Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 120
The meadow was massive and the constant thick swell of ground cover underfoot as well as the sea of flowering plants and massive tangles of vines would signify her arrival there. To circumnavigate the meadow to the south would surely be courting disaster as would the further likelihood of being discovered among the thin trees under the harsh moon light. Darting out into the thick of it seemed equally suicidal. The tallest plants in the meadow were waist high if that and trying to run among those thick bushes and clinging vines would be impossible. The beachhead made the most sense, until Felecia considered her most recent encounters with the aberration hiding out in the bay. The deranged animal knew that Felecia planned to kill it, or was trying to kill it anyway. Would the monster be waiting out at the edge of the waves? Would it be dangling its filthy tendrils, letting their multitude scrape this way and that along the sand, sea shells, and rocks? Would it be waiting for the little dumb animal who planned to kill it with a harpoon gun to take the easy road?
Felecia stumbled to the edge of the cold woods and felt the immediate rise in temperature that told her the meadow was near. She could see the first faint glimpses of the wild flowers that always seemed to bloom in the meadow. A magnificent and cruelly bright moon hung in the sky, the obscene orb appeared pale green and the light it gave seemed to turn the meadow into every imaginable shade of that color. The old shack made from packing crates and tar paper leaned to the north, northwest, telling Felecia that she would be stuck running nearly the longest length of the meadow to reach the constantly sweltering interior of the swamp.
They won’t go into the swamp, no one ever does. They won’t even cross into the meadow unless they have reason to. No one ever does.
The largest yet still spindly elm at the edge of the meadow served Felecia well as she leaned and moaned softly. She lost herself for a few moments, contemplating how far Ganly and his posse would go out into the cold night. She stood there until a long, ragged cramp seized through her lower back and mingled with the convulsions of her dehydrated guts. The pain was nearly blinding, Felecia squinted against the sickly green moon light and felt her eyes trying to tear even though nothing dared to flow down her dirty cheeks.
The shout came from the south, it was too far to hear clearly but it was unmistakably human. Among the furrows between the stands of trees to the southwest Felecia saw a distant light, it was brief and swinging to-and-fro. Phillip used the old pilot boat lanterns with their odd globe glass, sheathed in brass canisters. Those lanterns and the larger ones made of red and blue glass, wrapped in ropes or sheathed in brass, the ones ships used for signaling were both common in the village and all used for lighting at night. Where once canisters stood to be filled with whale oil and wick most had been converted to hold candles since. Familiar beeswax and tallow candles that Felecia learned how to make a life time ago.
Ganly and his posse were marching their way through the cold woods right to the meadow as if commanded from up on high. Felecia knew better though, there was no up on high, not on Aquidneck. Josephine had said it plain enough before,
Nothing ever happens on Aquidneck without the infernal knowing and acknowledging it all.
Felecia pushed away from the tree and started out in earnest, exhausted, dehydrated and in agony, one unsure foot in front of the other as the mud and muck of the forest floor gave way to the endlessly verdant meadow.
The occasional patch of strangling vines and hangman’s weed were obvious footfalls but their where nettles and thorny pods belonging to unnamed and vicious yellow green plants Josephine hadn’t told Felecia the name or use of as yet. There was also sumac and hemlock plants about, not to mention carnivorous dew drops and other plants Josephine had told Felecia didn’t normally grow on Aquidneck, not until she planted them in the meadow herself.
As Felecia attempted to march as fast as she could manage through the thickets and the strangling vines, the sporing clouds of trampled mushrooms and the obvious crushed cherries of an especially tall nightshade nearby she stopped to briefly gather her bearings. The meadow was a mad house of all things meant to end life; one Felecia had never fully recognized before. The leaning shack was closer now but that seemed like little consolation given her predicament. The old buildings sagging windows facing east looked like forlorn mouths, too long without a meal.
As much as she loathed the old shack its fetid interior promised the safest place to wait out the posse and their likely as not tepid search of the meadow before their majority sobered up and thought better of the trek.
A bright lantern light shown yellow and bright across the meadow and dared to brush Felecia before she dropped to the ground, her carefully wrapped collection from the big house be damned.
The yellow light swung from right to left and back again and made to make another pass before a surly and familiar voice rang out. “You hoping to count field mice? Or are you waiting for the old man to stand up and beg forgiveness?”
It sounded as though Ganly, the murderer, the hollow-eyed fiend who had haunted Felecia’s nightmares for years, found a new vocabulary with his new station in life as groundskeeper. It also sounded like he was just as willing to make others pay for his gains in life.