Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 162
The caves converted wardrobe doors were closed, the interior undisturbed except for the tables of dead and dried mushrooms and a build up of fresh dust. Felecia had only been gone a few weeks but she honestly assumed that the cave would be occupied if or when she decided to return. The monster out in the waves had already gone to whispering in strange ears after Felecia refused to do its insane bidding, the older woman and her poor, pregnant granddaughter had proved that.
Felecia left most of Jacqueline’s things when she left with Taryn. She left most everything except for immediate needs. The books written in the monsters nonsense language. The rank little fetishes that Jacqueline carved out of driftwood or the obscene caricatures she scratched into the patterns of stray sea shells. All told Felecia had spent, stayed, and wasted away in that cave for two years or as close as makes no difference and there was nothing of hers in that cave. There was nothing she had made for the sake of anything but simple survival, nothing with her name on it, nothing that Jacqueline hadn’t made first or done better.
When she set herself on the task of stealing a cart and collecting up the trappings of her former life in the cave, Felecia had imagined needing the cart and then some, maybe having to take two or three trips over the course of the next several weeks. She had also brought her bow and her knife, surely the cave would have a new owner, or some vagrant would have stumbled upon the place. Was Felecia willing to kill for the tools and trinkets from the cave? That was a hard question to ask and an even harder one to answer, then again, she brought the bow and the knife to the farm as well.
Packing up her former life, making arrangements, however inconsequential, for unknown decades of Jacqueline’s life, it all should have been daunting. Surely a detailed room by room accounting of all things miscellany and brick-a-brac was worth hours of labor?
Felecia had the cart packed up with room to spare for the chicken and a pale of feed tied over the end for the goat before the sun fully set.
The old, barely adequate wood stove was the largest and heaviest bit, the rest of the time was spent trying to find sturdy bags or baskets to fit the rest. Some more of Jacqueline’s yellowed hand me down clothes, the moth eaten but still thick comforter from the sleeping annex. Kitchen utensils and crafting tools and supplies. A handful of seeds and good dried spore for growing vegetables and mushrooms down the road. As for the books, the immense treasure trove of knowledge that Felecia had spent most of the last year devouring or barely considering, the choices were easy. Felecia took none of it, at least at first.
The ridiculous books with their insane hieroglyphics, the collection of grunts, yips, and lengths of diarrhetic vowels all strung together in the burble gurgle, three of them came along and Felecia argued it the entire way. One would wind up in a basket to be fished out with a sound of disgust, only to wind up stuck in a sack or another basket later. Felecia only thought she took one with her at first, the truly obscene thing that she threw out into the swamp, the book that seemed to write itself, the one that used Jacqueline’s words.
Had she thrown it in the swamp? Had she walked out and stepped on it to sink it deep? Was that the book she had in her hands? The one she found in a basket and threw back on the annex bed only to find it in a bag again later?
When she finally unpacked everything, there were three of the books, nearly identical from their black dyed leather covers, only the smallest of differences made the foul things stand apart from one another and Felecia was still unsure as it why she had brought them along, or when she had actually packed them.
The rest of the immense library stayed in the cave along with all those carving and etchings, along with so many years of collected oddities and nonsensical keepsakes from a life no one had actually lived since before the invention of the horseless carriage much less the electric light.
Let the place be a mausoleum, the woman who lived there treated it like one.
Felecia nodded at that stray thought and spoke to no one in particular as she closed the wardrobe doors to the witch’s cave one last time.
“She came out here with her husband, her brother, and died in that poisoned meadow, twice.”
Felecia considered what her own epitaph would read? Would there be anyone to inscribe it?
Everyone she ever knew, died or diminished. Her life was an endless withering until there was nothing left to turn besides her corpse.
Too long, too eloquent.
Felecia Conway, ungrateful child, hysterical woman, thief, multiple murderess.
Best to keep it simple, and concise.