Sourmouth (29 page)

             
“All we had to do was say its name and we seemed to have brought it to us. Who
knows what we could do if we figured out what the rest of this book
says.
We could end up with a very large house pet,” Violet
awkwardly joked as she stepped out of the room and back into the hallway.

             
The men followed her.  
             

             
“You hope to control it?”
Tusem
asked with his head
still halfway buried in the book. But even without him giving his full
attention the sound of concern in his voice was apparent.

             
“Control might be a strong word. We don’t want to put it in chains and drag it
onto a stage in front of the bright lights and ravenous crowd. But it would be
nice to not have to play these games all the time, searching and hoping to find
it. It would be even nicer not to have it stalk us from within the mirrors,
wanting to pick the meat off of our bones,” she said trying to rein in
Tsitusem’s
imagination.

             
The young man just made a sound of indifference that didn’t share his thoughts
on the subject in the slightest. The moral objections aside,
Tusem
wasn’t sure if domestication was the best option for
a mythical wolf.

             
The trio marched to the bedroom for the second time with book in hand.

             
As the group entered the room its gaze fell like weights.
Sourmouth
stood in its mirrored habitat with its forehead rested against the glass as if
it didn’t have anything else that it would possibly need to do. Its chest had
dried streams of blood running down its pectoral muscles from where it had
drooled onto itself. Its eyes were bloodshot, red veins strewn throughout the
vivid yellow globes. The wolf’s skin looked to have thinned even more than
before and took the appearance of a translucent grey layer of plastic.
Underneath its skin looked to be filled with a dense dark blue substance
reminiscent of coagulated blood.
Sourmouth
had begun
growing a wispy coat of white fur, thick only on the back of its neck like a
coarse mane.    

The creature’s eyes tracked the group as they moved,
switching from the people to the book that
Tusem
carried. It didn’t seem impressed by the object or the man holding it.

“This thing does grow quickly, doesn’t it?”
Tusum
asked rhetorically, admiring the speed of development
in the animal.

             
“Is it just me or does it seem undisturbed that we’ve decided to drop by?” she
said as she clutched her husband by his waist. It was notable that it
previously would venture off after making contact. Now it was comfortable in
their presence and possibly desiring it.

             
“He’s the one who choose to make himself known. If he wants time to himself he
wouldn’t have bothered coming out of the house,” Riley thought out loud.

             
Sourmouth’s
head rocked side to side, slapping gently
against the surface as if it was too tired to care about anything that was in
front of it.

             
“What do we do now?” questioned
Tsitusem
, finally
getting the nerve to look at
Sourmouth
face on.
Having been around the creature for a while without consequence he was slowly
becoming comfortable with the idea of them interacting with it. Alternative to
a newfound comfort was the possibility that he was listening to the
Tylers
far too much and it had impaired his judgment.

             
“You’ve got a book in your hand, why don’t you try reading from it?” Violet
suggested with her eyes wide open like a doe facing off with an oncoming
car. 

             
Tusem
shook his shoulders which he was unaware until
just then felt incredibly heavy. He had to rub his eyes, fix his hair and crack
his knuckles. He was doing everything he could to delay having to read from the
book. It was one thing to stand there and stare at the creature; it was another
thing to attempt to be the one to speak to it. But he realized that having him
read from it was pretty much the
Tylers’s
entire plan
before they even re-entered the house. 
             

             
Riley pulled his wife closer as
Tsitusem
carefully
tried to read out from the book, uttering words that were foreign to their ears
in a succinct way that emphasized each vowel to ensure that nothing was
mispronounced.

             
With mild annoyance
Sourmouth
used its face for
leverage to push off of the mirror to stand upright, leaving behind a smear of
red goo from its cracking and bloody cheeks.

             
Tusem
continued to try and read, his voice frequently
starting and stopping and repeating as he tried to figure out the words written
on the papers. Sometimes he would say something in Squamish, stop and curse in
English before saying something different afterwards as if correcting himself.

             
The creature’s expression wasn’t that of wild fury but that of boredom. It was
clear that it wasn’t sure what the humans were attempting to do. Or it purely
didn’t care. The beast just stood within its glass prison, its head slightly
nodding as it rocked on its feet.

             
Violet looked at
Sourmouth’s
face, which reflected
nothing but its utter indifference. She was hoping that it was just daft. But
thus far it was more than likely that the book wasn’t going to do anything.

             
“
Tusem
, I think you should stop”.

             
“What? Why?” her husband asked confusedly. He had been so wrapped up in what
Tusem
was doing that he hadn’t read the situation the same
as her.

             
“Should I continue?”
Tsitusem
said, his question
directed solely to Riley as if he were the orchestrator of their macabre show.

             
Violet was somewhat offended that the young student had decided to take
direction from her husband and not count her opinion equally, but she didn’t
see the offence as something big enough to matter at the time. There were more
important troubles at hand.

             
“Look at this thing. Does it look like it cares about you reading from that
infernal book?” she persisted as she cautiously backed away from the scene.

Tusem
closed the book around
his finger to not lose the page, “What do you suggest then? I thought that our
only stratagem was to see what happens when we read from this book”.

             
“Whether it was our only plan or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s not
working”.

             
The guys gawked at
Sourmouth
who complacently stared
back, its mouth cocked in a tiny smirk at their expense.

             
Riley huffed and stepped back too, pacing around the room fretfully and around
the unmoving statue that was his wife.

             
Tusem
closed the book proper and tossed it to Riley,
who caught it and threw it on the bed.

             
“What next?” Riley enquired to the group as he tried to run a groove into the
ground.

             
“If we cannot elicit a response from the wolf, we elicit a response from the
people that we want to impress,”
Tusem
answered.

             
“What the hell does that mean?” Riley asked in a grimace.

             
“The end goal was to bring
Sourmouth
to the people at
large, right? One way or another, that ends up being the media. You wanted to
go down in the annals of history. That means we need documentation. If we can’t
bring the creature to them, we bring them to the creature. Let us reach out to
some of the local news stations in the city and see if we can get a crew here
to film it”.

             
“You saw how hard it was to get you here. And you were already interested in
Squamish lore. How do you think we’re going to fare trying to get a news team
here? ‘Excuse me mister anchorman, but would you happen to want to spend the
day travelling to visit a decrepit house in the boonies to see a mythological
wolf creature that lives in our mirror?’” Violet said to try and debunk the
idea. She realized that it was hypocritical that she would shoot down the
student’s idea given that she and her husband planned something similar. Having
heard the plan fall from the mouth of someone else helped to expose a few flaws
in their previous idea.

             
Tsitusem
understood her trepidation, more than she
could ever understand. It was a well-known secret that the native population
didn’t have the respect of the people that they shared their land with. And if
they couldn’t get the police or government to pay them any attention when they
needed it, then they would surely have difficulties trying to bring the news to
them over something as farfetched as the paranormal. But this time
Tusem
had a trump card
:,
two
wholesome white Americans.

             
“We take them evidence. We take them the book and a photograph of the creature.
We give them enough to hopefully garner notice, if nothing else as a special
interest piece that they can tack on at the end of the sports segment when they
need to fill time. Why they get here does not matter. Because when they arrive
they will surely change their minds about how much attention they should be
giving the story”.

             
“That’s actually not bad. But who’s to say that they are going to have any
interest at all in listening to us about this?” Riley asked.

             
Tusem
took a few seconds to pause and think, “You
approach them with the angle that you have evidence about an unsolved murder
that took place here. About the father of the girl Violet told me about. Say
that you’re detectives from the States or something and you have figured out
who the murderer was. It does not matter why they come, as long as they come”.

             
Violet nodded in tentative agreement. It was a much better plan than trying to
convince anyone of some sort of supernatural beast. At least the better plan
until they could think of something else.

             
“But what’s your part in this? Were you our Sherpa or something?”

             
Tusem
shook his head, “I have no part in this until
you get back and convince them that
Sourmouth
is not
just a smoke-and-mirror trick. As soon as they see me involved you are going to
run into trouble getting them to believe you”.

             
“What do you mean? The more witnesses the more credible our story is going to
seem,” said Riley.

             
“Not here. We natives have a...stressed history with the white locals. Racial
and political tensions are still rife here. It is better if you two went alone.
Trust me”.

             
The
Tylers
weren’t convinced that they were better
off without
Tusem’s
involvement, as they didn’t have
the level of knowledge about Vancouver that they might need. But it didn’t seem
like convincing
Tusem
was an option.

             
“So are we dropping the idea of the book and the photograph altogether and
going with the evidence of the murder?” Riley asked as he began to gather his
wits about him to switch mental gears.

             
“Maybe you should take those anyway as a backup plan”.

             
“Slight hiccup in that though, we don’t have a photo of
Sourmouth
.
We don’t even have a camera or anything to take one,” Violet pointed out.

             
Tsitusem
looked at the
Tylers
like they just grew extra arms.

             
“Where are you from, the 1920s?”

             
Tusem
reached into his pocket and pulled out a small
black sliding smartphone. The young man turned around towards the mirror where
Sourmouth
stood hunched over. For the first time since the
group had entered the room did it seem even slightly
disturbed.

             
When
Tsitusem
extended his arm to aim the camera at
the wolf, it began to growl. The sound filled the room like a thin mist,
itching across the trio’s skin.

             
Without time for objection,
Tusem
clicked the button
on his phone to take the picture.

             
Instantly, the mirror shattered. Thousands of shards of glass exploded outwards
towards the group, covering the ground with its shiny remnants. All that
remained in the wooden frame was the empty backboard. The only thing that
reflected from the glass on the ground was the ceiling and the shocked faces of
the group standing above it.

             
“What the fuck just happened?” yelled Violet as she stepped forward, crunching
the glass underneath her shoes.

             
It wasn’t rhetorical, but the guys treated it just the same.