Gagghagh. So I don't know if revision block is a thing, but if it is, this chapter definitely gave it to me. This has been a rough, long week, too – I wanted to see the Hunger Games last night at midnight, which resulted in having to rearrange basically everything on every other day (school work, actual work, class, house stuff). It was a mess. Also because the weather's been nice here, all my professors keep relocating class to outside – which would be awesome if I didn't have the skin of a vampire, so I'm nursing a little bit of sun poisoning at the moment.
Also, a lovely reviewer by the name of Btch left a comment speculating about the nature of Zim/Slenderman in this fic. Her review was anonymous or else I'd respond in private. She suggested that all of this is going on as a result of Zim's Pak hijacking bodies and attacking people, which is not exactly what I have planned but IS STILL INCREDIBLY COOL AND SOMEONE SHOULD WRITE THAT STORY. Not even kidding. I would pay all the internets to read that. As it is I've got my own thing going on here, with its own Chekov's guns and resolutions. Very neat conjecture, though.
#TL:DR, #FirstWorldProblems, #GetOnWithTheShowAlready
Chapter 5: The Dream
Dib slept facing the window, a spare pillow hugged to his chest. Dreaming had become a chore anymore. Maybe it preserved sanity in some people but he felt like it drained his. Every horror was real in a dream. Every mistake he'd made was amplified, everything he'd worked past was undone.
Zim was there, more often than not. Usually the alien had him strapped to an operation table, with long pointed needles and blood-covered blades looming overhead. From somewhere in the darkest corners of his vision, the Irken would crawl up onto the table, using his Pak legs to lever himself. Dib felt tightness in his chest as Zim knelt on top of him. The red eyes shone like ghost lights.
And then Zim would cradle Dib's head in his Pak legs, almost tenderly, placing one spike on his left and right temple. Just as he felt the tip begin boring into his skull, Dib would snap awake and stare wildly about his bedroom in a panic. Hysterical screaming optional.
This morning wasn't particularly different. Dib gave himself five minutes of lying perfectly still amidst the sweat-soaked sheets, counting breaths, trying to orient himself as he re-entered the world of waking.
He finally managed to roll out of bed, wrapping his arms around himself at leaving the warm blankets. His clothes were cast in a rumpled pile in the corner. Posters covered the walls patchily - some faded and torn at the edges from age, and some from his newer interests (his giant "Ghost Quest" poster served the dual purpose of being related to the paranormal and having the show's curvy, red-headed hostess as its focal point). And across from him, blinking in earnest, was his webcam light.
Shit. Left the thing on all night.
Dib heaved himself over to his computer, a headache beckoned into existence by his motion. Poor sleep could do that. Holding his forehead in one bandaged hand, he wondered vaguely if there'd be any room left in his hard-drive after nine straight hours of hi-def recording. The webcam software snapped open the instant he tapped the spacebar, helpfully showing screenshots from every five-seconds of video. Dib scrolled through the thousands of identical shots idly, mostly out of grogginess than interest. Evidently he kicked and thrashed in his sleep, according to the footage.
The nine-gigabyte file was nearly in the delete bin before Dib saw it. An aberration five hours in. He felt a chill spread over his back unrelated to sleeping shirtless as he paused over the image.
For two minutes a narrow-bodied, square-headed and multi-limbed shadow had hovered over him as he slept. Dib watched his own form quiver under the blankets as the thing bent in through the window and touched his bare shoulder. Compulsively Dib scratched at his upper arm as he watched the video, ignoring the sting of his palms and trying to detect a scab or a bruise. Nothing there, that he could tell.
After about a hundred and twenty seconds, the figure vanished in a pop of strange purple light.
The pounding in his skull was getting worse. Dib blinked away the goo that had gathered in the corners of his eyes. He made several copies of the footage, stashed in different places across his computer, and then deleted the larger file.
Hundreds of shrieking, violent, demented thoughts rushed to the forefront of his brain, crowding his near-migraine and demanding attention and brooding and angst. Dib forced them all aside. He focused hawk-like on his hands as he picked out an outfit for the day, changed the blade in his razor, tossed a towel over the warmer and finally climbed into the scalding shower.
And then he curled into a ball beneath the halo of rushing water.
If he felt most vulnerable asleep, then Dib felt safest in the shower. It was the only place in the world free of obligations. Besides, Irkens were allergic to water. A moronic and limited form of protection, but one that soothed him nonetheless. The heat calmed his headache and left his jumbled thoughts stripped bare within his brain.
Whatever had chased him on the way home from work was in that video. It had watched him sleep and the idea made Dib shiver like a child even in the steamed bathroom. He felt dirtier with every second. The fear of that thing crawled down deep inside of his innards and grabbed hold of something near his liver.
Yeah, but that picture's got to be worth something. You know it was real now. At least you know you're not just overreacting and seeing shit because-
"Stop." Dib whispered aloud to himself. The fact that it was odd to do so in the shower barely occurred to him. He could be bathing in ancient Rome for all the attention he was paying the dingy grout and Gaz's fifteen shampoo bottles.
Dib resented this sort of evidence. Circumstantial. It was worse than no proof at all. The shadow was enough to frighten him, enough to make him see movement in every corner and walk with his back to the wall. He would swear his own damned soul that there was a monster or an alien or something in that picture, hovering over him as he slept. He knew it with the same certainty that he knew Bigfoot lived in matriarchal societies and that the Jersey Devil wore size eleven shoes.
Stop avoiding the issue, Dibshit. That's Zim in that picture. You know it as well as I do. He knows where you live, remember?
In a flurry of motion Dib stood up, sliding foolishly against the slick tile and shaking water from his hair in an attempt to clear his mind. The headache returned in all its thrashing glory. Dib focused on the pain, reveled in it, as he grabbed a bottle of shampoo and took to raking his stunted fingernails through his hair, trying to scrape his brain free of that same stupid redundant thought.
His head began to throb - a pulsing ache behind his temples as if his skull was full of shaken razorblades. Dib faltered against the side of the shower, vision starting to blur and discolor in the pain. Heat from the bathroom clogged his lungs and flushed his brain. The worst migraine he'd ever had was coming on fast.
His distorted vision suddenly started to snap back into focus around him. The pain didn't lessen, but at least he could half see again. Colors shaded in, edges grew sharper, but Dib started to realize that the wider he opened his eyes, the more grotesque the scene around him became.
Where the grimy tile walls should have been he saw long, steel bars covered in spikes. The shower had become a cage around him, an Iron Maiden. Any motion and he'd be speared through. Dib sucked a breath across his back teeth, whimpering in horror at the transformation. Blood stuck grittily to the bottom of his bare feet, and he felt the pointed bars needling his trembling, naked skin.
There was a clacking sound above him. The showerhead was still where it was supposed to be. Only now, instead of water, he saw a putrid green vapor had begun to leak out. His mind raced immediately to the gassing chambers of Auschwitz. In a screeching panic Dib reached out and shook the sharp cage walls, ignoring the agony in his re-opened hand wounds. He just had to get out-
And in a flash of being the shower took shape again. Tepid water misted off of his back from the perfectly benign showerhead. He looked down at his hands and realized he'd pulled the curtain liner down. A puddle had begun forming on the bathmat outside of the tub.
Safe. Fine. Normal. No sign of the hallucination, which had lasted maybe thirty seconds at most.
Dib ran a hand through his still-soapy hair and then tried shakily to put the shower curtain rod back in place. He found himself staring at every small thing - the ingredients in Gaz's conditioner, the texture of the soap in the dish, the gunk beneath his fingernails - to be sure that this was the right dimension.
It was just this case. It just struck a little too close to home and was screwing him up. As soon as he'd worked on it - interviewed the mother of the missing boy, gathered some more information - this would all go away. He'd solve it, realize that all this freaking out was over nothing, and that Zim was really gone forever and Gaz was right, he really was a goddamned moron sometimes.
Dib turned the shower off and grabbed his towel. He'd tried a thousand different drying and combing and hair-gel methods, but nothing would make the great jagged spike of hair lay flat, and anymore he mostly ignored it. The black scythe shook distractedly at him from the mirror as he dried himself off and pulled on a pair of dirty jeans and a tee-shirt.
He spent a few minutes gathering papers, packing his bag, struggling his still-sticky boots onto his feet. He found himself fabricating tiny chores to do. When all the trash cans were empty, the toilet paper rolls filled, the security system re-calibrated, Dib finally admitted to himself that he needed to leave. The sooner he moved forward with the case, the better.
He stopped in the foyer behind the couch, where Gaz had already situated herself for the day. Some show about serial killers blared on the T.V. as she pounded buttons on her Gameslave.
"Hey Gaz? Can you do me a favor?"
"Yeah?" she growled, barely looking up.
"Be careful today. Stay inside. And if anything weird happens, please call dad or something, okay? I really think...something bad might be going on." He spoke instinctively, before his better judgment reminded him that Gaz hated his cryptic paranoid ramblings. The headache that had dulled during breakfast returned in full force, so bad that he closed his eyes and missed Gaz's dangerously agitated expression.
"You're such a whiny bitch, Dib." A heavy sigh. "But if it will make you shut up, then sure. I'll be careful." The sarcasm soaking her finally word was so thick it seemed to hang in the air. It was the best he could expect, really. Dib nodded once, opened the door, and walked into the bleached winter Saturday.
The next step in these sorts of cases, after gathering background information (Dib's messenger bag would scarcely zip closed, it was so packed with papers) was interviewing witnesses. Dib pounded Mrs. Finch's address into the family compact's GPS, parked half-in and half-out of the overfull garage. Their dad had bought a crappy foreign car when Dib got his driver's license and Gaz her learner's - good enough to get them around town but not heartbreaking if it should get wrapped around a tree.
Throwing his messenger bag onto the passenger's seat, Dib gave the neighborhood one last scrutinizing glance. No movement or shadows that he could see - just one of the neighbor's dogs digging through a garbage can. He climbed into the car and shifted into reverse.
The day was overcast, threatening rain with a strange pressure in the air and a solid white sheet of cloud cover. Dib found himself hoping vaguely for a storm as he drove. Occasionally the flight of a bird or a plastic bag blown across the road would make him jerk the steering wheel in a panic. A drop in his stomach, a spiking pain in his thigh, and then gone.
Sometimes the vision was a shadow. A mass of black: thin, elegant and spiked. He'd see blood spilled across the pavement ahead and looked in desperation for a dead cat nearby and noticed none. When the car got closer the blood puddles would turn to water steeping on the road and the haunting figures vanished.
If someone had put a gun to his head Dib wouldn't have known if the things he saw were real, imagined out of paranoia or side-effects of his blistering headache. Maybe a little of all three.
He was immensely relieved to reach the Finch house in one piece - moving around without being surrounded by a 2000-pound Korean weapon felt surprisingly freeing. Dib took a moment to clip his I.D. badge with the unflattering photo onto his shirt before he got out of the car. His boots crunched on the gravel driveway as he looked around. The house was small, with a mid-70s look to it and the ratty landscaping and flaked paint that whispered of neglect.
Every minute of Dib's childhood that he could recall had been spent in a town. There had always been the buzz of streetlights, the lowing of traffic, the yelping of neighbors. Out here, on the farthest edge of town, was nothing. The little house was surrounded on nearly all sides by stalk-like trees, stripped bare in the winter chill. Dib shrunk against the wideness of the sky and the isolation of the place.
Walking up to the door, messenger bag in place across his shoulder, he stared fixedly at the porch and tried to ignore the forest as it closed slowly around him. Dib stepped up onto the creaking, water-warped porch and rang the doorbell.
After a minute or two of shuffled banging the front door finally creaked open. A woman about his father's age looked up at him blearily, hands twisted into her skirt, dark hair back in a ponytail.
"Morning." Dib held out one hand for her to shake. She just continued to stare at him, and he crumpled his fingers and pulled his arm back to his side. "My name is Dib Membrane. I'm a paranormal investigator sent from the firm you contacted a few days ago about..." (he paused awkwardly, not sure if there was a painless way to say it) "your son's disappearance."
A light of recognition seemed to go off in Mrs. Finch's eyes - he got the sense that she was only just now seeing him.
"Right. Of course. I'd thought that I'd seen all the investigators. Please, come in." She spoke with an automatic politeness that Dib rarely found on his cases. Usually witnesses or victims were impossible to shut up, greedy for attention - not unlike he'd been when he was younger, he realized.
Dib followed her into the house, crinkling his nose ever so slightly at the foreign, bitter smell of another home. Sure, the Membrane house reeked of burnt agar and chemicals and old pizza, but it was their smell.
He wove his lanky form through knick-knacks and cramped furniture into an almost laughably dated living room, complete with plastic wood-grained paneling and carpet the color of rust. Mrs. Finch waved for him to sit down, and he threw himself onto a canvas-covered sofa and opened his messenger bag, digging out a tiny notebook and a pen.
It was only when Dib looked up that he realized she had left him alone. He glanced around the room, at the floor covered in toy spaceships and dinosaurs. This kid had good taste.
Mrs. Finch shuffled back into the room, bringing him a glass of metallic water that he hadn't asked for. He set the cup down a nearby side table as she took up residence on an armchair across from him.
"I can only imagine how difficult this must be." he began. The words felt hollow and meaningless, but Bill had taught him that remaining professional at all times was the key to being taken seriously as a paranormal investigator. Right now it just made Dib feel like a lawyer. "But it would be really helpful if you could describe to me anything unusual that went on in the days leading up to Joby's disappearance. Maybe you saw some weird lights in the sky, or he talked about seeing something in the woods or had a lot of bad dreams - a lot of times kids can catch things that adults don't."
Damn straight.
Any satisfaction Dib felt with that sentence disintegrated as Mrs. Finch sighed. She looked away from him, staring at some point beyond the living room wall that he could never hope to see. Grief had left some simultaneous weight and emptiness in her posture, as if gravity was stronger here. Dib felt a sudden rush of uneasy guilt and embarrassment at being there at all - this sort of pain should be private, not to be seen by a dweeby teenage investigator.
After a moment or two of aching silence she looked up at him. "Joby always talked about weird things. He'd tell me he saw UFOs, or ghosts, or choo-chooba-"
"Chupacabras, you mean?"
"That's the one. I guess my point is that it wasn't particularly unusual for him to mention seeing strange things around. I probably should have..." and with a choking whimper she dragged a sleeve across her face. Dib made a point of scribbling down some half-assed notes as he waited for her to collect herself.
"I probably should have paid more attention. I never noticed anything weird, no. But he mentioned there was a tall animal in the woods. Evidently it didn't like to be seen, so Joby always made a big deal about his 'sightings.' He said it was like...a stick bug, but with a face like a person. Oh, and it didn't have a nose. That was very important for him to mention" (she chuckled softly and Dib felt the break in her somberness like a chilled beer on a hot day) "It was such a weird description that I figured he was just imagining something he'd seen in his books. Or playing pretend - you know how kids do. Is that the sort of information you're after?"
"Th-that's great, Mrs. Finch. That's really helpful." Dib's pen scratched noisily across his notebook and he wondered how close his father had come to having the same conversation with a police officer. He'd been lucky as a child, he realized - dicking around with different dimensions and aliens and the undead - and came out of all of it with a few classy scars. Physically, anyway.
"Where did you see Joby last?"
"He'd been playing out in the woods. I remember, because he has this model of the Space Station that he carries around with him, and before he went out I told him to leave it inside so he wouldn't lose it. I haven't seen it around since then…" She glanced around the room worriedly, as if expecting the toy and her son with it would materialize amidst the Ikea furniture, and Dib got the distinct feeling that he was wearing her thin.
They stumbled through a few more questions – "Was the house built on a burial ground of any kind?" "Are you aware of any gravitational abnormalities nearby?" "Have you, or anyone in your family, ever been an elf?" – before Dib managed to find an excuse to make his way back to his crappy car. He was just as glad to be done with it; he hated the awkward and exploitive mood of interviewing. Chasing things down or running tests in a dark, quiet lab was really much more his speed.
His messenger bag strap dug into his neck as he stomped down the steps of the front porch, carefully watching the ground. Carefully trying to avoid spending the rest of the day staring into the forest, looking desperately for any sign of movement. Things seemed to move at the very edge of his peripheral vision, until finally Dib twisted his neck around and looked over at the wall of trunks. He'd fought his curiosity before - he could do it again.
No, you can't.
Dib made it halfway to the car before he glanced up into the wall-like forest. The branching trunks metronomed in the wind, rousing up otherworldly creaking sounds as the wood strained nearly to breaking. He felt some small sigh of relief release itself when no horrors made themselves immediately present. In daylight the trees looked much less foreboding than they had the night before, when he'd been running home in twilight. There was certain elegance about winter trees spread lace-like against the winter sky, he had to admit.
Then a stalking, equally elegant shadow that he hadn't noticed slid behind a tree and disappeared from his view.
If this chapter feels a bit off, that's probably because it was originally two much longer ones. I realized that the last thing the world needs is more filler, so I consolidated them into one long-ish chunk. Maybe not the best editing choice I've ever made, especially considering that I am exhausted right now and probably missed quite a few things, but it got all of us about eight pages closer to a big hunk of violence. I think that's something everyone can look forward to. If you notice any especial weirdness/anachronisms that I didn't catch, or have any other opinion in general, I'd love to hear a review about it so I can try and fix it!
Otherwise, dears, Aunt Donnie has a very important meeting with a couple of Excedrin and her Jurassic Park DVDs.