Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 147
The Wooden Man
The nightmares didn’t strike in the middle of the night anymore. Waking in horror to the sounds of stray bits of tree branch raking across the old wardrobe doors. Startling in terror to realize she was all alone, that Jacqueline was still quite dead, that she had told the two villagers to run for their lives and tell the rest the swamp was dead to them.
The occasional fright, the nightly terror, were replaced by a sense of dull and numb dread. The monster out in the waves had played its terrible games and it had tempted and tested Felecia but, in the end, it seemed the monster finally lost interest in the latest and last of the Conway line. That didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Life in the cave, even once thoroughly mastered, was still life lived in a cave, all alone.
In the weeks after her run in with the village women Felecia couldn’t help but consider the girl, Emeh. She was just another dumb villager, some poor unfortunate born of unfortunate circumstance in a dirt-poor village nestled in the shadow of the luxuries of yesteryear.
Emeh probably grew up watching the men go off to fish while she and the woman mended nets, washed clothes, and cooked whatever edible scraps were around. Unless it was winter of course, when the water turned with the weather and all the men had to do was drink, yell, and turn their eye and hands to whatever wasn’t fast enough to run or weary enough to keep clear. The girl could always, day or night, summer or winter stand on the small hill in the middle of the village under the awful hanging tree and see the roof of the big house up on its cliff.
Did Emeh day dream like so many other villagers about the easy lives lived inside the chipped paint façade of Rotary House? Did she look up to that roof with envy, or hatred. Felecia knew first hand how many of the villagers felt about the Big House and the people who lived in it. Those folk wouldn’t have changed their minds no matter what Felecia said. No matter how many ugly stories she told them about her dear Nana.
No. Everything that Felecia needed to know about the girl she heard in those last few moments out in front of the cave. Emeh didn’t look up at the roof of the Big House and feel any way. Emeh didn’t look up or around, the girl kept to herself and kept to her chores and tried to stay out of the way. Most of the women and girls of the village lived like dogs, and poorly treated strays at that.
“She isn’t my problem. They aren’t my problem.”
Felecia said the words to no one in particular as she turned a pail of compost and night soil into the dirt of one of the small tables that she planned to plant mushrooms in. It was the first time she had spoken since the run in with them. The words sounded off, the voice that spoke them was hollow, without expression or concern.
There was concern though, they weren’t her problem and yet she thought about Emeh more and more, and the other girls and women of the village. There was dread in Felecia’s heart, dread hung heavy in her mind until it seemed to exude from her like a constant sweat. Dread soaked through her clothes and into the thin fibers of the hay mattress of the bed. Bad things were happening, constantly in the village. Awful things were being done to the women there and although they weren’t her problem, Felecia felt for them all the same.
Felecia didn’t have nightmares anymore, instead she closed her eyes and saw things while she was awake. The sounds the goats made at slaughter near the barn. Her Nana coming at her with the dreaded spoon. Dead eyed village women with black eyes and broken wrists. The dead woman in the village shack, some distant relative of hers, an old woman with a torn up back and a broken head. Jacqueline splayed out in the meadow, her life’s blood draining through the mouth slit of her ridiculous wooden mask.
Felecia would be studying one of the books about herbs or be out gathering and stop only to realize she had lost hours being locked in her own mind. A dropped pot in the kitchen would send her into a small panic. The rolling waves of the beach would send her running back to the relative safety of the cave. How she had grown to hate the cave. Wind too loud, time to go back to the cave. The waves at the beach too chaotic, run back to the cave. The rain slapping the leaves of the trees too irregularly, time to go back to the cave. So many things seemed to set it off and Felecia had no reference to what was befalling her besides sheer madness.
The wooden mask.
The damned wooden mask with its flat face, its whiskers, its vague unconcerned, slightly open mouth, and its tiny pin hole eyes. Felecia would see it so often, just laying by itself on the smooth washed pebbles of the beach while she lost hours locked inside her mind of inescapable waking horrors.
“Where did it go, where did she go, where did the bodies go?”
Again, Felecia caught herself talking to no one as she looked up from a book on folk medicine and remedies written when the island was still owned by the British.
There was no clear idea to make it. There was no list of tools and materials needed that was ever considered or written down. Felecia dared to forage near the meadow, close enough to spy the ashy remains of the packing crate house, she couldn’t bring herself to get any closer other than to take notice that the corral was gone and therefore all the mishappen animals that resided within. Thoughts of Nelly threatened to enter Felecia’s mind and she had to turn away and pinch herself until she bled to stave that off. Of the days foraging some corn was located growing wild. No doubt the stubborn remains of whatever maze had been sewn by the natives or perhaps by Jacqueline and her brother when their world seemed evergreen. The dried husks got set aside, Felecia didn’t know why she would need them at the time, only that she would.
A week later she found herself shaving some old wool shawls of Jacqueline’s to wear with fall once again setting in and found herself saving and rolling all of the pilling. Next came a good deal of digging through barely sorted manuals and clippings from under the bed until a recipe for lacquer was located. At the time Felecia filled her head with reasoning that involved refinishing the desk that served as her work bench. The old thing was coated in all forms of matter and debris, what was there to possibly lacquer.
Finally, the thing came to fruition and a head as Felecia found herself in the woods south west of the swamp, closer to the town proper than the village and frightfully close to a number of farms that Felecia had started to consider night raiding for badly needed foodstuffs. There was a massive, gnarled tree that Felecia found herself in the shadow of, the thing was twisted and even burned in places from a fire or a lightning strike. Parts of the thing looked dead beyond death and yet even the dead side seemed to have split and a young offshoot had been busy setting up a future life from the death and decay of its former self.
Felecia turned around the tree examining it in detail until she saw the form take shape in the otherwise dead and twisted tree. There was a long flat chunk of wrinkled bark that held unmistakable characteristics, two small knots that looked like pin hole eyes squeezing themselves shut in agony. A small slit of a mouth that was slightly parted yet saying nothing at all. The mask was horrifying, as if the tree had suffered so greatly it simply had to manifest something that spoke of all its pain, all at once.
That night and the next day all Felecia could see when she closed her eyes was that awful visage. The day after that Felecia sacrificed in its entirety to wandering out to that blasted tree with a few knives and a chisel. That act stopped the constant visions but something gnawed and gnawed at Felecia until she took the rolled pilling, some twine, the old corn husks, a small ball of filthy brown yarn, and a stinky pitch pot of homemade black lacquer.
Jacqueline’s mask was an old hermit, her way of scaring off superstitious villagers that got too close to her and her swamp as she foraged. At some point that simple act had turned into something else. Felecia heard the men out in the meadow on that fateful night. They were already out there, tracking the old man of the woods. The hermit had done…something.
The mask Felecia created was the face of an agonized lunatic, a hungry cannibal that snuck into the houses of men and ate them up.