Parasite Dimension

It started with the dream in the trenches.

Ivan walked through the thick smoke that drowned what was left of the buildings. He had lost sight of Lucas, who he’d given the rest of the cigarettes. He was sure there would be at least half a pack left by that point, and kept patting his tactical vest and each side of his trousers while trying to remember in which pocket he forgot his lighter this time. Oblivious to the war and without much in his mind except how bad he could use a smoke, he wandered off into the battlefield in search of his friend.

In the dream, it was never clear if the ceasefire was still in effect or not. That was definitely the strangest part. Still, there was little he could tell from what little he could see. The commercial district turned frontline was a jungle of blurry silhouettes amidst a heavy cloud, the air a coarse mix of gunsmoke and debris dust that filtered sunlight like a thundercloud approaching from high seas. Luminosity was a coarse, desaturated shade of ochre that almost looked like a sandstorm, only still and serene like daytime mist. The battlefield of his dreams felt like a desert as much as it felt like the sea: every bit as lonesome, and every bit as dangerous.

He’d wander through the commercial district and find himself walking into huge ditches dug into the cracked asphalt, which led him to trenches from past conflicts which were different altogether. The dream in the trenches wasn’t a recollection of any battle in particular, but an amalgamation of the dozens he’d seen throughout his years in the frontline. Across the endless walk into the dust cloud, that sinking feeling of desolation was always accompanied by the primal fear of being observed; or better yet, followed. Preyed upon. Too familiar for his liking.

For some reason that was never quite clear to him, the trenches were always empty, as if the battlefield was long abandoned. The narrow gashes into the earth were populated by nothing else besides crates of ammunition piled up in crude, risky fashion, as well as unattended infantry weapons and empty shells littering the ground.

And that was it. There wasn’t a single soldier in sight, either dead or alive. There wasn’t even blood. There was, however, the main reason why he could never tell if the ceasefire was even in effect or not: the distant sound of artillery. In real life, that would be an easy question to answer. But wherever that was, between the noise and the absolute absence of human presence, the trenches of Ivan’s dream were dug into a land where conflict seemed to happen and not happen at all, both at the same time.

Every now and again he could hear explosions of different magnitudes, in a wide range of distances. Weirdly enough, there wasn’t ever a single flash, no aftershock or vibrations of any sort. Even more unsettling were the occasional screams, either of pain or indistinct battlecries, also from a variety of distances. Some of them sounded like civilians. Women sometimes, probably children as well. Humanity was out of sight, but its pain felt just about within earshot.

Ivan had dreamed of that walk over a hundred times, and deep inside he knew he’d dream of it over a hundred more. What he didn’t know that night, however, was that this was where he would’ve heard the man laughing for the first time.

At first, there was just no way he’d be able to tell. The chaotic nature of that foggy dreamscape wasn’t going to let something mundane like that stand out in any way. But one thing that did stand out was how much it sounded like someone crying. A child, maybe? Or perhaps a full grown man, overtaken by the fear of dying with his face in the dirt, his deathbed a slop of mud and gunpowder and blood and spilled guts. Still a child at heart, one that faked his age for the privilege of dying for that land forsaken by God. Or maybe it was the fear of actually making it back, coming home from the war to not much besides a bathroom mirror each morning, inhabited by a man he recognized no longer. As these thoughts ran through his head like a bullet, Ivan would wonder if those cries weren’t his own.

In the dream, as always, he’d eventually spot Lucas.

He had his back to a wall, leaning against the mortar that held a door frame to a four-story building almost flattened by the bombings. Sometimes it was a shop, sometimes a bar. That night it just seemed like what used to be someone’s home.

“Hey”, Ivan would tell his friend every time. “Give me a cigarette.”

Lucas would just stare at nothing with a blank expression, as if he didn’t hear the first time. That was usually the part in which Ivan would begin to notice the sound. That very particular, very distinct sound.

“Hey, you deaf or something?”, Ivan would say, assertively. “The cigarettes. I gave them to you, where are they?”

Lucas, who up until then had stood still like a wax figure of himself, slowly moved his head toward his friend, meeting his gaze. And this was always the precise moment in which it hit him: the icy, stabbing pain of grief and regret. The empty stare of his best friend, stale and apathetic like a fading photograph. The one sight, even in that lonesome hellscape, that made Ivan realize, every single time, that the dream in the trenches had in fact been a nightmare all along.

The noise pollution was getting louder, more frequent, constant even. A low frequency slowly making itself more noticeable, more intense, bordering on painful. Someone laughed.

But was it even laughter? He’d try his best to get a good read on that distinct sound as it grew louder, and as though it sounded like screams of pain or a woman shouting in fear, it was clear by then it had been something else altogether. And by then it was too late: the distinctive sound of laughter stood out from the muffled noise of gunfire and battlecries superimposing one another from every direction at once, and the dire dreamscape of the trenches slowly gave place to the harsh lucidity of awakening.

The noise wouldn’t stop. It never did. Lucas just stared at him.

—

Ivan woke up in the pitch black of his bedroom. Startled by a noise he couldn’t distinguish, he pulled his sheets away and bolted up from his bed, looking around as if expecting to see someone standing on one of the corners. An oppressive midnight black was all he could see, however, as the stuffy air of his room peppered with the moisty stink of fungus and wet wood made the place in which he slept feel like a freshly-dug grave.

The noise was coming from outside the house. It was someone screaming, a voice he didn’t recognize, apparently male by the sound of it. His bedroom window faced the backyard, so that was his first guess as to where that person might be. He ran to the window and pulled the curtain aside in a brash motion, facing the windowpane from barely an inch away as he tried to get a good look at the ground level.

Nothing. The shades of black were even more intense outside, the cloudy night skies and the tangle of naked branches filtering whatever moonlight was out, feeling like nature’s own lead curtain. The icy proximity of the glass revealed nothing besides a vague outline of his reflection, barely visible from the lack of any light source on both ends.

Standing close to the window, however, he could hear the noise with much more clarity. Laughter. He was standing right there and there was nothing for his mind to even register other than a dense sea of black and the laughter that cut through it like a sharp razor on a steady hand.

Stunned and utterly confused, Ivan stumbled across the creaky floorboards into the hallway and down the stairs. His body was overextending, but he wasn’t going to notice. All he could think of was the noise. He could still hear the laughter outside, as he walked down the bottom steps into his living room, the sound pouring through the gaps of the front door as if whoever that person was had been standing right by the frame, close enough to rest both hands against the wood.

Ivan’s mind was racing so fast against common sense he didn’t even consider the danger, didn’t even think about grabbing a gun or an improvised blunt weapon. The weird, unsettling racket of that vicious laughter made it unlikely to be a burglar, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t someone looking to lure him outside and harm him in some way. Perhaps even worse than harm, or perhaps even worse than someone.

He didn’t care. Confusion and mindless curiosity had gotten the best of him, and he cared neither for who it was, nor what threat they posed. All he cared about at that moment was his need to see for himself what was going on, to see it in front of him, to assess the threat with the two eyes he was born with.

He pulled the front door wide open. There was no one standing there, but he could still hear them outside, maybe just a couple of feet away from the front porch and into the dark. As crudely as he stumbled across his bedroom and into the hallway and down the stairs, he lunged himself forward across the doorway as the chill of the autumn night engulfed his frame like a spark inside a gas leak.

He ran down the last step of his porch into the dirt and the dead blades of grass with his bare feet as the cold and the pain and the noise tore at him from behind like carrion eaters fighting for scraps of dead meat and a bloating white noise blew inside his ears from the exhaustion and he saw himself almost tumbling down forward, face first into the dirt, as his hands grabbed his knees and he felt weakened and winded up and disoriented as if he was about to faint.

He took two, three, four deep breaths before rising back and taking his first good look around.

Ivan was standing in the middle of the dark over thirty feet into the dirt road and away from his house when he finally realized there was simply no one there. Just the cold, black density of that chilly autumn night. His sight could register nothing, but the sounds were all coming back into his perception of reality: the wind ruffling the naked branches, the shy noises of the local wildlife, and most noticeably, the loud, startled barking of his dog, jerking his chain as it hurled its body against the night much in the same way Ivan had just done.

The laughter, on the other hand, which not even seconds ago sounded almost like it was coming from right behind his ear, was now gone, leaving in its wake an uneasy feeling not unlike the one left by the dream he had just woken up from.

That was when it hit him: the dream. The trenches. It was all coming back to Ivan as he stood still in the darkness and the gravel and the dry mud of his driveway. And as he looked around, barely seeing the outlines of the naked branches distinguish themselves from the cloudy night sky, the pale tree trunks almost invisible from a few feet away, the dense, black shape of his house with all the lights turned off looming from a strangely long distance, he wondered:

What the hell just happened?

Why did he leave his house in a hurry, in the middle of the night, still barefoot and underdressed in the cold autumn weather? Why did he run off that far without even realizing he couldn’t see anything? Why did none of that occur to him just a few seconds before, when he first woke up? Or was it minutes, by now? How much time had even passed?

Ivan could see his breath. His neck and his bare shoulders felt icy against the breeze, which was when he realized he had only a sleeveless t-shirt on besides his grey sweatpants, and the cold was starting to make itself noticeable. The pain, which would come back to torment him later that day, still hadn’t settled entirely, but the cold didn’t wait as long to take its cue. He rubbed his palms against the back of his arms, letting out a brief shiver. Ivan had grown used to the cold, but that night it felt like the first time it had made itself noticeable, much the same way the air we breathe never does. Just another weird sensation to the mixed bag that this strange sleepless night was turning out to become.

As he walked back along the dirt road, he felt his toes growing numb, barely registering the sting of the small pieces of gravel pressing against his bare soles. As they blindly felt the coarse, cold wood surface of the porch’s steps in the dark, Ivan finally asked himself:

What about the laughter?

Did he just dream it, as well?

For some reason, perhaps by instinct, he looked over his shoulder as the thought occurred to him. He knew he’d see nothing but pitch black, but there he was: looking back, seeing nothing, just as he expected. If there was ever anyone, or anything, standing there at that moment, there was no way he’d ever know for sure. Disturbed by the thought, he simply stepped inside and closed the front door behind him.

Standing in the middle of his living room at that hour of the night, Ivan finally realized how alone he truly was. The stale air, the barely visible outlines of the old furniture, the green light of the digital clock hammering the numbers three, four and six into his sight, along with the tiny letters “AM” right next to them, soaking the darkened surfaces around it in a milky, hazy glow peppered with dust particles. Just by physically being there, Ivan could tell without a shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely no one else besides him standing in his property at that moment in time. The dog, which hadn’t stopped barking for a single streak of more than two seconds, was the only living creature in hearing distance that wasn’t vermin.

His solitude was stone-cold, monolithic, like a tombstone or an abandoned radio tower. It was simply there, for all to see if they even cared enough to register the sight. His fear of being preyed upon by an unknown invader in the middle of the night quietly subsided to his loneliness, one which would last every waking hour of any given day, and not just the paranoid late hours of the night, an anxiety that claimed the right of way across the avenue of his misery. Fear could never compete.

Defeated by the circumstances like so many times before, Ivan slowly made his way upstairs and into his bedroom. The pain was starting to sink in by then, but it wasn’t noticeable enough for him to care yet. He laid down and pulled the covers over himself, staring at the ceiling, unable to stop thinking about the unsettling self-consciousness that had leaked into his mind during his sleep, when he was always at his least alert, at his most vulnerable.

He didn’t want to sleep anymore, didn’t want to risk going back to the trenches. But when he thought about how tired he’d be feeling the next day, he at least hoped his mind would just get tired enough to shut itself down if he just laid there and waited for sleep to come. It never did, and the morning light crept in like the usual death sentence.