Sunkissed Innsmouth
Part Nineteen
There was also the threat. Felecia thought about that as she laid in her shelter and shivered while the snow fell. Who would there be to tell? Most of the villagers still viewed her as a stranger if not a continued curiosity. How could someone from the big house, someone from the vaulted house of Conway, be slumming and dressing like the servants.
The villagers she did odd jobs for only barely acknowledged her, neither of them were close enough to her to simply blurt out how she had been crudely propositioned by a man who was hoarding food. After all, she already assumed most of the village was holding out and hoping that someone else would be the one to suffer first.
Telling Phillip seemed cheap, of course he would do something rash and poorly thought out. Hadn’t the groundskeeper already done enough for her? As much as Felecia couldn’t wait to procure new clothes so she could give her current outfit back to the sullen youth, she also needed to become self-reliant and resilient. Felecia needed to rely less on Phillip, not more, and certainly not in dealing with Mullens.
The answer to what Mullens planned and was likely still planning only managed to play out a few weeks later, after the weaver offered her a coveted bundle of fire wood in leu of payment for her services that week. Two days later the candle maker winked at her grimly after showing her a stash of stored goods and inviting her to stay for a long supper. The village really was full of those suffering and those preying on those who suffered, just like Rotary house, only in a more obvious and bloody sense.
A new pair of brown rain boots with thick rubber soles, a grey set of thick canvas overalls, a drab green sweater, long underwear, an oiled cap and rain jacket, even a new pair of work gloves. Months of Felecia’s hard labor all came down to a few selections listed in the Sears catalog that Phillip was careful to deliver to the post in the town down the road. Mullen’s crazed progeny broke away from his outhouse bonds and murdered the greasy would-be rapist in his sleep the very next day. Strangled him as it turned out. Sadly, the murders didn’t stop there. The bull necked, foul smelling mishap stalked through the night and visited two other huts in the village before a collection of sleep weary people stormed up Phillip’s fence line with torches in hand.
Groundskeeper, hermit, dour red right hand of the mistress of Rotary house, fosterer to the disowned last of her line, and apparently, the most reluctant of sheriffs. Some of the stronger villagers managed to wrestle the crazed young man who stunk of the outhouse, they had him trussed in a fishing hut on the beach and wanted Phillip to do something. Mullens’ get had murdered him, followed by an old spinster and then the candle maker before he got his hands around the throat of a fourth victim as her husband took notice of the assault.
Phillip listened to the villagers as they pled and demanded, he listened to their voices sure, but he also seemed fixated on their constant foot falls, crunching in the snow. The groundskeeper signed so loudly the crowd quieted for a moment before they realized he wasn’t going to break into some speech. He walked away from the crowd and closed his front door and the lantern inside blew out.
The villagers didn’t start howling or come charging down the lane to Phillip’s porch. They knew the man, so long that even his sigh of resignation could be recognized. Felecia hadn’t known the groundskeeper as long, not nearly, but she began to dress and made sure to collect her skinning knife and her bow.
Long after the villagers turned and walked back to their homes, and after Felecia finished getting ready and grew cold waiting out in the dark and the snow, Phillip came out of his house wearing his heavy boots and coat. The groundskeeper didn’t have his bow with him, or any weapon that Felecia could make out from her place down at the end of the fence line. Phillip didn’t look up or over as he reached the end of the property. “This is no dear hunt. This is bad business. Go get some sleep for tomorrow’s chores.”