Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 177
Felecia had hallucinated seeing Jacqueline’s slow, lazy scrawling words etching themselves with audible scratches between lines of the hideous burble gurgle pictographs. The moment in the cave had been so surreal and then so awful that Felecia had hurled the book out into the swamp and then sunk it as deep as it would go into the thick muck.
The book was there now, old as ever, but clean. Felecia ran a hand along the smooth tan skin of the books spine and felt a ripple of disgust run through her body. She didn’t want the book in her shack, she hadn’t brought the thing along, or at least she certainly hadn’t intended to. The book brought itself, or some unrecognizable, obviously masochistic part of Felecia’s mind had clumsily tossed it into a stack of goods meant to come along.
After hearing that intrusive voice again, having it thrust itself into her life of a sudden, Felecia didn’t want to look at the awful tome, or touch it, and she certainly didn’t want to open it and look at the awful burble gurgle language scrawled out in rust red ink. She needed to.
All told, her time with Jacqueline had been nearly as brief as her time with Phillip in his hovel but those where the two people in her life that had wound up teaching her the most, the ones who had shown any concern at all for her as a human being. The intrusive voice had scared Felecia down to the parts of herself she didn’t like thinking about much less taking the time to acknowledge. Terror deep down in places only Nana had left marks on before. The awful thing out in the waves had and apparently still was leaving other marks all its own.
Felecia needed Jacqueline, suddenly and desperately, even though she was dead, long dead. Maybe just looking at the book, skimming through its insane pages would make Felecia feel somehow better. Perhaps closer to the only woman who had ever really shown her any genuine concern.
Maybe the hallucinatory words will magically reappear? Maybe the swamp witch will speak once more, you know, from beyond the grave?
Those words weren’t intrusive but the thought rang out loud inside Felecia’s mind and it made her whimper.
The tears came then, hot and frustrated. She could cry inside the shack, only inside it though, alone and away from the world.
The book opened along the middle and most surely to the pages that Felecia first saw, the insane burble gurgle petroglyphs leered from the page in their hideous rust red color and Felecia wished once more to see the reassuring message appear from her dead great aunt.
The light outside began to fade and the goat began complaining for supper. Felecia continued to stare at the pages. She hadn’t sat down or laid on her straw mattress, she hadn’t moved a muscle in what must have been hours. She cried until there were no more tears and waited for the hallucinogenic words to appear, then she waited for the intrusive voice to come once more. Felecia waited for anything, anything at all that would give her the smallest hope that she wasn’t simply going slowly mad. After all, madness seemed her birthright. Her father’s journals, grandpa Samials famed fits, mother’s melancholies, Jacqueline’s obtuse rituals and erratic ideocracies. Madness flowed from the very spoiled roots of the Conway family tree, spreading poison along every branch, every twig, every leaf.
The goat finally got fed, then the pigs and finally the chickens too. Felecia made do with a handful of boiled potatoes. She told Taryn they would talk that night but the last thing she wanted to do was talk, she washed out her pot and sat by the small fire out in front of her shack and thought about her predicament.
Living in the cave was safe, it wasn’t exactly healthy though. Felecia wasn’t likely to be bothered there but if she was mad, if her future was to be spent hearing disembodied voices and murmuring obscenities to herself then well, the cave would most certainly expedite that issue.
Taryn didn’t deserve to be constantly pushed this way and that, Phillip was already lost most days and would never get better. Felecia would feel like a monster either way there, leave and Taryn would be stuck trying to take care of Phillip all alone, stay and he would forever obediently waste away his best years on a recalcitrant and angry woman who was slowly losing her mind just like his father had. Neither option was kind, but wouldn’t leaving be the fairer option?
“Where?”
Clarence huffed just then, the still half wild boar had come over and was sticking his snout through the fence nearest the shack. Felecia hadn’t quite finished all the mealy potatoes she had boiled and the glutton was sniffing after the remains she had set aside for the morning.
Eggs would do better if there are any come morning.
Felecia stood up and gave the glutton his midnight snack. Clarence was a real bastard but he had survived the long cold winter and didn’t kill the mate Felecia brought for him, nor the piglets that clung to life after. If the pig wanted what he could smell, let him have it.
“I’m sorry about this morning.”
Felecia jumped and flung the potatoes she had meant to set down on the other side of the fence. Clarence snorted in surprise and outrage. The bastard boar had probably seen Taryn coming up the way but that wasn’t what had him dashing and roaring around, some of the precious potatoes wound up on the wrong side of the fence and that was the real predicament of Clarence’s night.
No one came up the way to the shack by surprise, Taryn could track for sure but he always stomped his way across and over the dry grass or the leaves or the snow. Felecia could hear the youth coming for yards in the dark. Not that night though.
The look Taryn gave her said it all, it was no sudden prank or intentional trick. Taryn set down the parcel he had with him and stood still until Felecia let her shoulders drop and took her hand off the hilt of her knife.
“I got wrapped up with the livestock, sorry I didn’t make it down today.”
“They never kept you before. What happened this morning?”
One of the rare things Felecia enjoyed about her time with Taryn was his general obliviousness, the overwhelming moments of his life, his daily worries and work and the ever-looming issue of what would become of Pa. Suddenly the distracted but handsome, well, distraction, was proving very present and disturbingly aware.
Felecia walked into her shack and came out holding onto the permanently slimy feeling tome. She pushed the awful book into Taryn’s hands and then sat down by the fire. “My great aunt, Jacqueline, used to look at the weird writing in that book and speak profane prayers to a creature that lived out in the ocean because of it. I know how that sounds but it really isn’t that odd considering how insane my father apparently was, or my mother, or any member of my family. We’re all insane, Tayrn. That’s all there is to say really. We’re absolutely mad and it's sadly taken me this long to finally come to grips with it all.”