Sourmouth

by Cyle James

  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 moonl
ight 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.

  To the side of the window stood a large oak cuckoo clock with rusted metal numbers. In the center of the ceiling hung a red string dream catcher adorned with thin grey feathers from an unidentified bird. To the West of the living room was the reading room that Violet had entered through. To the East was the small alcove kitchen with a single range stove and the type of fridge that advertised itself as being better than salting your meat and burying it. In front of the kitchen area was a wooden dining table for two without any chairs to actually sit down on. To the South was a stairwell that lead to the second floor of the house.

  “This place certainly has...character,” Riley declared as he finally shut the door behind him, turning back to stare down the room with disappointment clearly present on his face.

  Violet’s eyes scanned back and forth between the sparse objects, “The type of character that my mother warned me not to hang out with. No wonder that old woman didn't want us to stay here. She was being altruistic really”.

  Riley stepped forward and grabbed his wife by the hand, “Do you feel brave enough to look at the second floor with me? I don’t want to go alone”.

  She smirked, “Are you afraid there might be a wild animal living up there? Perhaps a fuzzy wuzzy brown bear?”

  “Of course not. A bear would have enough taste to just ransack the place and leave to find something better,” he answered as he started pulling her towards the stairs.

  Each step of the stairs seemed to be a little bit of a different shape than the last one with a brand new creak emitting from every one of them. One step would be a bit taller than the last, the next would be slightly angled to the left, the one after that would be dented in the middle. The craftsmanship of the stairs put the structural integrity of the whole house into serious doubt.

  At the top of the staircase was a small landing facing a blank wall. To the left of the stairs was a dead end and a pale wooden rocking chair with a small red headed doll with saucer button eyes and a soiled white wedding dress, similar in fashion to the old Raggedy Ann toys. Just to the side of the stairs was a wooden banister to prevent anyone from falling to the floor below. To the right of the railing was a thin hallway no more than three feet wide with three closed doors and a small window at the end of the hall overlooking the landscape. There were no lights on the second floor except for the dull glow from the lamps downstairs and what fell from the stars outside, which was just enough to allow them a general sense of shape and direction.

  Riley led the charge forward, approaching the first door.

  “Are we taking bets on whether there’s a grizzly in here?” Riley asked with his hand on the metal knob.

  “Just open it,” his wife answered with a serious hint of exasperation in her voice that he hadn’t expected.

  “What’s crawled into you?” he asked as he opened the door a few inches inward.

  Violet hastily pushed it open the rest of the way, “I’m sorry. I’m just getting very tired and I’d like to get some sleep as soon as I can. The sooner we can get this exploration done the happier I’ll be”.

  The room was tiny, almost like a glorified closet. A closet that was no longer than ten feet long and just around five feet wide. It housed a little lamp on the floor and a spring cot with ruffled up blankets that Riley was sure originally carried the small pox virus. With yet another click that was quickly becoming a habit in the house, the lamp lit up the tiny room with startling intensity. A small window was built into the back wall that overlooked the outhouse to the back by the trees and dense foliage. Above was a cord that hung from the ceiling which connected to a flap that seemed to lead to the attic, from which a slow wheeze of air seemed to originate through the cracks. On the floor underneath the cot was a stack of old books, a few matches, a handful of half burned candles and a crusty stone bowl with ancient remnants of what was most likely food. On the walls were crude hand painted figures that sent chills over Violet’s arms.

  The drawings on the wall seemed to depict some sort of child’s interpretation of a massacre. In scribbles the bodies lay everywhere in bits and pieces in pools of blood. Some were obviously supposed to be various animals like deer and pigs, but others were observably human in shape. In the center of the Gacy-like drawings of slaughter was what looked like a predator, most likely the cause of the many deaths that surrounded it. The beast was much larger than any of the other figures, portrayed as being hairy with jagged lines in every direction; it had large sharp teeth that protruded from its mouth and menacing angled eyes.

  “I think that you found the bear that you wanted,” Violet said, placing her index finger tip on the figure to see if it might rub off.

  Riley shook his head, “I’m not sure that’s a bear. Maybe it’s a tiger or a wolf. It’s definitely something leaner. Or I guess it could be a bear on a diet”.

  “You’re going on the artistry of someone who was probably five years old when this was made, I don’t think you can count on accurate physical attributes. It could be a rabbit for all we know”.

  “What makes you think that the person who drew it was a kid?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just guessing, based on the level of skill involved”.

  “You’re not much better with a pen, darling. This could easily be from an adult who has a really creepy hobby,” he jested.

  “Fine. It may or may not have been done by a child. But let’s just imagine it is a bear for the sake of the discussion”.

  Riley chuckled, “Actually, it’s a better picture if we imagine it’s a rabbit”.

  Violet backed away and clung to the doorframe, “Now let’s focus on the why of the drawing. Do you think that the tenant slash artist was just nature aficionado? This isn’t exactly typical bored sketching. And I’ve seen enough true crime documentaries to know that this is some serial killer type behaviour”.

  “I don’t know. But I’m curious to see if there’re any more murals of death around this house. Or ya know, maybe a human skull”.

  Riley turned back into the hallway and commenced their exploratory trek. The second door they opened was the one to the right of the hall, parallel to its counterpart on the other side that they had yet to try. Inside the right door was the bathroom, or
at least what was supposed to be the bathroom. It was everything that it was supposed to be on paper; a sink, a toilet and a clawfoot tub with a standing showerhead and curtain. But everything in the room was filthy and destroyed. Absolutely everything seemed to be covered in a thin layer of mold. The tub was cast iron with the porcelain coating mostly worn off, which led to rusting inside and out. The shower curtain with gaudy with animal figures and was torn in multiple places with large gaping holes. The toilet no longer had a flushing knob and was replaced with a homemade device using duct tape and a stick. The sink was stopped up with gobs of torn-up cloths, which looked like they were covered in dried blood.

  “We’re totally in a murder house,” Riley commented as he eyed the room again and again.

  “I think I’m going to need to hold it in for the rest of the week” Violet said with a grimace.

  Riley attempted to turn on the tap in the sink, which rattled somewhere in the walls from afar before spewing out water that looked like it consisted of more mud than H2O.

  “There is the outhouse in the back that we could use if we really need it. Or I guess you could just go in the lake,” he meekly suggested with a sneer.

  “Just because I married the likes of you doesn’t mean that my standards are that low,” she responded with a laugh as she strained her feet to carry herself to the last door behind them.

  With a foreboding screech Riley opened the door to the master bedroom. A flick of the switch and on came two small lamps connected to the same wall socket that were sitting on the floor just a few feet apart. Their faint yellow emissions cast last shadows upwards onto the ceiling and just barely over the furniture in the room. The room itself was heavily decorated compared to the rest of the sparsely dressed house, though hardly well decorated by any uses of the word. The same unfinished wallpaper from the ground floor clung almost perfectly to every side of the room aside from a few large slashes on the wall above the bed that tore straight through and into the drywall. It didn’t take a genius to find it apparent that aside from the redecoration with a knife the renovations on the house had started in the bedroom. In addition to the lacerations the wallpaper had been stained a heavy yellow from tobacco smoke, only made worse by the poor lighting. The fact that everything was tinged from smoke was easy to see as there had once been multiple objects that had been removed from the walls that had left large whitish imprints in their absence. The largest of these missing pieces seemed to have been a cross that hung crookedly above the bed, which was still surrounded by half a dozen small picture frames filled with various paintings of Jesus.