Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Fifty Two
“Hello.”
This time Felecia didn’t shout, she barely spoke above a whisper. The doll was looking at her through its peekaboo curtain, its lifeless eyes saw all and nothing at the same time and still Felecia found the look unsettling. The doll, the person who made the thing anyway, had lived a hard life, it was etched into the heavy lids and tired, weary blue eyes.
No one answered her faint call and Felecia saw that the window the doll was looking out of was wide open. She could see that there was grass growing in small patches on the floor where the sun breached the open window. Moss and groundcover clover clung to the undercarriage of the pram. A spider’s web was stretched from one corner of the room over to the side of the doll’s head and a collection of egg sacks were glowing yellow in the faint sun light.
You don’t want to be here when they hatch.
The thought rang out in Felecia’s mind and she wanted to argue it. She had never been one of those squeamish girls. Her brothers tried to scare her with bugs and mice and she inevitably wound up being the one to set them free or try and nurse them back to health. Yet, she couldn’t really argue that worried voice, she didn’t want to be here, not because of some spiderlings that might hatch, but because the entire place was abandoned, haunted, standing still only because enough winter storms hadn’t come along to pull it all back down into the earth. She had planned to walk to the northern shore and she was nearly there, this was a place best left to the past, whatever it once meant to someone.
Pebbles and gravel sand began to crunch under Felecia’s shoes. She took one, long last look at the disturbing doll and kept on walking away from the place. The clucking of a lone chicken was the only thing that stopped her. The animals, corralled however crudely, however fetid and malnourished they looked, they were still alive, still corralled, still being fed in some way. Someone was still around. It was a mystery to be sure, but not one Felecia felt compelled to solve. The chicken was standing at the edge of the porch, perched on the railing that offered a partial view of the ocean waves to the north. Felecia looked at the chicken and the dumb animal seemed to look back, it clucked and ducked its head this way and that and then called out in a shrill croak.
The little girl that used medicine droppers to feed cow’s milk to tiny mice and carry spiders down the stairs and out onto the porch heard that chicken. Felecia had spent enough time learning to care for the estates animals under Phillip to know the call of a thirsty and hungry chicken.
The corral, such as it was, turned out to be crudely hacked up tree branches pounded into the ground and tied together to make a claustrophobic and rather poor enclosure for the animals. The fence was too wide and allowed the chickens to roam in and out at they pleased even though most seemed content to follow the goats and peck at what came out of them as they milled about and grazed. Several overlapping circles of cleared out or munched down grass and flowers hugged the side of the house and then stretched out into the field of flowers and back again. Someone came along to move the corral every once in a while, so someone had to be around.