The Pike_Evermore Read online

  But something was wrong. I had the impression of it laying shattered and in ruins as the flames started to consume it. The millions, if not billions of strands of pulsating, living light which led into the loom to create a fabric which brought me to reverent tears just trying to look directly at it, recoiled from the flames.

  I screamed as I watched the fabric unravelling. The impression of eons of work just falling apart. Then I raised my arms defensively above me as, with a great crack and rumbling, the great loom shuddered and then collapsed down upon me.

  The last thing I saw before I woke up screaming in bed again, was that blood on my hands. The horror of it was that I knew that blood was not my own.

  I sucked in shuddering breaths as the nightmare receded again, I desperately tried to cling to the fading memory of it. It was all that I had, this nightmare. It must mean something to the person I used to be. Before whatever accident occurred that stripped my memories from me. Was it a clue as to who I had been? Some Freudian glimpse into the person I was in another life?

  I stared at my sweat slicked skin, twisting an arm slowly in front of my eyes at the alien yet familiar appendage. I was getting damn sick of not knowing who I was. Not knowing if I was a good person or a bad person. What had happened to me that I couldn't remember? And why couldn't the police discover who the hell I was?

  Come on, it couldn't be that hard. I mean, someone had to be missing me somewhere. Someone had to have filed a missing person's report in the past nine months. Right? I wasn't alone in the world... right? I mean, I had to be someone.

  It almost hurt to know that whoever I was, I apparently hadn't made a mark on the world enough that it even mattered. The world spun on without me and nobody had even noticed.

  I stared in morbid fascination at the impossible, as the ink that covered most of my body seemed to flow like smoke again, twisting and changing under my skin as the tattoos reformed themselves. They were always moving and changing, morphing into various things. As frightening as that was to my fragile state of mind, imagine just how terrifying it was that they always seemed to be appropriate for the things happening around me, as if the art was mimicking the life that went on around me.

  It was a few days after I was found lying in an impact crater in the mountains before they started to show up on my skin as I got stronger after I was released from the hospital. I've had to hide them ever since I first noticed them, and saw them moving.

  I knew I had to be going insane but then I saw reports of flying women in San Francisco and Seattle. Or the woman that some fishermen swear came up from the depths of the Pacific to save them from their sinking vessel and swim them to shore.

  The world seemed to be changing, and getting stranger by the day, as it seemed that more and more unbelievable and inexplicable things were popping up all the time.

  Maybe I was one of those things, but I couldn't tell you why. I couldn't tell you much of anything. Hell, I'd settle for my name.

  “Sloan?” My roommate, Enid called through the door. “Are you ok? You were screaming again. The same nightmare? Can I come in?”

  I pulled the blankets up to hide the black ink on my body as it settled into its new configuration. I smiled at the door. Sloan was the name the hospital gave me because I was found laying in the charred crater on Sloan Peak in the Cascades in the middle of winter. They thought it sounded better than calling me Jane Doe. I didn't have a preference at the time, not knowing my real name, so the name sort of stuck.

  Once I got out of the women's shelter the police had recommended until I could get a job and a place to live, I answered a want ad for a roommate her in Mount Vernon, Washington. Enid looks like one would imagine. Her parents did her no favors by naming her after her great grandmother.

  She's sort of a mousy girl, but possibly the nicest person I have ever met. Well let me rephrase that since I can't remember anyone before all this shit happened to me, she 'is' the nicest person I have ever met. And once you get her talking, she's pretty funny and cute.

  I've been working on helping her get a better wardrobe than the frumpy clothes she wore, and found I had an uncanny gift with scissors as I cut her mousy brown hair hair in a more trendy fashion. I had this urge to protect the girl who was finally coming out of her shell.

  I called out, “Come on in Eeen. Sorry, didn't mean to wake you.”

  She opened the door, peeked in then scurried across my room to sit on the edge of the bed. “Can you remember any more of the dream?” Her eyes were wide with concern.

  I patted her knee and shook my head. “No, not really. Just chaos, pain, fear... I think there was a fire.”

  She nodded encouragingly, “Well that's something new.”

  Noting the time on my alarm clock by the bed, I grinned at her then pushed my sleep matted hair back out of my eyes and said, “Your turn to make breakfast, trouble. I get the bathroom first today.”

  She hopped up and grumped as she went out to the kitchen, “And here I was worried about you.”

  I chuckled, neither of us liked cooking since neither of us were very good at it unless it was microwavable. I expect I'll have a bowl of oatmeal or cereal waiting for me when I get done getting ready for my glamorous job as a records clerk in the downtown library.

  Hey, I had no skills I was aware of and a person has to start somewhere. Filing books and maintaining the lists for the librarians was the perfect fit for someone with no qualifications. It was that or working fast food or being a barista.

  I sighed as I trudged my sorry ass to the little bathroom in our tiny rental house. I just hoped to whatever god may be watching and getting a good laugh at my expense, that I had a more glamorous job in my real life.

  I wondered idly if Officer Lisbon had made any progress on finding out just who the hell I was. It's all in the weave I guess.