Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 167
Rotary house still stood up on its promontory overlooking the remains of its sad little fiefdom. The gravel drive way was completely overtaken by the land save for a few spots around a fountain that Felecia could never recall actually hosting water much less a running feature. Where Felecia’s life had changed once and for all during her public exhibition was nothing but patches of weeds and tufts of grass, not even the posts of the bench that Phillip had come to sit on still remained.
The great and glorious ancestral seat of the Conway family line shown a dull grey under the light of a waning moon. The substantial front porch that Felecia was never allowed to linger on no longer shown proud with its columns of always freshly painted white wood. The stuff had already been coming off in sheets during her last visit and now there was precious little of the white porch or blue siding paint left at all. The porch was blasted by sun and rain down to its cheap pine build, the siding the same only worse, the window sills around the edges of the windows on the first and second story were all crowded with dirt and mold so that the house looked like it was crying from its dozen pairs of eyes, weeping down onto the bare pine planks that now made up its tragic façade.
The roof of the once proud place stood our against the moonlight worst of all. If the peeled paint and running dirt made the old lady look tired and used, the bald and bare and sagging patches of roof top made Rotary house look like a truly abandoned place. An old plantation home left to sag slowly back into the earth after its captive workers had finally been freed maybe? No. It was more than that. The people who once called Rotary house home weren’t merely run off or deserted, or even dead.
Rotary house leaned on its hill looking like a true ruin. A place that was abandoned for very good reason, a place that no longer served it original or any purpose. A place forgotten and turned over completely to the rats and the proud pioneer colonies of mold and termites that would soon enough render the old mansion down to spare piles of earth bound, rotten remains.
Yet there was a light, a small candle flicker in a room Felecia recognized and knew well. Mothers room was always just down the hall from Nana’s suite up on the third floor. Even when the room belonged to mother and father, it was always just a room away from Nana’s. It was always just mother’s old childhood room with a spare pair of boots tucked up by the doorway.
Felecia shook her head slightly and shrugged at the scene. There was no time to get lost in regretful memories, no time to get locked up by old feelings of remorse or guilt.
The shutter doors leading to the cellar from the outside around back would still be locked up tight after Felecia’s last break in. Without any servants the front door seemed an easier bet anyway. Even down in the fetid village no one locked their doors, few even had the option. The main doors to Rotary House were open as Felecia knew they would be and she wasn’t slowed by their dim creaking sound as she pushed her way inside.
The once sparse space Felecia had witnessed was changed, further soured by dirt and disuse. What small bits of broken and common use furnishings once observed in the parlor room and the foyer were gone now, likely recent victims of the first cold snap of the season. Visions of her sainted Nana and mother busily breaking up furniture using old frying pans and paperweights to glean bits of fire wood made Felecia flush with shame, at first, a sort of sad excitement second.
Oh, to be a fly on that particular wall, until a pair of hungry hands came to light over a soft, plump, hairy body.
No.
Felecia didn’t come to dine on any fetid delights either. There was no time to wonder just how desperate the two remaining inhabitants of the old house had gotten, and no time to enjoy the thought of desperate, starving, or put in their place folks.
Felecia walked through the foyer, past the parlor room, past the kitchen and the dining room, around the L in the hallway and behind the grand staircase to places only the servants went on business and where the Conway children used to go exploring.
The cellar would still house what Felecia had come for, what she sought during so many of the awful nightmares. The household stash of kerosene used for the lamps and the kitchen. A pint would do given how empty and dry the house was. If someone showed Rotary House a picture of an open flame the old place would likely combust.