Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 143
The knocking got confused at first as just some sort of debris that the wind had blown against the old wardrobe doors. Felecia was trying to avoid the days heat by closing holes in some of Jacqueline’s raggedy hand me downs. The knock sent her off course as she barely avoided sticking herself with the needle.
The second knock wasn’t just debris, there was no disregarding it. Someone, somehow had stumbled across the cave entrance in all its inglorious swampy surroundings. Someone saw the profane, childlike carving above the withered old wardrobe doors and decided to come a ‘knocking anyway.
Felecia saw a shadow under the doors and through the slats of the doors, she stopped her mending and set down her needle and thread. Best to stay still, lay low, let them knock and knock and even pull at the doors, just so long as they didn’t pull hard enough to break the simple eye hole latch that served as a lock against the wind.
A hunter from the village, sorely lost? Some traveler from town who got even more sorely lost? Some upstart farmer come to ask about the well maybe? No, no to all of the above. Not only had Felecia asked Jacqueline very early on about just this sort of thing, and not only had the old witch assured here there were no guests in the swamp, but Felecia had been with the old witch for nearly a year and was now by herself nearly another, and never, in all that time had she or they together crossed paths with other people. Not until the fateful night in the meadow.
The meadow!
They had killed so many men, no one returned that night, maybe not even Phillip’s boy. Surely if the rest of the village wanted revenge they would have stumbled upon the cave by then. That night, that last night with Jacqueline was still only bits and pieces for Felecia. Ganly was dead, she just felt that much, and she remembered most of the others dying before that. It took days of wandering the woods, the beaches, and the swamps before she reconciled that she hadn’t just dreamt most of it. She wanted to believe that Phillip’s boy wasn’t dead, but she remembered Ganly and another villager beating him badly. She thought she remembered Ganly on top of….
Felecia’s memories of that night refused to be full, or even sane, more often than not her recollections of that night came in nightmare snippets of water color horrors. Was Philip’s boy alive? Despite her honest feelings and assumptions, was Ganly somehow also alive? Had the fiend finally come for a pound or ten of flesh?
A third knock came louder than the others but it wasn’t a door shaker by any means. If the weather outside had been foul Felecia doubted that she would have heard it above the wind or the rain.
A voice followed and Felecia stopped breathing for a few moments.
“H…hello. Hello! Please, you helped me a time ago, an I know I never did pay you besides them old books, but I need you now…we need you, real bad.”
The way the woman spoke said enough for Felecia but it was the way the older woman finished, she spoke just above a whisper and her shadow through the door seemed to shiver, to move protectively away all of a sudden.
Felecia could have considered what she felt intrigue, for a moment, until every encounter she ever had with the rest of human kind assured her that this was some new bit of awfulness she had no business being involved with.
A few more moments of held breath silence went by before another much younger voice continued. “They were right Nan; the old man is dead and gone. No one will help us now.”
Felecia nodded in silence; the younger voice had the right of it. The old witch, the old half mad cultist who wore a wooden mask with whiskers was gone, long gone. No one left in the cave was in any shape to help anyone. Hell, Felecia had been so long without human contact or hearing the sounds of speech that at first the words made no sense to her at all. She spoke to herself often, near constantly as the feeling of anxious loneliness became her only constant companion, she spoke well, and wrote eloquently, had she lost all of that in so little time? Was Felecia mumbling incoherent nonsense to herself all this time? Had she truly and permanently lost her mind all those months ago?
The older woman spoke louder of a sudden, she raised her voice and said, “No. No! You helped me; you can help my granddaughter. We need you, please. Open up. Open up!”
The older woman wasn’t tapping gently anymore, she wasn’t worried about disturbing someone or being in the way. Quite suddenly the older woman was pounding her fist against the withered wardrobe doors, threatening to shake the latch right out of its socket.
Felecia stood up at that threat. How dare some filthy villagers come upon her begging for help or relief of some kind. Had any of them ever shown her help or relief? Not without wanting something dear or dire in return. Now someone had come to bang and beg and make demands. Jacqueline had clearly lied on that score as well. Obviously, people from the village knew where the cave was, at least one did, and that one had come and been granted some boon or given some obvious service by the caves previous occupant.
“She’s dead.”
Felecia opened with that much before remembering the filthy brown poncho and the stained wooden mask with its odd straw whiskers.
“The old man is gone. I don’t…I can’t help anyone. Go away.”
The moments that followed seemed encouraging, the shadows near the doors moved away and the incessant knocking and blah blah blah of human speech stopped. Let them move along, let them go beg Phillip for help, or whoever the new Phillip was now. Let them walk right up to the off-white door of the Big House and pound on it asking for aid. They were all Nana’s willing surfs after all.
The younger voice chimed in, “See, it’s just like he said, we have no choice, I don’t. We should go before they notice.”
The older woman pushed against the old wardrobe doors and shouted, “In the name of Jaquo, in the name of Tak, in the name of Mr. Heumtoo! You honored the call once, please, please honor it now!”