My skin crawled and heart beat thumped all the harder as the hours ticked by. I could practically see the hands of a clock speeding in my mind and feel the shifting sunlight over her room. It felt like too long that I looked through what old childhood photos, birthday or christmas cards she'd exchanged with acquaintances, old journals she had, and was still nowhere closer to my goal than before. It turned out she didn't particularly keep details of the Sally-Anne Perks she sometimes met in her room anywhere. The only thing I could find at last was a small safe whose combination I'd guessed, that from the looks of the strange collection of objects inside, were items Leigh-Scarlett perhaps treasured, but weren't necessarily of monetary value. Within was one newspaper clipping about my death, I saw my name, parents' names, cause of death, highlighted in it, and the fact that one child was happily rescued from the wreckage.
Then one tiny photograph of two smiling girls in a garden with two sets of parents nearby. Leigh-Scarlett's bore a cunning resemblance to her, they had the same light blonde hair, same tall and slender frames, same sort of inquisitive smile and content happiness. Though Leigh-Scarlett's hair was lighter in colour, she was just a little more straighter and skinnier, and it seemed like she was ever so slightly different from her parents. What must've been my parents were two people of similar height and build, but with brunette hair both, smiling happily at the camera. Sometimes blonde was a trait that appeared every few generations, our faces were still similar enough one could guess we were related from facial features alone, but it seemed almost if not by some coincidence both Leigh-Scarlett and I came out looking quite similar.
I spent a fairly long time staring at it. Vanity was never anything I liked but it seemed we would've both likely been considered quite pretty and dainty children. We looked more like siblings than cousins, though in the photo my hair and hat was in shadows, Leigh-Scarlett wasn't wearing a hot, we both wore very different clothes and styles on that day, were engrossed in different activities, and no one could've guessed we would've grown to be each other's splitting replica all these years later just from those photos alone. Some things felt eerie but yet some things bore hope. Like the fact that I had all these minor annoyances, irritations, preferences, opinions, over Leigh-Scarlett's mother, over the fact that I didn't care for vanity usually, over the manner of Leigh-Scarlett's room, that didn't feel like they came from a life in a vacuum.
I must've picked up some sense of life, opinions about it, from somewhere before I awoke. It was like I was a normal person even though when I thought back to it - nothing. Absolutely nothing jogged my mind about the stretch of time between 3 and 11 years old.
Around lunch my mother came in with the lunch tray. Guilt ate up at my insides for how much work she did for me, I wondered if that was what made Leigh-Scarlett hate her home so much? It felt suffocating here.
"Don't look at those. They don't help you sleep at night," she said, putting them away. Her fingernails carelessly brushed against my face on the photograph as she placed it back in the combination box. I waited for a tiny hint of response but there was nothing to suggest she was easily giving away information about Sally-Anne Perks that day.
Deciding to try my luck over lunch I ventured, "I just missed the other girl in the picture that's all."
"Don't get too carried away. You never really knew her," she said sharply, "she was just the babysitter's girl afterall."
"When was her birthday? Was it similar to mine?" I ventured, figuring that if our similar birthdays were a lie than everything else could've been as well.
A part of me found Leigh-Scarlett deeply creepy and wanted to leave this situation and never come back, but another part told me there were many mysteries waiting to be solved and well...
"I don't know. I don't think anybody ever told you. It's slipped my mind," she said.
After lunch I paced around the room, panicking slightly. Leigh-Scarlett had made up a lot of things about me. Possibly the backstory of our parents being friends was made-up, possibly the backstory of my death was exaggerated slightly. But the girl in the photograph was definitely me. We looked alike. Possibly I was someone Leigh-Scarlett knew in her youth but then she made up a lot about me after my disappearance. The picture proved I did once exist at the same place as her though, to get it taken, it gave me proof, along with my gravestone, that I did exist in this town, this village, but there seemed to be no physical records of me after the 'deaths' when I was 3.
I thought of my parents. I just had the strong sense they were indeed dead and that that was a dead end.
After I suffered through the rest of the day I changed back into the clothes I originally wore and crept outside to meet Leigh-Scarlett by the edge of the park. The moonlight was shining brightly on everything that day, all the colours seemed vivid in all their enchanting silver, and there was a sort of static echo that hummed throughout the entire neighbourhood that only existed at these hours.
"Hey," Leigh-Scarlett sounded tired as she met me. She seemed otherwise in good spirits and happy so I suppose her comment about being able to go without food or water for a decent period of time was true. "How did you enjoy your day as me?" she asked.
"I was lucky to avoid suspicion. I kept feeling like I'd be found out as the day went on. How were the woods..." I ventured.
"Good but they got boring quickly," she said with a swallow, "so I guess I'll see you?"
"Yeah," I said.
After that I headed back through the neighbourhoods to the abandoned house that was where I appeared. The remnants of birthday cake lay on the floor. I felt a frown on my face. So that was definitely very very real? Apparently the wolf-dogs seemed to have wanted to get the cake mostly for there were only a few smidgens of pink icing left to tell me there had been a cake at all. I then headed inside the house.
The next few weeks of my life were spent trying to etch out a living in this strange place that I called home. The taps were still working somehow. They didn't always have water but they tended to have more during the morning and evening. I could find buckets and collect them to store for the day. The toilets were still working. So was the gas stove surprisingly. Inside it was fairly warm, the front door had a lock, the back door had one as well, but a portion of the wall had been knocked down to create a small hole about half it's height that I could easily climb in and out of. From the inside it was hard for anyone standing in the backyard to see there was a person inside the house if they didn't stand in front of the hole. There were no sounds of ghosts or anything. That part was probably exaggerated.
It was still colder than I would've liked, but I couldn't say there was no way to try and make out a living there.
I was able to boil up some water in some cups lying around to drink. There was a mess of some furniture lying around though it wasn't much. There was a mattress on the floor I could sleep in. No washing machine so I would have to wash things in a big tub of boiled water but there were clothes for adult women in the wardrobe that were close enough to my size I could just about slip into them.
I had no money for food however. And it was on the first day of the first week that I stood there, in the weed-filled backyard in the spring sun before evening came, I thought of the combination lock trick that I had used. When I first saw it I noted it was 3 numbers, 3 turns and twists of the lock before the right combination was reached. For some reason the number 3 just stood out to me quite vividly, it felt magical. I found myself tracing different patterns all with the idea of '3' in them somehow, 3 concentric circles, 3 interlocking rings, 3 starred stars, 3 cobweb like sticks, over and over until I shook the lock a little and it seemed to click into place.
The metal of the lock made me think of money. I tried to do something similar to conjure up metal coins, but couldn't. I frowned. There seemed to be some sort of blockade. Like the presence for metal was around me enough, but I couldn't fully summon it's creation into minted coins I could spend. However, I grabbed a leaf, traced my hand in symbols for money, for eyesight, for the brain, lots of them, overlapping all at once but keeping to that order, and then when I finished, I felt as if the leaf was special somehow. Like it would be seen for money.
I wandered with bated breath until I found a small store and bought some pies. It worked, I was able to.
I then ate my food solemnly in the grass outside. Many more questions tumbling in my mind. What was this...? It felt like magic of some sort. Runes? Elf-lore? Wood-lore? That was what it had felt like. Although I had no idea how I knew this, it just seemed to all fall into place before, like it was something I did before, or saw others doing, grew up with. I felt less alone in this world, but also so much more confused than I was before.
Either way, I had food and water for now, and even a sharp stick I'd fashioned for myself from the garden whose pointy end I could maybe poke the eye out of an animal with if they came wondering anywhere again. There were neighbouring bins I could throw my trash into which I usually did in the later hours of the evening. I had food and water for now.
Was I supernatural? A person with divine powers?
I frowned. I didn't feel as if I truly had divine powers or anything different about me. That I wasn't human. But rather that I had knowledge of something, somehow.
I had supernatural knowledge of something I'd guess was a mix between runes and lore.
Which explained my mysterious appearance. It seemed the sort of things to be related. In fact, it could've not been poison at all but rather some runic spell, a very powerful one at that that...caused me to lose all my memories and also put me in a sleep to wake up upon my 11th birthday. With no information other than those 4 sentences. Strangely, I didn't feel as if any of those past memories or things could be covered. None at all. I just didn't feel like I had it anymore.
Over the next few weeks I built up a small stock of everything, lived by myself in this abandoned house. Sometimes I heard howling of wolves at night, but they sounded quite far away. I slept with my stick by my bed, wondering about the mysteries of all of this.