Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 146
Felecia didn’t consider the girl as she tossed her bow down and rushed at the older woman. The awful monster out in the waves wouldn’t let her shoot the old bitch, would it stop her from strangling her, and if so, how?
Felecia growled like an animal and ran at the older woman, that vicious, all-knowing look stayed as the older woman continued to hold the book aloft, until Felecia nearly reached her with her arms out stretched and open.
Felecia ran full out, expecting to be suddenly stopped. Expecting her body to betray her like it already had twice, expecting to be lifted up and thrown aloft by some insane and invisible force, maybe to be snatched up and have her neck snapped. So be it.
Maybe the monster would make an appearance, soaking along in the swamp pools as it pulled itself through the muck and the mire, near suffocating under its own massive weight. The monsters many tentacles had held the boat wreck aloft with all the tender ease of a woman holding her finest tea cup. Surely an animal that delicate could swing one massive tentacle out and diminish Felecia’s noisome existence altogether. So be it.
Nothing happened though. There was nothing to stop Felecia as she ran at the older woman. The monster out in the waves forced her to let the older woman in, forced her to not shoot the older woman, but a bare-knuckled fight to the death?
For what? To prove herself to that awful thing out there over some fucking soot covered cave out int the middle of nowhere?
No.
Felecia wouldn’t play the monsters game, not on its terms or otherwise besides.
The older woman stopped holding the book a loft and stopped smiling fiendishly, she was waving the book out in front of her and howling the name she had given to the monster out in the waves until Felecia reached her.
The outstretched hands that had hardened into claws ready to choke the life out of the older woman reached instead for the book and Felecia easily yanked it out of the older woman’s hands before throwing the thing out into the deeper swamp.
The older woman lunged at her, trying to scratch at her and pull her hair.
Felecia balled up her left hand and drove it into the older woman’s guts. She looked down on the older woman then, as she heaved and choked. “It lied to you. That’s all it does, all it knows. It made promises to you that have you out here sacrificing your kin.”
The older woman spat and chuckled, she started to speak something savvy and ugly but Felecia was having none of it. If the monster wasn’t going to intervene, if it was watching carefully or suddenly without power to stop things, so be it. Felecia grabbed the older woman by her carelessly wrapped bun of hair and pulled her along by it, driving her foot into the same side of the older woman’s guts until she kneeled before the girl still cowering at the edge of cleared earth around the cave.
“Look at her.”
The older woman tried to wrench free and tried to use her hands to claw at Felecia’s grasp.
Felecia kicked the older woman again, and then again until the older woman howled in agony.
“Look at her!”
The older woman looked at the girl still balled up and cowering, one hand instinctively wrapped around her belly.
Felecia yelled down at the older woman. “She didn’t make any bed. She doesn’t have one to sleep in either. Tell her to leave, go ahead. Tell her to get and never come back here, go ahead!”
The older woman pulled away and Felecia pulled her along by her hair until she was nearly on top of the weeping girl. “Look her in the eye and tell her how you were good with my killing her so long as you had its love instead!”
The older woman choked and vomited and coughed and all the while she still refused to look the girl in the eyes.
Emeh. was the one to break the issuing silence. “Please, Nan. Please can we just go home now.”
The older woman nodded and proceeded to weep until the two of them were nothing but a pile of tangled, womanly emotions. The display made Felecia uncomfortable, reminding her of how she was never shown or allowed those sorts of easy outlets, not as a small child, or as a young woman.
Felecia waited a few moments before she parroted the sentiment that was just freshly handed to her. “Go back to the village. Go back and tell them all this place is dead to them.”
The bow and arrows were collected and returned to their place above the cook fire and Felecia was taking the first step down into the cave interior before either of them broke their communal bonding of crying and murmuring.
The girl, Emeh, spoke up. “Please. I’m sorry for the way we acted. Forgive us, please!”
Felecia shrugged and finished setting herself down into the cave interior before she reached out to lock the old wardrobe doors. “You did nothing, at all. That’s not a compliment. Pennyroyal and cohosh, beg someone to go into the village and get you both from the mainland. Pinch of both in your tea for a week and you’ll have your life to yourself again.”
“After that, girl, move on. Go find the first boy from town who will promise to marry you and do it. Anything is better than a life on this island. Just take a look at me and trust.”
Felecia watched the two of them, Emeh and her idiot Nan, go shuffling toward the tree lines beyond the cave to the south and back to where they came from. The book in its soft black leather housing was still resting out in the tree line and Felecia only barely managed to walk out into the woods to locate it and sink it harmlessly into the muck of some murky pool.