Sunkissed Innsmouth
Part Seventeen
At the time…
Soon enough it seemed all Felecia had was time. She only spoke to the groundskeeper’s boy when she had to from then on. Autumn surrendered to winter and the few fishermen attached to the village all solemnly swore by their ridiculous superstitions. They wouldn’t teach a girl how to sail or fish and they all barely managed to catch enough just to feed themselves until the currents changed and left them hungry to. Worst of all, when the time came Phillip gave over nearly everything that they had worked so hard to hunt. Felecia didn’t have the courage to face Phillip then. She watched as he hauled it all away, and watched as he came back complaining that the old witch chided him for such a paltry haul.
The nights grew longer and colder and the fallen branches and dry wood that Felecia counted on grew scarce. The solution, as Phillip saw it, was obvious, but Felecia flatly refused to spend another night in the groundskeeper’s house. Phillip deduced the reason quick enough and Felecia, already trying to sleep, had to roll away from the sound of the groundskeeper yelling at his boy, again. The yelling came often after that, and loud, and occasionally ended in the vulgar thud of a slap.
After the first hint of snow stuck to the ground a greasy looking man that Phillip referred to as Mullens came by. The man looked a good deal like Phillip, middle aged, paunchy, and all over fishy with wide, wormy lips and oddly malformed ears. Also, the same as Phillip, Mullens hair, such as it was, seemed to grow or be missing in all the wrong places.
Felecia was working on a new, more permanent back wall for her enclosure in the tree line when she overheard the man speaking to Phillip at the edge of his porch.
The two men weren’t friends, that was obvious, both in that Phillip didn’t seem to have any of those and also that he almost spat out the man’s name as he questioned him on what he wanted. Mullens was clear and vulgar with his intent. He leered up at Felecia as she took a break from plaining a log with a draw knife.
“The girl, she’s the heir to all of this.” Mullens waved his slabby arms out at the land around them. “You have her living out here in the muck, it’s unseemly. If you don’t have designs on her, so be it, but she’d make a fitting sheath for my boy.”
Felecia couldn’t see Phillip’s face from where she was standing, she didn’t see him step forward or hear him say anything but Mullens recoiled as if he had been hit all the same. Mullens ducked back for a second and then pushed his chest out at the groundskeeper. “We’re kin, damn you, you owe me for the other one, the disappointment.”
Phillip had been quiet so far, he clearly let his expressions say what needed to be said, until the greasy man mentioned his boy. “We’re third cousins you moron, most of us are around here, or damn closer than that. I never promised you shit and my boy is mine to worry about, not yours. As for the girl…” Phillip turned and looked up at Felecia and shook his head before turning back to Mullens. “…she determines her own fate. A fate that doesn’t end with the lump of lard you lock in your outhouse most nights for all his antics and howling.”
“How dare you…”
Phillip stomped off his porch nearly knocking Mullens over as he shouted over him. “No, how dare you. A man your age, hunting after child brides! Do you imagine the old witch will favor you when you show up pushing her in front of you with her belly down around her knees?”
The groundskeeper didn’t wait for an answer, he kept on walking, nearly pushing Mullens all the way out to the edge of his fence before the greasy looking man finally turned and walked away.
Felecia didn’t give that altercation or the greasy man a second thought, not down in the village where she worked for countless hours rolling tallow for candles or pulling wool for the village weaver. Those tasks became Felecia’s spare time jobs, beyond the scope of all the chores she did for Phillip, day in and day out.