Sourmouth

by Cyle James

  “Did theycatch the animal that did it?” Riley questioned a bit too nervously for the tone of the conversation.

  Samuel took another long drag that seemed to almost burn his cig down to the halfway point, “They searched and searched around the lake and then the island. A hunting party was put together to go out and look, for all the good it did. It was one of the rare times back in those days that the police and the natives ever worked together. Everyone on the island who had a gun had the same mission, and that was to find whatever killed Poyam’s father. Not to avenge him, mind you. No. I’m sure more than a few people had thought about putting a bullet through his head over the years. No, they went out trying to ensure that the beast didn’t kill again. Because if it was one room away from stumbling into Poyam, whose child would it get to next?”

  “And were they successful? Did they find out what it was?” asked Violet.

  “Funny thing, that. As far as the experts around here could tell, the claw marks that were left behind in Poyam’s father’s room were that of some sort of wolf, most likely an oversized grey. Mind you the experts in these parts like to spend their time in the local taverns, so take their expertise with a shot of whiskey. The problem with their theory was that wolves had been eradicated from Bowen Island hundreds of years ago”.

  “Could they have been wrong about what did it? Could it have been some sort of other animal?”

  “Not so much. The island simply doesn’t have any predators other than the occasional large bird of prey. Hunters killed off everything that was a danger long time ago. And animals don’t have any reason to attempt the swim over from the mainland. So the only things that kill over here are the hunters acting like tough guys when the deer population gets too big. Of course, common sense doesn’t come so common in some folks. The hunting party back then searched the island for days and couldn’t find so much as a paw print in the mud or a half-eaten carcass”.

  Riley straightened up in his seat, “Then whatever did it got away. No explanation?”

  Samuel chuckled in a way that should only come from the belly of someone much heavier than him, “There were tons of explanations, each one crazier than the last one. The conspiracy theorists had a blast coming up with ideas. I’ve heard that someone on the island had a pet attack-animal that they hid when the search started and that they could just release it the next time someone annoys them. I’ve heard that the animal got away from the island by stowing away on a boat back to Vancouver. I’ve heard from the natives that it was some sort of vengeful spirit that did the killing. And I’m pretty sure someone suggested a bending bullet. It was all a bunch of hogwash from a bunch of idiots”.

  The Tylers seemed to lose their ability to speak for a second as they got hung up on trying to sort out all of the information. Both of them seeing things could have been a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. Finding the book with an old legend scrawled in it could have been some sort of prank. The story about the stars could have just been another old native legend meant for fires and marshmallows. But a gruesome death in the same house where the book was found possibly being attributed to a gigantic wolf? It was beginning to become impossible to simply regard the spirit as a piece of fiction. If it was, it was engrained in the very DNA of Bowen Island.

  “Hun, do you not like your Nanaimo?” Diana asked quizzically pointing at Riley’s second helping of dessert that remained untouched in his hand.

  Riley looked down at it, realizing for the first time he hadn’t actually taken a bite.

  He slowly placed the dessert bar on the coffee table in front of him, “Sorry. I seem to have lost my appetite”.

  Chapter 8

  It was becoming an unfortunate habit, the quiet ride along the scenic routes of the island. Quiet of course with the exception of the Waits tape that played every time they turned on the engine, which currently crooned out More Than Rain. Neither of the Tylers really wanted to talk much about the situation they were in. They didn’t talk partly because there wasn’t much to be said and perhaps subconsciously not to aggravate the spirit in case it turned out to be real, which was an increasingly possible situation.

  When they returned to the house it was still early in the night and they were already spent. After properly unloading their groceries into what could hardly be considered a kitchen they took turns taking showers with some of their bottled water reserve so that they didn’t start attracting flies. After their underwhelming hygiene routine they both crashed onto the couch in the living room with aching everything. The duo spent a long while just sitting comfortably and thinking. Occasionally they would each look around the living room for evidence of some of the horror that took place in the house and would unsurprisingly find nothing new. They would especially focus their gaze at the ceiling towards the master bedroom, thinking about all of the blood that was spilled up there in the not-too-distant past. And more often than not their eyes would travel back down towards the basement, to envision the horrors that occurred there that could rival anything that might have happened upstairs.

  “Does it need to be said?” Riley asked randomly.

  “What?”

  “I guess it does...”

  “Babe, my head is still back in the fake Texans’ place. I can’t guess that you’re thinking,” Violet answered bitterly.

  “This was a bad idea. That’s all. Just thinking that we could have had a normal vacation in Aruba like other adults”.

  “We still can. We can just leave this all behind us like something we saw on TV once upon a time”.

  “And what? Just forget all of this? Can you do that still given how much we know and how far we’ve come? I don’t really want to have needless memories of child molestation and death by animal”.

  She shrugged, “I don’t know. I think so. I guess. I mean, what’s the other option? We keep digging into what’s going on until we find ourselves too deep to crawl out?”

  “I’m not liking what we’re finding out here. I could have especially been left in the dark about what happened in this forsaken house. But I won’t lie and say it’s not interesting to me. I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t want to find out what’s going to happen next. How many people can say that they’ve ever encountered something like this? Something possibly supernatural. It would be a shame to just let it pass us by”.

  “Pass us by?”

  “Yeah. Pass us by. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Remember the talk of our fame and fortune just sitting there to be taken? We could just pretend that there’s nothing going on here and move on with our lives. We could just stay away from that bedroom and that fucking mirror altogether. But eventually, someone else would find it and they’d do everything that we’re doing. But maybe they’d see it through...”

  “If I were to even contemplate still exploring all this, where do we even begin? We don’t exactly have any more leads to go on. Poyam has blown away in the wind, and the Calgary couple don’t know much more than local history. What next?”

  It was Riley’s turn to shrug, “I don’t know. I don’t know. We could always do like we promised and take the book back to Anna and see if that tells her anything new”.

  “I don’t even want to touch that book if we can avoid it. But short of running through the streets screaming that name out I doubt we’re going to find anyone else that can tell us anything about it”.

  “Sourmouth,” he said in a way to point out that his wife wasn’t saying it.

  “Is it weird that I’m a bit hesitant to say that word?” she laughed nervously.

  Riley scooted across the couch until he was leaned against his wife, “I’ve had to think about that question a few times myself. But I think I’ve come to the point where I’ve been able to rationalize that just saying the name can’t be the end of the world”.

  “Or so you think”.

  “Or so I think,” he admitted.

  Violet reached over and grabbed her husband’s hand and gave it a tight squeeze, “I
love you, ya goofy mook. I don’t know if I’d be able to face all this without you”.

  “...Mook?”

  “Yeah. Mook. Don’t even deny it”.

  “I can’t deny it; I don’t even know what it means”.

  “And that’s why you’re a mook”.

  Riley reached over his wife’s shoulder and grabbed her by the back of her head. Playfully he pulled her over into a laying position and jumped on top of her so that she couldn’t sit up. At first she tried to lazily push him off. But her protests were shortly drowned out by the kiss that he laid on her. And before long any resistance that she was hoping to put forth melted away.

  “Would it be situation-inappropriate to say that I want to have sex with you?” he asked with mock concern on his face.

  “It would. How dare a husband want to have sex with his wife on their vacation”.

  “Seriously,” he laughed, “I feel like I should feel bad about it or something. I feel like I’m trying to have a quickie on the way to a funeral”.

  Violet placed a hand on his cheek and pulled him in for a kiss, “There’s no reason to feel bad. At all. I think that maybe we should have a little bit of us time to get our minds off of everything. We might need to go slowly and work our way up to things though. It’s been...awhile”.

  Riley looked up and at their surroundings, noting the destroyed couch that they were laying on, “Even here?”

  Violet looked at the condition of the sofa too and grimaced, “Preferably not”.

  “There’s not a whole lot of options in this place. It’s either the couch, the cot in Poyam’s room, the bedroom or the lake”.

  “What’s with you and wanting to do things in that lake? Don’t you know that people pee in that?”

  Riley laughed and pressed himself against her leg, “Why do you think I’m so excited over the idea?”

  Violet pushed her husband off with a giggle, “You’re a pervert”.

  He grabbed his wife by the ass as she stood before she got the chance to twist away from him, “You’ve got no idea. I’m wanted in a dozen states for the kinky things I’m into”.

  He still had her by the waist with his hands as she faced away towards the stairs. To tease him she would make small motions with her hips, shaking her behind in his face suggestively as he sat on the couch mesmerized.

  “Oh, yeah? How come I’m only hearing about this now?” she asked as she bent at the knees, rubbing herself gently against his lap.

  Riley reached out and ran his hands up her legs, resting his fingers in the warmth between her thighs.

  “I’ve bribed a lot of people so that I didn’t have to alert the neighbours every time I move”.

  She reached back and grabbed his hands to prevent him from being so touchy, “The customers aren’t allowed to have any contact with the dancers without their express permission. You don’t want to meet the bouncers, now do you?”

  “You’re a dancer now?” he asked with a salacious lick of his lip.

  Still facing away from him, Violet spread her legs apart as she bent over at the hips, grabbing her ankles with her hands to give her husband a prime view.

  He made a small whinge as if in pain as he tried to resist touching her again.

  “I guess that answers my question”.

  She twirled on the balls of her feet back in his direction. She pushed apart his knees and lowered herself between them to the floor.

  “Enough of all this, sir, what’s the real plan here? This couch is disgusting, Poyam’s room is creepy and small and the master bedroom...well...that’s the master bedroom, isn’t it...”

  “Yeah, the bedroom isn’t the honeymoon suite, is it? I’ve been trying my best not to think about all of the nightmares that might have occurred there. But the fact is that most if not everything we’ve been told probably did. And the fact is that we’ll need to sleep in there again at some point in this week if we are playing on staying. I figure what’s the difference between sleeping in there...and not sleeping?”

  Violet lowered her head more gloomily than sexually, her hair dancing around the swelling in his jeans.

  “I kind of forgot about needing to sleep there. My mind has been so focused on all of what happened in there that it didn’t even cross my mind that I’d need to go back in. I sincerely don’t know if I’ll be able to get any rest in there”.

  Riley exhaled forcefully and scratched his head as he struggled to find a way to smooth things over, “People... People die every day in virtually every place in the world. If a place has existed on this Earth long enough, someone will have died there, possibly horribly. And probably horribly, pending the location. I don’t think that we can put too much thought into what had occurred here or elsewhere, because that’s all in the past. Right? It’s just a room to us now. It’s an ugly room that sends shivers down our spines, but it’s still just a room. We’re here to move forward with everything, aren’t we? How about we help that room move forward with our own little sex show?”

  Violet pinned her hair back as she shook her head and grinned from ear to ear, “You really want to get laid, don’t you? I’m half expecting you to start pulling out a tip to shove in my underwear”.

  He nodded and licked his lips again, “More than a little bit. That is if the mood hasn’t been utterly killed yet”.

  She grabbed his hand and pulled his arm around her, “I think that the mood can be restored pretty quickly”.

  Violet started to kiss along her husband’s jaw line, licking and teasing her way to his earlobe. With a childish snigger Riley stood and led his wife up the stairs to the second floor, stumbling into the walls along the way as they kissed. In the room they stopped to examine their surroundings, both having brief second thoughts about continuing. They both looked around as if they could possibly see what had happened in the room if they concentrated enough. Their eyes darted from Poyam’s father’s hypocritical crosses to the mysterious slashes that damaged the walls and finally to the mirror which sat happily uninhabited and as normal as the next piece of household furniture.

  “One condition,” Violet said as they both stared forward at the empty room.

  Riley merely made a sound of recognition as he waited with bated breath.

  “We need to cover up that mirror with something. I don’t want to have to look at it while we do naughty things to each other...”

  Riley looked around and tried to find a solution to their conundrum. He finally landed on the crumpled up bed sheet laying on the floor. Pinching with just two fingers to avoid touching the blanket as much as possible he lifted it up and draped it across the top of the mirror, more or less covering it completely.

  “The wife asks and husband provides,” he said.

  “And when the husband provides the wife reciprocates,” she replied with a grin as she ran her hand over his crotch.

  Slowly Riley found himself increasingly in the mood just as she had predicted he would be.

  Violet grabbed the bottom of his shirt and lifted it off of him in one smooth motion.

  He returned in kind by practically tearing her shirt off before tossing it to the floor. Riley hooked his index fingers into the waist of his wife’s jeans and pulled her close against him, nibbling across her neck with the tips of his teeth. With as much grace as he took off her shirt, Riley unfastened her belt buckle to allow her jeans to drop down to her ankles. He stood back and admired the sleekness of her legs and the shape of her ass that was explicitly exposed to him as she wore nothing but her tiny black and pink thong.

  With a giggle Violet stepped out of her pants and unfastened her husband’s belt, pulling his jeans off of him so violently that she tripped him backwards to the floor.

  In a tumble the couple fell on top of one another on the cold hardwood flooring, kissing and caressing like they didn’t care about how uncomfortable it actually felt to be on the unforgiving ground.

  Violet positioned herself so that her knees were on both sides of her husband’s
waist, straddling him from above as he ran his hands over her sides, paying particular attention to the curve of her hips. She reached back and unfastened the hooks on her bra and let it drop to her husband’s chest in a provocative show that he never seemed to tire of.

  Despite the years that they had been together, Riley was still in awe of Violet’s body. From below he stared upwards at the fullness of her breasts and the perkiness of her nipples like a devoted follower before his god. With single-minded purpose he wrapped his arms around her back and pulled her against him, her breasts happily hanging over his face. Riley playfully took one of her nipples into his mouth while he gently teased the other with his hand.

  Violet smirked as she shifted downwards, moving so that her knees were beside his. She inserted her fingers into the waistband of his underwear and slowly pulled it down just far enough so that he was able to spring free before her.

  Riley cupped his hands behind his head to make himself a pillow as he inadvertently let out a gasp as she took his softness deep into her mouth. He couldn’t help but continue to moan in pleasure as he felt her run her tongue over him while her hair hung down and tickled his stomach.

  “Are you alright?” she asked as she wrapped her fingers around him, massaging gently as she flickered her tongue around his head.