emptymouthpiece

Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 108

There was a short pause in the delirious memory and a pause in the rain as Felecia stood stiff in agony just outside the angled outer door to the cellar. She was careful and quiet as she pulled the door open and began to climb down the steep stairs.

Bartholomew wasn’t himself when he said those words, down in the dank cellar, down there in the dark with his little sister in tow. Down in that awful, dusty reliquary surrounded by the trinkets and the packed away memories of old, all Bartholomew could manage when confronted with wistful memories of who their grandfather might have been was the ugly truth.

“Grampa was angry. Always angry and mean, he smelled like brandy and burnt tobacco and he liked to call Clarence over to his chair late at night and flick him in the groin and laugh when he cried. He used to call me Bertha and he would introduce me to the servants every morning as his granddaughter. When you came along, he changed it to the first granddaughter.”

Felecia had always imagined a man who was misunderstood, maybe just sad from being away from the sea too long. She hoped for a man, stooped over and stinking of drink, peering in over her crib and maybe seeing her as something more than a way to secure land through marriage before his wife murdered him.

Bartholomew continued, “He used to hurt Nana, and Mother. He hurt one of the servants so bad they died. Grampa was awful and I’m glad he’s dead, except for how everything got worse here when he died.”

The cellar was pitch black beyond the end of the steep stairs and the rain was beginning in earnest, the shower cascaded down the steep steps and threatened to make mud against the simple packed earth floor of the place. Felecia, now numb and hardly present while she still recalled her memory of being down there before, climbed back up to secure the cellar door, locking herself down in the musty dark.

Everything did get worse.

Bartholomew would become a cooks mate on father’s ship that fall. Nana would only become worse with her ever present requirements on how Felecia acted and lived her life, all the while mother would only become more distant before hiding away altogether behind the blanket of her mother’s wishes for how everyone acted and lived their lives in Rotary house. The next year money would grow tight and everyone would begin to feel the sting of a life that had sudden limits. The year after that would be the first one where Nana and everyone else admitted the downturn of the household while the common folk continued to do without. The year after that would be the one that claimed father’s and Bartholomew’s life.

Everything only ever got worse in Rotary house.

The next year she would speak out for herself only to find herself stripped of all her possessions after having her room and things laid bare for the upstairs maid to see. After that would come the sullen watching of lifelong household staff let go for no reason but money, and the replacement of them with meager village folk eager to swallow easy praise from the madam of the house.

They had been married for nearly thirty years when Nana murdered Grampa. After all those years it seemed like she hadn’t even done it for any particular offense. If felt like Nana killed the old man for being home on a stray Thursday night. Felecia knew better though. Even at that age she figured as much. Grampa got old and sickly and he simply outlived his usefulness to Nana.

During the last years Grampa seemed like a man who welcomed his own death by treating everyone around him as though they were already half way there. Bartholomew’s testimony was only the first of dozens that all explained the same thing to Felecia. Death was the best you got out of Rotary house. The dead were lucky, better off by half. The dead didn’t know hunger or fear, they couldn’t cry themselves to sleep or feel their heart racing when Nana started calling their name in shrill contempt. Grampa might not have been a good man, or a good father, or a good husband but Felecia couldn’t find it in herself to hate the memory of the man she wasn’t even old enough to remember.