Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty Nine
The creaking began above the water line, the widest belt of planks began to creak and crack and moan, almost as if they had come alive and were in sudden and immediate agony. A long piece of board snapped free and fell into the water and Felecia stopped feeling the need for calm. She couldn’t bring herself to call out or cry, but her breathing started hitching in tiny terrified loops as the occasional lapping wave washed more water into the hull through the new hole in the hull.
Something grey and blue and pink all at once raked across the opening in the hull and Felecia whimpered. A giant animal had the boat in its grasp, something alien to land had the boat in its tentacles and was choosing then and there to break the ship apart in order to feast on whatsoever was still inside. Another board popped free on the other side of the ship and Felecia screamed. The scream was short and sharp and she caught herself and stopped.
I’ll drown first.
I’ll die before it starts to eat me. Felecia let that thought sink in so as to keep from any more embarrassing outbursts while she listened to the boat creak and crack and moan under the pressure. The water lapped in from either direction as the boat rocked left to right against the waves. New sea water joined with old until Felecia was thigh high in the freezing stuff. Fresh waves were dumping waterfalls into the broken boat until the scraping sounds of the animals appendages began anew.
Felecia felt the boat being lifted out of the sea and a sudden calm came over the significant pool of water that resided within. The implications of the event took some time for Felecia to process. One moment rocking back and forth with the waves on a rudderless boat with a broken mast and tattered rags for sails, the next being held aloft and calmed by an unknown creature. A creature so massive that its tentacles easily wrapped around the boat, so massive that it could hold the boat perfectly still even while it surely swam and countered the constant battering of the ocean’s waves.
What followed wasn’t a voice, the thing never spoke, it wasn’t a vision either because Felecia could barely see in the dank interior of the boat beyond the thin box of light that came from the doorway above. What came next was an overwhelming sensation of dread, her worst moments all condensed into a singular bleak experience. The feeling of opening the dowry day trunk and seeing her letters there, all over again, the day she was told her father and brother were lost at sea, the day she was barely old enough to dress herself and Nana beat her with a spoon so bad she didn’t dare sit down for the next few days at the dinner table. The day she realized that was never going to sleep in the comfort of Rotary house every again. The night her life changed forever when she was nearly killed and because a murderess herself.
The dread set in deep and Felecia felt a sudden urge to sink into the thigh high sea water and stop her nonsensical breathing once and for all. She didn’t see or hear the creature busily cradling the ruined boat, she felt its presence in her bones.