Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 142
Cleaning out the rest of the annex went along without incident, and quicker than before, not because Felecia unlocked some superior system for trying to separate and catalogue the mass of books, manuals, leaflets, clippings, scribbled nonsense and the endless short hand chicken scratch that was Jacqueline’s constant contributions; no, everything else went faster because Felecia wasn’t thinking about it anymore.
The endless tedium of house hold chores went by as well, making sense of all the quickly sorted piles from the annex was easiest of all because Felecia simply grabbed it, armful by armful and loaded it back on the shelves and then back under the bed when the shelves were full. The piles out in the living room, likewise, were simply shoved back into cupboards, onto shelves, under the desk and living room settee. The book that had seemed to talk to Felecia out in the swamp was stuffed under the bed and not given another thought, the temporary madness of that time replaced by a total and complete depressive nihilism.
What did it matter what Jacqueline knew or didn’t? She was dead. What did it matter what Nana said or more likely did when she found out her daughters husband was losing his mind and writing strange letters to the local authorities? What did it matter how or when Father had his change of mind, what did it matter if he was scared into hiding what he saw and knew, doomed to always be looking over his shoulder until he crashed his boat on the rocks? He was dead. What did it matter if Phillip knew any of it, or none of it at all? Phillip had his hovel and the memories of the boy he actually did love, maybe he even got his old job back, who cared. Phillip was a flawed, miserable man who lived at the outskirts of a flawed and miserable village with his flawed and miserable offspring in the shadow of an awful and miserable three story, chipped paint fire trap propped up on a hill.
What did the fast or slow potions or any of Jacqueline’s other hoodoo matter? What had Phillip’s hopes about Felecia’s place in the world come to? What would another day spent hunting jack rabbits or foraging for tubers matter? What was the point of washing clothes, or the scant, chipped dishes around the cave matter? What did sleep or eating or reading come to?
Later on, Felecia would loathe being reminded of those days, weeks, and months. The nothing seasons were nothing and nothing was done with them. There was no funk, no blue period, no careless moments of excess or tiresome self-reflection. Felecia lived like an animal, like something out in the swamp that occasionally manipulated fire and wistfully skimmed through pages of old, dusty books barely reading the words she saw. There was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to regret, nothing to worry about, and nothing to feel for, nothing to do, nothing to love or work towards.
The cave never returned to its former state of disrepair but the place regained a significant amount of its lived-in lack of appeal. Felecia eventually made due with the one set of clothing she had left, along with a number of Jacqueline’s oldest hand me downs. Most days were simply completed in an off-white shift and a pair of old, muddy boots, and those days mostly consisted of foraging just enough starch, ruffage, and easy to collect insect life to render down into some form of tasteless, over boiled soup. About once a week a trip was made to comb the beach for whatever washed up. Those moments came closest to something Felecia had feeling for and that feeling was anger and disgust. She grew to hate the smell and the look of the ocean and its salty water, not out of some lingering fear of the monster out in the waves, but because the thing out in the water never came for her.
The first time Felecia walked back to the beach at the edge of the swamp she did so out of mild curiosity. Would the monster still be there? Was it still waiting for her to offer herself over to it? Had the awful thing ever really talked to her, inside her head, to begin with? Had the candlemakers wreck and the night that followed its finding been some other and equally disturbing moment of mental illness?
“What did any of that matter?”
Felecia muttered, asking herself that question again as she walked away from the beach after standing in the surf for half a day. All she had to show for it was being tired and encrusted with salt and covered in sand fleas. There were some strands of sea grass and weed as well, some low tide finds she plucked out of the water too. The beach was natures trash can, full of ugly things that the sea didn’t want anymore. Felecia found it fitting as a buffet for who and what she had become, or maybe always had been.
The mantra for those times was first uttered as she finished boiling a pot of sea weed and grass with random bits of shellfish and cut up, gone soft tuber left over from the week before. She slurped a mouthful of tasteless muck that had the consistency of drinking phlegm and a salty nothingness to go along with it.
“This is life, now.”
Felecia found herself saying that again and again. Nothing to find out in the swamp worth eating so it was another night going hungry, this is life, now. A few days gone foraging with nothing to show for it, this is life, now. Fell into a pit of sadness and found sweet sleep only to wind up boiling the nights food into gelatinous pulp, this is life, now. Reaching up to feel the crookedness of her deformed lip and her crooked, broken nose, this is life, now. Yet another week-long set of sweating misery, back aches, cramps, and bleeding through every binding she had at her disposal and then some, this is life, now.
Six months, seven, hell, nine? Felecia had no way to know and didn’t care to keep count. Life crawled along with unerring precision and yet it also crawled along in one long grey blob.
Felecia was three days without so much as washing her hands much less the rest of her, the white, yellow, and yes, brown slip she was still wearing was stuck to her body with the renewed heat of the summer swamp and she was busy trying to get one of her new tables to grow a sickly white strand of mushrooms with tiny white bulbs when the strange knock sounded against the weathered doors of the cave, doors that once adorned a wardrobe.