The Third Parallel

It began with a dream that felt like a scar. I was sixteen, living in a flat suburb of Chicago, and my best friend, Maya, was twenty-one, tucked into a rain-soaked apartment in Portland. We’d met online, a shared love of horror films and obscure indie music bonding us across the miles. We’d never done anything occult, never even played with a Ouija board. I was a churchgoer, albeit a lukewarm one; Maya was still shopping around for a belief system. So when I woke up one October morning with three red welts across my stomach, I chalked it up to a weird allergy or a rough night’s sleep. The dream I’d had, of fleeing through a moonless forest from something that moved like smoke and hunger, I dismissed as an overactive imagination. The welts faded in a week, leaving faint white lines that I soon forgot.

A year later, almost to the day, my phone buzzed at 3 AM. Maya’s name flashed on the screen. Her voice was thin, shaky. ‘Something’s happening,’ she whispered. ‘I thought it was just a nightmare, but…’ She described a dream of running, of being chased, of teeth tearing into her side. And when she woke, she found three diagonal scratches on her left forearm, raw and stinging, as if etched by a ghost. My blood ran cold. I pulled up my shirt, though she couldn’t see, and ran my fingers over the faint, white reminders on my belly. The same pattern. Three parallel lines, evenly spaced, slanting from left to right.

We tried to rationalize. We compared photos, and the angles matched perfectly—a mirror image. I googled everything: sleep paralysis, dermatographia, even a shared delusion via some psychic link. But nothing fit. Then Maya noticed something else. In her dream, just before she woke, she saw a glimpse of a face—not human, but not entirely animal either. It had too many eyes, all of them burning like coals. And it spoke. Not in words, but in images: a hill of black earth, a gnarled tree with a single red leaf, and a circle of stones that seemed to hum. I gasped. The same image had flashed in my dream a year ago, but I’d buried it deep. We both knew then that this was no coincidence.

Over the next weeks, the dreams intensified. We were both there, in that dark forest, running together. The thing behind us was always just at the edge of our vision, a shape that shifted between wolf and man and something else entirely. We could feel its breath on our necks, smell the rot of old leaves and wet fur. One night, we stumbled into a clearing with that hill, that tree, that circle of stones. The stones were arranged like a crude altar, and on the altar lay a knife, its blade black with dried blood. The thing spoke again, and this time we understood: ‘The third parallel binds. The flesh is the key.’ We woke with new marks—on Maya’s ankle, on my shoulder. The pain was real, throbbing, and the lines were deeper than before.

We realized we needed help. I confided in my pastor, but he dismissed it as stress. Maya tried a therapist, who called it folie à deux, a shared delusion. Frustrated, we delved into obscure folklore, stumbling on a legend of a creature called the ‘Ghawra,’ a spirit that hunts across realms, using messengers to tear a path between its world and ours. It bound its victims by signature wounds, and once it had three sets, it could cross over fully. We had two sets. The third would come, and with it, the creature itself.

Panic set in. We tried everything to break the connection: fasting, prayer (Maya even tried a Wiccan circle), even disconnecting from all devices. But the dreams came anyway, and the marks multiplied. We started to feel each other’s pain—a phantom ache in my stomach when Maya scratched her arm. I couldn’t eat; Maya couldn’t sleep. In our waking hours, we were haunted by the sense of being watched. Shadowy figures flitted at the edges of our peripheral vision. On the night of the full moon, we both felt something alter. The air turned brittle, and the distant howl of a wolf echoed through our respective neighborhoods, though such sounds were alien to both Chicago and Portland.

The next morning, Maya called, her voice cracked. ‘It’s here,’ she said. ‘I saw it. Standing at the foot of my bed. It didn’t come through fully, but I saw its arm—black, with too many joints, reaching for me.’ I felt a tear on my cheek, and when I wiped it, my fingers came away red. I looked in the mirror: three fresh scratches, from my temple down to my jaw. The third set. I dropped the phone, and the connection cut.

That night, I didn’t sleep. I sat in my room, armed with a kitchen knife and a cross, though I doubted either would work. The air grew thick, and the lamp flickered. A smell like wet earth and copper filled my senses. And then, from the darkness in the corner of my room, a voice, not human, but layered, like many voices speaking at once. ‘You are the third,’ it said. ‘You are the threshold.’ I spun around, but there was nothing. Just my reflection in the window—but in the glass, my reflection had too many eyes.

I called Maya out of desperation, but the line was dead. I texted, no reply. I drove to her city—a foolish, desperate, eighteen-hour journey—but halfway there, I got a message from her, sent hours earlier. It was a photo: of her, her face pale, her arm outstretched, and on her palm, a symbol like a spiral. The caption read, ‘We are the door. He is through.’ A second photo followed, this one from an overhead angle, showing a circle of stones, and within it, a shadow with a wolf’s head and a man’s body. And then nothing.

I pulled over to the side of the highway, shaking. The road was empty, the night silent. And then, in the rearview mirror, I saw a pair of glowing eyes. The creature had crossed, and it had followed me. I screamed, slammed the accelerator, and drove into the dark, not knowing where I was headed, only that the forest was growing closer on both sides, its trees reaching like skeletal fingers. The last thing I remember before the headlights went out was the voice, inside my head, saying, ‘You brought the third parallel. Now you are mine.’

I woke in a hospital, a week later. The police had found me unconscious in a ditch, my car wrapped around a tree. I had no memory of how I’d gotten there. But on my stomach, the old scars were gone. In their place, a new mark: a spiral, like the one in Maya’s photo, etched into my skin. Maya is still missing. The authorities suspect foul play, but they don’t know the truth. The creature is here now, in our world. And I can feel it, a constant itch beneath my skin, a whisper at the edge of my mind, waiting for the moment I sleep so it can take me to that hill, that tree, that circle of stones—where Maya is, and where we will be together, forever, as part of its hunt.

I haven’t slept since. I keep a lamp on, and I keep my eyes open. But I know, one day soon, my eyelids will grow heavy, and the dream will come. And this time, I won’t wake up.