Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty Seven
The interior of the boat didn’t smell of sea water or long-ago ruined fish hauls. No, the dark, deck below stank of old, withered death. The fishing boat smelled like the trunk Nana delivered to Phillip’s house, as though a thousand old rats had crawled into its dark interior and breathed their last before sour corruption set in.
Felecia foundered in the sandy muck that rested on the floor inside the mausoleum that was the squalid living quarters of the old boat. She nearly fell and found herself reaching out as a fresh wave of salt water lapped into the sideways door of the wreck. Felecia’s hand brushed against something leathery and soft and felt her hands sink into something that defied explanation.
The dim light that cast long shadows into the interior of the ship wasn’t much help but Felecia knew from the feel and the smell alone what she had tipped over into. She gasped and lunged back, falling ass first onto the wet sand and the hard strewn pebbles that had been drawn in and out and in again by the tide. Her hand came back filthy and grey, green. Her hand stank of corruption and, fruit leather. The dim light of the interior showed her soon enough what she had grabbed onto once her eyes adjusted. No amount of soap would make her hand clean again, she grimaced in disgust and began running the filthy hand back and forth in a small pool of ocean water left behind by the last wave.
He was still secured by thick hemp ropes, sagging sure but still lashed in place, or nearly as though as he had made the conscious decision to tie himself to the ships crude steering before the partially protected wheelhouse cracked apart and gave way in the storm. His skin was grey, green, covered in exposed barnacles and mussels, his body had long ago rested against the broken tiller rod until his torso sank down onto it, helping to keep his moldy decrepitude in place while his legs rotted down to stumps or were eaten by the crabs just the same.
Felecia had leaned in and grabbed an armful of the village candlemaker before she realized it and he offered up his filthy muck in response.
Worse than just finding the murderer, worse than realizing she had found him and was sharing a space with him, was the feel of his greasy filth rolling along and oozing between her fingers after the discovery. That awfulness buried precious moments, it killed the sound of Jacqueline’s calls as she stood up and followed in the wake of the building sea swells.
The first heavy wave hit Felecia and nearly drove her forward. She used the sudden wash of water to clean her hand and hold it up to make sure it wasn’t covered in grey and green as she fought the power of the wave. Felecia squinted and leered at the body of the man who had lashed himself to the deck at the very last of moments. Whisps of dirty blonde hair rested against the off-white collar of a shirt that Felecia grew to know personally. The candlemaker, the murderer of that night some two years ago and counting, was busy moldering in the low tide on its way back to being wave washed ocean debris once more.
Finding out his fate, learning that the village candlemaker didn’t get across to the mainland, should have felt like some consolation. The murderer didn’t get away with it, didn’t get to live a new life under some assumed name or another. He very likely died out in the Atlantic, pulled out by the storm that came down from the north as Felecia was laid up in Phillip’s hovel. Chance and the current pulled him and the wreck past the island and into the bay only to wash it all back up on the northern beach here where so much of what the ocean no longer wanted was deposited.