Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 137
Felecia choked Ganly until he couldn’t form words anymore, she choked him until she felt hot tears spill onto her arm, she choked the fiend until he stopped digging at his throat or pushing feebly away at her arms as she pulled against him all the harder. Felecia kept on squeezing until the fiend stopped moving and making sounds all together and then she kept on choking until the fiend’s body began to cool under the rising sun.
Weeks later, Felecia wouldn’t remember much of that night after misfiring the harpoon rifle. She never found it again, or much of the rest of the things she took from the cellar of the big house. Nor did she find bodies of all the village men she and Jacqueline had slain, and she surely never found the old witch.
All Felecia knew about that night to be certain was what Taryn told her so many months later. How she had been the one to kill Ganly, how she kept right on choking the fiend even after Taryn was able to cover himself, clean himself up, and try and convince the wild animal still tethered to the corpse to let it go.
“I still wasn’t sure it was you. I figured it was, but you was so filthy, so wild. Villagers talk big about Indians and wild folk still wandering the north of the isle, I thought maybe it was true. I saw your hair though, only red hair I ever seen on the isle. You wouldn’t let go of him, like that night in the village with Pa, you was still fighting with nothing left to fight. I tried to pull him off but you kept hold, I tried to get you to let up but you cursed and spit at me. I just waited after that, you ran out of strength and were just holding onto him by sun up so I just pulled him by the boots until he was off you but you just laid there and wouldn’t move. You wouldn’t talk to me or say nothing but I was afraid to leave you in the field alone. I tried to pick you up but you fought me, then you…you picked up a rock and went over and starting hitting him with it. He was dead as I ever saw but you just hit him and hit him and hit him, you were covered in him, his blood, bits of bone and meat, didn’t matter, you just kept beating his face in with that rock until there was nothing left. I called you by your name, maybe I should have done it sooner, but that changed you. You stopped and dropped the rock, then you looked down at your arms and the front of you and you just ran.”
Felecia remembered being covered in mysterious gore, the first thing she really remembered was standing waist deep in the ocean waves, furiously scrubbing at all the dried accumulation. She had wounds, still discolored and oozing puss, but the salt water felt good on them, they had all closed by the time she regained her faculties. She was naked as the day she was born, out in the surf beyond the beach head where she first saw the wreck of the Candlemaker’s stolen boat. The place Jacqueline had taken her time and time again to watch as she threw trash offerings to a malevolent animal.
Remembering anything at all was a hardship and trying to piece together her last few, days…weeks, was immediately painful. She could picture Jacqueline laying there in the meadow, but she knew the old witch was dead. Bits and pieces of that final night together would reach out in nightmares and inform Felecia of what had likely happened. At the time Felecia was suddenly interested in getting away from the ocean she was just happily bathing in. She fast walked up the beach until she found the pile of rags that she had once called clothes. None of it was fit to wear, not even for modesty’s sake. Felecia didn’t think twice or consider what she was doing as she walked into the swamp and began to coat herself in thick, soupy mud. There was precious little of the squeamish girl left who first walked reluctantly into that swamp, following the old witch with her reluctant questions and haughty demands.
The young, bog creature that crept steadily back to her cave was a green and purple skinned, half healed, mud coated, twig in hair, stiff jointed monster. Felecia’s hands and arms ached for beyond what the pussy, slowly healing wounds could explain. It felt as though she had lifted and carried a whole mountain for some set number of days and every movement ached, yet she did move, curious to see what remained of the home she shared with the old witch.
The mud did its job as the swamp sweltered even as the beach beyond spelled colder weather. The stuff cooled the body and kept the worst of the bugs at bay, no urine required. Felecia didn’t even falter or stop to consider what lay waiting in the water as she stepped bare foot through the muck and the ankle- and knee-deep pools of stagnant water. The leeches and mosquitos let her be for the time being, later she would wonder if it was some shared sense of sympathy, one bottom feeder to another, or if she was just so awful, filthy, and past due, that nothing wanted her anymore.
The cave home waited for her on its small rise only the doors that once belonged to a wardrobe were left oddly open, letting the scant sunlight have a peek of otherwise forbidden spaces. The cave immediately smelled of death, more so than the surrounding swamp, Felecia could see from the entrance wooden tray tables over by the kitchen that were brown with rot where once was verdant life.
Felecia walked stiffly to the front steps of the cave, unable to comprehend who or what would have pushed and kept the old wardrobe doors leaning inward. She took the two steps down into the living room and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The sagging settee and the bookshelves cut into the stone waited to the left as always and nothing changed there but as Felecia stepped into the place and walked over to the kitchen, she saw the small cage and the putrid little thing that slumped there, covered in maggots.
Felecia only ever recollected what she saw and did that night in the meadow in snippets, quickly skimmed woodcuts in a very wordy tome perhaps, but she knew she was alive and real and very sadly whole when she realized that the monster from the sea had never come along to kill or collect ole’ nervous Nelly. No one had ever come for the nervous little chicken that lived its entire life in anxious terror. Felecia had collected and caged the poor thing and she was the one who swore it would be safe come anything and everything, she was also the one who left the cave in the hopes of killing the monster who lives in the waves only to wind up leaving the poor nervous little animal to die from starvation and dehydration.
Felecia observed the little chicken as it laid there, its neck and head leaning awkwardly from the cage toward the empty water traps of the nearby mushroom and worm beds. Nelly died trying to reach for water, simple water, a drink the little chicken could have gotten from any number of mystery pools out in the swamp.
The sobbing started in hitches, deep hard wallops of gasping air. Felecia didn’t wonder where it was coming from, she didn’t feel guilt for why she was crying for a dead chicken instead of the great aunt she couldn’t build a tear for. She wasn’t crying in absentia; she didn’t start crying and howling in agony over the loss of her childhood or the lack of love her Nana or her mother gave her. She didn’t start crying over all the hardships, over how her oldest brother leered at her, or how her father did his best and still managed to do nothing at all. No. Felecia howled and even screamed in harrowed horror over the loss of a small animal that she let die.
Jacqueline even said it aloud, if the little animal came back with them it would die, as all things died over time in the cave. Jacqueline did, the worms did, the herbs and mushrooms and yes, the little chicken that Felecia had doomed to a short life of thirst and starvation. No monster from the sea required.
There was no grandiose spectacle, no moment of table turning, furniture wrecking, book burning rage, no time spent speculating about the wide-open doors or the selection of tools and outerwear left undisturbed.
Felecia walked over to the crafting table and looked around for a weapon but found nothing. She patted at her person in absent need but found no arrows or knife. She turned to look about the kitchen and found nothing of use.
Felecia stumbled numbly away from the cave and stepped out into the small clearing near the well and looked down at the stump Jacqueline chose to use as a stool. Unlike the night at the meadow, Felecia fully recollected the moment she decided to kill herself. There were no knives or sharp instruments left, no poisonous plants or mushrooms left alive to eat and try to swallow before they took effect. Only a tree stump sunk in the muddy ground among a swamp that only offered death by slow decay or nearly as slow, poisonous bite.
Felecia stood over the stump and stared at it. This wasn’t wanting death, it was about lacking any purpose, surely that was important, it was also about having murdered the animal she cared most about by neglect, it wasn’t her choice, but it happened all the same. Surely all life would be better without her and what she had known and seen and continued to know.