emptymouthpiece

Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part Forty Seven

"The bonfire that night, had near the left side of the porch so she could enjoy the warmth and the view from a rocking chair, warmed Felecia’s body but it didn’t close the open wound in her mind. Forced laughter and sips of whiskey laced chicory didn’t hide the sickening outrage she felt. They knew. All of them. Nothing would ever change that. People she had little to no interaction with, people who considered her already dead or just as good as, knew about her defining secret. The knowledge only served to eat away at Felecia over time.

The worst wounds sustained that night in the village weren’t the broken bones or the disfiguring scars. The worst wounds came in the forms of dreams, awful terrors of the night. Sometimes the awful drunk was the one with the knife. Sometimes Felecia jumped awake pawing at the open wound in her throat. Other nights the man she killed wasn’t a man at all, he was something out of an old pulp nightmare. A wolfman or a vampire, or just an even more grotesque version of the fishy looking man he already was. He would have a massive mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and a disgusting lantern lamp dangling over his head like an obscene blue fishing lure.

One night, during one of the ugliest of dreams, Felecia woke screaming and startled Phillip and his boy awake. The awful drunk didn’t even kill Felecia in that nightmare, he slithered and scraped over the threshold of the hut leaving a trail of slime and salt water in his wake. He crawled atop her in the fishing hut and simply began to absorb her like mold taking a hold of a bread heel.

The night after that bonfire Felecia had an equally horrifying nightmare. She was alone, in the dead of night, naked as the day she’d been born and holding onto a metal canister of kerosine. The last dwindling electric light bulbs and still burning candles in Rotary house were shining out of its many window eyes like winking, heavy lidded lovers. The moon light was shining off of Felecia’s scales and showing her off to the world in little snippets of grey and gold as she went around the base of the ancient mansion, soaking the wooden siding with the contents of the metal canister. She looked around for some time once the canister was finally empty and realized there was nothing on hand to light a fire with and then and only then did Nana dearest lean out of a third story window, red faced and nearly howling “Get inside you stupid girl, don’t you know what that bastard moon will do to you?”

The moon, as if on cue, shone out bright through a layer of clouds and hit Felecia’s scales dead on sending a cascade of bright orange and red light shining against the kerosine soaked siding. The ancient mansion nearly exploded with flames that began to leap and curl up the sides of its faded edifice. Moments later the sounds of shocked cries and horrified howls filled the night air. Little Katerina began to scream in genuine terror and the sound made Felecia want to vomit.

“Do you see what you did? What you’re doing now!” Nana didn’t scream or cry out or howl, she remained calm as she leaned out her third story window, she remained calm as the fire worked its way up the side of the mansion, she remained calm and collected and ready to always deliver more rebuttals, more rebukes, more judgments. The fire nearly reached her and the old gorgon ignored it as she chided still. “

“Murdering children huh? It’s a bit of a leap from your filthy perversion, but not by much. This is something else you’ll have to learn to live with, you know that right? How much hell are you willing to hold onto for the sake of your pride, girl? How much hell can you grip onto until it burns you too, I wonder?”

No one had to wake up listening to Felecia scream then. She woke up outside Phillip’s tiny house, standing under the bright light of a newly full moon and seeing its light twinkling off her scales. Felecia came back into the world that night freezing cold and terrified, a scream frozen in her throat, but she also woke that night with a new understanding, a new sense of purpose. Phillip had mentioned and even recommended spite as a motive for her continued survival and that still made a certain amount of sense."