Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Forty
“The rifle, where did it come from? My father said all the estate guns were locked away.”
Felecia had looked at Phillip for the answer but his boy spoke up from the kitchen doorway. “Pa bought it. Your gran gave him the lot to sell and he bought it back.”
For the first time since knowing the two of them Felecia noticed that Phillip didn’t have a discouraging word or a violent reaction on hand when his boy spoke up. The groundskeeper kept his eyes on the fire and a cup of whiskey tainted chicory in his hand.
“Why didn’t we take it on the hunting trip then?”
Again, it was the boy who spoke up and Phillip who chose to keep his eyes locked on the fire instead of replying.
“It ain’t a hunting piece, it was made for war.”
Felecia kept her unfocused eyes locked on Phillip and tried to lean forward until a wave of nausea settled her back in place leaning against the ottoman. “Why not bring it with us to the village then?”
That was the closest Felecia ever came to expressing any feeling of anger or resentment about the night that changed her life forever. She knew it wasn’t Phillip’s fault, he had told her to go back home when she couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy and the stupidity of the villagers. He knew and recognized the situation when she didn’t and ultimately her actions where what put them in the position that they found themselves in.
Felecia had no right to be angry at Phillip, or resentful of him. Still though, there she was, broken, angry, and terrified and the question seemed perfectly valid. After all, she had gone into what she figured was a dangerous situation with her knife and her bow and Phillip brought…nothing.
Phillip’s boy started to speak and Phillip raised one hand, silencing the room. The fire crackled and spat for what seemed like a solid minute before he spoke softly. “The Spanish war marked your father and I for life. We were both young and saw the war as an adventure. For him the war turned out to be an option for revenue, for me it was a situation I couldn’t avoid. We took port after port until they conscripted us for the army and marched the whole crew inland. I watched friends, new and old, die from disease and battle. I dug trenches and marched into enemy fire alongside my good friend. Yet your father was well off and I was not, they allowed him to keep his rifle and took mine away when the war was done. When the old witch tossed his rifle out with the trash, I chose to buy it. I paid market value and I kept it because I assumed there might come a day when it would be needed.”
“I didn’t think that day would be the two of us walking into the village to deal with some local nuisance.”
Phillip took a drink and a very deep breath before he spoke again, “I know you’re angry, Fee. I am too. I had a plan of how things where to go and that was all I could see. We both made mistakes that lead to what happened that night.
Felecia had nothing left to say that night, or much of anything to say at all for the weeks of healing that came next; not until they walked up the lane to Phillip’s house.