Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 112
Sleep didn’t sneak up on Felecia, it hit hard and near instantly and the dream that followed was as sinister as any she ever had.
Felecia was nine and the worst was still ahead for her. Father and Clarence and Bartholomew were all gone for the second time together and this time was the long trip, the one father told her was around the horn. They had all been gone for nearly a month with so many more to follow when Felecia first stepped out onto the back lawn in the dead of night. Father’s gazebo was out in the distance and Felecia was determined to reach it, to see it for herself up close, to sit on the same bench as father and maybe catch a whiff of his sweet pipe smoke.
All Felecia found at the gazebo was a collection of leaves scattered around the floor and a curious striation of moss that had settled in the cracks along one side of the wooden bench. The bare cliff that waited beyond seemed more interesting after not finding a trace of father there. The slope was gentle at first, a few steps down into the grass and goat shorn ground cover and a steeper slope a few dozen steps beyond until the earth seemed to suddenly disappear down two hundred feet of jutting boulders and loose stones.
One false step too close to the slope and that was all it would take. The only thing to break a fall would be the jagged rocks and the pounding waves. Even at nine Felecia understood that someone would have time to know they were about to die as they fell that far.
Felecia gasped at the view and tasted the salt in the air, she was careful not to take those last two or three steps that spelled having her bare feet touch dirt instead of grass and ground cover. She forced herself to stop looking down the dark slope to the lapping waves below, better to look father out to sea, to let her eyes rest on where the moon light met the water.
The choppy sea rolled this way and that under the light until the view made Felecia uneasy of mind and unsettled in her intestines. She prepared to turn away from the wind and the salty air, ready to walk back to the relative safety of Rotary house when she saw something surface out there under the light. At nine she had no understanding of just how far away it was. At nine she only knew that the cliffside was steep and seemed to go a very long way down to the sea and that the light from the moon reaching just over the top of the mansion cast a light on the water closer to the strange mainland she only ever heard about.
Something was out there, very far away and under the water, only now it wasn’t under it. Massive flailing limbs had broken the waters surface. Felecia had seen the flailing tentacles of the kraken of old in her father’s books in the library. She knew the stories of massive squid and octopi that roamed the sea preying on whales and what else was ever large enough besides. She squinted and began to count the churning tentacles in the moon light. She counted until the undulating mass caused her further distress.
If octopi had eight tentacles and squid had ten, well…the thing out in the water under the moonlight had enough for both at the same time and more, much more. Among all those tossing tentacles and odd, stumpy suction cupped appendages besides, there were all the eyes, so many caught in the moon light left reflecting like the eyes of distant unnumbered predators. Some eyes shown yellow, others deep red and even some green besides, all those distant and alien eyes shown under the light, some on odd stalks others wet and wild half out of the choppy water and all seeming to gleam in the same dire direction.