Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Seventy Six
Jacqueline walked through the only doorway the simple cave structure had beside the one that lead up the short ramp to the outside world. A black see-through silk curtain brushed over the old woman and dropped back into place like a sheen of spiders web before Felecia pushed through its intangible, yet sooty membrane. The area just right of the soot coated shelves and the simple cauldron opened into a small secondary cave.
The chief object in the smaller annex was a single long, wide bed made from ancient straw and feather fill topping wrapped in canvas. The bed gave way only reluctantly to the obvious multitude of shelves that rose above it all the way to the roughhewn ceiling above.
Jacqueline seemed relieved to settle down for the night at the far end of the long, wide mattress, before she lunged up at the shelves and came back with a tome full of dried out pages and earthy smells. “Read this one tonight and tomorrow. Read it all the way to the end and then ask me your questions.”
That was where Felecia spent her first night in the witch’s warren, sleeping next to the unexplainable, snoring, aberration and reading by candle light until her senses failed her. Felecia learned new and ugly things meant to turn her ever farther away from the traditions and ways of thinking she had always known before but she learned them so very slowly that it hardly seemed much of a change at all.
The first dry tome turned out to be a simple manual on mushroom and tuber farming. The language was antiquarian, obviously written by some stalwart gardener/observer of the aboriginal techniques back around the break with England. Yet he wrote in a steady and familiar pentameter, one that made it so Felecia finished the tome over the course of the next day and had time to badger Jacqueline about the knowledge contained the very next night after their conjoined chores.
The slightly subterranean home had its share of above ground chores that were required to keep the whole thing going, not the least of which was the checking of small game traps and the fetching of water from the well. As Felecia settled in after a long day, she got around to asking questions about the knowledge passed on in the tome as she found herself resting for the night near the old woman.
“The author mentions deadly fungi that are often used to produce sleep and paralysis in smaller amounts. He mentions time and time again the concept that certain mushrooms and even some tubers that grow here can be used in different amounts and ways to achieve different outcomes. There are no recipes listed but he refers constantly to another work for those. Do you have that book as well?”
Jacqueline only managed to shrug as she pressed on through the tome she was reading as well, one bound in leather and written in some language what Felecia didn’t recognize.
“You said you wanted my questions?”
Silence, it went on so long that Felecia considered turning to peruse the lean but tall racks of books near the head of the bed. She was already turning and looking to read the spines of so many curious looking books when Jacqueline spoke.
“You want cook books, is that it? I have a few of those, above the cook pot. They might not be fit for proper reading but if you take the time, you could likely wipe the soot off to get the gist.”
“The writer makes mention of the recipes, all I want to know is if you have the companion tome of which the author speaks.”
Jacqueline hooked a thumb out beyond and above their humble underground abode. “The woman who wrote that book, English was her second language and she was hungry for it. She wrote and wrote and wrote, she wrote so much while she observed the beginning of her life that she missed the rest of it. That second tome she mentioned, it never did come about, not officially, and what words she did leave were for her kin. Muddy words about muddy works of a muddier mind left to dwell under the strain of motherhood overall. Everyone surrounding her life wound up the worse for it. I had hopes you would see something else in the simple pages of that work.”
“So, you wanted me to get angry for her, reading about her downturns. Why? Just to negate or nullify my own obvious issues?”
Jaqueline sat up and shook her head prominently as Felecia acknowledged the recent sea of misgivings and wrongdoings building up as the meadow beyond grew still and hot.