Feignt

The spatter of water on my face wakes me. For a moment, I think I’m lying in my bathtub with the ever leaky tap dripping on my forehead.

It’s not the feel of cold porcelain beneath me, pressing into my hip and my shoulder. I stretch my hand into the darkness. The surface is flat, no sides. It’s cool and solid, with bits sticking up that prick my fingers. I am laying on wet wood.

The sounds around me begin to filter through the thinning fog of sleep. Thunder rolling behind the falling drops. A subtle creaking that matches the shifting beneath me.

I might be sick.

I close my eyes, not that they were able to make out anything in the dark, and take in a breath. Slow. In through my mouth. Out through my nose. Three of these settle my stomach.

I open my eyes just as lightning flashes across the sky. The sky. Covered in clouds. The endless gray broken by shards of blacking jutting up above me. The shards slowly focus, forming into silhouettes of poles and flapping fabric.

I finally put it all together. I am on a boat.

I have no idea how I got here.

I push myself up to sitting as another wave moves beneath me. The shift in the boat is big enough that I have to fight to stay up.

“Hello?” I call into the dark, unsure if I want to get an answer or not.

The creaking of the boat around me is the only reply.

I think I’m alone. On a boat. In a thunderstorm.

I get to my feet, slowly finding my balance on the ever shifting deck. With the next flash of lightning, I turn.

This boat is huge. I don’t think I can continue to call it a boat. This is a ship.

Around me, several poles reach up the sky, rolls of fabric waiting to be unfurled and catch the wind. To my left is a wheel. To the right is what looks like a small enclosed space, a cabin, maybe. Between the cabin and me lies a gaping black hole. I assume that hole leads to space below. Space that could be used to store goods.

Or space that could hold people sheltering from the storm.

People could mean danger. They could be people that kidnapped me, brought me to this ship in the first place. But people can also tell me where I am, how I got here and maybe how to get home.

The rain picks up, no longer a few stray drops splashing on my skin. The drips have grown into a steady pouring rain that quickly soaks my shirt and pulls a shiver from my skin. It’s the cold that decides what I should do.

I step toward the hole, hoping for helpful people, but willing to settle for dry and warm.

Another flash of lightning reveals a ladder stretching down from one side of the opening. The lightning is not enough to show me what hides below, however.

The rain shifts to hail, pushing me ahead to grip the sides of the ladder and begin to slowly step down into the pitching darkness below. The boat shifts, hard, almost throwing me off the ladder onto the ground. I catch myself, driving a splinter deep into the meat of my left hand.

I quickly drop my feet to the ground, hoping to stabilize myself in the increasingly volatile ship. The ladder has become my anchor, the only spot I know in the dark. I keep a tight hold with my throbbing left hand while I reach out with my right.

I hope for a light switch, a cord, a lantern, a flashlight. I hope for anything at all.

I find nothing. My fingers sift through oil black darkness, meeting only the cold air around me.

Before stepping out into what could be a pit, or a bear trap for all I know, I take stock of what I have. A ladder leading up into a roiling storm. A splinter that is probably leaving a trail of blood on anything I touch. A pair of black leggings. Socks. Shoes. A yellow tank top. A dark blue hoodie.

Idiot. I pull the hood up, blocking the drops and bits of ice that are falling through the hole that leads to the sky. Instantly I am a touch warmer and a bit more isolated, as the hood blocks some of the crashing and creaking above me.

My hand finds the pocket at my waist that I had forgotten and slips inside, seeking the warmth of the pouch. My fingers brush against cool glass.

I have my phone. Double idiot. Apparently waking up somewhere unexpected can make you forget a lot.

I let go of the ladder to hold the phone between my two hands. I don’t want to drop it, lose it in the shifting space. Please, please, let the battery not be dead. I tap the screen.

I have never been so happy to see a screen demanding a passcode. Light splashes around me, but I know there’s more constant light held inside the small box in my hands.

I unlock my phone and turn on the flashlight app, quickly turning the phone to light the space around me.

A figure lurches out of the depths, arms fumbling as it reaches toward me. I scream at the approach of the zombie pirate and turn for the ladder.

The shift in perspective changes the person, enough that I stop in mid-flight. I force myself to look again, to shine the light directly on the whatever that lunged at me.

I am still alone in the ship. The zombie was no zombie, instead a wooden frame on wheels with two white shirts hanging from the top of the frame. Other than the not-a-zombie, there is nothing stowed in this ship. No crew, no bounty.

I turn in a slow circle, adjusting each shift of my feet with the never ending sway of the boat around me. Wood. More wood. In the farthest end of the ship, the wood juts into the space, broken by a door across one surface. It looks like a room tucked away in a corner.

One last chance for me to find a person, or an explanation for why or how I’m here.

A large lurch of the water beneath us nudges me toward the door, forcing me to step far faster than I would have chosen. My hand lands on the cold metal of the brass doorknob. The knob seems out place on this ghost ship, more similar to the knobs on my doors at home than I would expect in a boat as old as this appears to be.

I slowly turn my hand, spinning the knob silently as I push gently on the door. It opens without protest.

Another dark room. But this one is broken by bright streams of light from two walls. A dozen screens are mounted inside the space, all pointed at the desk in the center of the room.

My breath catches in my throat as I scan the images in front of me. The rolling sea. The wooden deck. The captain’s wheel. The top of the ladder peeking out of the hole. The dark outline of me standing in the doorway of this very room.

“What the hell?” I say to the screens, as if they will tell me why my nighttime adventure is being watched.

Watched by who?

I drop my eyes to the desk. To the chair between it and me. To the man sitting in the chair, staring at me, a hesitant grin on his face, one hand reaching out to me as if he hopes to calm a wild animal.

“Surprise?” he whispers.

I tip my head, trying to find an angle to look at what’s before me that makes it make sense. My mouth drops open, desperate to spill out words that don’t quite form.

“You’re on ‘I Thought It Was a Dream.’”