Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 141
The ships logs were nearly as hard to chew through and keep track of as the first book Felecia dared to take from the cave upon her return from the meadow. Most entries were all business. Lists of cargo taken on and dropped off. Reports made of good or bad conduct by members of the crew. Men who went overboard in the night, men who took a walk in some port town never to return. Men incarcerated for any number of misdeeds and abandoned by father and the company to meet their fate. Most entries though only made mention of the weather, the boats heading, lists of repairs the ship would need when they got back home, lists of common goods that needed to be purchased at the next port.
All those long, mundane, dreary entries made sense, if was a ships log, not a diary. Father never had a journal or a diary, not as Felecia ever knew anyway. So why take those logs, why take so many more. All in all, it was two large sacks worth of material that would have been very heavy to haul all the way from the Big House through the woods, across the meadow, into the swamps and then to the cave. It wasn’t until the fifth log that Felecia began to get a flicker of understanding.
May the 22nd, open water at 7° 40' 50'' N -79° 20' 43' W
Under way with a strong head wind until we break out from Las Tablas then we should be back in the spring trade winds for this cursed hemisphere. The canal beats the horn hands down but the cost to cross is devilish. Politicians have no sense of modesty when it comes to taxing those who attempt to earn an honest living in this world.
I had the dream again, the damnable nightmare. I only mention it here because this is in fact a written record of my ship and all things that pertain to its daily operations, maintenance, and safety. This regards that last bit, safety. We aren’t as safe as we should be and I’ve taken steps to solve that problem. I’ve confined myself to quarters with rations for the coming few days. I got us past the islands and around the isthmus but this damn nightmare won’t let up and I’m afraid the days without sleep have taken their toll. I nearly ran us into the side of the canal and wound us off course the night before that. Mathers has the duty if not the office of captain until I’ve forced myself to sleep by obvious means.
Mathers is a good man, a company man, but dull and slow witted. I can trust him out in open water and I know Keen will keep the crew in order and more importantly give us precise readings to keep us on course to the Galapagos. I need to regain myself before Mathers puts together why I asked him to step in, more over I need to regain Keen’s confidence before loose words reach the crew and I lose their confidence.
Neither man would dare report me to the old witch but it isn’t my hide I worry for, it’s the ship, the men, that awful voice visits me in my nightmares and bade me do the most devilish things out here on the sea. Worse, I swear the thing I saw that night I proposed to Tal, the awful swell down in the water below the cliff, it follows me now, it follows my ship every time we put out. If I dare to stand out on the deck at night, I can inevitably see it, the giant disk of its awful visage always gazing up into the sky, the monstrosity of it all, its endless eyes, its rows of savage teeth, its wormy appendages, announcing itself loudly to an unconcerned sky. Proclaiming itself in profane glory as the closest thing to God I have ever seen, or heard.
The awful creature creeps into my thoughts. I know how this sounds, how it would be read if this log were ever seen by prying eyes beyond mine own. I tell the truth of it though; I am nearly undone by my lack of sleep and my fear of the damnable monster always resting out in the waves. It cries its siren calls to me and I find myself trying to drive my ship into the shoals, trying to deviate my course to steer away from its awful homeland where its call only grows stronger. Those damning motives are my own though, for its motives are so much worse. The creature bade me to turn my crew to piracy, to steal and murder, not for riches or for the sake of building a fortune or a fleet, but to kill for the sake of killing. The thing out in the waves hounds at me and forces me to revisit the war, the sickening thrill of killing another man. The profane pleasure of winning the highest of stakes.
No. I must stop this. I must sleep and to do so I must drink myself into numb dreamlessness. I’ve locked myself in this cabin with three bottles, a pale for my excess, and not a drop of fresh water nor a bite of food. I shall get well and truly cupped and only then will I finally find some long period of blissful unconsciousness.
May my next log entry be blissfully brief and may this and many more voyages to come be free of this sort of pointless, merciless, madness.
The next several entries in that log were just that, brief, dull and dreary.
In that one log entry Felecia’s father had explained in familiar detail his own run in with the psychic monster of the Narraganset bay. Father had suffered under its oppressive heel as well and it seemed as if the monster had nearly done him in before he self-medicated in order to regain his sanity, if not his sobriety.
Father was patient, forthright, sometimes funny, always hard working, dour at times, profound, mostly late at night, but what father always seemed was “in his cups.” Felecia recognized the specter of alcoholism in her father early on and accepted it as par for the course. There was little love lost between him and mother by the time Felecia learned to recognize such things, as a small child she chalked it up to that, as well as the constantly emasculating specter of Nana.
Father had his reasons to always be just the slightest bit if not more, drunk.
But well, maybe he really, and truly did have his reasons.
Felecia didn’t need to dig long or hard to know how awful and emptying of the soul it felt to have the creature in one’s ear, and mind. She didn’t have the welfare of a ship and crew on her shoulders. She didn’t have the expectations of a captain of ships and industry as well as the head of a household with three children, a shrew wife, and a calculating and always combative mother-in-law to contend with. She didn’t have any of that and she nearly buckled to the monsters demands under the strains of recent events.
That log entry made things clearer for Felecia regarding a great many moments in her life, the next entry of interest, near the last of the logs her great aunt had chosen to steal from Rotary house would set Felecia’s teeth on edge and alter the course of her life altogether.