Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Seventy Four
The interior of the cave was astonishing, so much of the past finery, so many small things that had survived the seemingly insurmountable sea of years. Yet none of the once precious keepsakes were left unmarked.
Jacqueline’s home turned out to be a set of domes, two hollowed out caverns roughly hewed into the gray granite rock above, one significantly larger than the other. The main, room, with its slopped entrance served as living room, dining room, cookery, subterranean farm, and storage for all of life’s many needed bits of gear. The second much smaller dome turned out to be Jacqueline’s bedroom and personal library.
Furniture and fixtures from the gutted and storm ruined house out on the meadow all made their way to the cave eventually but none of it was set up or left alone to create a home, not as Felecia understood the word. The front of the main chamber was a mish mash of sitting room furniture eaten away by rot and covered with animal pelts and secured and strengthened with lengths of polished elm or poplar branches or animal bones besides. A loveseat and a settee blocked off the front of the room from the rest alongside a small table that rested with a camp chair nearby. Another low, long table had been posted behind the loveseat and left to gather all manner of debris and clutter. The table was a workstation of sorts, part candle works, part herbal mill, part hide and pelt prep station. A short book case nearby seemed to have become a canning station as well as an exemplifier of Jacqueline’s slow and not terribly steady work as a taxidermist and wet specimen keeper.
Beyond that mess, toward the back of the main room rested a collection of shelves mounted directly into the earth that surrounded a crude cooking cauldron of sorts. There was no ventilation in the cavern, no way for the wood smoke to clear or the stench of all manner of cooking to clear the air. Black soot clung to all of the upper reaches of the main room and the top few shelves toward the back above the cauldron spoke to lesser used cook items and storage goods being carpeted in years of carbon debris.
Beyond the hearth and short bookcase, in the darkest part of the already very dark cave interior Felecia smelled earth and the stench of dung. She stopped at the edge of the work table, not sure she wanted to venture further until Jacqueline pushed passed her. “The smell takes getting used to, but these beauties grow year-round if you do it right and they always get me through the winter months down here.”
Jacqueline picked out a few eggs from the ones she had collected in the meadow and dropped them into a pail before mashing up the foul contents and dumping it at one end of the churned earth. Pale yellow and white worms pushed up from the depths and began feasting greedily. The sight was disturbing to say the least, as was the vast sea of mushrooms that grew beyond. The stench of a thousand burnt meals and a thousand pails of nightsoil were the only things strong enough to mask the stench of the wet corrupted earth and the field of putrid mushrooms that grew there.
Felecia was already considering pinching herself, A good hard pinch on the wrist, or maybe the cheek. A long hard pull on an earlobe maybe. She was still asleep, still propped up in the decrepit ruins of the house on the meadow. This had all been an absurd and thoroughly disturbing dream. Only Felecia’s dreams were never like this, never this real, or this nasty.
Jacqueline continued on, not turning to see the look of horror growing on Felecia’s face. “Good for stews and soups, mashed up with those long, orange taters we get out here in the woods, even just fried in fat on their own. Mushies are good eatin’ and easy to keep in here.”
Another moment of silence went by as Jacqueline kept stirring up the muddy earth and feeding the colony of worms. “I told you already, don’t judge what you can’t know. These rain drenched woods, my swamp as you call it, this is summer time when the living is easy. The ground dries soon, turns to cake and then nothing grows. The trees drop their leaves or turn colors and stop dropping nut meat. The animals up and plain vanish and the clams and lobsters become impossible to find without a boat. Mushies have saved my life more winters than I can count.”