Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 111
Ever since she cleared the meadow and got into the frigid woods nearer Rotary house time had seemed to stop nearly altogether, and yet it seemed to leak away more than ever. Felecia felt like she had been gone for days, she felt like she hadn’t slept or eaten in a week. By the time she found the last of the harpoons, some of the caps and a precious handful of the yellowed cartridges she could see daylight clearly through the seams of the cellar door leading back outside.
Felecia couldn’t stay the day. She didn’t dare risk some servant coming down into the cellar and seeing her, yet, she couldn’t possibly step out into the light of day, the cellar was behind the house but the kitchen windows would be unavoidable not to mention the north facing windows of the house and the prying eyes of any servants out working in the barn yard or garden.
Being seen, in her state, with her filthy brown poncho over the top of tattered and nearly featureless clothes? No. None of them would recognize her as a Conway. Any who did would know she was that Conway. No scenario that Felecia thought through ended without one of the younger servants running to fetch the new groundskeeper.
Ganly, the wormy lipped, flakey skinned, wet eyed specimen. Ganly, the thief and murderer. Ganly, the man who had gotten away with it all and gotten a new stately position among the rabble of the village. Ganly, the man who had given Felecia the wound that defeated her every time she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Ganly would come for her in the woods and she would be weighted down with the oversized rifle. Felecia had little trouble believing that the murderer would kill again, its what else he might do that kept her locked in place near the back of the cellar and using its damp darkness to hide.
The cellar door and the back of the house faced east, beyond the cellar door leading outside was the needlessly pruned grass yard yawning out to a gazebo father built for mother when Clarence was a babe. Father was the only one who ever went out there, sometimes Bartholomew would venture out there too but Nana never failed to catch him on his way and steer him clear of the awful sun that burned tender flesh. Beyond the gazebo was a sloping cliff that tumbled into the ocean itself. Felecia used to walk out there in the moonlight after the rest of the household was asleep.
Trees once stood all the way to the edge of the cliff and even clung to its slope. Nearly everywhere the big house and its grounds stood was once the forest of Aquidneck Island. The timbers that made up the foundation, the planks laid out above Felecia and the massive columns that bore the weight of the three-story mansion above. Nearly every wall and casement, every shutter and length of wainscotting, all of it was once the living and breathing forest here. All of it stood nearly pristine, largely untouched and held sacred by the natives until the Conway’s came along and turned half of it all into cut timber to build their home, their boats, and to sell the rest to the town down the coast.
If the overcast daylight shown through the seams in the cellar doors it meant afternoon, the east side of the yard nearest the big house didn’t see much if any direct daylight until then. Somehow, impossibly, Felecia had wasted half a day or more in her search for the oversized rifle, its ammunition, and all the while wasting precious time staring at old heirlooms and burble gurgle tomes of unknown origin and meaning. She got to thinking about the sloped cliff, the bare sides of massive boulders that jutted out of it here and there, the stubborn saplings that tried to grow in the salt spray soil in the spring.