Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 125
“I don’t want to die here. I can’t be left behind to be hurt by them if you die here!”
Jacqueline sniggered bitterly and spat a wad of red residue near the front door of the moldy ruin. “Fuck that, we kill three or four and the rest will run. This new Yoseph, he’s craven, he won’t be able to corral the rest as they run from the blood.”
Felecia tried to talk, to speak reason before the old witch rode over her. “Show men blood, real blood, and they run. They always do. I’ve been out here for years chasing them away from my wetlands, my beach.”
What if we don’t though, what if we vanish from this stupid, moldy ruin and head back to the cave together?
Felecia wanted to try that on for size and started and stuttered until Jacqueline cackled cruelly. “You killed already, girl, back in that village and again tonight. These men would all rape you to pieces and hang you from a tree just like they tried to hang Yoseph’s get. You said it yourself, they’ll make sport of you before the end.”
As they continued to slowly push through and hunt and peck their way between the thorns and the brambles of the meadow the village men began to make noises that Felecia could hear as Josephine chided.
“I’ll go back with you now. I’ll go and I swear I will stay put; I promise. I’ll read all those old books and let you spell out their meaning for me. I’ll learn your methods and recipes as you’re ready to teach them to me. I swear it. Please, let’s just go.”
Felecia never begged. She yelled, yelped, howled, cried, and disappeared to a place where she was small and resting on her father’s lap when the pain was too much to bear, but she had never begged anyone before that moment.
Jacqueline only shrugged at Felecia’s genuine show of placation. “Slinking off won’t do now, these men will follow and foul and murder us both. Maybe if you staid put this wouldn’t happen right now, but this was gonna happen either way, no matter what. No sense in kicking yourself over the inevitable.”
Two of the men were breaking through the thicket and had already reached the edge of the gravel and crushed sea shell walkway up to the front door of the moldy ruin. Only moments stood between their innocent march through the meadow and the discovery of wet, mutilated corpses.
“Please. Please Nana! I want to go home.”
Felecia wasn’t thinking anymore, she was looking out at the men closing in with their torches, their fillet knives, and the odd bludgeon. These simple village men weren’t armed for war, they were marching into death because a man they barely knew and probably didn’t even like or respect was ordering them along. They were all slurring words drunk for the sake of courage and waving their unsteady hands around as they closed on their place of death.
“Fuck your Nana, and fuck you if that’s who you think I am, girl.” Jacqueline shrunk down and pushed at the bottom of the front door of the hovel as she slunk out into the moonlight underbrush. Felecia was left alone inside the vulnerable house.
Jacqueline vanished into the thorny brush that laid on the far side of the front porch of the ruin across from the gravel yard and Felecia knew she was too late to change or stop what would come next.
The first of the new scouts discovered the death place of the men that Ganly had goaded forth. He was looking over the wet, ruin of the man that Jacqueline had killed when he motioned to the man nearby and made to raise his voice in alarm.
Once again Felecia felt that time was her worst enemy. The man was going to stop waving wordlessly and begin to shout his dismay. The man he might have known was now dead and surely had died badly. An arrow was nocked and at the ready, another shot to the neck would end this man’s calls or pleas and leave him to feed the gravel and the crushed sea shells with his vital fluids. Once more Felecia understood and agreed with the old witch, those men, their individual hopes or proclivities set aside, they would all willingly join in or merely abstain in her ruination and murder besides.
Us or them.
Jacqueline’s hoarse voice sounded out inside Felecia’s head and Felecia aimed her bow through the small window opening near the front door, not at the man about to call out, but at the man nearest him. They might stop these two from making noise but with the others so close it wouldn’t be much of a mystery what happened to them.