Sourmouth

by Cyle James

  Riley winced with his hands on his hips like a disappointed teacher. He didn’t believe her theory either.

  “Perhaps they are running away,” Tusem volunteered.

  “Running away?” Riley questioned as he started his walk to join the other two.

  “When a large predator enters a new hunting space such as a lioness, the smart animals run away while the getting is good. It could be that the animals here sensed something dangerous was afoot,” he hypothesized as he looked for tracks in the mud.

  “I suppose those are both options” Riley conceded as he fished the house key out of his pocket, stopping just before putting the key into the door. In a flash he ran through scenarios in his head, hesitating whether or not any of what they were doing was a halfway well thought-out plan. For all he knew as soon as they entered the house the monster would go into hiding like it had so many times before. And then they were back to square one. Riley turned towards his wife to see whether she was having second thoughts as well.

  Violet’s expression was surprisingly almost blank. It was if she either didn’t register anything that was happening anymore or just didn’t care. Either of the two were dangerous mindsets to be in.

  Tsitusem motioned towards the door to get Riley to continue, “I am very interested in finding out what it is exactly that you have inside of here for proof of your wild claims”.

  Riley struggled out a small smirk as he pushed open the front door.

  The trio entered in a row, wary of the dark room that waited before them.

  Violet broke off from the group first, walking over to the lamp and flicking it on.

  Despite what the Tylers might have been imagining, the house was exactly the same as they had left it. Except that now Sourmouth was nowhere in sight.

  “You brought me all the way up here to look at your home-décor-catalogue reject,” Tusem said in a way that conveyed that he wasn’t asking.

  Riley was getting sick and tired of the bloke’s attitude and was contemplating giving him a smack when his wife decided to interject herself between them.

  “Tusem, if you could please have a little bit of patience. I promise that you’re going to see something that is going to change your life. We just need to figure out how to show you”.

  “It would help if you gave me some sort of clue as to what I’m supposed to be seeing so that I am not feeling like a fool standing here in your gaudy living room,” he replied tersely.

  Without consulting his wife, Riley treaded over to the side of the room by the cuckoo clock and grabbed onto the curtain that Violet had swung over to cover the window.

  “Riley...” she mumbled as she backed up closer to the door in case a quick exit was required.

  Instinctively, Tsitusem took a step back as well. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but the fact that there was someone in the room bracing themselves made him nervous.

  Riley swung open the curtain. And there was the window. And nothing but the pane and the copious amounts of trees outside of the house.

  Tusem let out a long annoyed sigh.

  Riley turned around and kicked the base of the clock, sending throbbing pains from his big toe through to the rest of his foot. It was mixed emotions for him, as he kind of hated this young man and yet it was important that he believe their story so that he might be able to help them.

  “You think it might be back upstairs? Either in the bathroom or in the bedroom?” asked Violet of her partner.

  The student looked incredibly uncomfortable as he tried to figure out what was going on.

  “There’s no harm in trying,” Riley agreed as he took the first steps towards the stairs.

  Tusem didn’t inch from his position until Violet grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him as she followed her husband to the second floor.

  “I have had enough of these games!” he protested to deaf ears, the nervous urgency in his voice unhidden.

  On the second floor Riley opened the door to the bathroom and charged in, the door handle slamming against the wall with a bang. And like the window downstairs, there was no sign of Sourmouth. In hindsight the strategy of making a racket was probably a bad one as they were trying to attract the wolf and not scare it in the opposite direction. But realistically they didn’t have any idea as to how the wolf’s thought processes functioned at all. It might have very well been attracted to the noise.

  An agitated Violet pulled Tusem into the master bedroom for one last attempt only to find the disappointment of yet another empty mirror. This put them one step closer to losing their last connection on the island.

  Riley came in behind the two, slowly catching up on the fact that they were again empty handed just by seeing his wife’s expression.

  They all stood for a few moments expectant, as if something had to happen whether or not they were prepared. But nothing came. As if the creature was suddenly shy about being put on the spot.

  “What the hell do we do now? Just wait for it to come back?” she asked as she took a seat on the bed, leaving Tsitusem awkwardly standing in the middle of the room.

  Riley’s shoulders fell as he considered their options. He contemplated grabbing the journal from Poyam’s room and trying to goad the creature to come out.

  “I am going to leave if I am not told what is going on! You said that you had undeniable proof that the Sourmouth myth was actually fact,” Tusem yelled at them both.

  Violet wanted to point out that he couldn’t actually leave, seeing as they drove him. But she opted to go the diplomatic route.

  “We believe we’ve stumbled onto something...supernatural. We believe that what we’ve encountered is actually Sourmouth. The thing is it doesn’t run around the woods in the full moon like something out of a movie...it lives in the mirror,” Violet explained with a sense of conviction that she hadn’t expected.

  But despite her faith in the matter the young student still laughed, pointing his finger at her like a child teasing on the playground.

  “What sort of idiot do you think I am?” he asked, most likely rhetorically.

  “And this is the problem we face. Sourmouth has been showing up for the past few days, seemingly stalking us. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. As far as we know there’s no way to call it if we want it. We’re stuck trying to figure out this thing that we can’t even prove exists and that might actually be tremendously dangerous,” Riley professed, hoping that the onslaught of information might help convince the young man that they were on the up and up.

  “Sourmouth just spontaneously appeared in your bedroom mirror?” Tsitusem asked, his face slightly less amused than before.

  “Essentially yes, but not exactly. My husband found a book in the attic that had a bunch of pictures and old words in another language; we are assuming it’s Squamish. In the book was a page with the word ‘Sourmouth’, and since we found that book we’ve been visited every day by this...thing. It keeps changing and evolving as it goes along. Honestly we’ve gotten to the point that we’re scared,” Violet answered, her voice more shaken than the last time she spoke.

  Perhaps it was the performance of it all, but she could tell that Tusem rather believed her. If the roles were reversed, she probably would have as well. Because if she wasn’t telling the truth, at least according to how she saw things, she was a damn good liar.

  “If... If I believed you...what did you want from me? All I know about it is what I’ve already told you,” he finally relented.

  “We were hoping that you would know more for starters. We’ve exhausted our connections. And if you can’t help us, this thing is just going to keep coming back and we don’t know what’s going to happen when it does,” Riley confessed as he sat on the bed beside his wife.

  “Why do you not just leave if you are worried about it coming back? Just get out of the house”.

  “We don’t actually know if it’s the house or if it’s us. We’ve been told, and this is just a speculation, that the creature may be haunting us personal
ly. We could try and run away. But there isn’t a guarantee that it would work. Right now we seem safe and we’re able to find out more about the thing which in turn might allow us to keep it at bay. That seems like a better idea than suddenly changing things up and hoping for the best”.

  Tusem looked back at the mirror with the tiniest hope that there would be something there. He was hoping for something to prove that he wasn’t just convincing himself of it all and wasting his own time.

  “I’m sorry,” he said still looking away from the Tylers, “I can’t help you any more than I already have”.

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, contemplating the next steps. Did they now drive him back to the restaurant and try to continue their search for information? Without a lead where did that leave the Tylers?

  “Can you read Squamish? If we got the book for you, could you tell us what it says?”

  Tsitusem’s head titled slightly to the side as he thought about the question.

  “At the most I might recognize a few everyday words like ‘water’ or ‘family’, but something as specific as this? A book related to some sort of ancient creature? I doubt it. That doesn’t come up in regular conversations with the elders”.

  Riley nodded in recognition of defeat and stood up, his wife following his lead.

  Without even needing to be told Tusem fell in line, correctly assuming that they would be leaving.

  As one the trio made the trek down the hall and the winding stairs, into the living room and out of the front door. Whether it was awkwardness or disappointment, all three seemed to be downtrodden. The Tylers were back to square one and Tusem was absent proof of his people’s history.

  Outside the sky was even darker than it was before. The clouds soared through the air like they were racing. The wind that blew through the lakeside retreat of Killarney no longer mildly howled but savagely screamed.

  With a quick glance at his wife Riley headed towards the driver’s seat while Violet walked towards the passenger’s.

  Tsitusem approached the rear car door. His shocked yelp nearly drowned out by the sounds of the raging weather as the young man jumped backwards from the vehicle.

  Riley wasn’t even in the car when he had to stop and run around the hood to meet up with the other two. Upon his arrival he was greeted by the familiar silhouette of Sourmouth that stood staring back at the three from the backseat window.

  Its face was slightly obscured by the reflection of the clouds that were whipping about above, but it was easy enough to see that the beast was displeased. Its face was crunched up in a scowl, the blood still oozing from the cracked skin that partially covered its mouth, a seemingly permanent injury it wore proudly. Sourmouth paced from the rear window to the passenger’s and back, utilizing its newfound horizontal landscape to stretch its legs that were hidden from view.

  “Holy...” understated Tusem as he crouched down to stop himself from losing his balance and falling over.

  The Tylers watched as the young man craned his neck side to side, trying to figure out the trick behind the magic that he was seeing. The wolf’s movements grew more and more agitated as it walked, its muscles twitching as it inadvertently flexed. At the end of each stride the creature would stop to look at the onlookers, pulling back the skin from its muzzle to bare its fangs and silently growl before resuming its walk in the other direction.

  “Can it...do anything?” he asked the couple as he finally was able to stand up.

  “That depends on how you define that. It seems to be able to move from one reflective surface to another. At first it seemed to be confined in one room. But then it could move around the whole house. And now it seems to not even be restricted by that. At one point I also thought it could, I don’t know...whisper in my head...it’s stupid,” Riley answered.

  “We’re afraid of what it’s going to be able to do next,” Violet followed.

  Just as Tsitusem was about to speak Sourmouth stopped in its tracks, looking out directly towards the group as they casually talked about it like it wasn’t even there. Without warning its body careened forward towards them as if it were going to burst through the glass. And then as it got closer to making contact with its side of the window it simply disappeared from view.

  The three nervously looked around, their heads extended like meerkats trying to locate the looming threat. From the taillights to the headlights they searched but none of them could find Sourmouth no matter how hard they looked.

  Violet stared at the window of the car where the wolf had been, realizing the direction that it had walked in as it left. Her eyes gazed downward to the ground and on to their feet, following through behind them and back to Poyam’s house. Sourmouth had gone inside.

  “Should we...chase after it?” Tusem fretfully asked, not sure whether he’d like either answer.

  And it was after he finished speaking that they all simultaneously noticed that the wind had ceased. It was almost as if the breeze itself halted as if not to so much as rustle the leaves.

  “That can’t be a good omen,” Riley declared as he eyed the trail back to the porch.

  “What are we thinking? Should we stay or should we go?” she asked with a hand on her husband’s elbow.

  “If I have a vote I say that we do whatever is safest,” Tusem piped in with a forced grin cutting across his mouth. It was an air of confidence that wasn’t fooling anyone, in the least himself.

  “I thought the entire point of bringing you up here was to prove that Sourmouth was real. It’s here, most likely waiting for us in the house and we’re ready to run away already?”

  “And you have proved it. I’ve seen it. A wolf in the glass. What more is there for me to see?”

  “I don’t know, but we should try and find it, shouldn’t we? Who knows what’s going to happen next? We could discover something astonishing. Even more than we already have. I mean, what will happen if you can read from its book? We’ve never even thought about trying to talk to it in its native language until you got here,” Riley explained to him in effort to convince him to assist.

  “But what do I get out of this? Huh? Why should I risk my neck to help you have a conversation over tea with this bloody thing?”

  “Because,” Violet interrupted, “I know you want recognition for all of your painstaking work. You want to be remembered for your contributions to your people and this is the best way you could ever achieve that. Because if you don’t manage something ground-breaking, you’ll always be that outsider who spent his life alienating his people for absolutely nothing”. She wasn’t quite sure where she got the nerve to talk about the stranger’s life like that, but she knew she had to try and hit a nerve to be effective.

  Tsitusem dashed forward towards the woman a little too aggressively, wanting to get in her face to scream his displeasure at her assumptions. His hostility prompted Riley to intercede with a forearm to the young man’s chest that pushed him back hard enough that he nearly lost his balance.

  Tusem raised his hands to signal his apology and acknowledgement that he meant no harm.

  “What do you know about what I want?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “Right now you’re an outcast going against the wishes and traditions of the respected people of your community. But they simply don’t see that you’re a...pioneer. The traditionalists want to tell their tales by mouth from generation to generation without regard to the possibility of things being lost in time and you’re singlehandedly going against that. That’s a choice that I guess might alienate you from a lot of the people around you that believe you’re abandoning customs,” she expressed, hoping that her read of his motivations was correct.

  “If no one does anything then our history is going to simply disappear! Slowly from one child to the next, but surely it’s going to be lost. That’s why I’m doing this. To prevent the narration of our people being washed away with the last of the elders like we’re going to be if we keep standing out here”.

  “And wh
at if you could do more than just record stories? What if you were the one that helped shape the world as we know it by proving one of your people’s myths to be real? It’s a feat that would bring you respect and help legitimize your faith and culture to billions of people”.

  Tusem paused without replying. His original intentions were purely altruistic. He merely wanted to provide for future generations the only way he knew how. But perhaps a part of him did want a degree of recognition. He wanted certainty that his hard work wouldn’t be for nothing.

  Both Tylers raised their chins to the sky, gazing at the swarming clouds that threatened to burst with their torrential rains. It was getting late and they were all getting irritable.

  “I don’t care why you’re doing your little history project. What I care about is that thing in the house and what it means to us,” said Violet with her hands clenched and quivering.

  “And what exactly does it mean to you?” Tusem asked sternly as he put one foot forward before retracting it back.

  “That’s none of your concern,” Riley said from the sidelines.

  The young Squamish student eyed both of the Tylers with anger very clearly stemming from his panic. He had followed them into the mountains on the whim that he might find something that would be critical to his work. He hadn’t been expecting something that could legitimately turn everything he thought he knew about the world upside down. Let alone be incredibly perilous.

  Tsitusem put out his hand palm upwards, “Give me the keys. I’m leaving”.

  Riley broke out in an abrupt giggle that hastily cut off.

  “I’m not giving you our keys. If you want to throw away this opportunity then you can either sit out here in the car or you can walk back”.

  “Walk back? You son of a bitch. It’s more than an hour walk from here to the restaurant, never mind the docks”.

  “Life is full of tough choices,” Riley replied with an almost sinister smile of satisfaction.

  Violet wasn’t fully comfortable with treating Tusem like they were. After all, he was originally interested in helping them when they asked him to assist out of the blue. The fact that her husband didn’t seem to like him aside, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong that made him deserving of essentially being held hostage in a possibly dangerous situation.