Sourmouth (27 page)

Instinctively,
Tsitusem
took
a step back as well. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but the fact that there was
someone in the room bracing themselves made him nervous.

Riley swung open the curtain. And there was the
window. And nothing but the pane and the copious amounts of trees outside of
the house.

Tusem
let out a long annoyed
sigh.

Riley turned around and kicked the base of the clock,
sending throbbing pains from his big toe through to the rest of his foot. It
was mixed emotions for him, as he kind of hated this young man and yet it was
important that he believe their story so that he might be able to help them.

“You think it might be back upstairs? Either in the bathroom
or in the bedroom?” asked Violet of her partner.

             
The student looked incredibly uncomfortable as he tried to figure out what was
going on.

             
“There’s no harm in trying,” Riley agreed as he took the first steps towards
the stairs.

             
Tusem
didn’t inch from his position until Violet
grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him as she followed her husband to the
second floor.

             
“I have had enough of these games!” he protested to deaf ears, the nervous
urgency in his voice unhidden.

             
On the second floor Riley opened the door to the
bathroom             
and charged in, the door handle slamming against the wall with a bang. And like
the window downstairs, there was no sign of
Sourmouth
.
In hindsight the strategy of making a racket was probably a bad one as they
were trying to attract the wolf and not scare it in the opposite direction. But
realistically they didn’t have any idea as to how the wolf’s thought processes
functioned at all. It might have very well been attracted to the noise.

             
An agitated Violet pulled
Tusem
into the master
bedroom for one last attempt only to find the disappointment of yet another
empty mirror. This put them one step closer to losing their last connection on
the island.

             
Riley came in behind the two, slowly catching up on the fact that they were
again empty handed just by seeing his wife’s expression.

             
They all stood for a few moments expectant, as if something had to happen
whether or not they were prepared. But nothing came. As if the creature was
suddenly shy about being put on the spot.

             
“What the hell do we do now? Just wait for it to come back?” she asked as she
took a seat on the bed, leaving
Tsitusem
awkwardly
standing in the middle of the
room.             

Riley’s shoulders fell as he considered their options.
He contemplated grabbing the journal from
Poyam’s
room and trying to goad the creature to come out.

             
“I am going to leave if I am not told what is going on! You said that you had
undeniable proof that the
Sourmouth
myth was actually
fact,”
Tusem
yelled at them both.

             
Violet wanted to point out that he couldn’t actually leave, seeing as they
drove him. But she opted to go the diplomatic route.

             
“We believe we’ve stumbled onto something...supernatural. We believe that what
we’ve encountered is actually
Sourmouth
. The thing is
it doesn’t run around the woods in the full moon like something out of a
movie...it lives in the mirror,” Violet explained with a sense of conviction
that she hadn’t expected.

             
But despite her faith in the matter the young student still laughed, pointing
his finger at her like a child teasing on the playground.

             
“What sort of idiot do you think I am?” he asked, most likely rhetorically.
             

             
“And this is the problem we face.
Sourmouth
has been
showing up for the past few days, seemingly stalking us. There’s no rhyme or
reason for it. As far as we know there’s no way to call it if we want it. We’re
stuck trying to figure out this thing that we can’t even prove exists and that
might actually be tremendously dangerous,” Riley professed, hoping that the
onslaught of information might help convince the young man that they were on
the up and up.

             
“
Sourmouth
just spontaneously appeared in your
bedroom mirror?”
Tsitusem
asked, his face slightly
less amused than before.

             
“Essentially yes, but not exactly. My husband found a book in the attic that
had a bunch of pictures and old words in another language; we are assuming
it’s
Squamish. In the book was a page with the word ‘
Sourmouth
’, and since we found that book we’ve been visited
every day by this...thing. It keeps changing and evolving as it goes along.
Honestly we’ve gotten to the point that we’re scared,” Violet answered, her
voice more shaken than the last time she spoke.

             
Perhaps it was the performance of it all, but she could tell that
Tusem
rather believed her. If the roles were reversed, she
probably would have as well. Because if she wasn’t telling the truth, at least
according to how she saw things, she was a damn good liar.

             
“If... If I believed you...what did you want from me? All I know about it is what
I’ve already told you,” he finally relented.

             
“We were hoping that you would know more for starters. We’ve exhausted our
connections. And if you can’t help us, this thing is just going to keep coming
back and we don’t know what’s going to happen when it does,” Riley confessed as
he sat on the bed beside his wife.

             
“Why do you not just leave if you are worried about it coming back? Just get
out of the house”.

             
“We don’t actually know if it’s the house or if it’s us. We’ve been told, and
this is just a speculation, that the creature may be haunting us personally. We
could try and run away. But there isn’t a guarantee that it would work. Right
now we seem safe and we’re able to find out more about the thing which in turn
might allow us to keep it at bay. That seems like a better idea than suddenly
changing things up and hoping for the best”.

             
Tusem
looked back at the mirror with the tiniest hope
that there would be something there. He was hoping for something to prove that
he wasn’t just convincing himself of it all and wasting his own time.

             
“I’m sorry,” he said still looking away from the
Tylers
,
“I can’t help you any more than I already have”.

             
Everyone was quiet for a moment, contemplating the next steps. Did they now
drive him back to the restaurant and try to continue their search for
information? Without a lead where did that leave the
Tylers
?

             
“Can you read Squamish? If we got the book for you, could you tell us what it
says?”

             
Tsitusem’s
head titled slightly to the side as he
thought about the question.

             
“At the most I might recognize a few everyday words like ‘water’ or ‘family’, but
something as specific as this? A book related to some sort of ancient creature?
I doubt it. That doesn’t come up in regular conversations with the elders”.

             
Riley nodded in recognition of defeat and stood up, his wife following his lead.

Without even needing to be told
Tusem
fell in line, correctly assuming that they would be leaving.

As one the trio made the trek down the hall and the
winding stairs, into the living room and out of the front door. Whether it was
awkwardness or disappointment, all three seemed to be downtrodden. The
Tylers
were back to square one and
Tusem
was absent proof of his people’s history.

Outside the sky was even darker than it was before.
The clouds soared through the air like they were racing. The wind that blew through
the lakeside retreat of Killarney no longer mildly howled but savagely
screamed.

With a quick glance at his wife Riley headed towards
the driver’s seat while Violet walked towards the passenger’s.

Tsitusem
approached the rear
car door. His shocked yelp nearly drowned out by the sounds of the raging
weather as the young man jumped backwards from the vehicle.

             
Riley wasn’t even in the car when he had to stop and run around the hood to
meet up with the other two. Upon his arrival he was greeted by the familiar
silhouette of
Sourmouth
that stood staring back at
the three from the backseat window.

Its face was slightly obscured by the reflection of
the clouds that were whipping about above, but it was easy enough to see that
the beast was displeased. Its face was crunched up in a scowl, the blood still
oozing from the cracked skin that partially covered its mouth, a seemingly
permanent injury it wore proudly.
Sourmouth
paced
from the rear window to the passenger’s and back, utilizing its newfound
horizontal landscape to stretch its legs that were hidden from view.

             
“Holy...” understated
Tusem
as he crouched down to
stop himself from losing his balance and falling over.

             
The
Tylers
watched as the young man craned his neck
side to side, trying to figure out the trick behind the magic that he was
seeing. The wolf’s movements grew more and more agitated as it walked, its
muscles twitching as it inadvertently flexed. At the end of each stride the
creature would stop to look at the onlookers, pulling back the skin from its
muzzle to bare its fangs and silently growl before resuming its walk in the
other direction.

             
“Can it...do anything?” he asked the couple as he finally was able to stand up.

             
“That depends on how you define that. It seems to be able to move from one
reflective surface to another. At first it seemed to be confined in one room.
But then it could move around the whole house. And now it seems to not even be
restricted by that. At one point I also thought it could, I don’t
know...whisper in my head...it’s stupid,” Riley answered.

             
“We’re afraid of what it’s going to be able to do next,” Violet followed.

             
Just as
Tsitusem
was about to speak
Sourmouth
stopped in its tracks, looking out directly
towards the group as they casually talked about it like it wasn’t even there.
Without warning its body careened forward towards them as if it were going to
burst through the glass. And then as it got closer to making contact with its
side of the window it simply disappeared from view. 

The three nervously looked around, their heads
extended like
meerkats
trying to locate the looming
threat. From the taillights to the headlights they searched but none of them
could find
Sourmouth
no matter how hard they looked.

Violet stared at the window of the car where the wolf
had been, realizing the direction that it had walked in as it left. Her eyes
gazed
downward to the ground and on to their feet,
following through behind them and back to
Poyam’s
house.
Sourmouth
had gone inside.

“Should we...chase after it?”
Tusem
fretfully asked, not sure whether he’d like either answer.

And it was after he finished speaking that they all
simultaneously noticed that the wind had ceased. It was almost as if the breeze
itself halted as if not to so much as rustle the leaves.

“That can’t be a good omen,” Riley declared as he eyed
the trail back to the porch.

             
“What are we thinking? Should we stay or should we go?” she asked with a hand
on her husband’s elbow.

             
“If I have a vote I say that we do whatever is safest,”
Tusem
piped in with a forced grin cutting across his mouth. It was an air of confidence
that wasn’t fooling anyone, in the least himself.

             
“I thought the entire point of bringing you up here was to prove that
Sourmouth
was real. It’s here, most likely waiting for us
in the house and we’re ready to run away already?”

             
“And you have proved it. I’ve seen it. A wolf in the glass. What more is there
for me to see?”

             
“I don’t know, but we should try and find it, shouldn’t we? Who knows what’s
going to happen next? We could discover something astonishing. Even more than
we already have. I mean, what will happen if you can read from its book? We’ve
never even thought about trying to talk to it in its native language until you
got here,” Riley explained to him in effort to convince him to assist.

             
“But what do I get out of this? Huh? Why should I risk my neck to help you have
a conversation over tea with this bloody thing?”