Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 140
The odd, in-between the lines writing didn’t reappear, but in some odd and inexplicable way Felecia felt she was gaining some small grasp of the alphabet and phonetics of the material. Still though, late at night, after one of her frequent nightmares, Felecia would pick up the book that seemed to write out messages directly to her, hoping to see something again, if for no better reason that to continue the lunacy and not be forced to confront the thought that she had maybe lost her mind for a time.
Eventually those long periods of sleep were overtaken by the frequent nightmares and gave way to a period of reluctant yet necessary housekeeping. The cave was small, so small, and yet cleaning it seemed impossible. Every shelf was impacted with books, ingredients, dried or preserved hides and specimens. Every surface mired in layers of ash, candle wax, spillage from one endeavor or another or just the constant, inescapable film of mildew and yes, even growing moss. The living room seemed the least used by anyone and therefore the easiest place to start and still it seemed to take days just to sort through the mess much less clean. Next came the small area around the work bench and then into the dreaded kitchen. The ancient wood burning stove, no doubt the one Jacqueline had as a young woman in the old packing crate home, gave off seven distinct layers of char and grimy, greasy ash before bearing down to spots at the bottom that seemed so thin, they might open up under the heat of one more cooked meal.
Felecia found the season taking a turn and finding herself thankful that although the swamp suffered through the winter, it never allowed snow to stick. A fire pit was easy to make on the bare ground just outside the cave, a lean too above to keep out the weather though, again Felecia had to use trial and error before she finally found a system that worked. She could grill and boil outdoors which was most of what she did anyway. The oven would be saved for pursuits that didn’t involve food.
As for those other pursuits, the tables beside the kitchen were saved for last except for the small sleeping annex. Felecia considered dragging them out into the sun and letting anything that wasn’t already surely dead, die under its gaze. There wasn’t some small flicker or some tiny, pink undulating form of life that stopped that idea, just a general sense of unease in undoing the sorts of still misunderstood alchemy that Jacqueline practiced there.
A compromise was made in so much that Felecia cleared all of the material from two of the tables and kept two others just as she had found them in their dry, decayed, and dormant state. Gardening was a good next start but Felecia was a novice at best. Growing mushrooms required knowing where to find the existing ones while not making fatal mistakes in what to plant. As for the old fast and slow remedies and other odd, mystical applications, Felecia wrote the majority of that off. Jacqueline was the one who wanted her to follow in certain footsteps and just like Phillip, she would find herself disappointed, well, if she weren’t dead.
The last bit to clear and clean was the annex, there was nothing to be done about the ancient bed, it was as much dirt and the accumulation of sweat and nightsoil as it was still straw and bundles of cotton batting for pillows. Pounding at it and letting it air out on a dry day was the best to be done there, but the shelves above, and the massive, incongruous stash of items below, well, that seemed to take as much time as everything else put together.
Still, Felecia had to forage and hunt where she could, she had to bring up water from the well and boil it, and be thankful there was one. Some days, the routine of life itself took up the day and all Felecia could do was promise herself she would get to the next big choir when she could manage it. The deepest drifts of snow would be settling in over the village by then, darkest, January winter would be in place and Felecia only then realized she must have had a birthday somewhere in there. She was fifteen, no sixteen. Surely sixteen but it all seemed so muddy of a sudden.
The library, as is stood around the walls of the annex was six shelves from bed platform to ceiling and times four that, each shelf was near to exploding with weighty velum tomes covered in thick wood panels, some coated in leather, some marked directly on the wooden covers. Other books were traditional paper wrapped in thick cardboard with their thin leather bindings. Still other materials were simple newspaper collections, pamphlets and small manuals sewn with cat gut or simply stapled together. Under the mess of the bed Felecia found scores of old log books belonging to ships the family must have once owned. Their purpose briefly escaped Felecia until she considered their references of places and things were how Jacqueline was likely to have come up with so much of the world that she believed existed.
Old sailors stories, that’s the sum of it. Old sailors stories, wives tales, and lies.
Felecia was feeling haughty and all knowing for the first time in months when she found and began sorting the old ships logs, she allowed herself to think that statement clearly and shrug dismissively as she began to load the logs up in a couple of sacks to be put out in the living room along with everything else Felecia either didn’t know what to do with or planned to get rid of.
One of the logs fell out of the sack and landed open faced on the cold, stone floor, revealing a signature that Felecia recognized all too well. The hand was her father’s without a doubt, she had spent years of her literate childhood examining the thick, blocky italic way her father scrawled his thoughts across the page in his at home correspondences to creditors, business partners, and underlings in the company.
Another day was sacrificed in the endeavor of just sorting out those seemingly worthless old log books so that Felecia could properly catalogue where and who they had all come from. There were logs from her grandfather, and the man before him who supposedly spawned their families fortune and man misfortunes. There were logs from her great uncles and uncles, from cousins once and twice removed, men she never really knew, and finally, and most importantly to her, seven logs from her father. All of them from the earliest parts of his career with the company ships after marrying mother. Those logs represented a part of her father’s life that had long remained a mystery to her. They weren’t in the family library at the big house and now she knew why, but how?
Had Jacqueline donned her wicker mask and played the old man of the swamp to sneak in and steal them when Felecia was a babe, or even before she was born? Had the old woman come by and stolen them all sometime later? Was Felecia asleep in her room when the cellar downstairs or the library down the hall from her bedroom was looted by the half mad phantom of her great aunt, and if so…why?