Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 129
“I…”
Felecia barely got the sentence started before Ganly’s words erupted once more into the night, only closer now and louder than ever.
“Stop runnin’ Merl! Stop or I got no choice!”
The fiend yelled at the figure standing near him, now backlight against the moonlight and the clouds as they traveled across the sky. “Shoot him, shoot the both of them if they keep running!”
The figure didn’t move and Ganly yelled all the louder. “I’ll toss you and your Pa out into the water come tomorrow God damn it! Raise that piece and do what I tell ya!”
The figure shouldered the long arm and the more distant shadow stopped for the moment. The man was halfway to the tree line, the man before him already a distant shadow. “I quit, Ganly. They killed the rest and I got a wife and two kids to think about.”
Ganly howled out, “Yes you do, think about them being left to stand at the tide line, ready to get washed out with the rest of the trash!”
The man stopped walking and let his shoulders slump, but he didn’t move toward the mass graveyard. Ganly grinned so wide Felecia could see the moon glint off his yellow teeth, “Good man. Now go get Ben, tell him what I told you. Both of you get your asses over here and we’ll finish this together!”
While one man tried to fast walk through the tangled vines and thorny bushes, chasing after the other, Ganly looked over at the figure backlit next to him. “We’ll stay put here til they get back, make them walk ahead. If you see anything, you shoot. I don’t give a fuck if it means hitting one of them, we’re the ones who live. You understand me, kid?”
Felecia listened until the fiend stopped shouting and then she looked back over to the old witch, she was ready to continue with her grand speech, ready to plead her significant case for the sake of safety and sanity.
“I’ll stay right here. I can get Ganly with my bow. No need for you to wait for him. Once I kill him, we can both leave this place. The rest of them will run, Phillip’s boy too.”
Felecia stopped moving ahead and reaching for her weapon to see if the old witch had anything to add. Jacqueline didn’t argue or grunt or respond at all. Felecia stopped and looked down, she didn’t stumble or stop or mutter or mumble to herself as she realized that the body next to her had nothing else to add to the conversation because there was nothing left of the old witch.
The fiend had been busy shouting and making such a fuss that Felecia was distracted by him, too distracted to see her great aunt die, too focused on the fiend and his posse to know if the old witch had whispered anything else before her final labored breath.
Jacqueline was splayed out on the meadow floor, flat on her stomach with her left-hand underneath her and her right still forming the letter C near the handle of her corn knife. Her head was resting upright but only because of the wooden mask. There was a good deal of blood pooled and drying around the mouth of said mask. Jacqueline didn’t have any last words, she had last choked, gurgling, eruptions of bodily fluids instead.
There was a sense of sadness to be sure, the realization that the old witch was truly gone, the eerie sensation of being so close to mortality itself. The first thing that came to Felecia’s mind though wasn’t loss or sadness, it was indignation. The old ruin forced this situation and there she was, canceling plans and checking out early. She was the one who wanted them all to pay, the one who wanted to watch the men of the village run in terror. All Felecia wanted was a way to escape the horrific encounter intact and alive enough to regret having ever left the relative safety of their cave in the first place.