Sourmouth (22 page)

             
“I’m thankful for the sentiment here. But placing my face against your breasts
is just going to have the opposite effect. I think you’re just being a cock
tease now”.

             
Violet laughed and gave her husband a tap on the temple with her finger tips
before trying to crush him with the hardest hug she could manage.

             
And like that they sat for nearly fifteen minutes without finding the need to
talk. It wasn’t until they noticed it getting even darker outside did they
bother to even move.

             
Violet got up from the couch, leaving her husband lying on his stomach across
the cushions. She stepped over to the window near the grand ole clock and
pulled back the dusty curtain. Violet stood leaned against the pane staring off
into the heart of the trees, trees that were quickly disappearing in the
approaching dark as if overtaken by a sea of black.

             
“Did you ever notice that it gets dark faster here?”

             
“It is winter.
Winter
in Canada,” said Riley as he
picked up trash off of the floor and placed it in the empty grocery bag.

             
“It just seems crazy to me that the day feels like it goes by so fast. You can
barely get anything done before its night again and you’re expected to get
ready and start the day over again”.
             
             

             
“Who is expecting you to do anything? We can stay up all night frolicking and
eating junk food”.

             
“We don’t have any junk food, do we?” she asked.

             
“We could always make a run back to the store. Though I’m 90% sure that it
closed at like 7 o’clock”.

             
“It’s the only place to get rations on this island and it closes its doors just
after dinner? I mean, it’s nice that they have the decency to wait until most
people get off work and have time to drop by if they need anything. But they
couldn’t extend those hours a bit for convenience’s sake? Do they close on
Sundays for people to visit Church too? It’s not the 1970s; get hip with the
times already”. 

             
“We could probably still make it if we rushed. We could get some graham
crackers, chocolate and marshmallows and make s’mores. We could just pull
kindling off the walls and make a fire, this place is practically firewood
anyway,” Riley proposed.

             
“I don’t think mommy and daddy would care for us burning down the house on a
school night”.

             
“Mommy and daddy?”

             
“Sour and Mouth upstairs. Real quick with the belt they are when they’re
disturbed,” she said as she pointed upwards to the ceiling.

             
It was the first time that Riley had thought about whether the creature was
sentient on its own. How did it behave when they weren’t there? Did it even
exist outside of their presence?

             
Still looking upwards he asked “Do you think that it’s up there right now? Just
waiting for us to stroll into the room to try and scare us like the guy in a
mask hiding in the dark in the haunted house ride?”

             
Violet laughed nervously, “Somehow I don’t think it plans things very well. I
don’t think the wolf-man is a forward-thinker”. 
             

             
Riley sucked his top lip and released it with a pop.

             
“We should go up”.

             
“I was kind of hoping for some time to get my nerves together,” Violet
confessed, looking at the stairs like they were an insurmountable obstacle that
she wasn’t ready to overcome. 
             

             
“You can take some time. I don’t think my curiosity can wait much
longer”.             

             
“Have you just been sitting here waiting for me to say that we should go up?”

             
He raised an eyebrow, “Or thinking of a way to get up there on my own”.

             
Violet closed her arms tightly around her, suddenly feeling a chill in the air.

             
“You don’t need to come up with me,” Riley reassured her, noticing how
uncomfortable she seemed suddenly.

             
He stepped forward and placed his hands on her, one on her shoulder and the
other on her side. Riley meant it sincerely but couldn’t help but feel like he
was trying to convince a child that there wasn’t a boogeyman in the closet,
when in fact the boogeyman lived inside of the mirror.

             
“I want to go up with you. I need to go up with you,” she said as she visibly
braced herself for what was to come.

             
“I don’t want to make you do anything you’re not ready for. If you want to
wait, it isn’t going anywhere.”

             
Violet extended her arm and placed her hand on her husband’s chest.

             
“If I’m allowed to back out now I’ll never get the courage to do it in the
future because I’ll know I could always back out. Don’t enable that”.

             
Riley nodded as he grabbed his wife by the hand and turned towards the stairs.
With a deep breath they started forward, one step after another like there
wasn’t a single reason not to stay exactly where they were.

             
Somehow the
Tylers
had expected something to change.
What they expected to change they were unsure of the more they thought about
it. But despite their unknown wishes everything upstairs was exactly the same
as they had left it: the creaky rocking chair absent its stuffed master that
lay on the floor in
Poyam’s
room, the decrepit
bathroom otherwise known as the Center for Disease Control’s field office and
the horror show master bedroom that they currently stood in waiting for the sky
to start falling. But after an all too quiet ten minutes they would have been
satisfied with even a little rain.

             
“Do you think it’s not home?” Riley asked rhetorically as he carefully observed
the empty mirror that sat as lifeless as every other mirror in the world just
like it.

             
“Maybe we caught it at a bad time? We should leave a note,” Violet proposed
with a half-hearted
giggle.             

             
“Just stick a note to the mirror, text face on the surface asking for it to
please get back to us at its earliest convenience?”

             
She nodded, “It’s the
neighbourly
thing to do. After
all we are renting out its home”.

             
“Maybe we should start having sex. It seems to get off on that,” he suggested
with a lecherous grin, eyeing the bed behind them.
             

             
“Or maybe it really hates it. There probably isn’t a Mrs.
Sourmouth
out there, right? You’re taunting it with its carnal desires that it can’t
fulfill”.

             
“...It isn’t like I can fulfill mine either...” he muttered under his breath
before Violet backhanded him across the chest.

             
Still rubbing the sore spot Riley cautiously approached the mirror,
scrutinizing every inch of it as he got closer. As far as he could tell nothing
had changed. The only difference being the absence of the daunting figure in
the shadows that had previously been so eager to make its presence known.

             
Riley reached out and gave the surface of the mirror a tap with his fingernail.

             
There wasn’t a response.

             
He reached out and lifted the frame outwards from the wall, looking behind it
to the wall.

             
But there was nothing hidden.

             
“Maybe we need to say its name three times?” Violet speculated out loud from
behind her husband.  

             
He turned towards her with a chuckle, “It’s not Bloody Mary”.

             
“Don’t look at me like that! Legends come from somewhere right? We’ve got this
thing living in the mirror that allegedly can kill. That sounds like a certain
urban legend to me”.

             
Riley turned back towards the mirror with a puff. As stupid as he thought the
idea was he regrettably didn’t have any better ideas. 

             
“Bloody Mary...” he joked.

             
“....
Sourmouth
...” Violet stated in a way that sounded
like a very annoyed order for it to appear.

             
“
Sourmouth
,” he corrected in a more docile tone.

             
As he stood in front of the mirror Riley felt a sudden sense of unease. He
remembered feeling something similar as a kid in elementary school playing the
game in his
friend’sbathroom
. And while nothing ever
happened then, Riley couldn’t help but wonder if he was just saying the wrong
name all along.

             
“...
Sourmouth
,” he repeated, his voice heavier under
his breath on his second turn.

             
And still nothing came of it.

             
For a moment Riley second guessed saying the name the third time. The legend of
Bloody Mary said that she would come to life and killed whoever dared to say
her name. And if somehow she and
Sourmouth
shared
more than the mirror in common
then
the
Tylers
would find themselves in more trouble than they were
prepared for.

             
Riley took the deepest breath that his lungs could hold as he closed his eyes.

             
“...Sour-”

             
“Boo!” screamed Violet from behind as she jabbed her finger tips into her
husband’s spine.

             
Riley jumped to the side and almost hit his wife in the nose out of instinctive
reflex.

             
“Damn it, Violet!” he yelled at her, his fists clenched angrily in a ball.

             
She clutched at her stomach as she doubled over in a fit, laughing hysterically
at her husband.

             
“My lord, I thought that I was a wimp. But it turns out that I’m married to the
cowardly lion!”

             
“
It’s not funny,” he said, relaxing
slightly, staring at the still uninhabited mirror.

             
“If you did it to me you’d find it a laugh riot”.

             
Riley thought about it for a moment before realizing that he totally would
have. And it was hard to stay angry at her knowing that she was doing her best
to cope by trying to ease some of the tension.

             
“If you’re done playing around, can I continue?” he asked, his voice betraying
that he was mostly over it already.

             
“Don’t bother. Trying to call out
Sourmouth
like
we’re going to get in a schoolyard fight is stupid. Trying to call it out like
this is even more stupid. Let’s try something that doesn’t make me feel like a
fool just for making an attempt” she decided conclusively.

             
“Fine,” he started, “What do you suggest?”

             
“I came up with the Bloody Mary thing even if it was a wash. You come up with
something,” she said, sitting back on the bed with her legs crossed almost as
casually as if she was waiting on tea. The only tell that she was still afraid
was the slight shaking of her legs as they pressed tightly together. As hard as
she tried to appear calm for her husband as much as herself, she couldn’t find
a way to relax her nerves.

             
“But that was a joke. It doesn’t count”.

             
“Just because it was a joke doesn’t mean that it can’t count as my turn”.

             
Riley sucked on his teeth and placed his hands on his hips, trying to come up with
their next move.

             
“I’ll bark at it,” he declared as if nothing else could top his decision.

             
Violet exhaled and jumped to her feet, “You somehow topped
me”.             

             
“Topped you? I’m serious. I’m going to howl at this son of a bitch until he
knows that this is my yard,” Riley laughed as he watched Violet exit the room.

             
“Don’t leave me here!” he called out, his chuckle following the wake of his
wife.

             
Slowly he turned back towards the mirror with the sudden sensation that he was
being watched. But still the mirror sat empty aside from his own modest-looking
reflection staring back at him. Riley walked up to the mirror again,
tentatively placing his fingers against the glass as if he expected them to
fall into it. While they didn’t pass through, surprisingly the surface felt hot
to the touch, as if there was a low set burner behind the glass. He recoiled
slowly, rubbing his fingertips together like he was trying to get off a bit of grease.

             
“What on Earth are you doing?” Violet asked as she re-entered the room, the
book held in her hand.

             
“Trying to burn myself. The damn mirror is strangely hot”.