she said in a rush before storming out of the building.
“Wait, Farah” Todd ran after her. And I stood there, watching, hearing, feeling. Breathing in the chemicals in the air, trying to figure it out. What had she seen? I had to go out too. The answer I needed wasn't inside.
And so I did, and it was a decision that changed the whole direction of that case. Outside was Todd looking around, and no Farah to be seen. Could she have disappeared again? Or maybe she just ran very fast. Either way the street was deserted, not a single soul out. Which wasn't exactly unusual though. The sky was a vibrating white. Not the white from clouds tangled upon themselves, traveling the wide world. These, if anything at all, were not clouds. It was a complete whiteness, the lack of things, the disappearance of matter. Emptiness surrounded us and it could be the reason my head hurt so badly. Todd turned to me.
“What are we gonna do?”
“Well, first of all, find out what she saw, right?”
“But we don't even know where she saw it, where she lives, nothing at all. I didn't have time to file the files…”
“It's okay, we'll figure it out” I pressed my hand to his shoulder, and he shuddered underneath. His eyes were cold as the weather and I wondered if there was a connection there. But probably not. After all, Todd was one to always have some sort of sadness behind him. And it was totally normal, and we accepted it as it was. He couldn't be happy all the time, and sometimes I had the thought I could be the one who saved him, or helped him at least. That I was there for a reason, and the reason was him.
But enough of thinking and wondering. It was time for action, time to discover what was happening to our town and to Farah.
“We'll need to begin somewhere” he said, more calm and focused. I nodded and looked around. Then, as if they appeared out of nowhere, the same muddy footsteps we saw inside our office. They leaded to the road, and then to the wilderness in front of it. After that, there were a few houses, and then a whole neighborhood. So she must live there. I took Todd's hand and, saying nothing, I leaded the pace. He didn't flinch, as he used to do when we first met. And it was good. It meant trust.
"Tell me Todd, how many houses are after the forest?"
"I don't know, around five or six maybe? I don't usually go there"
"Right"
"Is she there?"
"I believe so"
He took his hand in a rush, as his phone was ringing.
"Yes?" some shouting was heard from the other line, and his face went paler than it usually was. He covered the microphone "it's Farah" he said in a whisper.
I jumped from excitement. We hadn't even crossed the road, and the leads were coming right to us.
"What is she saying?" he shushed me and kept listening. The intrigue was eating me alive. Meanwhile, the sky got much deeper, and the white from before was turning into a menacing gray.
"What do you mean shadow? Like a hooded person?" shadow? How could there be a shadow in such a sunless day?
When Todd seemed to talk again, he hung up in a rush and put the phone back in his pocket. He was breathless.
"What did she say?" it took a few seconds for him to think of the words.
"Apparently there's a shadow trying to- trap her?"
Without an inch of hesitation I walked through the empty road and into the woods, Todd following close behind. We had to put a solution to this once and for all.
In a person's life there's not many times where a jaw drops and the blood freezes, where time seems to stop and whatever you're looking at is causing all this disaster at once. For a holistic detective, there are indeed many times where this happens. For me, it's just my cup of tea. But what we were seeing right now, in that forest clearing, under the silver sky, was beyond anything I could imagine. Or perhaps I could actually imagine it, just not picture it in real life. This was real life, and it was all terrifying and absolutely fascinating at the same time.
What stood before us was but the culmination of all our night terrors, our deepest fears, our vivid anxieties. It was the nature of chaos. An idea so morbid it cut like razors. That's why I feel all three of us saw something different. Todd and me standing in the end of the clearing, Farah in the middle, just watching it float. For it floated. A grey jellyfish with a million eyes, empty inside except for a few body parts. Human body parts. Farah's eyes were clearer and brighter than the whole sky, and I could feel her tremble.
I tried to reach out to her, but my limbs were numb. The sight itself wasn't nearly as terrifying as the feeling it created. Perhaps the true horror laid in the situation, not in the object. And perhaps to snap out of it I had to think around the place, take my mind elsewhere, become someone new.
Apparently Todd discovered this earlier, and before I could set foot outside my disgust, he was already catching Farah and kicking the jellyfish. He had always been braver than me, after all.
"What the hell is that?" he yelled.
"I don't know" Farah yelled back.
I walked towards them as fast as I could, which wasn't much. But to my surprise, the jellyfish didn't seem to even notice. It just floated, ominous, a couple metres above us.
"We need to get out of here"
"Oh what a brilliant idea" Farah got out of Todd's grip and ran to the parking lot next to us, to a single blue car parked there. Seeing as we just stood watching her, she yelled: "what are you doing? Come on!"
And so we ran. And the jellyfish turned its million eyes towards us, and I felt a pressure in my skull. The sky was turning grey, dark grey, awful grey. It had never been like this before.
Inside Farah's car was cozy, smelled of pumpkins and chocolate. She started the engine. I looked up.
The world ended on cloudy days.
Whatever it was we knew about our world, it stopped for a day, letting other realities slip through. But it was a day. Tomorrow wouldn't be cloudy no more, strange creatures would lurk back to their dark homes and the sun would shine again.
But that was tomorrow, and there was a long day ahead of us still.
Todd, sitting in the front with Farah, turned on the radio. It was an old-fashioned one, so he searched for the channel for a few minutes. He finally picked an indie country type of music and turned the volume down.
"So what was that?" Farah asked. No one answered, so I supposed the question was directed at me.
"A creature from the clouds, probably"
"Like an angel?"
"That was no angel, miss. I'm not sure what it was. But it didn't seem evil"
"Well, it had the chance to kill me and didn't, so I guess it wasn't"
"Just what is it that you saw miss?"
"The hooded person. His face…" she made a noise of disgust. I decided to not ask further. A creature from the clouds, the reason of our fright.
"And what are we gonna do now? asked Todd.
I shrugged. How was I supposed to know? We had never encountered problems with creatures, only with humans and the strange ways of the universe. There was no manual for these things.
But I started thinking, tried to find a way to defeat the evil. Until I realized, there was no evil to defeat. This was harmless. Every year, clouds came and went. They brought mystery and eerie sights, but no harm to anyone.
"I think we should all just head home" I said.
"But what about the creature?"
"It's no problem. Let's focus on what happened to Farah this morning. That's something important to deal with"
They nodded. Todd turned the volume up, a funky tune playing. Farah sang along and it seemed like things were better, brighter.
I had never faced something like this. Never thought I would. And if it happened, I imagined a thousand scenarios different to this one. Scenarios where I fought, where I won, where I lost, where I found out about things, where I discovered secrets. And after all the fear I had felt, there was nothing waiting for me. Just Farah and Todd sitting in a couch at the office, listening to pop music and drinking tea.
It was probably around six pm and screeching, eerie noises came from the street. We knew better than to listen to them.
"My theory is there was some sort of electromagnetic stuff going on which made your visibility less… visible" said Todd.
"Is that even possible? I don't know physics but that seems, well, not too scientific"
"Believe me, it makes sense"
"Maybe it was some light trick. The clouds playing on us" I said.
"Maybe" Farah smiled, bobbing her head to the music.
At the end of the day, we didn't even solve Farah's case. She hadn't paid us anything though, so I guess it was fair. She did give us one hell of an adventure, which, though short, didn't lack in extreme emotions. At least now I could cross out 'facing a real life monster' from my bucket list, if it even was there in the first place.