Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 168
The door at the end of the hallway would lead to a set of narrow stairs Felecia knew well and as she walked down the hall, she did her best not to recollect how her father had led her down this hallway. Fear and apprehension were for the old Felecia, the scared little girl. A woman who has accepted the she needs to burn her ancestral home to the ground with everyone in it has no time for childhood memories or fears.
There was only a little light that penetrated into the house from the windows of the dining room or the small window at the turn of the L shape of the hallway that Felecia could use to see by. The pale moon light started to lie to Felecia as she reached the end of the hallway. There was a door there, leading to the cellar, only there wasn’t.
There were no crude boards hammered over a door to keep it in place, no series of boards nailed down carefully to give the clumsy appearance of hiding an obvious doorway. Felecia reached out in disbelief and ran her hand along a length of wallpaper that felt just as dry and caked over with dirt as every other wall there.
“The door was here.”
The words trickled out and Felecia was sure she would be answered. Surely this was all a test, a trap, some horrible experiment involving the monster out in the waves. There was a door there. The hallway was built for a reason, no one build a hallway leading to nothing. A soft knock a few taps, the wall would sound hollow and that would prove out the reality of the situation. For reasons that were beyond comprehension the door leading to the cellar was covered over. Perhaps some perverse security measure to ensure filthy woodland inhabitants who found their way into the cellar from outside wouldn’t be able to gain entrance to the rest of the house?
A sharp fingernail ran across the seam of the paper and Felecia dug at it for a moment. Her knife came into play next as she tried to push through the seam to reveal what might be underneath. Such careful precision, such attention paid to not making noise, for what?
Felecia dug her knife into the wall and saw the blade come away powder white with bits of stucco clinging to it. Someone hadn’t just covered the cellar door; they built a wall in front of it and papered the wall so that no one would assume there was ever a door there. Why?
The kerosine was the preferred way to go but it wasn’t the only way. Felecia turned away from the sudden dead-end hallway and made her way back to the grand staircase and the doorway leading to the dining room. It wasn’t until she crept around the dining table on her way to the kitchen that she saw the vast and undulating shadow that blocked the moons light as it swayed.
The window of the kitchen door leading to the back of the mansion was Felecia’s first real glimpse at what was going on.
The tentacles swayed and jerked; undulating in their countless multitude as they took up the greater portion of the nights sky outside to the east. The awful eyes, arrayed in their hundreds, no two exactly alike in either color or shape were all locked forward in an intense and all-encompassing hateful gaze.
The things imponderable mass hovered impossibly above the old gazebo near the cliffs edge, its rows of jagged and insanely angled teeth ground and rasped together sounding like nails on a chalkboard at the center of the horrific disk that was the monster as its circular jaws opened and closed and opened and closed. Staring over long at the crazy patchwork of its eyes threatened to send the mind teetering forever, summersaulting into madness through a chasm that surely had no bottom. Luckily for Felecia those intent and hate filled eyes, numbering in their dozens, were fixated on the gazebo.
Walking through the still filthy kitchen and out into the backyard felt like an impossible task. Felecia had only ever seen a few of the monsters tentacles, a few distant glimpses of its impossible form, and that had been enough for a life time. Now she was staring at the majority of the thing, more than half of it to be sure as it seemed locked in place, held captive and floating a few hundred feet above the ocean that was its home.
The monster in the waves, the god thing, radiated madness and malice, it wasn’t, it couldn’t be some ocean creature gone horribly awry. Felecia understood then why her father was so melancholic, why his journal sounded so suddenly conspiratorial and dire. Felecia understood then why her great aunt chose to worship the thing. The word god didn’t sit right with Felecia but the word otherworldly sounded just right. The thing hovering impossibly in the air, writhing and grinding its rows of dagger teeth was nothing natural, nothing from planet earth at least.
The kitchen door opened and Felecia felt herself walking outside into the weed choked field that had once been the household cook’s prized herb garden. Was this like her opening the wardrobe doors to the cave? Was this her body refusing her commands and disobeying her once more? Was this the monsters doing?
The creature wasn’t looking at Felecia, it wasn’t acknowledging her existence at all, and yet her feet were walking, one slowly in front of the other toward the gazebo, toward the cliff side, toward the monster. At about halfway along the stone pathway to the little wooden structure Felecia felt her arms busily working at her quiver and her bow. She only had five arrows, not even five hundred would matter to the monster, not even if each one was aimed at a crazy, sick making eye.
The bow was ready and there was an arrow firmly nocked and Felecia was still walking toward the gazebo, terrified of the monster and what its awful plans really entailed. She was nearly lost in the horror of it all, so wrapped up in dread that she barely heard the familiar voice, hardly noticing the slow, dull chants emanating from the gazebo in that hideous burble gurgle language.
Among the awful yips and grunts and needless arrays of vowels there were familiar words, English words. The voice was familiar as well, too familiar and almost painful to hear. Whenever Jacqueline fell into that nonsense it was a high pitched, fervent repetition, like a child reciting a bed time prayer or an enraptured devotee.
This familiar voice wasn’t reciting anything, fervently or otherwise, this voice wasn’t high pitched, enraptured, or unhinged. The voice coming from the gazebo was the resonating focus of all that malice and dread. The low pitched, steady, commanding voice. The voice used to redress all wrongs, the voice that stung just as bad if not worse than the spoon or the brush, the voice that spoke of missed meals, missed opportunities, the voice that always commanded, always condemned…
“Nana?”