Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Forty Eight
Healing took time, the physical injuries mended first of course. Felecia stopped sulking about her fate, about the awful scabby mess that was her face. She stopped brooding about the village and the awful people who called it home, and tried to do the same about the big house. Walks down to the end of the lane and back became jogs and then outright runs.
Running felt good, it felt right. The exertion was hard at first, her mending ribs made arguments against it as did her still frequent headaches but Felecia ignored those complaints and pushed through. Cleaning and cooking, things that took all day and most of her strength became simple tasks that left her hours to roam the woods behind Phillip’s house. After a bit of careful coaxing the youth agreed to help Felecia set up a few targets using old boat paint and broken planks. Ten yards, twenty, fifty, a hundred, two. Felecia practiced with her bow again and again. A routine began to form and it lasted for months before Felecia realized that the transition from reluctant house guest to member of a new household had taken shape.
Felecia didn’t want to be Phillip’s retainer. She was beholden to him and knew it, everyone did, even if the groundskeeper turned game warden wasn’t making it obvious or calling in any favors it was none the less true. The clincher for her decision to move on wasn’t Phillip remarking by the hearth that she was a boon, a soothing balm between him and his boy. Though it was true that they kept to themselves and didn’t fight as much with her around.
No.
Felecia waited until one morning when Phillip and the youth went into town for supplies. She didn’t take long, she hardly had much to pack. She also didn’t help herself to any of the houses sparse food or meager tools. She didn’t go snooping in hopes of finding any old pieces of paper or stubs of pencil. A bit of charred wood used on the porch deck did the job well enough.
Thank you for everything. I need to start over.
Felecia took a look up at the stand of trees where her time there began. The old lean to was gone, most of it turned into the make shift chicken coop that rested at the side of Phillip’s house, the rest was used for fire wood. Most everything Felecia had at her disposal there were things missing from Phillip’s house, tools and utensils that were happily reabsorbed during her stay there. Still, that stand of trees was where she learned to make a home for herself, albeit a primitive one. She understood that she could do so again given the time, tools, and another stand of trees somewhere out in the forest.
Late summer left the usually cold and wet woods humid and stifling. Felecia stopped often just to catch her breath but she knew her message on the porch would be taken only one way. Phillip wouldn’t read it and shrug; he wouldn’t step over it and tuck in for the night. He wouldn’t take it for what it was, a heartfelt thanks for everything he did and tried to do, and a declaration of the end of Felecia’s time there. No more bridge between the dust choked halls of Rotary house and the vile, piss-soaked culverts of the village. No future for either because neither place deserved a future.
Felecia didn’t deserve one either, not by her reckoning then. She didn’t have the same old terrors of the night, not since the last one that left her waking up in Phillip’s yard. No, she didn’t dream at all anymore and every moment not spent in the pursuit of some mundane task was another moment spent knowing she could go get a few gallons of kerosine and make an awful new reality. A fiendish plot that more and more of her seemed perfectly at peace with.
The first night in the woods was spent leaning against a rock with her small pack for a pillow and her coat for a blanket. Felecia thought a lot that night and listened to her stomach rumble. She didn’t want to die; she just didn’t trust herself around people anymore. Hermitage seemed necessary, safe, a way to let the tiresome scales of the world balance themselves without her around to watch in horror.
Phillip would have to come to understand and no one else would miss her. The woods were cold and indifferent, they were perfect. Live or die, move around foraging and hunting until mishap or sickness took her, so be it. Otherwise, maybe another lean to and the occasional tools and supplies carefully lifted from the grounds. Nana had certainly taken enough from Felecia; it was only right that the old witch gave something in return.