Douglysium

Ana Otto- A review of investigation 021 as a follow up to my previous investigation. The statement being reviewed regards an investigation for client Ray Mcnamara in regards to the disappearance of their dog Terra during a storm after their return from a vacation in Jamaica. The statement is by Ray Mcnamara and is being played via recording. The investigation is being led by private detective Ana Otto near REDACTED in the U.S.A, and the transcripts are written by Nancy Otto. The date is January 10th, 2015 and the recording is from January 7th, 2005. Content warning, this investigative statement contains themes of tornadoes, storms, acrophobia, aerophobia and the harming of animals that one may find disconcerting. Investigation begins.

Ray Mcnamara- Hello?  Oh right, this is a message not a call… Um… where do I start? I’m calling in to request your help in searching for my dog. I heard you investigate the paranormal and perform exorcisms and stuff. No one else can find my dog but even if you can’t save him I hope you can at least tell me where he went or maybe even where I could find him. 

Oh right, the statement. Well, I think it all started right before we started heading back. Right before we left for the airport for the trip back home we decided to relax by the seaside and in the distance hanging over the vast sea was this odd storm cloud. I could feel the chilling wind of the storm just by looking at it, even from where I sat in the warmth of the sun along the cliffside of the resort. The cloud was massive, bigger than any cloud I had ever seen, and it towered into the sky higher than any skyscraper. I didn’t really think about the cloud that much at the time outside of how big it was and after a couple of minutes of goofing off with some family members and staff we had to leave. Which meant we probably would have been gone by the time the storm hit anyway. 

But then when I went back into the hotel room we stayed at during the trip to get our dog… we brought our dog with us on vacation by the way. I’m not sure if I mentioned that but we brought our dog with us because we were worried about leaving him behind when the forecast predicted a lot of snow in the area we lived in. We were worried he’d get trapped somewhere alone. He’s a small black standard poodle by the way. I sent you some pictures in case you see him around and his name is Terra. A-anyway, when we went into the hotel room the poor thing was absolutely losing it. He was trying to hide under the couch and probably would have gotten himself stuck while hollering and howling the whole way. We managed to get him into his carrier pretty easily but it was all super weird. He was well-behaved the whole trip until that point, and in general he’s a relatively quiet dog. Well, he is EXTREMELY afraid of thunder, so at the time I just figured that his more sensitive dog hearing picked up some thunder from the storm cloud in the distance. I mean it did seem pretty big after all. 

As we took the shuttle back the cloud seemed to… speed up I guess? Like yeah, it was still far but even after driving for like two hours it looked like it was the exact same shape and the exact same distance from my specific location. As if it was tailing us or something. Anyway, we go through the airport and almost everything’s all hunky dory, nothing too weird to report there except for an encounter with an old man. He was a tiny pink skeleton of a man who walked with a cane and had clearly taken notice of the cute dog I had. He definitely wanted to do a little small talk and at the time the rest of my family was taking a bathroom break (I had already gone and someone needed to watch the dog along with all our stuff for a moment) so I figured I would humor him until everyone came back. He seemed quite spry for someone of his age with a cane and a lot of our small talk revolved around how he was learning to play piano. He said his name was Simon Fairchild and the name definitely sounded familiar. I couldn’t quite remember where I heard it from at the time but I looked it up later and found out that the Fairchilds had donated a crazy amount of money to the airport and their respective company we were passing through. They even helped design some of the airports. Oh, by the way, it was owned by Endless Blue or something. They are a relatively small company, so they’re no Delta or anything, and their symbol is a circle that resembles a cloud swirling over the ocean if you need help finding the company. 

Anyway, despite the fact that Simon was talking to me it was very obvious that he was more interested in Terra. I asked him if he wanted to pet the dog and the most gleeful look spread across his face, it made him look almost childish despite his age. “Oh, can I?” he said “I would absolutely adore it if I could.” He put his boney little fingers between the bars and reached through the cage in an attempt to pet the dog before I could say anything else but Terra absolutely lost it and pulled away as far as he could in that little cage. As he did I swear I could hear thunder in the distance but when I glanced outside the window the weird storm cloud hadn’t moved, staying at the exact same distance from me as it always had. Simon let out a little chuckle which snapped me out of my trance. “Afraid of a little thunder now are we?” he said. “Yeaaaah…” I trailed off as I slowly turned back to face him. “It’s really weird because he wasn’t always like this. Actually, when he was a puppy he would bark back at every boom of thunder he heard and then one day I came back from work while a storm raged. The storm was so bad that it almost completely blotted out the sun and the wind sounded like the howling of some great beast, and the traffic… Oh, the traffic was a nightmare. When I got home I found poor Terra whining and shaking under the couch while the rest of my family was trying to coax him out from under it.” 

Simon gave a response that was much more jubilant than I was expecting, “Well that’s just ADORABLE! Stuff like that always makes animals feel a lot more human now doesn’t it? Do you ever wonder why dogs like this cutie here are afraid of thunder?” “…I don’t know” I replied “He probably just realized that barking at it wasn’t making it go away…” This conversation was getting weird and I wanted out. Simon began to muse playfully “Hmmmm, I wonder if he thinks thunderclaps are the barks of a giant monster dog or something. Animals are so interesting, you never know what’s rattling around in their heads except for little glimpses into their world. Whether they truly love you and see you as a member of some sort of pack and family or if they just see you as a food dispenser is a fun question. Everyone questions if animals like dogs feel true love but I have yet to meet anyone who denies that they can feel fear. I remember I had a dog once, a cute little mutt, and I was surprised by the fact that just like every other human I’d seen, he even had nightmares. I mean if you CAN have nightmares you have to be truly afraid of SOMETHING right? In fact it means that you can become so afraid of something it affects your subconscious. That moment really opened my mind to possibilities I hadn’t considered and- ha ha, goodness me, I apologize if I’m boring you… mister…” “Mcnamara, but just Mcnamara’s fine… or Ray.” He let out another chuckle and I noticed my family was coming back. Simon seemed to notice the shift of my eyes or body language or something and said “Well, I’ll take my leave Ray. I hope you and your dog have a positively delightful flight. Pray that my piano lessons go well and hopefully that storm blows over.” That last comment caught me off guard. I said “What?” but when I turned around Simon had already made it across the massive hall, out of earshot. Honestly, the speed at which he managed to get so far seemed almost unnatural looking back on it. 

The flight was surprisingly normal with a couple of exceptions. I got a seat next to the window because I love staring out of it. But every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of that massive storm cloud and I would feel my heart race. Even thousands of feet in the air I still couldn’t see the top of it. It sat at the exact same distance from me as it always did, even in a plane that was moving 100s of miles per hour through the sky. I asked my brother sitting next to me if he could see it and he looked at me like I was crazy. He could see it but when I mentioned how it had been behind us all day he said that he hadn’t been paying attention and chalked it up to a weird coincidence or just some similar-looking clouds. Every once in a while I swear I could hear Terra crying out but that didn’t make any sense. No one else reacted and I shouldn’t have been able to hear him anyway since his crate was with the rest of the cargo and stuff. I eventually just went to sleep only to be woken up by the sounds of thunder when we landed. 

When I looked outside it was the dead of night and there were no stars or moon so I couldn’t tell if that storm cloud was still following me due to how dark the sky was. The thunder I heard must have just been from a dream or nightmare I was having right? I mean I didn’t see any flashes of lightning and I even asked my family if they heard any thunder but they said no and reached the same conclusion I did. Anyway, we went through the airport and got Terra so everything was fine. But y’know how bad the weather was in some parts of the state. On our way back there was a really REALLY bad storm. Lots of snow, wind, and rain. It got so bad we ended up having to crash at the house of one of my parent’s old friends, Sam. Good thing we did too or else we probably would’ve been stuck in traffic and snow until at least the next morning. Sam was super nice despite how last minute our house crashing was and she even had a couple of extra rooms for us, which I took full advantage of. The moment I laid on that bed I was knocked out. I don’t know what Sam’s beds are made of but it was some of the most comfortable shit I had ever laid my back upon… or maybe I was just stressed from the storm and having to constantly calm Terra down… Anyway, I slept like a baby… 

Then there was a crash. I woke up to a thundering boom, shouting, and yelling. The storm had gotten worse. I thought for a moment that what I heard was the howling of some massive beast but I soon realized it was the howling of the wind outside. It was so loud that I could hear it crystal clear through the walls and windows. I tried to close my eyes for a moment in a shitty attempt to wake up from this dream or even just sleep through the storm. But the cries of the tornado sirens dashed that hope and made my heart drop. A tornado? During this time of the year? It wasn’t even summer. How unlucky was that? The wind was so loud that I could barely hear the siren and I realized that the yelling was from Sam and the rest of my family. It was hard to make out their words but they were trying to get everyone into the basement. 

Disoriented and groggy, I got up even as my head painfully throbbed and spun. There was a booming noise and the whole house shook. An earthquake? No, thunder. Part of me was relieved, if there was an earthquake on top of the tornado then at that point my luck was so bad that I probably would have just preferred to be put out of my misery. As I ran through the house another crack of thunder rattled the house and sent a collection of silverware and glasses tumbling to the ground with a crash. There was something… off about the thunder. It was too “perfect…” too rhythmic. Each crash was spaced perfectly from the last by a couple of seconds. It sounded like… a gait or a stride. Almost like the footsteps of a lumbering giant or maybe something banging against the very Earth. I saw one of my dads, wide-eyed, beckoning me with a “come here” motion as he stood in the doorway to the basement. Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A black blur of fluff and fur booking it at full towards the stairs leading to the next floor. “TERRA!!!” I shouted, but he couldn’t hear me over the howling winds and crashing thunder. Terra had a habit of running upstairs whenever he got really scared, I don’t know, probably some animal thing about going to high ground for safety. 

Look, I KNOW I should have just gone into the basement. I mean, this could have just ended with both of us dying but Terra is like my baby, man. Without thinking I chased after him as my dad screamed at me to leave the dog and come back. I even heard him begin to chase after me but I lost track of the sound of his footsteps as the glass of the windows in the house shattered while rain and snow blew in. I pursued Terra up the stairs as thunder kept shaking the entire house like an earthquake and I finally managed to grab him as we made it into one of the rooms on the second floor. Thunder boomed and, in response, the house cracked and I heard the sound of wood splintering and support beams snapping like twigs. I squeezed Terra with all my might and cried. The tornado was here. We were going to die. I felt us violentely rise into the sky, this was it. I held my eyes shut waiting for something to happen. Maybe a piece of debris would hit us or I would just feel the cold hard ground. I could still hear the roar of the wind and boom of thunder but nothing else happened… I opened my eyes and my heart sank. What must have been hundreds of miles below me somehow was Sam’s house and the entire neighborhood around it. I screamed and flailed in a desperate attempt to find any perch that could keep me from falling. There was definitely debris in the air around me but it just hung there in the wind, as if meticulously placed there just to avoid hitting me and Terra while staying just out of our reach. 

Terra let out cries of sheer terror and we just hung there in the air for a moment. Every once in a while we would hit some sort of turbulence and my heart would jump as we dropped down a couple of feet towards the ground before being violently pulled back up by the wind several times over. BOOM!!! Thunder exploded from behind me. It was just then I realized that during this entire storm I had heard thunder but never seen any evidence of actual lightning, no flashes of light or anything. I turned towards the sound of the thunder and saw that cloud, the same one from Jamaica, towering into the sky and almost as dark as the night. Several tornadoes whirled below it and slurped up various things into the cloud. This time the cloud was definitely catching up to me, moving quicker and quicker. As it did the tornadoes below it moved almost like legs, rising off the ground before lowering once again to touch it in a fashion that looked like something large scuttling across the Earth’s surface. Whenever a tornado hit the ground I heard the crash of thunder reverberate from the cloud, like the sound of some massive step. 

I tried to move but I just hung in the air and there wasn’t any debris for me to grab onto. The cloud let out a thundering boom as it enveloped me and I felt a flash of pain in my ear as thunder shook my body. I don’t think the thundering noise I heard was from lightning, but from the cloud itself. I felt the rain and snow pelt me and I closed my eyes, clutching my screaming dog. There was no point in keeping them open anyway, all I could see was the dark gray of the storm cloud around me. Ice, rain, wind, and dirt battered me from each side and each time it did I held Terra tighter, which I think made the wind hit me stronger in response. If something that stupid is even possible. Eventually, something large and wooden smashed into me and caused me to lose my grip on Terra. I opened my eyes in shock and pain trying to find a glimpse of him but all I found was dark rolling clouds, rain, snow, and the sound of him wailing as he went flying in some random direction. Within seconds his howls became one with the wind’s own howls. I started sobbing in full force upon the realization that Terra might die alone and terrified. The cloud around me began to whirl and spin and before I knew it I was being flung around by a tornado. I could make out countless shapes. At first, I thought it was debris but then I began to hear someone scream. 1, 3, 10… I don’t know how many people and animals were flailing in the air. I tried to look for Terra but the moment I thought about it something in the air changed and I rapidly began to ascend, screaming as I went. It became almost impossible to untangle the howling of the wind from the screams and cries of all the people and animals. 

Then I was flung by the tornado high into the sky. Below me I could see a part of my neighborhood and the city in the distance. It was night time and for a second it seemed almost beautiful. The city lights below me shined like stars. Then I felt the air rushing past my body from below. I was falling. I screamed and flailed but there was nothing to hold on to, nothing to cushion me, or change my trajectory, and as I looked around I noticed there was no tornado or clouds in sight. For a moment it was just me, my dread, and the cold hard ground below… Eventually, I did hit the ground, and parts of my body sickeningly cracked as it contorted into a form it was never meant to take. My vision went blurry and I saw a pool of blood slowly spill from my body. I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from because my entire body was in a mix of incredible pain and numbness from the freezing cold. Luckily, I passed out from the pain and it turns out I landed in someone’s backyard so they came outside and found me before I was gone for good. 

Almost every bone in my body was broken in some way and my left leg had a small case of frostbite. I won’t speak too much on the recovery process and all that but suffice to say I still have scars and I still have trouble walking sometimes… As embarrassing as it is to admit I have since developed a sort of fear of wind. Not just small breezes or anything but whenever I hear a strong wind during a storm or cloudy day my heart drops and I imagine a tornado barreling through my house and flinging me into the sky. I constantly check the weather reports for tornado warnings and sometimes it gets so bad that I have panic attacks… Most of the other people I’ve told don’t believe me or think I was just seeing things or misremembered something or even passed out in the tornado and had a weird dream. It doesn’t help that all the doctors say that if I had really gone as high as I did and then fallen like that I would have died at least a dozen times over in a dozen different ways. But I know what I saw and if I survived then maybe Terra’s still alive too. I still think about all those screaming people and animals in the tornado and sometimes I can hear their cries in the wind. Cries that no one else could hear of course… 

I put up posters around the neighborhood but no one has found him and everyone assumes that Terra wasn’t as lucky as me. That he was thrown into a body of water or his body was already picked clean by scavengers. But this is clearly out of the bounds of conventional thought and logic so… I don’t know, I was hoping you could work your magic or something.

Ana Otto- Statement ends. My diagnosis: most likely the work of the Boundless. For a little while I questioned if this supernatural storm cloud Mcnamara was pulled into was actually related to the Devastation due to the Entity’s connection to loss and destruction as well as the fact that the storm focused on pulling away their dog, something they very clearly cared deeply about, in addition to the fact that the tornado destroyed a portion of Sam’s house, and a follow up investigation shows that Miss Hatfield was indeed very distraught about it. However, the presence of Simon Fairchild seems to point to the Boundless at play. Something that is further emphasized by how Mcnamara was flung high into the sky and then dropped. It appears that this cloud fed off the fear of large storms, big noises, and being carried away or flung into the air by tornadoes. Mcnamara’s could’ve been taken into the Boundless itself and then thrown back out. It could be that Mcnamara did not provide a sufficient level of fear for the cloud or simply that Mcnamara being left outside the cloud provided even more fear to feed. 

This brings me to Terra, the dog. From my perspective, it would seem that Terra was the one the storm was actually targeting and that Mcnamara just got caught in the crossfire. The dog was the one who was the most afraid and had Mcnamara not chased the dog during the tornado then there is a chance that only Terra would have been pulled into the sky. The cloud also didn’t seem too concerned with pulling Mcnamara into it until they got too close to their dog. There is also the comment by Mr. Fairchild about animals and fear. I’m still looking into the relationship between the Dread Powers and animals myself but I suppose if Dread Powers born from the fear of animals, such as the Pursuit and the Viscera, can feed off the fear of humans and even create Avatars of them then there is no reason to assume that it can’t also work the other way around for the Powers born of human fears. I’ve even encountered animals, such as ants, pigs, dogs, geese and ducks, acting as Avatars for the Powers. 

I also wonder what Simon Fairchild was doing in Jamaica. Following the Boundless’ cloud perhaps, or maybe the cloud was following him until it found Terra? I also can’t rule out the possibility that he somehow summoned or controlled the cloud. Even then, this could all just be a coincidence and he might have just been looking for potential targets to feed to the Boundless amongst plane passengers and staff. Someone who has some form of acrophobia or aerophobia would make easy prey. I’m sure planes and airports act as a rich “feeding ground” for many Avatars and monsters of the Boundless. The search for Terra is ongoing and I am not sure if we will ever find him, especially if he has been pulled into the Boundless itself. I also possess little in the way of tracking living clouds and this applies doubly so for clouds that seem to ignore wind currents and other weather patterns while being metaphysically connected to something that loves creating vast locations.

Ana Otto- Investigation Conclusion: It has been several months since this investigation started and I’m glad to report that Terra has been found. Unfortunately, his physical state was about what you would expect based on Mcnamara’s account of being in the storm. He suffered some frostbite and almost every rib he had was broken due to a quite brutal fall. Unfortunately, some of the damage seems permanent. He also appeared to be in an absolutely terrible mental state. Similar to Mcnamara themselves, he appears to be absolutely terrified of wind and storms. He also seems to be even more scared of thunder than before and hearing it, even from video or audio devices, will send him some sort of panic attack that is usually accompanied by defecation and/or urination. 

He has since been reunited with his family so my work here is officially done. I suppose I should feel good about this but in all honesty I don’t. I didn’t really save the dog at the end of the day since the cloud merely dropped the dog after it was done with it and it was only after this that I was able to find it. There’s also the matter of all the people in the cloud itself. I still have no way of tracking the cloud and no way of saving them but I am still working on a way to at least keep tabs on it. I found some “cursed” wind chimes that unnaturally ring and flail around whenever something connected to the Boundless is within range. So I hung them up in specific places around the city and left some motion detectors and cameras that go off whenever a certain level of motion is detected. Case closed.

Ana Otto- Review: I’ve returned to this investigation because I knew I recognized the name Miss Angelo mentioned in the last investigation from somewhere and I can confirm that one of the members of the Mcnamara family gained possession of Sam’s house and even helped with repairs. I wonder if something strange is afoot… Well, stranger than usual anyway. I took Ben Bannet to examine the home and it appears that the layout of the attic and basement in particular have been changed and there are strange structures in the walls of the house. These all seem to be based on the architecture of one Robert Smirke, which could be related to its increased paranormal activity. However, the changes are odd and seem to be gradual, implying that the house did not always have these structures. I will keep an eye on the house to observe if any of the Dread Powers’ forces make a move into or out of the house. End review.