Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 176
None of the crippled men that night rose to the occasion and none of them rose up once they were well enough either. No one came out to the small shack that Felecia clearly marched back to with her bloody corn knife in tow. None of them followed the obvious trail she left as the rivulets and drops of blood flowed and dropped from the long knife as she carried it at her side the whole way. None of them stalked about her home and made life hard for her or hers. There was no one set out to set her little shack on fire for making life hard for them and theirs.
Someone did set out for the hanging tree though.
Taryn was the one to let Felecia know a few days later as the night sky to the south came alight with the dying life of the old oak tree. Its limbs caught and grew with intensity until Felecia had no choice but to come out and look toward the village to watch the red and yellow flames dance and lick at the blackness of the night sky.
The old oak was nothing but a blackened trunk surrounded by spindly whispers of frail limbs and after a few storms even those ugly remains were erased. No one was hanging women and girls anymore yet the abuses went on.
The old man of the swamps became the wicked witch of the woods and what became the rarely seen terror wielding poisons and magics became a masked assassin who murdered men out in the open.
“You can’t do that again.”
Six days had come and gone between the mass culling in the village and when Taryn came upon Felecia as she tended her fields of anemic potatoes and stubborn onions.
“Care to elaborate? Unless you mean planting these potatoes, because I would have to agree with you there.”
Felecia wasn’t one for wit and it felt forced and pandering as it came out.
“You know what I mean.”
Retaliation, it was obvious and something that Felecia had been waiting for ever since she made her terrible examples. The men of the village gathered and came out and when they couldn’t find the witch, they took out their frustration on the old groundskeeper and the freak.
Felecia stopped stooping over and gave Taryn a long, careful gaze. He didn’t look hurt or wounded in anyway. “Did they do something to Phillip? Or the house?”
“One of them died from the wounds, another one ain’t looking good. None of the men are doing nothing.”
Felecia shrugged and set down the small sack containing her catch of puny, wrinkled little spuds.
“Good, so long as they aren’t hanging women then they can keep on doing nothing.”
Taryn got that look he tended to get more often than not when talking to Felecia before he stomped forward and pointed in the direction of the village. “Hung or no, they all starve, they die anyway. The men work, and if they ain’t able, or too scared to leave their shacks, then no one gets to eat.”
Felecia honestly didn’t care about how many of the men she wounded died from their wounds, or how many decided not to go outside for a few days, or a week, or who decided to turn their face to the wall. The women of the village weren’t living much of a life anyway, now they had a chance, the strong ones, the ones who wanted to live would learn to do the work themselves. The women who could adapt would learn to survive, and thrive.
Like Josephine, you mean. Like you did.
Felecia backed away from Taryn and jerked violently away from the whole encounter. He didn’t hear the awful intrusive voice. He couldn’t. No one else could because it didn’t exist anywhere except for inside the empty, dead parts of Felecia’s head.
It had been years, if felt like decades of awful, debilitating, endless life since she last heard that awful intrusive voice. The monster in the waves was gone, dead, Nana had killed it, nearly, before it pulled her to their conjoined demise. The miserable, awe-inspiring fiend had entered Felecia’s life, altering it forever in a downward trajectory and then the thing had simply chosen to abandon her, not to mention the poor, half mad woman who had given the majority of her life choosing to worship it in all its profane nature as though it were some sort of god.
“I ain’t gonna hit you, I never would.”
Felecia didn’t even recognize the words as English, not at first, Taryn was already looking away, looking down, searching for that constantly evasive spot on the ground that drove Felecia half mad. She had gone and kicked the puppy again, for that’s all Taryn really was, a sad, affection starved little dog who didn’t know how to get along in the world. Amends needed to be made. He meant well, he always did and that’s a good amount of what Felecia didn’t like about him.
The intrusive voice was back, was the monster out in the waves back again too then, was…Nana? Felecia’s mind began to race with questions that required answering, not the least of which was that she was possibly, finally going truly mad.
“I made the examples I needed to make. If they chose to leave their women alone and act with civility, I won’t have any reason to visit them again.”
Taryn blinked slowly and then staired as though he had been handed an amount of knowledge that he couldn’t possibly comprehend all at once.
“They’ll leave those women. They’ll take the boats that still float and leave and…”
“I know, I get it!”
Felecia was busy, there were so many terrible and obvious things to consider of a sudden and none of those considerations revolved around the goings on of the luddites in the village. Again though, there was the nervous, possibly piddling puppy to consider.
Taryn tried to rattle on about their perceived problem, the issue at hand being that if the vile, scum that inhabited the village, chose to leave, their sad, sullen women folk would lose all chance at life and Felecia came along and yelled in the middle of the idiotic diatribe, disrupting the endless chain of nonsense events.
“You have my word, I did what I needed to do, now if I have to deal with them again, it will be one on one, after hours, late at night.”
Taryn stopped bothering with the confused look and started to furrow his thick brows but Felecia didn’t have any more time to try and be nice. “I’m tired, I need to lay down, we’ll talk tonight, okay?”
Taryn shrugged and moved along with the usual amount of hemming and furthering with pointless questions and equally pointless well wishing.
The luddites in the village were monsters, nearly through and through, they got what they deserved and Felecia had no time to consider them, much less reconsider what she had done to make them play well with others for some small amount of time.
One Taryn moved on Felecia retreated to the interior of her shack and looked around it’s squalid interior. She had saved some of the books, well, they had saved themselves as it turned out. Chief among the forbidden tomes was the one where Felecia had seen writing slowly scrawling itself between the existing lines once, so long ago and under truly desperate times.
