Sourmouth (8 page)

Riley scanned through the book, looking at nothing but
page after page of comparable artwork to what came before and to that of which
was scribbled on the wall in the bedroom below the attic.

“Do you really think that the owner of that silly room
was also our author?” Violet asked, stopping Riley on a particularly violent
looking tableau as he flipped through.

He shrugged, turning the book askew to see if he could
make better sense of the assortment of body parts that it seemed to depict,
“It’s as good a guess as any. I certainly wouldn’t want to meet the kid, he
seems like a bit of a nutcase”.

Violet sneered, “Or it could have been a girl”.

“Or girl,” he begrudgingly conceded.

“Hey, what’s that?” Violet asked as she stopped him on
another page.

It was a separated sheet situated in the crease of the
middle of the book and looked to have been torn out at some point and
reinserted. It showed the same shadowy figure as the previous pages and on the
wall in the attic room, but this time it was more roughly etched with rapid
scratching motions instead of smoother drawings as before. It had the same red
lettering as the other pages, but had a more recent addition of blue ink
overtop from what looked like it came from an old fountain pen. Riley found
himself spellbound as he gripped the bizarre book between his fingers as he
took a deep breath before uttering the word written, “
Sourmouth
...”

The effect was almost instantaneous. They both had
suddenly unexplainable pits in their stomachs that seemed to turn and twist
fiercely. The hair was raised on their arms and on the nape of their necks as
if it were trying to escape on its own accord. To make the swift sickness even
worse, the couple were immediately overcome with a chill down to their very
bones as if they had been stuck outside in the woods overnight without so much
as their skin to keep them warm.

“Fucking hell...” Violet mumbled to herself as she ran
her hands down her goose-bump-covered arms in effort to regain the feeling in
her nerves.

Riley slammed the book shut and tossed it to the
ground. It unexpectedly felt incredibly heavy, as if it had been weighted by a
bag of stones since he had first picked it up. He stared down at the journal as
if it had personally given him offence. Rationally, it wasn’t possible that the
thing could cause anything to happen beyond a paper cut. And yet he couldn’t
explain why the book made him angry. And in turn not being able to explain it
made him even angrier.

“I’m going to throw this fucking thing back into the
attic where it belongs and we’re not going to think about it anymore. I don’t
want you going up there. And I don’t want you exploring the rest of the house.
We’re going to go to bed and we’re going to wake up and have a nice fucking
vacation,” he commanded in a tone that Violet wasn’t sure she had ever heard
him use.

With his elbows rested on his knees and his head held
down towards the book, Riley cut her a stern steely eyed glance that seemed to
be trying to warn her in silence. Maybe it was that she was still trying to
regain her composure from feeling nauseous, but for the first time in their
relationship she was slightly scared of her husband.

“Yeah...sorry,” she answered, not quite sure what she
was apologizing for but felt the need to say it just the same. She felt a bit
guilty for having goaded him so strongly into opening the book after he started
having reservations. But aside from getting the creeps nothing actually was
wrong. As far as she figured her husband was upset at her for no real reason.

“Let’s get some sleep,” she agreed, knowing full well
she’d probably be wide awake into the morning.

Riley picked up the book with both hands as if to
protect it from someone trying to take it from him and burst to his feet.

Violet watched as he left the room silently to go and
return it to its original resting place. It was only when she was alone did she
realize how unsafe she suddenly felt. She knew that it was an irrational
feeling, that it was just the combination of the nightmare and the frightening
house that was playing havoc on her tired mind. But no matter how much she
willed it away she couldn’t shake the sense of unease that had overcome her.

Seconds ticked by and then minutes as she waited for
her husband to return. She couldn’t hear him from within the master bedroom.
Violet couldn’t tell if he was in the other room, if he was in the attic or
even in the bathroom. All she knew was that she was alone and increasingly
scared.

“Riley!” she called out in a surprisingly shaky voice
that startled her.

Her call got no response.

“Riley!” she repeated with a bit more power behind her
tone.

But still she got no reply.

Violet started pacing the room. She was suddenly aware
of every action she made. She noticed that her breath was shallow and quickly
paced and that her feet felt numb as they brushed against the cold wood floor.
She had unknowingly started to hug herself with her hands to try to keep
herself calm. She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about it all, like when
you realize that you can’t get your tongue to sit right in your mouth or that
you need to force yourself to blink. While the hyper awareness was annoying to
think about, it was all a nice diversion from feeling so scared.  

And that’s when she saw it. Out of the corner of her
eye she saw a dark figure hidden in shadow. Violet was instantly gripped with
terror and found herself unable to move. Her feet felt like they were frozen
still on blocks of ice and that she’d need to rip herself free if she were to
try to run. She desperately wanted to call out to her husband, in part to
ensure that it wasn’t him that she was seeing and in part to have someone to
save her if it wasn’t.

With a mouth as arid as the world’s driest desert she
tried to swallow and breathe and for the longest moment she wasn’t sure she
knew how. Violet found that the very air seemed to get stuck in her throat like
needles and choke her. If the mystery figure didn’t kill her, the fear almost
certainly would.

Violet tensed up and tried to force herself to turn
towards the shadow that stalked from behind her. If the thing in the unknown
hadn’t already attacked then certainly it couldn’t have been dangerous. So she
thought. It must be fine to turn and face whatever it was that was watching her
so intently.

With more courage than she ever thought she would have
Violet found the she was slowly swiveling on the balls of her feet. Without
thinking about it she was in a position similar to that of someone readying to
run at top speed despite the fact that her feet would probably fail her before
she left the starting line.

When her eyes began to focus she was both
simultaneously relieved and confused. It wasn’t some dark figure hiding in the
corner of the room; it was a dark figure facing back at her from within the
full length mirror situated on the wall opposite the bed.

The entity in the mirror was tall, taller than the
mirror could adequately hold within its boundaries. Its feet from the knees
down were obscured and lost to the bottom of the frame, its head rising above
Violet’s and near the top of the almost six foot tall mirror. It was lanky in
shape, with a body wafer-thin and dangling arms that seemed to hang on the side
of its body like foreign life forms unaware of how they should be attached to
the torso. Its hands were the size of baseball gloves with long, sharp fingers
that waved in unison with one another at its side.

The mirror copied the room behind Violet as it should
have; however her own reflection was concealed by that of the figure. The
perfect mimicry of the mirror ruined by the concealing figure, which was
unbelievably out-of-focus like the reflection of the sky on an ocean in a
storm. Its body was cast in a faint shimmering shadow that didn’t originate
from her side of the room, which made it impossible to make out details of the
thing. She could just barely make out its basic form in the darkness that it
hid in.

From what Violet could manage to see she thought the
sight was too ridiculous to be real in its own right. From what she could
gather the thing looked as if it was almost featureless. It stood naked without
hair or accessories on its body. As it swayed on its feet to and fro Violet
could have sworn that its face was nothing but blank skin. It didn’t have a visible
nose or a mouth or even eyes. It had nothing on its face except for the shapes
of what should have been there underneath the surface like protruding bone
underside of skin.

A gasp of air escaped Violet’s mouth that she hadn’t
been aware she was trapping. As foolish as it was, she carefully scanned the
room with her strained and tired eyes to make sure she was actually alone. To
her simultaneous comfort and dismay she was indeed on her lonesome, which meant
that whatever she was looking at truly was only standing in the mirror.

With the steps of someone who was trying to remember
how to walk she moved forward towards the figure, who continued to stand
patiently within the confines of his glass prison.

As Violet got closer it began to leisurely react. Its
first movement was to cock its head to the side like a bewildered dog. It
seemed to be watching her with the eyes that it didn’t seem to have. It was
studying her movements and trying to understand her in the same way she wanted
to know everything about it. Standing a foot from the mirror Violet stopped,
wary of getting any closer in case it was capable of lashing out.

Against her better judgement she slowly began to reach
outward to touch it.

She jumped backward and yelped as it reached back
towards her.

Her instincts told her to run, to move as fast as her
wobbling legs could carry her to safety. But then her head won out as she
realized that the thing wasn’t trying to grab her...it was mimicking her
movements. Like a true reflection the figure began to copy every action that
she took. From the subtle twitches in her shaking hands to the exaggerated
twists that her body took as she prepared to take flight.

“This isn’t fucking real,” she whispered to herself as
she tried to steady her nerves.

With a deep breath and a reinvigorated sense of
bravery she stepped forward again. This time she moved with purpose and with a
shaky confidence. Once more she put out her hand, inching her index finger
towards the mirror. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to validate everything
she knew about how the world worked and that the surface of the mirror was
actually where it was supposed to be. She wanted to know for sure that whatever
it was that she was seeing was real and not a figment of an exhausted imagination.
Every inch that she gained so did the creature, moving as cautiously as she was
until they were both almost touching one another. Violet clenched her entire
body, bracing herself for whatever might come as she attempted to make contact.

“What are you doing?” a deep voice asked abruptly.

Violet nearly fell over as she jolted backwards on
impulse as if it was the figure in the mirror that spoke to her. She turned to
the doorway where Riley stood with his arms crossed, looking grave and a very
much irked.

“Um,” she started, her brain failing to find the words
to explain what was going on.

She turned back towards the mirror and was shocked to
find nothing but her own reflection. The faceless thing was gone and all that
was left was her utterly shocked surprise and the empty room behind her.

“There...there was something in there,” she said with
as much conviction as someone claiming to have seen Santa Claus after one too
many glasses of spiked eggnog.

“What was in where? Something was in the mirror?”
Riley asked incredulously as he re-entered the room.

He walked up to the mirror and gave it a quick glance
before diverting his gaze to his wife and then back to the mirror. Whatever his
wife had seen he clearly wasn’t seeing the same.

“You mean there was something on the mirror? Or
behind? Like a bug?” he asked, as he curiously started running his fingers over
the frame.

Violet barely had time to try to warn him before he
lifted it from the wall, hanging it perilously on the nail above it.

“There’s nothing here, Violet,” he said plainly,
holding out the mirror from the wall with his hand as if he was proving
something.

Violet carefully stepped forward, her caution looking
highly irrational to her husband. As he had said there wasn’t anything hiding
behind the mirror. There was no trapdoor or hidden monster. It was just a dirty
wall with really ugly wallpaper.

Riley dropped the mirror back to its resting place
with a dull thud that startled his wife’s already shot nerves. Part of her was
unsure if what she had seen was actually there at all or if it had all just
been her head making her see things.

Violet looked at her husband unsurely. It wasn’t often
that she felt so self-conscious, especially with her husband. She didn’t know
what to say next to get him to stop looking at her like she was losing it.

“What was it that you think that you saw?” he asked
with his eyes narrow like that of a gumshoe from a black and white noir film.