un Kissed Innsmouth
Part Ninety Seven
Jacqueline stopped for a minute and looked at Felecia until Felecia turned her eyes away and found an inconspicuous spot of earth to stare at instead. “You’re bright, girl. You know where the rest of this goes. Never figured the towering monster/mother of your youth for a coward, did you? The kind of feckless wretch that let’s others do her dirty work for her…well, rest usured, she always was and still likely is. Abe went out in the following weeks, down the coast to town and then into the village. He came back with a wagon and enough leftovers and remnants to rebuild everything. I didn’t want to, I wanted to run as far away as a horse or a boat would take me. Abe was my rock, or a rock, he weighed me down with all the love he had for me and it kept us here. We built the house you were in when I found you. We lived there for a time, until Abe saw it at the beach. He brought me out a few times, explaining the insane horror of it all but I never saw it, and I didn’t believe him. I loved him, mind you, still do and will til I die, but I didn’t believe him and he knew that.”
“One day I was foraging for mushrooms out here in the deeper, wetter woods and I came back to find him and his wagon. The thing was full to brim with books and childhood memorabilia, the moron had taken it upon himself to raid the family library for certain books he said were handed down to us by our grandmother and her people. I tried to talk him into taking it all back. It had been over a year since Yacob and his men last made sport of us and for all I knew they assumed I was dead, or Abe, or both of us. Worse, I was seated with child. Something that was growing bigger and for longer than Abe or I ever thought possible. He didn’t want to put us in danger, he was just fevered, he needed me to believe, to see what he saw and know what he knew then.”
“Yacob and his men came for us, but they waited, bid their time. I managed to talk Abe into hiding the wagon and its stolen cargo and even managed to keep most of it away from our new home in case we were visited. That was when Abe started carving out this place. Not as a home for us, but as a place to stash the books, and a place for him to set aside an altar to his insane new deity. He blessed the meadow around our house in its infernal name and sure enough all manner of herb and vegetable began to grow there. The child growing inside of me though, the longest and latest disaster flushed out like the others before it and that was when Yacob and his men paid us a visit, paid me a visit.”
“Abe was out, breaking rocks and clearing ground for this cave when they rode up on me. I’m thankful to this day that he and the books were gone when they came. We were supposed to kill you and burn it all to the ground. That’s what Yacob said while he and his men…well, I did the math while they did it to me. It was never about killing me, not the first time with burning my things and not a second time with studding me out. My sister had no use for me dead, just beaten and broken, endlessly. I was a bad lair, still am, I wouldn’t have been able to bullshit Abe if I started growing big with a child that wasn’t his. Abe was the honorable sort, to a fault, and like all honorable men, he would have sought satisfaction for such a wrong.”
“I crawled into the surf after they left me, I waded out into the waves and let the water take me and pull me out and down the coast. At the time, I figured it was better that I simply vanish than let time do the talking. When I went out into that water I didn’t believe. It waited until then to show, the being that held you a loft in the remains of that boat wreck lifted me from the water with its tentacles and the moon light showed me all. I found myself back on the beach where I started after that, knowing that I had been given options, sold a bad bill of lading and had only one option to correct the delivery. I drank herbal teas and then took mushrooms and cleansed myself of what had been done to me and any fruit that might have grown from that meeting.”
“I never told Abe, I kept him from his death for a few more years and embraced thoroughly his new devotion and obsession with the thing that haunted the waters of the northern beach. We gave up on the meadow, not because it refused to grow, but because the abundant light and life of the place felt false given our conjoined new faith in the infernal. We didn’t deserve the life we once sought, my Abe was slipping into madness and I was falling face first behind him. The dreams then were the worst I ever had, it was testing me, suggesting to me, pointing me toward the end it wanted for my bloodline and the more I fought against those wishes, the worse our lives seemed to get.”
“Abe didn’t share my sense of stubborn resentment to the thing that played in the surf while we tossed offerings to it. It bade him to do the same and in many ways he obliged. He was caught preaching the infernal in the village and had to be driven off a number of times. He was caught selling stolen family heirlooms down in town in exchange for goods and was turned over to my sister’s men instead of being jailed there.”