Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 161
The surrounding woods were starting to get damp with dew and there was a faint light coming over the trees of the swamp to the east. False dawn, a little later than when Felecia figured was the best time to further pursue her new life of crime but waiting longer would mean spending an entire day hiding out and waiting.
Felecia crept up to the barn and listened for any sounds that might be human, perhaps a wife, or a child sent out early to collect milk or eggs for breakfast. Nothing of the sort. There were precious little in the way of animal sounds either. A dared peek between two slats of uneven cut planks and Felecia saw what she required. The cart was small, maybe five or six feet long by three or four feet wide. It’s wheels were made from solid rounds of cut wood, the axil a simple piece of solid stock iron driven through a channel under the cart and flattened out while still hot around the edges of the wheels. The simple conveyance looked old, likely a generational hand me down tool. It was also covered in filth, the cart did everything for that farm, from hauling dirt and rocks, to manure and harvested crops and likely anything else deemed to heavy to carry by hand.
Beside the cart in the barn there was a small table with an assortment of hand tools, a few empty stalls that looked to be the right size for whatever animals would have normally been around to tie up to said cart, a pile of dry hay that looked about as old as the bales at the Big House barn, and a small pen with three scrawny looking goats.
Felecia gathered some of the hay and led one of the female goats out of the pen before tying the animal to the back of the cart. A brisk walk over to the nearby out buildings and a trip to the sad menagerie of old cluckers that still lingered in the coop behind the barn had Felecia trying to manage a bag of dry feed, two chickens who were both desperately trying to peck their way out of the burlap bag they had been stuffed in, and a bag of fresh manure because without that all the seeds in the world wouldn’t take root in the poorly island soil.
As for seed, there wasn’t much on offer, there was a small vegetable garden but it was across the way, close to the farm house. The crops, what there was of them at all were all onion, radish, and a small strip of hops. Late fall and winter crops. She didn’t have time to pluck and graft stems or sift among the rows in hopes of finding something that was still growing and looking to promise more down the road. What there was to be had there, looked ready or past harvest.
There was likely some truth to what Taryn had mentioned, they were calling it a depression after all. The barn and the fields of the farmhouse didn’t look much better or more open for business than the ones by the Big House. Maybe there was no one to work at that farm anymore, maybe the folks living there were hermits now too, living in one or two rooms, making due with canned things until those ran out.
The idea of destitution and what the farmers there might be facing or already struggling through made Felecia feel like a villain for stealing but there was nothing for it. She had nothing to trade, not down the coast in town, certainly not in the village. She had no skills to speak of, no trade, nothing that any other girl her age could manage to do, and most of them better than her by a mile.
Those girls haven’t killed men.
Felecia ignored the vicious internal monologue while she loaded up the cart and prepared to get it rolling out of the barn by pulling it along with a rope. The chickens began making an awful racket inside the bag and the goat went from greedily munching dry hay to pulling away and bleating.
The cacophony certainly threatened any chances for a peaceful getaway. Felecia couldn’t blame the animals; she was a stranger and obviously coming along to steal them for some unknown reason. The goat was distracted further by a handful of dry feed tossed into the back of the cart and the chickens were likewise quieted by it but one of them took wing long enough to jump and flap loudly until it was free of the cart and Felecia.
The cart was out in the open and Felecia was busy up front, pulling the heavy thing along by a rope to keep it from rocking forward on its props and driving furrows into the ground. Stopping was likely as not a chance for the goat to get nervous again or the other chicken to see a chance for freedom so the stray chicken was written off with the hope that Felecia still had one that could be relied on to lay eggs with any regularity.
The trek back was much slower, and far harder on Felecia physically, the cart caught on any and every rise in the terrain and would have to be pulled high or lifted up to keep rolling forward, the goat got to calling loudly again once it didn’t have anything within reach to eat and the one remaining chicken jumped out of the cart twice leaving Felecia with no choice but to hunt after it and get it loaded back in the cart, being pecked mercilessly the entire time. The final remedy involved tying a small length of baling line around one of its feet and securing it to the cart, even then though, the bird nearly hung itself upside down for want of fleeing.
The animals still made a racket and so did the cart as it clanked and banged over rocks and tree roots. The trail would be comically easy for anyone to follow, bits of spilled hay and dry feed, chicken feathers, and of course two wooden wheel ruts running the whole length. When the farmer or farmers finally did discover the theft, they wouldn’t have to search long to find the direction their good and livestock had gone.
As the swamp grew closer and the cart began to run afoul of ground that was anything but solid pulling the cart became a nearly futile event. The axle would get clogged with weeds and debris and have to be cleared, the wheels would get built up clumps of earth that made them jam up as they tried to turn and meet the cart walls. The cave was at the edge of the swamp, that was the only fact that kept Felecia pulling and yanking and pleading and shouting curses at the cart instead of abandoning it and the whole endeavor.
Afternoon was giving way to evening before Felecia spotted and small hill with its sudden, chiseled face and the small flat land that stood by the well before the swamp took the land over once more. There would be no leaving the cart on the hill, no leaving the animals or letting them out of her sight. She wasn’t worried about the farmers and had no plans to stay in the cave overnight, even above the overwhelming exhaustion of the day and the lack of sleep from the night before, more disturbing than the awful nightmare that left her waking up clawing at her own throat, Jacqueline had sewn the seed of her predicament and her nervous apprehension.
Animals died in the swamp; they died in the cave. Anything brought back to the awful place would die. Felecia considered the monster out in the waves as a direct meddler, a half bright monster that flummoxed around in the world and minds of man. No. The awful thing didn’t have to pull its incongruous, slimy bulk through the swamps to dispatch one hapless chicken, it only had to drive an old woman half mad and plant seeds and wait for the madness to grow. Felecia went mad and wandered the swamp like something that belonged in a cage at a mad house. Though the monster didn’t kill nervous Nelly using its own tentacles and teeth, it still caused the little chickens death.
Felecia didn’t dare stay in the cave any longer than necessary, didn’t dare let the goat or the chicken out of her sight and she wouldn’t dare linger or let her mind wander on anything lest she find herself naked in the ocean waters once more, covered in mysterious injuries.