Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 116
I used to find that girl pretty, I used to fancy her.
Felecia considered the thought as the vacuous girl went running and squealing for safety. She shrugged and turned her attention to the rest of the gathered peasants. They all seemed locked in place for eternity, none of them daring to speak or move, not until Josephine finally closed her mouth and cocked her head.
“Fee…little Fee. Is that you?”
Felecia didn’t raise her bow. She only pulled the arrow she had notched taught against the string. The maids voice sounded odd, foreign. Surely it was English, but had Felecia learned to speak something else of late, something related but lesser and very, very different these last few years?
The new girl sitting at the table, the villager, she stood up and turned away, obviously heading back to the big house and possibly beyond. Felecia raised the bow and pulled the string back to her ear. One of the girls on the blanket screamed, another shouted for mercy. Josephine stood up and got in the way as the village girl kept running.
“Fee…Felicia, if that is you and I think it is, then I know you would never hurt a soul. I know you! Put that thing down, we have food and water. We can go speak to your Nana together, you and I, in the morning.”
Felecia didn’t need to think long on the matter, she didn’t need to consider how many times Josephine had been a willing instrument in the overall abysmal mistreatment that had been Felecia’s childhood until her exile. Nana didn’t carry a wooden spoon or a strap around the house, she didn’t have anything ready at hand. Someone always went to fetch a weapon, and that someone was almost always Josephine. As Felecia begged and cried and howled and sobbed, someone was always watching and that person had almost always Josephine. When it came time to sentence Felecia to long hours cutting potatoes and scrubbing pans, it was Josephine acting on Nana’s behalf who made sure that Felecia staid at her station. When it came time to scour Felecia’s room and confiscate her most private things, it hadn’t been Nana who did the dirty work. When it came down to the day of and Felecia had begged the loudest of all, if was Josephine who considered her job first and Felecia second before the humiliating exile that followed.
Suddenly it was Josephine who required attention, suddenly it was her time to make demands that included more waiting, more succumbing, more obeying. Felecia was ready for nearly anything after those long hours of being tired, frustrated, disgusted, and humiliated by the unnamed horror that waited out in the bay, but the one thing she wasn’t ready to do was be made to wait for Nana some more.
Felecia kept the bow aimed and the arrow string pulled tight, she didn’t pull or turn or God forbid let loose, not until she was ready. Felecia held her shot and aimed just over the left shoulder of the matronly woman who was busy chittering worthless words at her.
The shot went clean through the well-lit kitchen window, shattering a single pane of glass. The arrow went through and strafed past the shoulder of the village girl and nicked a wall in the hallway before impacting into its intended target with deft precision. The grandmother clock resting in the hallway at the entry to the downstairs living room/parlor exploded in a shower of tinkling glass while suddenly sprung clock works all called out for one final moment of alert.
“I don’t wait for Nana, or you, not anymore.”
Felecia didn’t wait for the old maid to acknowledge what had been said, she didn’t wait for the woman to glean the meaning of the moment. She drew a second arrow from around the gear she had tied on her back and notched it with precision before she turned and ran for the woods leading to the north. They would continue to gasp and some would point, most would wonder who the apparition that emerged from the cellar really was, some would guess for themselves and some would know for sure. The only thing that mattered to Felecia then was the village girl running through the big house on her way back home to warn the new groundskeeper.
To let that unknown and nearly innocent girl make her trek back to the ramshackle huts would be a likely death sentence for Felecia, killing her before she could run out the front door of the big house would have been simple murder.
There were a few times, ugly and all too real moments were Felecia considered the gravity of making that decision on the fly, not only for her but for those around her who mattered most. There were plenty of times in the ensuing years where she wished she had pulled to the right and dropped the serrated arrow head directly into flesh that mattered most in the moment instead of spending a shot into destroying a memory from her unequal past.