emptymouthpiece

Sun Kissed Innsmouth

Part 134

Felecia could hear the fiend and the one remaining villager. She didn’t hear Phillip’s boy though. The youth wasn’t speaking up or standing nearby the two as they considered what to do about the animals or their new captive. Felecia was pointing an arrow at the youth’s flat face, watching his sharp eyes grow suddenly concerned. She was about to die, probably worse than die before that, but she couldn’t help but want to know if she had shot the youth. Knowing wouldn’t change anything. Maybe it was one last bit of mystery to hold on to as she tried to keep sane in the face of her murder, or worse.

Do you dream when you’ve been knocked unconscious?

Felecia didn’t have facts to support or deny that internal question but she was pretty sure she had dreamt, or had a nightmare. She was standing by the harpoon gun, cornered by the Fiend and the remnants of his posse. Capture, death, or worse was coming and Felecia knew it in her nightmare, she knew once the villager was struck with the harpoon and went flying that there would be no saving herself. In the nightmare Felecia reached out, with her mind, she buckled, took a knee, took the pledge, made the plea.

There were no invisible, tenebrious threads of telekinetic horror that crept along through the thorny undergrowth to sink deep into her soul. No demonic presence that came along to collect and swallow Felecia’s tender, immortal soul. Instead, the incessant insects once again ceased their calls, the breeze coming off the bay stilled. Felecia heard the sound of the beach waves lapping back and forth become a rushing boil. The waters edge out beyond the thin tree line north of the meadow besides the remains of the ruined packing crate house shifted and ebbed forward creating a small tsunami of salty brine that washed in until it reached the back of Felecia’s heels. The trees behind her were pushed aside and those that resisted shattered into a debris of wood pulp as dozens of massive tentacles lashed out of the darkness, reaching for everyone and everything in reach.

Nothing around Felecia was spared, not the goats and chickens still stuck in the corral, not the villager who went back to his default position of covering his face and begging for his pathetic life, not even Phillip’s youth, not even as the trusted rifle fired one last time to no avail as a shrill howl followed its harsh report. Even the fiend, Ganly, wasn’t spared. He tried to run and got near to the middle of Meadow before one of the massive, ropey tentacles wrapped around his left ankle and dug its barbed suction cuts into tender flesh. The fiend howled and threatened and even hacked at the unimaginable appendage that pulled him painfully through the thorny underbrush with a small fillet knife. The thick purple, blue tentacle only tightened its grasp and sent the fiend howling in agony as its raspy suction cups tore flesh from bone as it continued to drag him along. Felecia could only watch in quiet horror as everything living was pulled back toward an insane visage of some cephalopod/mammalian thing.

The monster from the deep had so many eyes, and so many more rows of teeth of all nature surrounding a massive maw and still lining and yawning down a universally terrifying throat down into deepest, digestive darkness. The thing didn’t have a head as one could be described, it merely rose from the depth and turned the massive disk of its awful existence toward the earth instead of the sky and vomited hungry misery upon the soil until it was so temporarily sated before drawing once again down into the surf and leaving its awful, leering, yearning, façade looking up to the sky once more for such sporadic nurture.

In the nightmare, Felecia was left standing by the stump of fence post, still smelling the sea and feeling the cold bay ocean lapping gently against her heels. She was safe though, the massive, tentacled, toothed, and eyed monstrosity came to meet the land and feed on everyone and everything beside her all the same. She was safe afterward though, and still very much herself. Even Jacqueline’s body was hauled away, along with the corpses of so many villages she and Felecia had killed that night, but wasn’t that so much the better? So many slates cleaned, so many tabs paid. Felecia was left there, sparkling and new after her unholy baptism in the wake of the monster that takes everything eventually.

It was a nightmare, no matter who it took or who it spared. It was a nightmare because it was absolute and nothing in the real world is absolute. It was an obvious nightmare, regardless of the circumstances. It was a nightmare because it was easy, too easy.

Felecia tried to squint through the pain and look through both of her eyes as she scanned around slowly and still, she couldn’t see the youth. Was he dead? Had she killed him by accident?

“I ain’t staying to see her tortured.”

Ganly turned sharply to look down on a figure that was hard for Felecia to focus on down in the dark underbrush. “You ain’t gotta stay here, kid. You did your job. The old man is dead. We ain’t gotta talk about old Tom ever again!”

The youth continued from his position stooped over his pack as he tried to collect his things. “If you’re gonna kill her here, make it quick!”

Ganly stopped bothering to try and be friendly or understanding. He stood up, looming over Felecia and looked down at her instead of the youth as he responded blankly. “No. I made the call, and I get to claim the kill. Rules of the woods. This little bitch helped that old he/she run us all ragged, she gets to die just as slow and ugly as I want her to. That’s the rules. Don’t like it? Fuck off back to your Pa. Hold out for what comes after that.”