Powerful phantoms and evil spirits were haunting professor Daly’s morning cup of coffee.

Or, rather, they weren’t so much haunting, as having an early morning briefing on the possibility of implementing such a haunt on a reasonable timescale. It manifested in a faint aftertaste of acid on professor’s tongue and a slight jitter of professor’s fingers on the porcelain cup.

This was not Roger’s usual experience with coffee. His usual experience with coffee was one of most professional academics, which is of a fondly regarded and essential addiction. For example, coffee was required to persuade yourself that you genuinely enjoy sitting through a two hour seminar dominated by specialists stuck in a never-ending rat race of publish or perish. In other words, it was usually a life-saver as opposed to an anxiety-inducing poison.

With a slight shudder somewhere deep in his spine, Roger put the coffee cup down and rubbed his left eye. Unfortunately, the coffee demons were not the first sign of Tuesday morning trouble. In fact, Roger had been under a thrall of a particular feeling since the very moment he woke up. The feeling was a low grade, slow simmer worry; it reminded him of a back-of-the-head buzz that occurred when he would forget about something, such as that the stove was still on. Alas, he had checked the stove about twenty times already, and was greeted every time with a complete absence of flames.

Roger checked his phone. It showed 8:39 and no new e-mails or text messages or ancient curses disguised as mobile games. “Silly nonsense”, Roger muttered to himself, adjusting his bowtie. How could he, a professor of theoretical physics, even entertain the notion that his unexpected worry had any sort of supernatural cause? Out of the question! Just like his missing music box, this mystery had a trivial, dull explanation that was floating near the surface of his consciousness and was at arm’s reach away from being discovered. All he needed was a nice breakfast.

He was in the process of spreading a square of butter over his toast when his eyes caught a peculiar glimmer through the kitchen window. Roger’s logical first instinct was to dismiss it, but on that day, logic was not the strongest force in his body. So he put down the butter knife and approached the window tentatively, all the time focused on the source of the flickering. Upon closer inspection, the source turned out to be street lamps at the parking lot. Instead of turning out for the day, they were currently imitating malfunctioning Christmas lights.

This was enough to have Roger acknowledging his sourceless concern. A flicker like this could easily be an indication of a serious electric fault! Appropriate services had to be alerted at once in order to prevent any possible accidents, such as that one time when Arthur and him made the regrettable decision of fixing the institutes’s central heating regulator and instead transformed the building into an oasis of tropical climate. Oh, Arthur…

Roger’s hand hesitated over his phone. Suddenly he felt himself fall truly into his every eight decades of age, his mind drifting somewhere far in the past. He smiled, images wheezing past him in his memory. Was it all over for him? Had he ran out of exciting things in life, and was now destined to remember only for the rest of his days? “I’m an old fool losing my mind over flickering street lamps”, Roger thought.

Then every single light in his apartment went out at once.

Roger sat in the darkness for a while, trying to breathe as quietly as possible, and listened to the world around him. The electricity didn’t just disappear - it had stepped over the line of raving madness. It went utterly wild, chirping in the plugs, blowing bulbs in his bathroom, and making his microwave cycle through every single setting it knew, or ever heard of, or had enough creativity to come up with. Despite the situation, Roger was now feeling calmer than before. He reached for the phone and dialed the number he had saved as “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”.

But no one picked up.

“This is a matter of malfunctioning technology,” professor Daly reassured himself. “Nothing special. Nothing supernatural. A simple, annoying fault.”

As if to mock his words, the ancient TV that stood obscured by book stacks in the living room came to life and spat out the morning news in a hissing, crackling voice. Tiny sweat drops formed on Roger’s forehead. He wasn’t entirely sure, but last time he checked, the TV set was not connected to electricity in the first place.

“Is anyone here?” professor Daly called out, fingers dialing Dirk’s number again.

Nothing. Not from the empty room and not from the phone. Bracing himself for anything physically or philosophically possible, professor forced himself out of the kitchen and into the living room, where the TV was falling in and out of static. He circled the device cautiously, as if it was a feral animal about to lurch in attack. Almost too afraid to look, professor stepped behind it and traced the cord with his eyes… then let out a sigh of relief. The TV was plugged in after all.

“A silly old fool indeed.” Professor Daly chuckled.

Then someone knocked on the door.

“Well this is beyond disrespectful!” professor Daly exclaimed. “Whoever this is, playing tricks on me, I’ll have you know that I am a respected member of the scientific community and a professor at Cooltown University. I will not tolerate such intrusions into my daily life!”

The only response was another knock.

“Right,” professor said, now more on the anger upswing of the emotional rollercoaster. “Let’s see who this is, messing with electricity and disturbing me for no reason.”

He marched confidently into the corridor leading to the entrance door, stepped confidently across it and laid his hand on the lock with the same boiling confidence. Whoever was at the other side was now silent, perhaps aware of professor’s presence. Roger hesitated just before opening; he had a moment of overwhelming fear drown him in cold sweat, but the moment was immediately dismissed as silly superstition. He clicked the lock and swung the door open.

Opposite him, just inches away from the threshold, stood a shadow. A tall, lanky, disproportionate silhouette - legs far too thin to support the body, neck far too delicate to hold the massive head. The entire shadow was pitch black, except for the face, which was bright, blinding white, shining directly into professor’s eyes and making tears roll down his cheeks.

Professor fell back, leaning heavily against the wall, eyes transfixed on the shadow. The light was hurting him and distorting his vision, yet he was unable to pull himself away. Words got stuck in his throat, his own limbs failed him. The shadow extended an arm far too long for its body and waved it in front of professor’s face. It paused, unmoving, and professor heard another light bulb shattering to pieces somewhere in his apartment. He had almost started contemplating his own suddenly very relevant mortality when the shadow turned away as if in slow motion and disappeared from sight.

“I’ll be damned. Lord,” professor muttered. “Oh goodness me. Oh fuck. Lord have mercy on my soul.”

As if sleepwalking, he slammed the entrance door shut, grabbed his phone and a whole bag of toast bread from the kitchen, ran into the bathroom, and barricaded himself in.

*

Twenty kilometers away, Dirk had happily slept through eleven missed calls, shielded from the world by blackout curtains and a triple layers of fluffy blankets. He made a regrettable decision the previous night to follow the stream of youtube recommendations and fell into a rabbit hole the depth of the Mariana trench. He emerged on the other end at 4am, endowed with knowledge of such esoteric nature, he couldn’t even imagine a situation in which it would ever come up. Considering that Dirk had issues with the simplest of concepts, such as the current US president or the number of planets in the solar system, this was rather ironic.

Now, at almost noon, Dirk was dreaming dreams of deep sea creatures and bio-luminescent monstrosities. These were dreams he overwhelmingly preferred to dreams of Black Wing rooms, blank and faceless and empty. Sun’s long fingers seeped through the curtains and brushed across Dirk’s face; he scrunched up his nose and burrowed himself deeper into the nest of blankets arranged on his bed. The Sun did not give up. It reached deeper into the bedroom and crawled up Dirk’s exposed ankle, warming up his skin. He mumbled something into the pillow, still hoping to fall back into the dream, but alas. The moment was lost.

A hand reached out of the blanket fortress and rummaged across the floor. Once it hit its target - the phone - it retreated back underneath the covers, like a snake crawling into its den with a hunting trophy in its stomach. From the covers came a low groan of screen light hitting sleepy eyes, then a very short yelp. Next second, and Dirk was suddenly vertical, hair tousled wildly, staring at the red number eleven on his phone. He was dressed and sitting in (Farah’s) car five minutes later.

“I am so sorry, professor!”

Soon afterward, and Dirk and Roger sat in a nearby coffee-shop, away from the gloomy apartment still devoid of electricity.

“It’s quite alright,” Roger assured him. “You are not my bodyguard after all, and no harm came to me.”

“If something had happened to you…” Dirk continued, ignoring professor’s words. “I am a terrible detective and a terrible person and…”

The issue with apologizing is that the start of the process is tremendously challenging, but once you get going, it becomes rather more difficult to stop.

“Please stop blaming yourself for crimes that were never committed, son.” Roger smiled warmly. “As you can see, I am sitting here in front of you, whole and unharmed, if shaky.”

“Yes, but,” Dirk said. “I have to take you under my protection now. We don’t know what had happened this morning, but in case it happens again, I need you to stay where I can see you and protect you.”

“That is very sweet,” the professor chuckled, “but not strictly necessary. To be frank, I am not even sure whether that whole deal had really happened. We cannot dismiss the possibility of hallucination, especially at my age.”

“Well what if it wasn’t a hallucination?” Dirk replied, unsure of whether he should bring up his own exceedingly bizarre experiences.

“If it wasn’t,” professor said, “I dare say, whatever that fella was doing in my apartment, I don’t think he was looking for me. When he opened that door...” He shuddered involuntarily, and took a sip of his tea to calm himself down. “When he opened it, he looked at me as if he was expecting someone else. And left quite quickly, and didn’t come back.”

“Professor,” Dirk said with stern conviction. “I insist on you spending the next few days in my apartment under close protection. I do not want to scare you beyond reason, but we cannot dismiss the possibility of far graver things operating in this case. I am sure you can take a break from teaching for a little while.”

“Perhaps I do deserve a small holiday,” Roger pondered, unwilling to share the magnitutde of fear that was still dancing wild in him, and how he really rather liked the idea of being protected for a bit, even if it was just Dirk. “Alright then. But we’ll need to stop at Cooltown. I shall notify the institute organizational board and pick up some of my things.”

*

They were met on Cooltown Campus with dreary skies and a general atmosphere of unease. Everyone around seemed strangely subdued; the faculty, the staff, even the stray cats. The numbers of swarming undergrads was on a sharp decline as well, which would have been normal close to midterms - a time when all swarming undergrads retreat to libraries and dorm rooms - but was fairly suspicious now, hardly four weeks into the semester.

Dirk sat on a bench outside, waiting for the professor to inform the faculty of his emergency holiday and collect two kilos of work papers from his office. He watched the somber undergrads drag themselves to an afternoon lecture, coffee cups in hands, huddled around one person with chicken scratch notes of the only student who attended all previous classes.

Out of curiosity, Dirk integrated himself into the group, peering over their shoulders. From the notes, he learned that something called “chirp” (or chang? chalk? chip?) was always oppressive to another chirp, and that a “quack” could be either up, dull, sponge, or bottle. This was fascinating to Dirk and he yearned to learn more, but alas, he was soon tapped on the shoulder and extracted from the group.

“Oh, Lilly.” Dirk smiled amicably, recognizing the technician-cleaner girl he saw last week.

“Yeah, hey, um,” Lilly hesitated, “private detective guy. You’re visiting Roger again?”

“Actually,” Dirk began, walking away from the crowd and lowering his voice, “we are here for a bit of an emergency evacuation.”

“What? Why?!” Lilly seemed immediately startled. “Is he okay?”

“He is okay right now, let’s put it that way,” Dirk replied, frowning in what he hoped was a manner with the appropriate level of seriousness. “I am taking him under my protection as a precautionary measure.”

“Protection from what?”

“Well.” He considered whether he should say anything at all, and eventually decided that it was strategically useful. “There was a peculiar accident…”

He conveyed the entire story, conveniently omitting close to a dozen missed calls on his part, and taking several side-quests, roundabouts, and dead-ends on the way. Lilly listened attentively while somehow also managing to ignore about 80% of what he was saying. Her attitude only changed towards the end.

“…and considering that the summerhouse was robbed, I am now investigating the possibility that the music box was stolen as well.”

“The… music box?” Lilly looked as if she had unexpectedly swallowed a whole live toad. “Is that… is the music box the thing you were searching for in Roger’s office?”

“That’s why I was hired.” Dirk nodded. “Forget the music box though! We have mysterious silhouettes and mad electricity and a whole bag of other unexplained events!” He was visibly giddy with excitement. “That’s the priority.”

“And Roger’s also in danger,” Lilly added.

“And he’s in danger.” Dirk had to force himself physically back into the serious tone. “And in fact I should probably go check up on him.”

“Yeah I have, uh, things. As well. Young people things,” Lilly muttered. “Tiktak dance. Veeping. The coffee machine in the faculty room is clogged too. So bye.”

“Bye!” Dirk waved at her, but she was already gone. “Huh. What a strange girl…” he murmured, walking in the direction of the institute entrance.

Two minutes later, and Lilly was rushing from one place to another, in a manner that very much reminded her of undergrads waking up one horrible morning and remembering that they had a term paper due in five hours.

“Damn, blast, triple damn with an extra side order of damn!” she yelled at no-one in particular. “I am screwed. We’re all screwed. They really are here already and I am so fucking screwed!”

She knew she had to leave at once, and she also knew that the place would deteriorate beyond recognition in her absence, and surprisingly that rather stung. For the most part, she hated the institute and everything about it. However, she still remembered a time when she loved it with her entire heart, and that alone was enough to make her hesitate.

Alas, she had no right to hesitate anymore. Things were getting far too serious.

Lilly spent a few hours preparing the institute for the worst, which was her not being there to take care of it. She instructed all other cleaner staff, set up auto-watering systems for some of the potted plants, provided a month supply of coffee, sugar, tea, and creamer in the faculty rooms, and changed all the bulbs in the building just in case. Finding temporary homes for the cats was the worst. She managed with all except one - the black, green-eyed cat.

“No one wants you, Erwin.” Lilly sighed. “Stupid superstitious humans. Oh well.” She shrugged. “Guess I’m going on the run with a cat.”

She gave one last look to her cabinet. It wasn’t really a cabinet, but rather a utility closet - but she called it her cabinet anyway, because it made her feel better. She then packed her bag with her scarce possessions:

A wallet with a single credit card and lose change. A few physics textbooks, including “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” and “Modern Quantum Mechanics”. Some snacks. A half-empty bag of dry cat food. An completely empty metal flask. A small cosmetics bag, filled mostly with tissues and hand cream. A notebook. A pack of assorted colour ball pens. A tiny photo album full of polaroids. And, last but not least, a small, dainty music box decorated with brass vines and leaves…