Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 113
Felecia turned and fled the cliffside, past the gazebo and nearly trampled Elle’s herb garden. She felt like she would never be sure of what she really saw. She had no one to talk to about it anyway. The servants were all Nana’s spies or likely to dismiss little Fee as a liar or a simple child for telling such an outlandish story. Mother was already nearly a stranger, a sullen and often absent figure in Felecia’s life, someone she could never find except at meal times when it was conveniently inappropriate to talk.
Bartholomew would believe her, but he was gone and not likely to return for a few months. She could write it down, knew she had to even, but nothing she could write out in her careful, yet sloppy, cursive would be enough to encapsulate the mind-numbing horror she had witnessed, the terrible monster she had observed out there in the waves.
Rotary house felt colder than usual as Felecia reached the kitchen door leading out to the small herb garden. The place always felt cold, and empty, it was more often than not terribly quiet at all times but just then it felt colder, more lonesome, more haunted by the ghosts of happier times and better days than ever before. Beyond the kitchen and the grand foyer, out in the parlor room near the front doors the faithful grandmother clock chimed. The sound was hideous against the still quiet.
Felecia crossed the kitchen and dared a look back outside and saw only thick fog where the clear night sky had just been. She dashed through the great dining room and into the foyer, careful to avoid looking at the tall, slender clock that greeted all visitors where the foyer met the parlor room before the stares.
The stairs!
Felecia stomped up the first three steps without thought and pressed her right foot down on the edge of the fourth as the first wicked creak began to sound. The stairs down were seven where you like and then two steps over to the right and then three to the left and then two more to hop over and then six along the middle and three where you like and they had to be taken in reverse to make a trip up the stairs without making a sound.
Felecia knew the order of the household stairs front and back by nine years of age, she stopped and took a few deep breaths and held onto the banister to help her shift and hop and quick step to best avoid making any noises along the stairs to the top of the second story landing. From the landing it was a quick trip around the corner of the stair banister and down to the end of the hallway past the water closet to her room.
The journal she had begun to keep from the year before was half full of plaintiff remarks and half-finished childish letters made out to Father and Bartholomew during their first trip out to sea. More than half the pages were empty but they always seemed tainted by the paltry words spread out on the pages nearby. Her journal wouldn’t do and so Felecia had resorted to the general stationary and the quill pen and ink her father had gifted her that year for her birthday.
“Practice your penmanship on these, write one big letter to me and your brothers, once a week, and give it to the groundskeeper when he comes by. He’ll add the postage and take it all to town and eventually we’ll get to read what you write us when it arrives in our mail on the boat.”
Felecia had been religious about the first handful of opportunities to report all and everything to the bits of yellowed paper she scribbled in. Only, her letters weren’t hers after all. All the household letters ran through Nana first. After the all-seeing eye and whatever it chose to argue came the general length of each letter. Felecia was made to defend herself and argue against censorship for the sake of expediency twice before the letters were eventually shortened anyway. As she sat down with the paper laid out and the quill steady, well…what was there to really say in the face of being called wordy or worse, dramatic.
Felecia did her best and hid the intent of her messages behind the heaviness of her ink and the intention of her remarks and still the pages seemed stiff with her regards and smelled fragrant of her laments. After a few times Felecia realized the letters weren’t hers to send at all, they were just another part of the familial duty she was expected to carry out under Nana’s watchful gaze. Her letters conformed to what was expected and in turn Felecia took about as much joy in writing letters to her father and brothers as she did her needlepoint.
Bartholomew was the only one who knew what was really going on, he told Felecia after his first voyage to write him her real letters. The sort of ones she wanted to write. This was different though; this wasn’t complaining about Nana or how Elle treated her in the kitchen during her dreaded scullery punishments. How does one explain, at nine, in a credible way the witnessing of a hundred limbed monstrosity once viewed during the deep cold of a winter night?