Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Seventy Five
Confronted with her prejudices for the second time in as many hours left Felecia reeling. Growing mushrooms when you already lived underground made a certain sort of sense, what else would or could grow in such an environment? Still though, the pail was obviously a mixture of kitchen scraps and nightsoil. The old woman was eating mushrooms that grew from her own waste.
“I apologize, it’s…well it’s all just a bit much. Life has gotten very surreal since I stumbled into the meadow and I thought my life was already far removed from any sense of normalcy before that.”
Jacqueline stopped disturbing the already disturbing earth and sat the pail on the ground and the rest of her collected eggs atop a rack above the simple cooking cauldron. “I can’t spare your feelings Felecia, that ain’t my job. I’m not made for comfort or warmth, no more than my sister ever was. You followed me into the woods and down here hoping for answers and I got none. I can tell you with a smile on my face that when it comes to your family, I don’t know shit!”
Felecia jumped at the rise in Jacqueline’s voice. The sudden profanity punctuated with a shout left Felecia bumping into the crowded work station and absently reaching for her bow.
“What I can do is teach and that’s what I want to do. The question is, do you want to learn?”
Felecia didn’t turn to run or continue reaching for her bow, she didn’t step forward or ease up either. She found herself locked in place once more, mesmerized and terrified simultaneously.
“I do, always. The need to know is the one thing Nana couldn’t discourage or beat out of me.”
Jacqueline smirked and looked over at the girl stuck in place. “Good. I’ve learned so many things out here stuck on my own with my books. A lifetime’s worth of skills learned the hard way, all for the benefit of outsmarting and outlasting the bastards in the big house.”
Felecia shrugged and lowered her bow and dropped her pack as well by the work station and Jacqueline smiled and nodded at the churned earth before her. “Good. Come closer.”
The fat, yellow and white worms were still busy churning the earth like so many long, wet noodles in some obscene feast as Felecia neared the corner of the mushroom farm. Jacqueline reached out and sprinkled a pinch of some unknown brown powder over the worms and they suddenly grew still. She whispered a few words close to the pile of sickly noodles and they separated and drew into sinewy cords. The earth itself seemed to shift and the roots of the fungus seemed at once to harden while also spreading out to form new and complex structures.
Another whisper and a pinch of some other unknown substance had the whole structure exploding in activity. Worms seemed to swallow finger sized loads of earth and mushroom roots stretched and seemed to consume some of the smaller worms altogether.
Felecia gasped in astonishment and horror and Jacqueline cackled. “They call it magic. The dullards mystify the mundane so they can burn us at the stake. They always have and always will, one way or the other. The reality is some of us learn how to live without them altogether, better, stronger, happier, and they can’t stand that idea so they come to loathe the idea of us living at all.”
Felecia’s eyes were locked on the obscene feast of flesh and earth going on before her eyes as she muttered. “Who’s they?”
Jacqueline did some muttering of her own as she sealed the wax paper ends of the packets of powder she had produced for her little show. “Them, people, men most of all. You learn things along the long lonely road, to do what others can’t do but you aren’t a marvel or a boon for doing it. You are born female, so instead, you’re a whore and a witch.”
Felecia didn’t have anything to add to that, mostly because it was baring to hear someone talk that way. It sounded somehow awful and soulless to hear another woman speak out loud in the quiet voice Felecia had always used. She knew her history, read enough of the great works to be sure that she knew how the world seemed to work. The awful way that all meaningful transactions were made.
Jacqueline smiled wickedly and shook the packets of powder pinched between her gnarled hands. “It’s all in how much you mix in, how you make your medicines, and how you apply them. All I did was stop life for a moment and then breath life back in. Everything else was just the animals and the plants and how they chose to react to it all.”
Felecia was fascinated and repulsed at the same time but her need to know won the day almost instantly, “And you’ll show me how?”
Jacqueline cackled again and nodded as she placed the sealed packets on the shelf near the eggs. “I’ll do you that and one better. I’ll show you how to live out here, really live, without them all.”
Felecia nodded at the dusty, uncomfortable settee and grimaced, “I suppose I’ll sleep here then.”
Jacqueline grimaced and waved at the mushroom farm, the sooty hearth and the cluttered bookcase. “Bullshit, you won’t learn much at all out here, certainly not at night. Leave your bow and your bag and come see what my Abe really built for me.”