Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 105
Maybe the awful creature really does have it out for us Conways. The stray thought caught in the cool air as the rain settled in and began to make everything that much harder to traverse. Felecia shook her head and kept her mind on the task at hand as old fears and hatreds threatened to creep in on the moment.
Felecia stopped at the edge of the trees overlooking the northern side of Rotary house and its barn. She stood and watched the distant candle lights and thought about the empty and meager land she saw before her. Everything down there seemed harder, to find, to come by, to work for, to produce, everything around the old family homestead came at a dear price. The torrential downpour had begun once Felecia realized she was near the stand of trees at the outset of where Philip found her more than a year before and the feeling of loneliness only grew worse as the cold and the awful quiet of the woods came in to surround her.
Phillip had done his part, and so had his boy. Felecia learned to live, she could survive on her own now, she could fight if needs be but she could also hide and stay silent beside and she chose to do that as she watched the old barn slow and grow quiet. Felecia stood still and in wait for all those hired to do the work to leave and all those left to live in the big house to retire for the night.
You know where it is. They always keep it in the same place. Felecia could hear the awful intrusive thought begin to creep in and chose to respond. It felt better to whisper a response out loud in the cold, still night. “You do it! If you’re so damned powerful, just slither up and help yourself to the kerosine.”
No god, no all-powerful being, just some frightful and intrusive sea monster stuck out in the bay calling like a siren from the old Greek stories. Felecia wrapped herself against the cold in the arrogant knowledge that the creature could cry and call all it wanted to but that it had no power here, and likely as not no power anywhere beyond it’s watery home.
The rain continued to hammer down in solid sheets and Felecia could feel her shoes begin to sink and settle into the muddy earth. Getting back to the cave would be harder than planned. The swamp would be large tepid lakes of water filled with every unimaginable creature and filth. Solid land from the edge of the meadow to the old oak would be hard to come by and any solid land at all from the oak to the ledge of the rocky outcropping of the cave face would be a foregone conclusion. Worse, the filthy poncho coated in its unmentionables would be washed clean by the time Felicia finished this trip.
Leeches would be likely; the damned mosquitoes would be nearly required. If she wasn’t careful there might be another case of round worms to worry over, her poor feet would never really recover from the last bout, certainly not in appearance.
“All this time and still only worried about appearances!”
The voice was like a thunderbolt, Felecia shied and dodged away, her bow was in her hand and an arrow was drawn before she realized she was about to aim at nothing but the spindly trees behind her.
The voice was Jacqueline’s, but also not, the old witch rarely yelled and even when she did it was a high timber, a tea kettle whistle. That shout was different, it was something deep and ugly trying to sound like the old witch.
Felecia didn’t bother to whisper into the wind and the wet that time, she let her reply sink in, somehow knowing that the thing could hear her. How terrified you must be if you’ve resorted to parlor tricks.
Hours went by after that, hours of silence except for the wind and the rain as it continued to turn the ground into thick mud and then crisscrossed creeks of cold muddy water. Felecia watched as the candles in the big house snuffed out, one by one. She had a good sense of time, before the village, before the cave. Felecia used to sit up at night and be able to guess with unerring accuracy the time of night when her father would find her hiding and following him around the house after a late arrival home.
Just then Felecia felt distant and too angry with the world to know its time, it was dark, maybe as dark as it would get before the faint rays of dawn would begin to peek. She had waited a long time out in the rain, too long maybe. Was it 2am, 3, maybe daring even towards 4? Surely everyone would be asleep, but also how soon before the house maids and the girls who pulled the short straw to milk the goats would light their candles to be seen through the downstairs windows?
Felecia made to step forward and found her body numb and unresponsive. She looked down in disbelief, blinking the rain out of her eyes to see better. Her legs were there and stuck solid, both nearly ankle deep in the earth as it grew infirm around them. She remembered pulling out of the mud before, she remembered Phillip shouting for her to let it go, to leave the boot behind. She heard herself strain, heard moans and grunts leave her mouth that she hadn’t requested. There was only slight movement at first, one half sunk calf threatened to shift the semi-solid earth around it and then nothing. Lifting wouldn’t do, the boot sucking mud would take its prize and Felecia would be left digging in the muck looking for the remains of a shoe that was barely worth saving.