Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 130
Who would be there to tell Felecia which books to read next? Who would be there to shout confusing orders at her as she sprinkled or tossed ingredients into some insane concoction or smile knowingly as she accidently murdered an entire bed of worms, mushrooms, herbs, or all of the above?
Who would be there for anything she did again? The answer then was the same as when she was pushed out onto the front steps of the Rotary house porch a few years before. Any old passerby or no one at all. It would matter all just the same.
Felecia looked down at the corpse beside her as it rested on its stomach in the meadow weeds. Crying, wasn’t that what was appropriate. The humility to be swallowed, even for only a moment, by unfathomable grief? No, there were no tears as Felecia looked down at the body, only a vague sense of general loss and a sense of impending dread and horror.
The two plebes joined back into the Ganly’s posse, such as it was, and Felecia understood what would come next, regardless of her need to process her losses. The dullards would trudge slowly ahead, uncovering more horrors until they found Josephine and the villager that Phillip’s boy had shot as well.
Felecia gathered her senses and began to rest as the men waited to meet up near the entrance to the slaughter house and once more as they settled causes among themselves in relation to the narrow sense of duty that they still felt they owed to the moment. Neither of the men agreed to go first, one was still arguing to go back to the village, to come back with others when it was light out. The other man, the one Ganly had called Merl, he motioned beyond the ruins of the packing crate house and said it would be better to light the place up, like they had planned. “We’ll have plenty of light then.”
Both plans were better than what Ganly thought up, Merl’s plan was so sound the familiar voice of Phillip’s offspring chimed in. “We’d have more light then, and the murderer wouldn’t have a hideout no more.”
“Four of them and two arrows.” Felecia had already considered that dilemma as she moved away from Jacqueline’s corpse. Killing the villagers was pointless, if all the dead surrounding them already didn’t have Ganly ready to flee, one or two more dead underlings wouldn’t make a difference to that fiend. Killing Phillip’s boy sounded awful, but not impossible, the youth had only ever rarely been anything besides unpleasant, if not down right hateful of Felecia. Hardly an excuse to kill someone, but considering the rifle. Well, there was nothing that would stop Ganly from fetching it off the boy’s corpse and then the same problem would continue. No, Ganly had to be the target, and the only one that mattered really. Kill Ganly and the rest of them would have no reason to stay out there.
Still, arrows broke, especially crudely made ones using wet woods from a swamp. Felecia needed Ganly dead beyond a doubt. The harpoon gun was looted from the old ancestral home in order to kill a god. Would it even kill one evil man?
Felecia took the old, incredibly heavy oversized rifle from its pappus and used what she had learned from her few lessons with Phillip’s rifle to load and prime the thing. She focused on the task at hand and finding a tall enough rock or fallen tree to rest the massive rifle on.
How did I carry this thing so far on my back? How did I haul it through the woods and only now realize how unwieldy and awful the weight of this thing is?
Felecia ignored the posse while they continued to bicker by the old packing crate house. She wondered to herself how she managed such a feat and then whispered to herself once more.
“How did I not notice before?”
The awful, outside voice, the one she hoped she had only hallucinated earlier in the cellar of the Big House, the ugly sing song whisper, came back again to reply, only then Felecia knew it wasn’t her mind playing tricks on her in the dark.
“Because, girl, I gave you the strength.”