text: Eyes of a woman crying. Eyes open, watery and frightened. Another survivor of the animal attacks. The other was not so lucky to bleed only tears. "All night long." she sniffled with a trembling voice from the crying. "How did you know it had left, if you never saw it?" Detective Mjölby wondered about another anomaly in her story. She consistently made no sense. She was trying to explain something and it was hard to explain. She just sobbed. Unable to get any more information from Mrs. Pearson, Detective Mjölby left her alone at his desk and went outside. The evening was very quiet, a warm sunset in a silent and long evening. The air was stale and thick but with some of the morning mists that had never quite faded from every swampy corner. Now frogs chirped merrily. How could this world be so full of rancor and vice? He had often wondered that. But this, some animal, all made man's sins seem different somehow. Detective Mjölby had always found humans to be the source of ultimate savagery and predation. Maybe nature had something to say about that. He returned to the lab and listened to Mark and Earl. The two men had similar voices and switched roles as dumbass and smartass as they discussed the topic of the stuff of nightmares while eating sandwiches. Mark put his down and lit a cigarette in the lab. Detective Mjölby cleared his throat and therefore announced himself. The toothpick that followed was the beginning of more chewing, more face-touching. It never ceased, but information could be useful now, even if it wasn't. Detective Mjölby was okay with such a contradiction. Nothing was making any sense anyway. “Well if they do have a lab with ebola, somebody somewhere is eventually living next door to it, relatively speaking, of course.” Mark pointed something out from earlier in their conversation. “For nerdom” Detective Mjölby raised a shot he had poured from Mark's desk and drank it and listened. “My notes?” Mark requested from under the bottle. “Man's best friend.” Earl brought up an image of a dog. "The hair of the dog that bit you?" "It is a dog. We know that. What else?" Detective Mjölby griped. “This is the one true story of the invisible dog as it actually happened in 2018. All the events in this story are real and all of the people and places are totally real. Invisible dogs are real.” Mark explained as they showed images of flowers, insects and reptiles and strands of DNA. This guy and his 'power point presentations'. “The” Earl frowned and pointed and said: “Daphavirus” and then explained: “It is a South American virus that used to only affect a certain species of firefly in South America, now modified to affect reptiles. They made a chameleon turn invisible.” "Who did?" Detective Mjölby was standing up. "Who do you think?" Mark chastised. "The military industrial complex did this. Made this thing. It is...a conspiracy." Earl added. "I have real detective work to do here. This thing kills some people and leaves others. That is a pattern, shows motive, human motive. What can I do with a pattern except follow it, use it to predict and stop this thing." Detective Mjölby told his clownish lab geeks. "Sorry boss. What you want us to tell you then?" Mark chewed food. “If all these people's lives connect at some intersecting moment, then where is the intersection? Where is the connection?” Detective Mjölby requested. He gestured to the place where the victims' remains were. “We have some shit, don't we?” Earl raised his glasses back up on his nose and lit his own smoke. “We have twelve victims of the invisible dog.” Detective Mjölby had counted them. “Was it ever mummy-wrapped like the invisible man?” Mark snickered. Detective Mjölby left them there and went outside into the night. In darkness it made no difference. When it cannot be seen. Detective Mjölby vowed to hunt the monster and stated: "Every dog has its day...and each day ends." Then there was the matter of the blood they found and tested: Sometimes the blood of the invisible dog is on the sidewalk, as a metaphor, and other times it is there literally. The sample was taken back to the Briar police department where a crude but effective homicide laboratory was full of specimens and evidence of the dog, already. The latest incident, on the county line north of Briar, the dog had killed again. It probably had rabies, now, as well. The invisible dog had become rabid. Detective Mjölby sat there brooding in the darkness. The clown had gotten released from the hospital and then the psychiatric ward had released him as well and now the police had signed off on him too. He was a free man. No more invisible dog leash trick, but he did plan to resume business. Elsewhere. Weeks went by and it was as if the dog had stopped its rampage entirely. While Detective Mjölby kept up the search, following up on every scrap and lead he slowly became convinced. He had not caught the dog because he had not really believed the stupendous weave of interwoven and sometimes contradictory-seeming facts about the dog. Now it was all making sense. The phone rang. He found himself talking to someone calling herself 'deep-throat' and willing to tell him what she knew if he would keep the information to himself, unless something should happen to her, of course. He agreed. Then over several more phonecalls throughout the night, Detective Mjölby learned all about the invisible dog. He even found out about the ephemeral addiction and why. If it didn't make sense of things he wouldn't believe what he was hearing. A man in the dog's body needed the ephemeral to stay in control and the dog was now addicted. The man had used a directory of ephemeral registration for the drug, but the dog had just followed its nose. This part of the pattern of killings gave Detective Mjölby a good clue how to catch it. The dog would come for a treat.