Sunkissed Innsmouth
Party Twenty One
Phillip didn’t shout or find some spot on the floor to look at, he kept his eyes on the corpse, mostly the hideous face with its locked look of pained anguish. “Can’t say I’m surprised. You should have told me when it happened.”
“I…”
Felecia started and stopped, lost in other thoughts as she looked closer at the corpse and its awful face.
Phillip turned for a moment to Felecia and then back to what he was doing, which was leaning in and smelling the white froth that still coated the corpses bloated tongue. “Trust me, when I kill a man, I don’t do it in the night like some thief. I don’t kill braggarts and blusterers for making rude offers either, though some in the village would likely celebrate if I did.”
When Felecia didn’t add anything or seem to be getting closer or trying to ask what Phillip was doing, he motioned towards the corpse. “Come here and tell me what you smell.”
When Felecia kept her place by the door Phillip’s face turned to stone. “You’re the one who wanted to graduate. I need a second opinion.”
Felecia nearly tip toed over to the body splayed out by the bed. Was it worse that she knew Mullins? The man was grotesque in life, almost nearly as in death. Why was there this sense of trepidation, and outright fear? Felecia recognized then and there that she wouldn’t have stabbed him, maybe not even if he had dropped that sack and come at her out in the snow. She dared to lean closer and that’s when it hit her. She knew that smell well enough and it was strong but also wrong. A familiar baking ingredient but also mixed with something sour and awful.
“Vanilla? No, almond cookies. Elle used to make them when father brought almonds from the islands.”
Phillip nodded, “Back in the flush years some of us got a batch of those cookies as well. Only way I know that those cookies smell like the poison we used for rat warrens in the village, before the children turned to eating the damn things.”
Felecia stood in place, casually avoiding the gaze of the corpse while Phillip grunted and stood up. “Go check his pantry.”
Everyone was hungry, and cold. Surely things within the groundkeeper’s house weren’t beyond desperation, still Felecia looked at Phillip and pointed at the corpse. “Are we here to hunt down his son or loot him?’
Phillip nodded over to the collection of shelves and cabinets that marked Mullen’s kitchen/storehouse/closet. “Humor me and go look.”
There was nothing much to see really, a few cans of beans, a bulging can of peaches that shouted nights spent leaning hard on the outhouse seat. None of the canned and fermented splendor that Mullen’s had on display when he came waddling up to Felecia’s shelter in the snow.
“He had weeks’ worth of food in that sack when he came by. A month’s worth for a family, easy. None of its here.”