Trigger Warning
Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 166
Occam’s Razor
Suicide.
To say it was an abhorrent thought or an alien concept to Felecia would be a lie. The idea that she would be better off without the world was a frequent companion through her youngest years. Nana would often leave Felecia feeling even worse, as though the world would be a much better place without her in it. After losing father and dearest Bartholomew, Felecia laid in a bath of warm water and stared at the razor her mother used to shave her legs with wondering how much it would hurt.
After having her things gone through, after the discovery of her private letters, after knowing that the maids and the rest of the servants would all know and begin gossiping about her deeply private thoughts, well, the closet rod proved sturdier than Felecia’s will to die, but only barely. She had to wear scarves around the house for a few days to cover the bruises and dearest Nana gave her the most disgusted look imaginable at the time over dinner, yet no one said anything.
Felecia laid atop the straw bed in her small shack and looked around at her scant collection of things, mostly items of everyday use. Taryn was as inconsistent as the sea with every right to be and Phillip was a burned-out husk. The villagers were a milieu of excessive stupidity and casual abuses, all her relatives were dead or hated her.
“There will be no one to miss me.”
The words fell out of Felecia’s mouth and sounded hollow, meaningless. Some would have assumed those words were spoken to elicit pity, be it self or otherwise. No. Felecia looked around the dim shack interior and smiled wanly.
No. No one would, and wasn’t that the point.
The only creature depending on Felecia at all was her nemesis, the monster pulling all the strings, the largely silent mastermind behind her nearly every downturn. The monster wanted her to do something, wouldn’t extinguishing herself be the best form of non-compliance?
Now there wouldn’t be any razors to stare at or any bed linens to tie into crude nooses. Now Felecia had all she needed, dried and at the ready. Jacqueline had taught her; the old books had taught her. A few pinches of this, a dash of that, a few swallows of special brew laced with chickaree and honey to help the medicine go down. An uneasy stomach and a few spasms would be the extent of it, a nearly clean get away from the seemingly endless anguish of living.
Killing herself held some appeal, that much was hard to deny but an awful question nagged at Felecia while she laid uncomfortably on her straw mattress.
If I do that, what will the monster do to Phillip, to Taryn?
The miserable thing out in the waves held on to hope for decades that Jacqueline would have the guts to do its bidding and when it got tired of waiting for her it shifted its dire hopes onto Felecia and fixed a collar around her neck. If she took herself off the board, who would be next? Would the angry beast take its revenge for being slighted in such an obvious way?
Felecia waited until the sun crept behind the trees like the coward it always turned out to be and then she stood and took stock. She didn’t have finery and that was well enough but she wanted something to be remembered by. The last time she dropped by the household staff just barely recognized her, now she would be a stranger to all unless she cleaned up the best she could.
Felecia tied her hair back in a messy version of the tight and careful bun her mother always wore. She put on the least yellowed of Jacqueline’s old chemises and did her best to tuck its excess into her brown trousers. There would be no skirts, under or over, no roll, no lace petticoat, no ancient mud and blood-stained pinafore. No old family heirlooms or hand me down jewelry either. Felecia took only her bow and the last five arrows that shot straight and her knife.
The goat and the chicken got supplied with what Felecia had left on hand as she looked up at the first glimpse of a pale moon trying desperately to peek out from behind flat gray clouds. She spoke her declaration to the closest thing to any god she ever recognized as she looked up at the pale sickle in the sky.
“Let my silver scales tell my tales by the moon light. My face is clean and my hair is wild red witch grass. If I’m not a Conway then who else could I be?”
The first stop wasn’t the big house. Felecia considered everything carefully as she laid on her straw mattress and considered sweet oblivion.
The night was cold and threatening rain, the air was brisk and breezy and already dropping sheets of mist. The louts in the village would be inside their shacks or tucked under their tiny tin and tar paper porches. Most wouldn’t even bother with a lantern light since they all stopped gathering for their drunken conferences at night.
Felecia stalked up to the village outskirts and waited for the night to grow colder and cloudier until the rain began falling in its steady autumn sheets. There were ten of them by now, some girls, some women, all slightly slimy unfortunates left to wither and change color like strange leaves dangling from the hanging tree.
Felecia let the bodies fall as she cut them down, one by one. She took her time and waited to see if any of the drunken louts dared to come out from under the safety of their little porches. None did. When she was finished cutting them down, she surveyed the ground around the hanging tree, its odd and sad fruit were splayed out on the ground waiting only to return to the earth in full. Custom spoke of burials but Felecia never understood the point in all that. Giving them to the sea sounded better but each body would require dragging individually to the pebble beach some fifty yards away past and through the stacked village squalor. Even if she managed to drag all her new sisters down to the cold waters edge, what then? The tide at the south of the island was where things came to rest, not to wash away. The poor unfortunates would just grind up against the smooth ocean rocks until they stopped looking like people at all.
Ten strange and awful victims, sisters down to the last and all Felecia wanted to do as she looked around was to lay down and join them in their rest. None of them should have been dead and Felecia felt she probably should have died just as many times over by then. If only she could have laid down and let them all go back to their lives, fresh and new as though their husbands, brothers, and fathers, hadn’t murdered them simply for the unfortunate convenience of their sex.
If there was a next day, a big if, she wanted to come back to the village and make every single lout pay for their hubris and their superstitious stupidity. A life she would gladly lead with her stupid mask on, sneaking into their huts and scaring them right down to their rotten roots.
The bodies were left in their inglorious pile around the tree, Felecia took a moment to collect their nooses, promising to herself to leave one outside every hut belonging to a murder who deserved the same if she was ever able.
The rainy march up to Rotary house would be taken slowly, her new dire and sad arraignments collected up in a sack carried at her side save one. Felecia wore one of the nooses around her neck, one so recently worn by a young girl with a belly big enough to tell a sad tale. It wasn’t Emeh, but the girl was about the same age.
There were no family jewels left, no heirlooms to draw attention to the Conway neck, but that one would do well enough for what the night had left in store.