Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty Five
It was late summer once again and the season turned into another hot and wet affair. Felecia was fourteen and noting a year since she first arrived in the swamp and stayed with Jacqueline. Another trip out to the meadow was being planned and Felecia contemplated a whole different way of broaching the same tired subject that she had tried with Jacqueline at least two dozen times over the year prior.
“Maybe we could procure some digging tools from the village. I could slip in easy at night. A few pickaxes and shovels. We could make a third room, one for more mushrooms and a coop for chickens.”
The ploy was obvious but it was a new spin on the same argument of moving the meadow animals into the swampy forest, the plateau above the cave was the first genuine push, followed by a more subtle consideration for a camouflaged corral around a stand of trees in a high point of the swamp just north of the cave. The ideas and considerations offered up from there on only seemed more desperate and less likely until that one.
A chicken coop next to the mushrooms, surely that could be done. Felecia felt particularly smart in that moment, like she had suddenly solved a puzzle she had been looking at for a very long time. The piece just fit, that was, until you considered who had created the puzzle to begin with.
Jacqueline stopped filling her water skins from the well and looked hatefully at Felecia, if for only a moment, before her eyes softened while her brow furrowed. “I get it, you think me feeble, maybe insane. It hasn’t showed you yet, it mocks me like that. Like it tends to do. The thing that followed my grandma’s ship is a god, or so close that it makes little difference. I’ve seen it. It demands offerings and it decides what to take and what to spare, not me.”
They were both loaded up and well underway and moving north of the ancient spindly oak tree before Jacqueline chose to speak again. “You read my grandma’s books, her coded diaries. My mother robbed us all by staying mostly illiterate. All I ever had was those old stories and they were legion. Yoseph and his men knew better. The people in the village were careful to observe the old ways. Not my mother though, and not my sister. They forgot the way, they don’t give anymore so it takes, everything.”
Jacqueline stopped talking but kept on fast marching through the swampy woods until Felecia breathed a sigh of relief. Silence was better than listening to the nonsensical rambling. If what Jacqueline was explaining was what counted for her religion, then Felecia felt more privileged than ever to have been raised without that sort of thing around the house.
“I tried once. I took one of the chickens. It…it went bad. I’m not feeble, or insane. The animals have to stay in that meadow because my Abe made it safe. He did something to the earth there, something he never showed me, not before they killed him. The animals, that moldy old house, it’s all safe there.”
Felecia began to smell the ocean through the remainder of the swampy woods before the pebble strewn beach and knew what would come next. Better to keep to herself now and let the inane worship of the sea be carried out, gruesome offerings included of course. Best to keep quiet and let this time pass before they made their way back to the ancient oak and then east to the meadow.
Yet the oddity of the old woman’s statement made Felecia consider asking the second of her constant questions, usually hidden under thin tactics or veiled accusations, but not that time. “So why not quit the cave, why not rebuild on that safe ground?”
Felecia knew the answer to that question, she had spent a year avoiding asking it directly, trying not to fail the first lesson Jacqueline had tried to teach her. Why ask the obvious.
After a brief moment of tense silence Jacqueline stopped and looked back at Felecia through her ridiculous wooden mask. “Why don’t you go back to Rotary House?”