Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 124
The always humid air of the meadow was suddenly thick with the smell of blood, and under that the stench of urine and feces. Felecia couldn’t have killed the poor village conscript any faster if she had shot him right through the eye, the blood didn’t spurt or gush, it poured out of the ruined hole of his neck in both directions, carpeting the crushed sea shells, the gravel walkway and the nearby plants of the meadow for a foot in any direction one cared to look around the man as he slumped to the ground and lay still.
As for the other man, Jacqueline yanked open the shack door and stepped out just long enough to sweep the corn knife across the back of his neck. The moon was full and in its awful splendor Felecia saw a flap of purple and red lift to expose something horrendously white where the man’s neck met his shoulders before he fell to the ground. His blood didn’t run like a fountain but once he was down it gushed and flowed and seemed to soak into the ground around him until everything Felecia saw out there was dark red and stank of hot pennies.
Precious moments of silence followed as Felecia ducked back into the shack, behind the front door and brought the vicious blade back up to its ready position.
Felecia already had an arrow nocked and was holding her bow down after firing it to kill the man with the lantern. She thought to raise it when she heard the terrified and suddenly empty gasp made by the second man that Jacqueline did away with before he fell to the ground with a thump. The silence after that was deafening while everyone seemed to hold their breath.
Ganly finally broke the silence but only just barely. He called out over the meadow in a faint whisper, calling the names of the men who had once answered to their given names but who would be silent forever now.
Ganly called the names out twice and three times apiece before he made fresh demands to the men surrounding him. “Fuck it. Burn the place down and we’ll come out and sift flour bags full of salt into the ashes in the morning. Just light the place up!” That was his final and most pronounced departure of the evening and it was met with absolute silence.
Jacqueline and Felecia both waited inside the old hovel, they waited for the foot falls of others as they worked through the meadow groundcover and they waited as the sky above grew darker and more hostile. Felecia assumed a full hour had gone by between the last bit of movement of the men laying outside and when Ganly yelled out his plans to his remaining underlings.
Felecia figured there would be two, maybe four more at most. After all, in all her time at Rotary house and then staying with Phillip she never saw much in the way of village men volunteering for anything, much less something dangerous. Phillip asked, once, and then went and did it all by himself, frowning and cursing the villagers for dolts and cowards. Ganly pressed and threatened though, you could get cowards to do things for you, so long as they feared you more than the unknown ahead.
The small lantern lights started shining from the tree line and started fanning out through the meadow. Felecia counted ten, maybe twelve before she stopped wasting time counting the lights. Even if they all stayed out there and still, even if a few of them stood in a straight line one before the other, there were more of them than there were arrows. The old harpoon gun was a small after thought. The sound it would make if she could get it loaded, primed, and actually get it to fire, would likely make them stop in their tracks for a little while, but not forever. Even if she was lucky enough to hit one of them with a harpoon, the rest would have her in a minute if they ran at the place.
No. There was no scenario of staying and fighting that didn’t end badly, for both of them. Felecia also considered the kind of man Ganly was, had always been. The old man, the old swamp witch would die, most likely in the fight, but unless Felecia followed her to her own death, there would be something worse than death that likely awaited Felecia.
“We need to go. There’s plenty of time to walk the beach north and let the ocean wash away our trail.”
Jacqueline didn’t speak, she didn’t move. Her cold, narrow eyes stared out at nothing beyond the menacing shadow of the wooden mask with its straw whiskers. Felecia made to pull at her once more and the old witch feigned and moved away, farther into the dark near where the kitchen once was.
“Let them come. Let them get close enough to throw their lit rags.”
The old woman was ready to kill them all, so many idiots, so many luddites and simpletons with their women and little ones left to depend on nothing. The village was awful, squalor and destitution for the sake of steady vices and ready hands. The place smelled like fish offal and burnt tar, it sounded out with the bleating of as yet to be slaughtered animals and freshly beaten children, but the men who held those lanterns and candles and torches aloft as they picked their way careful through the poisoned and thorny meadow, they didn’t deserve to die for having merely lived.