Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Seventy One
The slow march seemed to go on for hours until the swampy woods gave way to a sudden rise in the earth. A few stands of young elm trees, grey and withered, were the only plant life that dared to grow so close to a length of rather carelessly hacked earth. The sudden flood of moon light almost seemed harsh after such a long time under the swampy canopy and Felecia had to take a moment to allow her eyes to focus on all of what they were trying to tell her.
The old woman kept on through the mud and up onto the rocky bare earth that waited before the rise. She slowly removed her steel pan and all those empty water skins. The whole mess was laid down and the dry mud caked poncho was placed over it all. The old woman set her lantern down, took off her odd mask and illuminated the rise in the earth so that it all shown even better in its awkward profanity. She grunted crudely and rolled a small stump a few feet ahead of her before she upended it and grunted and groaned more as she eased herself down on her seat next to a small wooden platform near the earthen rise.
Felecia found herself stuck in place, thunderstruck over the spectacle. The tool marks were obvious, someone had carelessly come along with far more time than craftsmanship and hacked a shelf out of the grey granite of the earth. One entire half of a small hill at the southern edge of the woods had been painstakingly removed leaving a ten-foot high by fifty-foot-long shelf of crudely exposed earth. Someone had also gone to the great troubles and no doubt tribulations of digging a well shaft only a few feet shy of the exposed shelf of earth.
The old woman, once seated, was all too happy to lift the wooden hatch of said well and began reeling up a small pail of water. She sat the pail down carefully and took a ladle from it to slowly sip from. Two, three, four, long drinks later and the old woman dipped the ladle back in the pail and motioned at Felecia.
“I don’t put out cups for tea, girl. I ran out of that stuff a long time ago. Come get some water, you need it.”
Felecia didn’t move though, she stood in place still staring until the old woman took note and turned her attention to the granite façade.
“My Abe did that, carved it into the stone after we cut our place out of the earth and dug out the well. A whole season, every day and night, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, and still he came out and finished it all off by carving that. He knew that I needed something to look at, even if neither of us were artists so to speak.”
The moon light showed brightly down on the spectacle, the dirty old woman sitting on her stump, waving at the singularly grotesque with one gnarled hand. The armoire doors from the dilapidated house had found their new home, obviously back when Felecia’s mother was still a babe. Their varnish was nearly all weather worn as they stood mounted to cover the entrance to a bare earthen cave.
Carved ever so crudely, as if done using stones scraping slowly against other stones stood a relief of two obscene merfolk, their grotesque proportions and malformed appendages scraped and dug into the old rock for all the world to see. Two pornographically correct lovers cresting over the top of the old armoire doors, locked in a mating position best recognized as fit for the stables.
The old woman talked and kept on until she realized that Felecia wasn’t moving and then she turned and looked back at the carving once more and then again at Felecia before making a judgmental grunt. “Fuck me, you really are a vestal virgin, aren’t you? Has Rotary house changed so much? No stable hands or serving maids? That sullen bitch only manage one get who only had you? Is that it?”
Felecia didn’t respond or try and communicate with the lewd creature, not at first, she found herself turning away from the crude carving and considering how well, if at all, she could find her own way back to the meadow. No water there for sure, just a dusty, moldy old house one more harsh winter away from caving in on itself, but a weather proof place none the less that didn’t involve fornicating monstrosities carved into stone.