Sourmouth (30 page)

             
The mirror had broken, and
Sourmouth
was gone.

             
“Should I repeat the question until someone tries to come up with an answer?”

             
“How am I supposed to know?” Riley replied angrily as he walked over to the
pile of bits and pieces, shoving them around with his foot.

             
“I think I made a grave mistake,”
Tsitusem
muttered
as he knelt down and looked at what was left of the mirror.

             
“If you know something you better start talking,” she said as she walked over
and ripped
Tusem’s
phone from his hand.

             
“Um...I don’t know for sure...but I think it was the photograph”.

             
“What do you mean ‘it was the photograph’?”

             
“That broke the mirror,”
Tusem
clarified with wide
eyes.

“Why would it break the mirror?” asked Riley.

“It is just a theory, but have you ever heard of that
old legend about photographs stealing your soul?”

“Yeah...”

“I think
Sourmouth
has heard
of it, too”.

“Guys, we didn’t even get a picture. We just have a
bunch of blurry glass falling,” Violet groaned as she clicked through the
smartphone.

             
Riley stood up and stormed his way to his wife’s side, looking over her
shoulder at the less-than-stellar picture that was taken.

             
“What do we do now?” he asked as he contemplated whipping the phone against the
wall across the room.

             
Tsitusem
was still kneeling over the glass shards and
hardly paying the couple any attention.

             
“
Tusem
,” Violet repeated her husband.

             
He snapped back to them with a look of nervousness as if everything that was
happening had just finally hit him.

             
“I think you need to leave,” he said without volunteering an explanation.

             
“What do you mean ‘leave’?” Violet asked him as she and her husband loomed over
the man.

             
He stood up to face the couple, “You should get off of the island completely.
Not to go and get a news crew, that idea is dead. If there’s nothing here to
show them then there’s no point in trying to convince anyone”.

             
“There’s nothing here to show them? Why can’t we just find
Sourmouth
in another surface like in the bathroom or one of the windows downstairs?”
Violet asked, her nerves shot and her body gradually increasing in the amount
that it was shaking.   

             
“I don’t think that it’s going to be returning anytime soon. I think I fucked
up,” he declared, his eyes sending blaring alarms to the
Tylers
that they should be taking his warnings seriously.

             
“So run away as far as we can go? Is that back to America? Should we be taking
a flight overseas?” Riley asked, unsure of how screwed they actually were.

             
Tsitusem
tried to answer but it only came out in
stammers. He stopped and took a few moments to regain his composure before
continuing.

“I think that
Sourmouth
isn’t stuck in his reflections anymore. You said that you think that
Sourmouth
is ‘bound’ to you. I am worried about what a free
Sourmouth
might be capable of doing in a situation
like this. Further might be better. Get to the docks. Get to the Vancouver
airport and get far, far away from here”.

             
The
Tylers
looked at each other, the fright
unmistakably draped across their faces.

             
“What are you going to do?” Violet asked the student, her feet almost ready to
move her out the door as she spoke.

             
He made a large shrugging motion and just shook his head.

             
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay back here. I mean, it isn’t after me. I can
explore the house. I can make a trip to a few of the reservations and ask
around about the legend. Basically, I’ll be your watchtower”.

             
“Ok. Ok. Let’s say that we leave. What next? When can we go home? Or even feel
comfortable that we’re not going to have our guts torn out?” Riley inquired
fully knowing that the young man wouldn’t have definitive answers. But damn it
if answers weren’t deserved in trade for sending them running so abruptly.

             
“Take my phone with you. It has my home number saved in the contacts. You can
call me for updates when I get back to the city. Or I’ll call you when I have
something important. Other than that, I don’t have any answers for you”.

             
Violet nodded and pulled on her husband’s arm as a hint to get moving. She
realized that they weren’t going to get any further than that and time was
crucial.

             
Riley resisted her pull enough to turn back to
Tusem
,
extending his hand towards the student.

             
“Things haven’t exactly going swimmingly tonight, but I thank you for trying.
And I am sorry that we’ve put you in this situation”.

             
Tsitusem
laughed with a small croak in his throat, “I
am sorry, too...I wish I could have known more before I tried helping...”

             
And with a quick handshake they parted, with
Tusem
remaining in the master bedroom and the
Tylers
sprinting down the steps and out of the doors of
Poyam’s
house for hopefully the last time.

Chapter 16

             
The weather had turned from being an impending storm to being a raging tempest
while they were huddled together in the dilapidated house. It was amazing that
they hadn’t noticed the roaring winds and the downfall of freezing rain that
threatened to blow the house into the lake. But despite the looming flood,
Sourmouth
was the greater concern. What was a possibly
dangerous experiment suddenly become an oncoming train veering off of the
tracks. And the
Tylers
didn’t know which direction to
run to get away from it.

             
The scramble out of the front door was halted only briefly by the need to grab
their jackets to shield themselves from the rain. It was on the porch that they
smelled it. The air carried the putrid scent of rotten meat that sickened them
to their very cores. It was an unexpected assault on their senses that begged
them to throw up on their feet.

             
Violet was the first to see them. She was the first to respond with a deafening
scream.

             
Laid out in front of the house in a showcase of blood and bone were the
carcasses of almost two dozen eviscerated animals. Sporadically arranged in a
circular spread were deer, rabbits, squirrels and birds. All of them long-dead
and apparently gutted from the stomach, their intestines oozing onto the muddy
ground from gaping holes in their bodies. Large chunks of meat lay about
interspersed with half-chewed-on paws and an assortment of various teeth. 
  

             
Tsitusem
burst out of the doorway and approached from
behind, rushing to come to the couple’s aid should he be able to. But it was
the young man that reacted the worst to the scene. Immediately, the combination
of the rancid meat-smell mixed with the visual evidence of a horrific slaughter
took its toll, forcing him to vomit violently over the banister of the porch
into the bushes below.

             
Riley was the first to step forward, his feet barely touching the ground as he
walked lightly towards the animals. The thing he noticed before anything else
was that the path of bodies seemed to follow along the way directly to their
car. It was the world’s most horrifying trail of breadcrumbs that strongly
suggested that the
Tylers
should immediately take
their leave. The second thing was that the rain seemed to flood the open
cavities in the bodies, causing what was left of the blood inside to spill
outwards until it dyed the mud a dark crimson.

             
“What the hell is all this?”
Tusem
yelled from behind
his hands on the porch as he attempted to mask some of the smells.

             
Riley looked down at one of the deer carrion, its flesh liquefying and filled
with flesh flies and maggots. “It’s a message”.

             
Violet stepped off of the porch and started towards her husband, hoping to make
it to the car without vomiting herself. She contemplated closing her eyes to
avoid looking but didn’t want to risk tripping and landing face first in
something’s ribcage.

             
“I think you need to leave,” Riley yelled to the student just as his wife made
it to his side.

             
Through a hacking cough
Tusem
responded, “No, I think
I will stay. Nothing has changed for me despite this...show. The creature is
still focused on you, not me. I will be fine”.

             
It might have been that he couldn’t regain his composure as he stood outside
amongst the bloody wreckage, but
Tsitusem’s
face told
the tale that even the student didn’t quite believe what he was saying.

             
Riley nodded to
Tusem
a second goodbye as he urgently
pulled his wife along to the car.

             
The car itself was yet another demonstration of the seriousness that they were
neck deep in, as it had recently been decorated by four long slash marks along
the side of the passenger door. About an inch wide each and almost two inches
deep the cuts tore through the
fibreglass
hull and
into the frame. With little more than a secondary glance Riley almost yanked
the doors off their hinges as he rushed to get his wife and himself to safety.

             
Riley kicked the gas pedal down and the car jumped forward, its wheels throwing
the mud born from the rain into the air behind them. They sped down the
mountain roads a bit too perilously, sending them sliding across their seats
and against the car doors. The trees whizzed past, a sign of ground being
gained. The rain bounced off of the windshield as if the speeding car was
trying to retaliate against the storm.      
             

             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
             
              #

             
What was normally a tedious slog went by like the trip had been played on
fast-forward. The
Tylers
’ vehicle swerved around the
bend to the Bowen Island docks where a line of cars sat in a row towards the
entry gate. From the agitation on the faces of the drivers it was clear that
they had either been there for a while or were going to be. That wasn’t news
that the
Tylers
wanted to hear as they looked over
the raging waves of the water before them.

             
They pulled up behind a grey compact and turned off the engine. Without needing
to share words the couple both stepped out of the car. They were shocked by the
savagery of the increasing downpour that drenched their clothing in seconds,
sending a chill over their already shaking bodies. The duo approached the
ticket counter where a solemn-looking middle-aged man sat with his arms crossed
in a baggy winter coat with a fur lined hood. His eyebrows were grey and thick
enough to keep falling water or burning sun from ever falling into his eyes.

             
Riley tapped with his knuckles on the window hard enough jolt the man to his
feet to slide open the Plexiglas.

             
“Can I help you?” the man asked with the annoyance clear in his voice as he
eyed the couple thoughtfully.

             
“We need to get two tickets to the city,” Riley answered with insistence, his
eyes red with exhaustion.

             
The man exaggeratedly leaned in his chair and looked over the couple’s
shoulders to the lineup of cars building behind them. He returned to his seat
with a dry smile.

             
“You see those cars behind
you?”             

             
“Is that rhetorical?”

             
“It depends on whether or not you can see them”.

             
“I can fucking see them; what about it?” Riley asked irately, his fists
clenching against the counter in front of him.  

             
“That’s the line of people that also want to get to Vancouver. But they aren’t
going anywhere which means you aren’t going anywhere,” the man stated.

             
Violet leaned in against her husband to talk through the window.

             
“Can you tell us why no one is going anywhere?”