Sourmouth (5 page)

Riley smirked back.

With purpose Riley walked towards the house, dragging
his luggage behind him.

“What are you exactly planning on doing? Unless you
know how to pick a lock...” Violet questioned, dragging her own collection of
luggage along the ground.

Riley didn’t bother answering as he dropped his stuff
and stepped onto the wooden deck.

The house was two floors of old world wood with an
attic and a basement. It was nearly perfectly square in shape about thirty feet
in each direction in terms of size. The roof was angled slightly to the left,
which gave it an almost modern look as if it were stylized instead of just
poorly built. The windows were filthy with accumulated grime and grit from
countless seasons of storms. To the back of the abode was what looked like an
outhouse.
To the front was a pile of wood and a rusted axe
for chopping. There wasn’t a garden or a garage to the property. And if there
was any bit of contemporary living built into the house, it was well and truly
hidden from sight. 

Riley walked up to the wooden front door, twisted the
knob and gave it a push with his foot.

Nothing.

He twisted again and gave it a harder push just in
case it was jammed shut.

Still nothing.

With the walk of a deflated cartoon character he
proceeded to patrol the perimeter, eyeing every inch of the exterior as he
walked along. His wife dropped her own luggage and decided to follow him along
with her arms crossed over her chest in attempt to keep warm in the quickly
chilling air.

Finally Riley found something that looked workable, a
torso high window frame that already looked halfway broken into. “I need
something to pry this open. You think the rental car has some sort of crowbar
or something?” Riley asked as he tried to slide the window upwards using the
friction from the palms of his hands.

“Do you think they normally rent cars to burglars? Why
would there be a crowbar in the car?” she replied.

He turned back to her, “Then how about you find me a
thick stick? Something that won’t snap with a little bit of pressure”. 

Violet shook her head as she turned around and headed
back towards the front of the house. It was only then that she realized how
eerie Killarney Lake was as she looked out towards the serene waters.

The hint of sun that had been resting in the sky had
fallen into the night and the beautiful hues that had impressed so greatly
before had given way to nearly complete darkness. The many trees and plants
became large and looming shadows that hide many sounds from unknown sources.
Each unidentified rustle raised the hair on Violet’s neck. With an odd sense of
danger around her she rushed forward to one of the bags that she had dropped on
the ground and started rummaging through the compartments.

Common sense told her that nothing was out there.
Nothing but animals, fuzzy and cute with big googly eyes like stuffed toys
filled with fluff. There hadn’t been anyone that they saw on the way up to the
lake and there certainly wouldn’t be anyone out there now simply because it had
suddenly gotten dark. But when fear takes hold it’s not common sense that grips
you, it’s the many horror stories that were told around the camp fires. It’s
the horror stories that actually ring true in the news at eleven o’clock with
its gruesome details too violent for the showing at six. And with those
thoughts in mind Violet had the sudden desperate need to get inside where she
wasn’t so exposed to the world of darkness that lived before her.

Violet grabbed a long metal nail file from one of her
bags and practically sprinted back to Riley, who was still enraptured with the
task of trying to get into the window using his bare hands.

“Here,” she said slightly out of breath, “try using
this”.

Wordlessly he took the file like he was a doctor being
handed a scalpel by his loyal busty nurse. Riley slid the file underneath the
frame of the window and pushed downward on the handle, creating a small lever.
With a crack the window rose about two inches from its starting position.

“Ah ha!” Riley proclaimed loudly which startled his
still nervous wife.

“Let’s just get inside, shall we?” she said, “I’m
starting to get the creeps out here...”

Riley started to lift the window higher up so that
they might be able to fit through it, when he felt something strange on the
bottom of the frame. A texture that he couldn’t quite place and certainly
wasn’t expecting. As he pulled his hand away, he could see that it was covered
in dozens of tiny translucent dots. Tiny insect eggs were just dripping from
the rotten wood that had now been exposed to the air for the first time in many
years.

Violet almost gagged as she watched her husband try to
shake the bug sacks off of his hand. It took nearly a full minute of flicking
and scraping his hand against his shoe before he was sure they were all off of
him. 

After taking a few deep breaths it was Violet that was
able to crack the first smile, albeit a small one.

“What’s so funny?” he asked her, pointing his now
clean hand at the open gap, “You’re going to have to go through there. I can’t
fit my ass through this little frame”.

Instantly her amusement vanished, replaced by wide
eyed revulsion, “No fucking way am I going in there. You can forget it mister.
I’d rather freeze to death in the car”.

“I hope you mean that because if we don’t get in there
tonight then we’re not getting in there any night. We might as well get it over
with unless you think that you can magically find the key”.

She looked around in a panic, trying to find an
alternative solution, “How about you just kick in the front door? We’ll pay the
old woman back for the damages after. The new door can be the one thing in the
entire house that’s less than fifty years old. She’ll be happy that we added
value to the place for when she sells it”.

Riley scrunched up his face in befuddlement, “What do
I look like to you? A secret agent? Does it at all seem like I’m the type that
can go around kicking in doors? Unless you want to carry me around on your
shoulders for the rest of the week after I break my damn ankle, I think that
you need to grab yourself by your ovaries and woman up and go on through this
window”.

Without waiting for a response Riley started to shimmy
out of his sweater, leaving himself exposed to the bitter wind in a thin black
sleeveless shirt. He proceeded to gently place the sweater over the bottom
portion of the window frame, covering the collection of eggs that had amassed
after falling from the rotten frame that they had called home above, “After you
my lady”.

Begrudgingly Violet accepted that there wasn’t really
an alternative, “I hope you know that I despise you”.

He just smiled as she began to inch forward towards
her goal. Riley got into a crouching position in front his wife and put out his
folded hands in front of him like he was practicing a routine in cheerleading
practice.

“Are you planning on vaulting me in?” she asked,
stopping a foot shy of whatever he was currently thinking of doing.

“Unless you think you can just make the jump through
yourself, I thought I’d help you in so you didn’t snap your neck falling to the
other side” he answered while still holding the pose.

Violet shook her head as she placed her right foot
into his hands and grabbed a hold of the sides of the window frame. In one
heaving motion she rose upwards and into a ducking position.

Quickly she stuck her left leg through the window and
into the house with most of her torso following suit, landing from her 7/10
launch by straddling the frame between her thighs. Despite knowing better, she
couldn’t resist looking upwards at the cavernous piece of wood that held the
glass above her. As expected but not hoped for it was chewed up and decayed by
whatever vile bug that chose to make it its home. With a shudder she shifted
her weight to the side onto her left
arse
cheek and
pulled in her right leg so she could finally complete the dismount.

With a thick thud and a slight creak of the wood
below, Violet landed on both feet inside of the house, safe from both broken
neck and man eating insects. Inside was nearly pitch dark and just barely
illuminated by the faint light outside dancing off of the water from the stars
in the night sky. She could only make out the faintest of shapes; a wooden
desk, a lopsided book shelf, a sunken in chair and a tall lamp on an end table.
Violet slowly etched forward in fear of stubbing her toe on some unforeseen
object before her. After a few seconds of fumbling she managed to find the
lamp’s knob and turned it on with a forced click.

It might have been her first world privileged
lifestyle, but part of her preferred the room before it was filled with the
dusty light of the lamp. Even without touching anything Violet could
practically feel the accumulated inches of dust and dirt that covered every
surface around her. The musk was undeniable, as if the grime itself were
scented. Everything in the room looked to have been a hundred years old, even
if it had been most likely made in the past few decades. It was if everything
was stuck in a mystical vortex that pulled it out of the early 20th century.
The chair was made of thick wicker that splintered out into every direction,
the shelves and table were made up of untarnished fir wood, the large patterned
rug under her feet an indiscernible woven mess. It appeared that the room was
used as a reading area for whoever lived there before. Though from the sparse
density of actual books it seemed like the room didn’t see much action in its
heyday.

“If you wouldn’t mind hurrying it up in there, it’s
pretty fucking cold out here. Could you please go and open the front door?”
Riley called out.

In Violet’s haze of examining the room, she completely
forgot she actually had a mission to carry out.

With a cautious gallop she exited into the
semi-hallway, which quickly gave access to the left of it to the wide open living
room that was still engulfed in shadow. This sight required pause. For a reason
she couldn’t put a finger on she felt suddenly intensely uncomfortable. As if
she was in a place she didn’t belong, like a child exploring in the dangerous
attic after being expressly forbidden to do so by an angry father. Without the
illumination of the starlight from the reading room window she couldn’t even
begin to find her way through the darkness to locate some sort of alternative
light.

“To think...I could be at home right now in my warm
pajamas, sipping a spiced chai tea while watching good looking doctors make out
on television,” she mused as she took one restrained step forward after another.

In a blind stroke of luck she could see slivers of
light through the cracks in the curtain across the room, which provided general
markers of where she was in the darkness. She could tell that one of the walls
was approximately 10 feet to the right of her, with no windows to the left or
rear she reasoned due to the lack of shimmering slivers. She made the logical
guess that the front door had to be ahead of her, as the light was fairly
strong, most likely because it was the front of the house in the direction of
the reflection of the lake.

Her guess paid off as she brushed her hand against the
door as she went blindly searching for the lock. It was only about the size of
her thumb and cold to the touch, turning with a loud thud as if it had been a
deadbolt.

With urgency Riley opened the door himself from the
outside, rushing inwards with both of their luggage collections trailing behind
him.

“Damn, that got cold fast,” he said as he dropped
everything into a pile.

“Yeah, too bad you’re going to have to burn that
sweater otherwise it might have come in handy in the future,” Violet responded
as she searched for a light in the pale moonlight that crept in through the
open door.

“That’s a pity, I really liked that sweater. But yeah,
I’d prefer not to have bugs burrowing under my skin just to combat a chill,” he
agreed as he started feeling along the walls for a light switch Violet
instinctively knew wouldn’t be there.

Instead he grazed his hand across what felt like a
string.

“Good riddance,” she responded as she managed to bump
into another end table with a lamp, “It was an ugly thing. It was like a bad
Christmas sweater without the X-Mas cheer”.

With another click she was able to bring the room to
life, which only revealed her stationary husband looking slightly dejected with
his arms hung low by his side. She realized that she might have insulted him
slightly by accident, but knew him well enough that drawing attention to it
would only make it worse. What she was able to notice was the key in his hand,
hung on the end of a long leather-like cord.

“Where did you find that?”

“Against the wall,” he replied rather dejectedly.

“I wonder if that’s the same key she had us searching
in the damn dirt for”.

He shrugged, “Doesn’t matter, does it?”

“I suppose not. It saves us from having to crawl in
and out of the window though”.

The living area kept the reading room’s pre-modern
civilization’s homely aesthetic. In the middle of it was a puke green couch
with tears patched up with duct tape and scratches from some long deceased
animal that may or may not have been a house pet. The walls were mostly exposed
wooden planks, with patches of smoke stained floral wallpaper that had never
been completed. There was an old timey radio set about the size of a small
jukebox underneath the window to the right of the house that was covered in
cobwebs that hung from the dials.