Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Thirty Four
Still, she persisted, knowing it was all for nothing.
Felecia, all barely thirteen years of her stumbled on through the mud and the snow, her good hand white knuckled around the handle of her knife, as she marched into certain doom. Phillip wasn’t perfect, he wasn’t even a good person. Then again, neither was she, not as it turned out that night and well, in many ways she didn’t want to think about or deal with then or since. Phillip wasn’t a lot of things she needed him to be, but he had saved her, he stepped in when no one else would. Even if she failed, Felecia knew she had to try and do the same for him.
The mob was thankfully distracted, so busy jeering and yelling and helping with fixing the rope over the tree and around Phillip’s neck, none of the assembled noticed the oncoming distraction, or the real threat the was still looming for them that night.
Felecia slipped and nearly took another header into the muck before the earth granted her a small reprieve by having one of her boots sink deep enough in the slippery, snowy mud to lock her in place. She stood there for a second, her knife lunged out in front of her, her ruined mouth and broken nose wincing as she dared to run her dry tongue around her bloody gums and back across her dry palette.
“Let him go!”
Felecia had never screamed before. She had yelled a few times, mostly at her brothers, shrieked a few times as a small child until shamed into keeping it down. She had yelped and howled, mostly when Nana took a spoon to her. She had never screamed though, not until that night.
The mob, the entirety of their leering, jeering number were locked in guilty horror, if for only a moment or two. There must have been fifty of them give or take and they all stopped what they were doing, up to and including preparing to hang the groundskeeper for daring to try and stop Felecia from being murdered.
The spectacle wore off and some of the mob stopped worrying about the knife wielding, blood soaked, mud caked half apparition. Some got back to the business at hand while others peeled off and made to quit the exploit. Felecia surely looked horrific, her face split and splattered, her body soaked and caked in blood and mud. She fixated on those who returned to the job of playing executioner as she continued to scream, “My Grandmother will have your homes burned to the ground! She will have you all wiped from this land!”
Many members of the mob kept silent then, some of them began to doubt their resolve and the validity of what they had chosen to do that night, still though, there were enough of them to keep on. Half a dozen or so shrugged or waved away at Felecia and got the rope fixed and started pulling at its excess. Still others seemed to aid Phillip in a sort of sympathetic judgement. They helped the groundskeeper up just long enough to get him situated before they let go or even pulled against him as the rope pulled taught.
Felecia gasped and tried to fight the pain of fresh, cold air hitting her wounded face. She advanced and lunged at no one in particular as her double vision played havoc on any chance that she had at wounding some of the remaining members of the mob. Still, she advanced and slipped and slid anyway. She watched with growing horror as Phillip struggled and choked against the ropes weight.
One of the villagers crept forward and Felecia didn’t try to waste valuable time or effort in feigning or jabbing at one of the sets of twins coming at her. Felecia tried to focus on the man instead and saw only a loose mix of fishy features for her trouble. “Please. I was attacked, Phillip was only trying to help me. This is all a gigantic misunderstanding. Please, you have to help us!”
The vague, blob, villager reached out and Felecia felt her knife being yanked out of her good hand. Someone else was already coming at her from the side, soon she would be back on the ground, in the frozen snow and the muck. Maybe someone would get overzealous, maybe not. Maybe some member of the mob would take pity on her and simply slit her throat. Either way, Phillip was about to die and even if she wouldn’t be made to watch it, she would certainly be forced to listen to his death before hers came next.