Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty Eight
Felecia heard her name being called, the sound got her turned to the opening again just in time to see a second and much larger wave come washing in. The water came in fast, nearly knee deep at first. Felecia fought against the wave and reached out for the doorway back to what was left of the light only to have the power of the water pull her feet out from underneath her. She heard heavy ropes pull and slacken in the distance and became so fixated and aware of the hideous movements of the candlemakers remains that she let the wave carry her all the way to the back and bottom of the boat. She ran into the few head sized boulders that made up what remained of the boats original ballast before she regained her footing and started working through the water and the soft silt that had collected along the side of the boat along with the wave water.
The third wave was building out on the water line as Felecia reached the remains of the doorway and got her hands on it. Jacqueline was calling out again but it wasn’t to ask after or demand answers from the girl. The old witch was back to her nonsensical chanting, the burble, gurgle language she seemed to speak when she made her insane offerings to the sea. Only now she wasn’t chanting, she was shouting in terrified excitement.
Felecia figured she needed to get free of the boat before the next wave hit but she was also concerned with the sounds of mania coming from outside the boat entrance. “Jacqueline, I got downed by the wave, I’m fine. Please stop that infernal shouting!”
Something wet landed with a heavy thud along the upturned side of the boat and began making a rasping, dragging sound along the outside of the hull. The third wave rammed into the side of the boat and Felecia turned to the interior of the doorway and faired only marginally better than she had before. The wave was near waist high and pulled Felecia halfway across the opening, just to the left of where the remainder of the old wheelhouse and the candlemaker were still resting, lashed by ropes to the battered frame and partially impaled on the steering rod. She righted herself as the wet, heavy thing was joined by its twin and the boat was pulled toward the ocean so that the fourth wave would have likely filled the cavity of the boat up to Felecia’s chest if it weren’t for the sudden righting of the boat.
The wooden keel scrapped horribly against the broken seashells exposed beneath the silt. The weather warn boat, the impossible play thing moaned and creaked piteously under its own weight as the opening that Felecia had walked through was now little more than a darkening window to the sky. The stairs that once connected that opening to the hold below had long ago been ripped away and pounded to splinters by the merciless ocean.
The boat interior had knee deep standing water weighing it down as the wet, rasping sound continued from every direction. The boat was being pulled by unseen forces out into the ocean waves and Felecia had no earthly concept of what was doing the pulling or why.
Jacqueline’s infernal burble, gurgle chanting, intermingled with pleading calls to Felecia grew distant and were soon drowned out by the sound of pounding waves and the wet scraping and rasping of unseen appendages that pushed and pulled at the waterlogged wreck. Felecia managed to keep calm through all of it, in spite of the fact that she was trapped with the rancid remains of the candlemaker in the tight watery sleeping quarters of the ship. She kept her composure while the boat was pulled and began to float, heavy in the turbulent waters of the bay. Felecia breathed shallow and tried to keep her eyes fixed on the darkening portal to the outside world instead of looking around or behind and above at the fetid corpse. Even as the unseen appendages drug along the hull of the boat Felecia kept her cool, trying to rationalize and make reason with the unreasonable and she even began to think hard on how best to try and reach the opening above until the boat began to moan.