Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 139
“Life wants to live, all life does.”
Felecia mouthed the words and listened to them sound out, small and hollow in the heat and damp of the swamp. Phillip sounded profound and wise when he said it, Felecia sounded like a bird, mimicking words it had heard time and time again but still didn’t understand.
The small breeze, the trickle of the run off water as it ran into and passed the small pools, the endless drone of the insects and the chirps and sounds of shuffling that the birds and reptiles made as they fed, it all built up and collected around Felecia and left her unsure where she still wanted to kill herself yet she was completely unable to get up and walk back into the cave.
Felecia slept a lot in those first days after regaining her senses and taking stock of all she had seen and done. The stand of old willow and pine trees closest to the lifeless doorstep of the cave became her home for the time. The weather was still dry enough to allow for her to sleep and stay under the stars and she made due with what little and disgusting things there were to eat in the swamp. She wondered, briefly, about the animals in the corral and then removed herself from those thoughts. Surely the village would send, someone, perhaps Phillip and his boy would come upon them and take them back before they too succumb to dehydration and starvation.
The first days were full with fitful hours of trying to build a lean too like the first one she had tried to erect on the rise near Phillip’s shack. The wet, sparse cover provided by the tress didn’t do much to keep the swamp out and the ground was far too wet to make the poles secure. Eventually Felecia made do with something that used the tree trunks for supports, their loose branches, and nearly all the twine or strangling vines she had on hand laced together and still the roof did little to keep out the rain and even less to keep out the bugs.
Regular applications of clay mud to bare skin were all that kept Felecia from being eaten alive and even with that she learned to stick leaves to the parts of her selfish she rarely looked at and only considered late at or when relieving herself. It was probably two weeks, maybe more before she dared, out of sheer boredom to steal into the fetid insides of the cave to collect a book. She moved fast and barely opened her eyes, refusing at all to look in the direction of the kitchen.
The book turned out to be a lengthy tome full of information about geography and finds of early human civilizations written by a Dutchman back in the last century. The book wasn’t good for passing time and certainly didn’t do the trick of waylaying boredom but it was good for falling asleep too on nights where Felecia found it hard to get to sleep.
A few weeks later had Felecia running in for another book and coming back with one of the very old books that Jacqueline used to read. Looking at all the funny, nonsense squiggles was only passively entertaining and Felecia didn’t really consider looking at more of it until she woke from one of her frequent nightmares.
The youth gave her that knowing and suddenly worried look in the nightmare and she had shot him, she had watched him die, grabbing at the missile that ran through his cheek and back into the meat of his mouth until it stuck out of the back of his neck. Those constantly downcast, pale blue eyes suddenly wide and haunting. Ganly hadn’t just knocked her out in that nightmare, he picked her up and threw her through the thorny bushes and then slowly, incrementally, choked the life out of her altogether. She woke up that particular night just as she began to feel her limbs convulse on their own. She was shrugging and jerking against the trunk of the nearest tree and woke gasping for humid, stale, swamp air. The silly old book was laying there on what bedding she had and she reached out for it. If nothing else, maybe a minute using the moonlight to look at the funny, all to fluid lettering, would help put her back to sleep.
Felecia looked at the writing with her weary eyes and began to see something write itself in the margins.
The impossible new words seemed to flood in and run into the existing material until Felecia nearly convinced herself it was all poor lighting. Until she saw one small sentence appear between two existing lines.
“I’m right here girl. Always was and will be.”
Felecia closed the book and leaned out from the pathetic shelter above to get a clearer view of the stars. She tried to breath like she had when she was a child, just like Bartholomew had taught her, deep through the nose, shallow through the mouth. She waited to calm down but it never came. She reached over and took another peak at the weird tome. Surely, she had only seen things.
“The language of our mother’s mothers, allows us to see messages, when we’re ready. If you can see this in the old books, then you must be.”
Felecia slammed the book shut and pushed it away from her with a miserable grunt. The next morning was the first legitimate rainfall in some months. The makeshift home in the trees wouldn’t do, the two old books and Felecia’s small collection of goods were all getting wet and there was nothing for it. Not out under the stars.
The cave interior was much less fetid but far filthier than the last time Felecia had cared to examine it in any detail. The tables were bone dry and devoid of life, the kitchen was a wash of old grey and green slashes where mold and mildew once ruled before succumbing to the vacuum of time. The cage where little Nelly laid looked empty save for a collection of loose bones and bleached feathers. Felecia took the whole thing out whole moaning piteously to herself.
There were still long periods of time where nothing was done except sleep, sleep and dream, sleep and nightmare, fall asleep and jerk awake, fall asleep and wake up screaming. Eventually Felecia’s body healed entirely but still her mind was so often plagued and in spite of her preferences, intelligence, and adherence to science to prove the things she didn’t yet understand she kept the odd old tomes close, scanning through them more and more as the nights grew darker and colder.