Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 160
Walking with purpose from the edge of the woods through the swamp to the cave was half a day, skirting the swamp and walking along its clearly defined edge to the farms outside the town was a whole day. Felecia hadn’t wasted time more than to observe the perverse spectacle of the grave in the meadow and still it was well past nightfall before she came to the one farm she had found before on her solo treks to find mushrooms.
The timing was sound, best to do what she came to do after dark, well after to be honest, but the reality was, she had been walking nonstop all day. Felecia was hungry, cramping from lack of water and over exertion and most of all, still reeling from what she had witnessed in the meadow. Without a watch she was apt to put the time at somewhere around 10pm, there were no lights in the field or out buildings but a few windows in the farmhouse still showed candle light. She would do best by waiting and there would be no waiting as exhausted as she was, not without falling to sleep at some point.
An exhausted form of complete and total dreamless oblivion was coming and Felecia knew there was nothing she could do to put it off once she settled for even a moment. The chances she would only sleep for a few hours were slim, a predawn excursion would be the best time to do what she came to do, sleeping longer would run the risk of running into whoever tended the land but Felecia had no other choice. She nested down beneath a stand of trees at the outset of the farmland closest to the barn and outbuildings that involved her plans of theft and let the inevitable darkness over come her.
The rifle shot split through the night leaving only its repeating echo to answer its call. The ocean itself went silent as though the seas refused to lap this way or that, the bugs and slimy denizens of the swamp ceased their incessant croaks and chirps. Even the loud mouths and oafs from the village finally fell silent, if for only a few precious moments.
Felecia ran full out, unconcerned with the sharp thorns and tangling vines of the meadow. She ran, backlit by the still burning remains of the packing crate house, knowing that they would see her, she ran until she nearly tripped over the villager splayed out on the ground. The man’s eyes were distant, nearly vacant, he was breathing but only barely in long, hitching breaths. There was no panic, no distress, no moans of horror at recognizing his own demise. The man sucked in his last few breaths, absently clutching at the massive hole that had been blown through his chest. This wasn’t the first man Felecia watched die, or the second, it was hard to watch but no different than watching a deer breathe its last. At least when the deer was dead, there was a feast.
The other figure, the one flat on the ground, the one laying on its stomach with the corn knife still gripped in it’s gnarled hand, wasn’t making remarks about the dead man. The body with its wooden mask skewed up and a crazy angle wasn’t oozing life or making over melancholy about the inequities of life. The cold human clay that laid there like so much compost waiting to return to the earth wasn’t ever going to do anything but rot, the hole in the mask said that much. The hole wasn’t nearly as big as the one in the man’s chest but that was how bullets worked sometimes, wasn’t it? Lead impacted bones and broke up, pieces kept on going, blasting through cartilage, tendons, muscle, arteries, even brains.
It was a dream, another awful nightmare, another ghoulish confusion of actual events that Felecia’s faulty and malicious mind liked to throw at her when she was down and at her worst. It was just a dream but Felecia didn’t feel better for knowing what it was. The air was cool, the smell of sea salt was thick but not as thick as the smell of burnt gun powder and burning wood. Ganly would start shouting orders any minute, or would he? Soon enough some sick variation on what actually happened would play out and Felecia would wake up horrified and panicked.
The wooden mask moved, only slightly but it moved. Felecia was in a nightmare and she wanted very badly to wake up. The wooden mask moved again and the gnarled hand clenched and unclenched and clenched again around the handle of the corn knife. Felecia dared to whisper, calling for herself to wake up. The body shifted and lifted its head so that Felecia could see every detail of the wooden mask, up to and including the hole that had so recently been driven through the wood by a fragment of bullet.
“You let me die.”
Felecia was shaking her head, not only at the absurdity of the accusation but at the horrid and incalculable chance of Jacqueline’s corpse, reanimated and speaking with its gravely voice.
“You never buried me.”
Felecia tried to speak up, to defend herself, to say that no she hadn’t and no she couldn’t have.
“I laid out here, rotting for months…”
Felecia managed to speak then, to whisper at the awful apparition, telling it to go away, telling it to shut up.
“I turned black like tar under the sun and bloated til my guts burst.”
Felecia woke up choking, there was something wrapped around her neck and she began clawing at herself in a dead panic until her hands came away clutching the thin blanket she had pulled over herself.