Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 172
The old woman’s strength started to falter and that left Felecia with one final decision to make, she could probably just push Nana off of her, she could probably get up and cough and spit and manage to get up and walk, rain soaked back to her shack in the woods. Surviving had no appeal though and that left taunting.
Felecia could barely speak above a whisper, her vocal cords were damaged from her repeating howling, her throat was sore from the pressure being applied. Speaking felt awful, a reminder of her time spent near death in Phillip’s shack. “You can’t even do this right.”
Nana growled and pushed down and doubled her effort and Felecia felt herself get light headed, she began to see spots and understood that it wouldn’t be much longer before she would finally be free of the endless disappointments of the world. The rain was landing in large uneven drops and one drop landed in her gaping mouth as Felecia instinctively gasped and tried to take in breath. She began to choke and brought her hands up without thinking, Nana’s sure grasp and relentless effort was no match as Felecia knocked her off and rolled to her side choking and gasping.
Later, laying in her stinky, straw mattress in her damp and unwelcoming shack out in the woods. Later freezing in there under a thin blanket with snow built up all around, Felecia would occasionally try and rewrite history. A change of mind, or at least a realization that allowing her demented grand mother to murder her was somehow a bridge too far. No, Felecia always brought herself around to the truth, she had managed to survive by accident, and an arguably unfortunate one at that.
Nana growled again and spat and reached out with her gnarled hands trying to finish the job she had started but being murdered had become yet another thing that Felecia saw as fruitless and futile. She struggled, choked, coughed, spat and vomited, and then she got to her knees and then her feet. Felecia was up and walking to collect her bow over by the gazebo as Nana stood up and shouted.
“You had best shoot me with that thing. I won’t stop hiring men from town until you’re dead!”
Mother as weepy and servile as ever had been standing near the gazebo, Felecia hadn’t noticed her and likely never would have if she wasn’t busy calling out “Mother! Mother please, you’ll catch your death in the cold and rain, let’s get inside.”
There wasn’t a spare second spent to consider Felecia as she passed her to collect her bow, there truly was no family there, certainly not for the likes of her.
“Shut your yap, you imbecile! Turn around and kill that little harlot!”
Mother didn’t turn though, or even slow on her trajectory toward the source of her life long miseries. “Nonsense. You said the girl couldn’t be saved; I know she can’t be. Let her rot with the rest of the luddites. Come on now, let’s go get dry inside.”
Felecia collected her bow and hung it on her shoulder. She knew there was no time to waste wishing for the courage or the impulse to shoot Nana. Let the old bitch fester and grow mold in her dilapidated castle. Maybe a day would come when there was no one left to haunt the halls of Rotary House, no one left at all of the Conway line save Felecia and a few musty mummies left to whither and gather dust under their moth-eaten blankets.
“Do as I tell you, damn it! Do my bedding or you’ll be sleeping wet assed in the woods with her!”
The slap was loud, so audible over the din of the rain and the lapping waves below that Felecia jerked and turned.
Nana was spread legged, flat on her rump in the mud and mother was holding her own hand and wincing as if she had surely broken something fine and important.
“I saw her throw it off the cliff, the phylantor is gone. No one need fear you anymore, mother. Now come in and get dry, or you can be the one to sleep out here in the weeds.”
The fight that ensued was as short as it was pathetic, Felecia watched with little interest beside the gazebo as Nana strained to right herself only to lunge and wind up back on the ground, holding gnarled fistfuls of mother’s once well kempt hair. Mother countered by pulling hair as well and there both women laid, rolling around back and forth, shouting in pain and shouting out their anger and hatred for one another.
The obvious end would come soon, they would both tire and leave Felecia to wander off to a lifetime of watching from affair as their endlessly conjoined lives grew ever more desperate, all the while walled up in their virtual wainscoted tomb.
The tentacle was hard to see at first, there was no massive return of the once vanquished monster. No magnificent rise of undulating limbs and wild, lunatic eyes. Something out in the dark came and caught Nana by the ankle. The old woman called out in a style of genuine pain that didn’t have anything to do with getting her hair pulled or her old, withered cheeks slapped. There was a sudden jerk and then a moment of desperate silence before Nana called out to no one in particular. The second jerk was harsher and it was only then when Felecia noticed the slimy appendage hauling Nana toward the edge of the cliff.
Nana barely managed to call out the once, “Save me, damnit. Grab ahold!”
The tentacle pulled back one last time and Felecia watched as mother called out in desperation and a renewed sense of terror, she reached out and grabbed ahold of the old woman and howled in horror as she too was yanked along. Felecia watched as the both of them were pulled over the edge of the cliff.