Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 106
You’ve been standing there for hours, like some miserable, rain-soaked sentinel, lost in a fog all your own. How terrified you must be of daring to come back here only to be a thief.
Felecia refused to acknowledge the intrusive words, refused to whisper out loud or shout at the awful sea creature trying to anchor itself inside her mind. Instead, she focused on her left foot and leg, focused on pushing…driving through the muck until she felt real movement, and a moment of real terror as sheer agony shot up her leg into her back. Could you break your leg trying to move through clay mud?
The pain only intensified as Felecia tried to pull back and away from the agony. She nearly landed ass down in the muck before she righted herself and began sucking air in giant agonized gasps. Her left leg was moving freely now in the muck but her back was pure fire. Another agonizing amount of time was spent moaning and sweated while she worked this way and that to release the right leg. Once free she stumbled a few yards and fell against the farm fence that Phillip was always repairing and making once more.
The wooden post leaned and the fence rails sunk into it threatened to come free before Felecia found her balance and stood up feeling fresh fire erupt in the small of her back. There was no offer of intrusive words and no familiar forms of surely having known better or being told so. Felecia forgot all about her stealthy entrance and greeted the world fresh and anew as she cried out still leaning against the freshly leaning fence post. The rain was wet and cold and the world was sparce, dank, dark and altogether awful and as if she needed any other reminder of the new world that was all hell, all the time, she felt herself bleeding, Felecia felt it release and flow against the now unset wad of cloth once secured where it was supposed to be in the crook of her small clothes.
A wet wad of waste had built up while she stayed in her stupor and it chose then and there to make itself known to the world.
Felecia started to cry as she felt the sticky awfulness run down her leg. There was something that she needed, now more than ever. There was something waiting for her in the cellar of the big house and she was so close and finally free to go get it and she felt like she didn’t dare to move.
The rain refused to ease up and false dawn seemed likely to begin to intrude on her plans, Felecia dared a step and nearly vomited from the pain, she took another and winced as her ankle settled back into the muck. Every step was hell and there had to be a hundred jolting, wet, and uneven steps between the fence line and the cellar door around the back of the mansion.
Rotary house had no caches of dynamite, or handy tins of cyanide for the rats. The big house had no cashes at all really, not anymore. The cellar was always full though. Before those shelves that ended in the bare bulb over the bench. Before the place Felecia’s father felt he had to walk her over to, were the countless places where the family and its countless employees over the years felt they needed to store and catalogue all manner of items both mundane and ludicrous, all of which had outlived their time of use or moment of being entertaining.
Felecia hadn’t seen the thing down there among the spiders and the mice but she knew it had to be there, likely near the front, packed in a crate or left carelessly on a shelf. Grandpa Samial, the wife beater, the angry drunk, the one her brothers only spoke of in hushed tones and her mother and father never spoke of at all. Well, he was a man of the ocean like his father and his father before that and Samial may have largely missed the golden age of sail but he seemed to fancy himself a curator of the toys and tools of the era.
Father didn’t care to bring the work home, and certainly not in such an obvious way. He left Rotary house to the women for decorations but not the father-in-law he so obviously loathed.
“Watch out for that thing, its sharp as a razor.”
Bartholomew had led Felecia down to the cellar when they were both very young, Nana was away, something to do with a death in the extended family, and Clarence was thankfully away on his first voyage with father. That spring always seemed magical to Felecia and those few weeks without Nana were the most magic time of all.
“Grampa kept all this stuff up in the house, your were still a baby but I remember it all when it was up there.”
Bartholomew was busy admiring a fearsome looking fish with a giant scythe for a tail, the thing was as long as the old side board it leaned atop of and covered in dust and what looked to be colonies of brownish black mold around the remains of its vacant glass eyes and kitchen knife teeth.