Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Ninety Eight
“Yacob came out alone to the meadow and trapsed out here into the deep woods until I came upon him only a few hundred yards from this place. I was cordially invited to attend the sentencing of my beloved brother for his theft and his insane heresies, which means I was tracked down and punched into submission by my sister’s favorite attack dog. I woke up in that cursed village, in one of those stinky tar paper huts. I could barely see out of one eye; my wrists were tied behind my back and there was a gag stuck in my mouth. I was pulled out to the big, crooked tree where they tended to do things like hanging the condemned. Abe was already waiting for me there. They had beaten him, starved him, tortured him. He hardly looked like the young man I knew and loved by then.”
Jacqueline fell into an awful, brooding silence and Felecia waited until she assumed the old woman had finally grown tired of telling the awful tale. She stood up and went to collect the water that Jacqueline had come out to fetch and was already turning away, toward the house when Jacqueline continued in a dry whisper.
“She didn’t want me dead. She still doesn’t. She wanted me to suffer, to be beaten and driven to the edges of the fetid forest beyond her world. Our affair was never mentioned, the theft of property was barely recognized. Abe was strung up on the tree because he disturbed the villagers, he spoke loudly against the big house to them and made a call for them to rise up and demand more while he spoke of the horror that waited beyond the waves. Through Yacob, she demanded my Abe do the one thing he would never do.”
“I never heard the word recant so many times, never heard the sound of a whip tearing through skin before then, never heard so much choking and gasping. I never saw my Abe cry not as a boy, not as a youth, not as a man at all until that day. He never said what they wanted him to while they hurt him though, he never denied that awful thing out in the ocean. I was never more afraid but never more proud of him. They broke him though, body and mind. They let him down and hung me from that tree and they didn’t hit me but maybe three times before I was keening and wailing. I was begging for their mercy, for my sister’s, they never even asked me but I recanted, I howled out disregard and genuine hate for the thing out in the water. I passed out before they stopped whipping me. I wasn’t conscious when Abe recanted for my sake.”
“I was unconscious for days, I laid on my stomach covered in creams and ointments, forcibly nursed back to health by women from the village who confided in me they were working on my sisters orders. Abe had been left to fester in the field below the crooked tree until he was fit enough to wander off deliriously. I never saw my brother again, never saw the love of my life, not after that awful day. I went back to the meadow and found it still long abandoned, I went to this cave and found it empty too. I didn’t need to walk up to the beach to know that’s where he went. My Abe walked into the surf to beg that thing’s forgiveness on my behalf and it took his life.”
Jacqueline looked back to Felecia who kept her grip on the water pale. The old woman raised her voice as she waved at the northern beach and then dismissively at Felecia. “That’s how I know it’s a god, you see. Just like the Christian one, or the version the Jews pray to, it’s selfish, demanding, it takes and takes and takes and then when you have nothing else to give, when you’ve run out of prayers or mystic incantations, it gets bored with you and shows you its ass. So there, you have the story you wanted to hear, no more trying to get you to read books, no more hand holding either.”