The end.
Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 181
Taryn went on, thankfully oblivious to how Felecia reacted to the suggestion. “Naw, it might catch the trees, whole damn island would go up then.”
Felecia barely heard the youth and only really caught on when he cleared his throat, “Next time you’re in the village, maybe tell ‘em to leave the place alone instead.”
A number of facetious if not outright cruel replies came to mind until Felecia remembered to breath and relax her shoulders. “Sorry but it doesn’t quite work that way.”
Taryn finished his second smoke and nodded in the direction of the village, “So long as it works, I ain’t asking questions.”
The night ended on good terms, Felecia ducked back in and said goodbye to Phillip who was already snoring with his chin resting on his chest. Taryn thanked her for the supper and told her not to be a stranger and she assured him that she would be around, from time to time.
That was life then, for a while. Felecia tended to her fields, her animals, her shack. She tended to the village too when someone came by asking for help or needed her special sort of assistance. Her collection of tokens and petty payments continued to grow as the village women and girls brought them by until there was no recourse but to offer up the excess. Taryn had little need for tokens and shiny baubles and Phillip repudiated any offer brought by Felecia as he equated her exploits to criminal activity or the will of the creature whose name he never would reveal or speak out loud.
Still Felecia made her once a week trip over to Phillip and Taryn’s hovel from her own sad little shack and every time she would bring her offerings of eggs, produce, dried herbs, household needs or outright curiosities and most weeks she would come back with a hangover and more questions than answers as to what possible place she still had in the world.
A month or so after her reintroduction to life around Taryn and Phillip, Felecia woke one night as the snow was beginning to thaw in earnest and found herself walking absentmindedly up the hill and onto the grounds of the Big House. By then it had been nearly half a year since she last saw the place. The barn was still sagging on its foundation and leaning ever to the right but it looked about the same as it did when Felecia tracked Phillip on his last long wander away from home. Rotary house though was a very different story. The house had been solid, very much so. Felecia heard time and time again from father and both her brothers how much expensive and exotic woods and marbles and fine fixtures went into its construction.
Felecia grew up afraid of the mansion, not because of any awful and dark corners or rooms of artificers use but because she was always having one bad moment or another, and she grew to believe that the place would always stand like some silent sentinel, watching blandly as the abuses continued indefinitely.
Rotary house’s façade had pealed completely revealing bare clap boards made from cheap pine and posts hewed from pitted oak. The porch posts looked tarred over, as though they were nothing more than reclaimed masts used by ships before they splintered or chipped. There were barely any windows left intact. Village children had likely had some fun throwing stones at most but others looked smashed in, sill and all, by one storm or another.
The snow, or what remained of it, was still clinging angrily around the edges of the sagging roof, or otherwise holding court instead rooms where it blew in and stuck fast to the floors and sparse furniture that remained. A massive chunk of the roof that must have stood over the grand staircase was crumpled and caved in making the massive dome between the third story window sills look like the caved in forehead of some massive dullard that had never been able to learn how to walk or care for itself.
The massive double doors of the house had been pried open at some point and left that way, leaving Rotary house all the more looking like a mentally handicap entity all too happy to see and painfully hug any and all passersby. The shattered windows and bits of storm blown debris along with the bare façade gave another feeling though, one of menace and melancholy.
Felecia didn’t need to test her weight on the weatherworn porch, she didn’t need to shimmy through the opening of the forced open doors to see the decrepitude and decay of the interior. The smell of the place was obvious, it was rot, well earned and finally revealed. The peeling wallpaper and moldy wainscotting was finally showing and speaking to the injustice and the inequality of the place during its supposed heyday.
Felecia let her shoulders slump and let her mouth droop open as it tended to do unless she worked to keep her bottom lip even.
“I bet the place would go up like dry kindling now.”
The imitation wasn’t perfect but the inflection was there. Taryn would have been angry at the joke and Felecia recognized that much so the imitation must have been a good one.
There was accuracy in that statement too. The place was dry, winterized, and stripped down to the untreated bones of it all. Felecia once fantasized and was very likely enthralled by the creature out in the waves as she considered the stores of kerosine kept in the cellar of Rotary house. A few years before and that’s what it would have taken, a careful soaking of the porch and siding and just as careful a hand to get it all started in a few key places.
Rotary house would have caught fire then if Felecia had struck a flint along the rusted boot scrapper still fixed to the first step. She didn’t hear little Kat’s inhuman screeches or see visions of her Nana leaning out of her window with her wiry hair catching fire all around her. All Felecia saw then as she looked up at the mansion was a sad old house full of miserable memories. A place that proudly demanded to be put out of its misery.
Felecia walked across the drive that had once been gravel but had long since given way to tracks of weedy sod over to the leaning barn, coming back with a few tufts of dry, rotten hay. A handful of the stuff was all it took, places in the doorway and lit with one of Taryn’s precious all weather matches.
Felecia took one of the corn silk cigarillos Taryn took the time to hand roll for her as a payment for all the eggs and potatoes she brought by and set the end in the fledgling flame.
Watching the old place catch alight was a balm for her soul and letting the nicotine play its magnificent trick on her senses as she smoked let Felecia’s mind be at ease, no nightmare screams or visions to be had as the doorway caught and the flames spread up and out from there. There was no denying that instead of some considered sense of ill ease or dismay, Felecia felt joy at watching the family homestead begin to catch fire and begin to burn in the cold, dry winter air.
Life wasn’t going to get better, not hers, not Taryn’s, not the villagers, and certainly not Phillip’s. No, life wasn’t going to improve for any of them and the ideas Felecia had as a child for where here life would go, the direction of it all was pantomime fantasy after all.
Life would never be better than it was then, it would never be any better than it had ever been, and that was the reality of it all.