Sourmouth
Page 21
“Tusem. Please. This is a world...world-changing occurrence that we’ve managed to stumble into. This is something that was only talked about in fiction until it popped up in our damn mirror. And maybe it makes us bad people, but we want to take advantage of it the best we can. Perhaps we can be the people that history looks back on proudly for having accomplished something. We can be the people that textbooks describe as being brave enough to stare the supernatural in the face and conquer it to strive to make life bigger for everyone on this planet”.
Violet tried to put her explanation in the most relatable way that the student could understand given his own goals. It might have been easier to convince him if Tusem’s mission for his people wasn’t just out of the goodness of his heart, but if there was even an inkling of selfishness in his actions then he’d appreciate what the Tylers were hoping to achieve.
Tsitusem took deep breath after breath. His expression doing nothing to communicate what was on his mind. Was he still thinking about leaving? Just walking back to sea level? Or was he planning on joining their merry band of wolf-seekers?
“At this point I don’t care what you want to do now. But I do know that you’re not interfering with what we’re going to do, which is walk into that house and make history. But, if you’re willing to stay we could use your help,” Riley confessed as a last ditch effort as he prepared himself to go back into the animal’s den with or without backup.
Tusem took a moment to compose himself before softly nodding in acceptance.
“Since science has failed us, let us do it for the sake of history...right?” he said, calling back to their conversation earlier in the restaurant.
Violet smiled fretfully, “Let’s just hope that when this is all said and done we’re in the textbooks for physicists and not the ones for medical students”.
And with that the trio cautiously made their way under the watching storm brewing above the house.
Chapter 15
All three removed their jackets as they entered the house as soon as they felt the heat pressing against them like an incessant wave. It had only been ten minutes since they were last in the living room, but in that time the temperature seemed to have risen to a sweltering degree. The air felt dense like it was trying to push its way past them to escape from the house.
“Did someone leave the heater on?” Tusem asked as he folded his jacket onto the back of the couch.
“There isn’t a heater. This is all Sourmouth. The wolf seems to burn hot,” Violet responded as if it was a normal factoid that their guest should have already known.
Aside from the increased need for an air conditioner the house seemed just as it was before. Nothing was disturbed from the littlest speck of dust to the large uninhabited windowpanes.
“Unless we’re waiting for it to come down to us, I say we head upstairs,” Riley planned as he ogled the ceiling above them.
Violet nodded and grabbed her husband by the hand, squeezing it tightly as if to silently say that she was there with him beyond merely standing side by side.
Riley squeezed back as he started towards the stairs.
Feeling like the most awkward third wheel, Tusem followed the couple back up to the second floor. His eyes scanned every surface whether or not it was capable of holding a reflection. His beliefs were so quickly stretched that he was ready to start seeing the beast everywhere he looked.
Somehow the level of warmth surrounding them increased by each step they climbed. It was if they were playing hide and seek and Sourmouth was telling them that they were getting closer to finding what they were looking for.
Passing Poyam’s room, Violet stopped and pulled back. She pointed up to the attic at her husband, suggesting not so subtly that it would be a good idea to grab the little journal that had started it all.
Riley wasn’t quite sure that it was necessarily a good idea, but he didn’t have a better one to refute with. Letting his wife’s hand drop to her side he walked off, he entered Poyam’s room as the other two watched him struggle to make the climb into the attic.
As Mr. Tyler disappeared from view, Tusem examined the drawings that decorated the wall across from the small cot.
“Who drew these?” he quietly asked, running his hands over the raised textures.
“We think that it was the little girl that lived here,” Violet said as she kneeled down beside him.
“Little girl?”
“A girl and her father lived in this house. By all accounts the father was a monster of a man in his own right, beating her and abusing her for half of her life. We think that somehow she learned to bring Sourmouth to life and sent it after him in revenge”.
“Sent it after him? What do you mean?”
“He’s dead”.
“Dead?” Tusem repeated as if he didn’t understand the word.
“Terribly dead. Couldn’t be deader,” she clarified without a hint of comedy in her voice. She was emotionally zoning out again, a defense mechanism for when things got too rough.
Suddenly Riley dropped down onto the cot with a crash, the wrapped black book in his hand.
Tusem pointed at it with a crooked, unsure finger, “That is the journal you were talking about?”
Riley tossed the book absent barbed-wire wrap to Tusem who caught it like it were about to explode.
The young man rolled it over repeatedly in his fingers, feeling the weight of the thing. Once he was satisfied with examining its exterior he pulled off the plastic, exposing the rough textured top. Flipping through the pages he was impressed with the artistry. He wasn’t expecting such stylized contents in a century old book.
“Who made this?” he asked as he scanned through the pages in awe.
“We’ve got no idea. I doubt that it was the little girl, as she most likely found the book just like we did. But for all we know, she might have drawn what was on the wall and what’s in the book like some teenaged demonic Rembrandt,” Riley hypothesized.
“Just looking at the lettering I doubt that a child would have the knowledge to actually read any of this let alone write it. I’m having trouble forming full words from what I’m seeing,” said Tusem as he concentrated on the page that depicted a close-up of a clawed hand that seemed to have its fingers dislocated, pointing backwards and to the side.
“There’s nothing to suggest that she had to have done it when she was a little girl. She had been through a lot. If she did make the book, it could have been formulated over many years until she had the ability to actually do whatever it is that’s written down”.
“You think that the book actually teaches something? Like a spell book? You think she’s a witch?”
“I never said a witch,” Riley clarified, “But I think the book does have some sort of power to it. We were told about ‘calling into being’, some mystical thing where words and ideas are given power. Knowing about Sourmouth gives it more and more ability, so a book created in its honour would be a pretty sufficient way to handle that”.
“All we had to do was say its name and we seemed to have brought it to us. Who knows what we could do if we figured out what the rest of this book says. We could end up with a very large house pet,” Violet awkwardly joked as she stepped out of the room and back into the hallway.
The men followed her.
“You hope to control it?” Tusem asked with his head still halfway buried in the book. But even without him giving his full attention the sound of concern in his voice was apparent.
“Control might be a strong word. We don’t want to put it in chains and drag it onto a stage in front of the bright lights and ravenous crowd. But it would be nice to not have to play these games all the time, searching and hoping to find it. It would be even nicer not to have it stalk us from within the mirrors, wanting to pick the meat off of our bones,” she said trying to rein in Tsitusem’s imagination.
The young man just made a sound of indifference that didn’t share his thoughts on the subject in the slightest. The moral o
bjections aside, Tusem wasn’t sure if domestication was the best option for a mythical wolf.
The trio marched to the bedroom for the second time with book in hand.
As the group entered the room its gaze fell like weights. Sourmouth stood in its mirrored habitat with its forehead rested against the glass as if it didn’t have anything else that it would possibly need to do. Its chest had dried streams of blood running down its pectoral muscles from where it had drooled onto itself. Its eyes were bloodshot, red veins strewn throughout the vivid yellow globes. The wolf’s skin looked to have thinned even more than before and took the appearance of a translucent grey layer of plastic. Underneath its skin looked to be filled with a dense dark blue substance reminiscent of coagulated blood. Sourmouth had begun growing a wispy coat of white fur, thick only on the back of its neck like a coarse mane.
The creature’s eyes tracked the group as they moved, switching from the people to the book that Tusem carried. It didn’t seem impressed by the object or the man holding it.
“This thing does grow quickly, doesn’t it?” Tusum asked rhetorically, admiring the speed of development in the animal.
“Is it just me or does it seem undisturbed that we’ve decided to drop by?” she said as she clutched her husband by his waist. It was notable that it previously would venture off after making contact. Now it was comfortable in their presence and possibly desiring it.
“He’s the one who choose to make himself known. If he wants time to himself he wouldn’t have bothered coming out of the house,” Riley thought out loud.
Sourmouth’s head rocked side to side, slapping gently against the surface as if it was too tired to care about anything that was in front of it.
“What do we do now?” questioned Tsitusem, finally getting the nerve to look at Sourmouth face on. Having been around the creature for a while without consequence he was slowly becoming comfortable with the idea of them interacting with it. Alternative to a newfound comfort was the possibility that he was listening to the Tylers far too much and it had impaired his judgment.
“You’ve got a book in your hand, why don’t you try reading from it?” Violet suggested with her eyes wide open like a doe facing off with an oncoming car.
Tusem shook his shoulders which he was unaware until just then felt incredibly heavy. He had to rub his eyes, fix his hair and crack his knuckles. He was doing everything he could to delay having to read from the book. It was one thing to stand there and stare at the creature; it was another thing to attempt to be the one to speak to it. But he realized that having him read from it was pretty much the Tylers’s entire plan before they even re-entered the house.
Riley pulled his wife closer as Tsitusem carefully tried to read out from the book, uttering words that were foreign to their ears in a succinct way that emphasized each vowel to ensure that nothing was mispronounced.
With mild annoyance Sourmouth used its face for leverage to push off of the mirror to stand upright, leaving behind a smear of red goo from its cracking and bloody cheeks.
Tusem continued to try and read, his voice frequently starting and stopping and repeating as he tried to figure out the words written on the papers. Sometimes he would say something in Squamish, stop and curse in English before saying something different afterwards as if correcting himself.
The creature’s expression wasn’t that of wild fury but that of boredom. It was clear that it wasn’t sure what the humans were attempting to do. Or it purely didn’t care. The beast just stood within its glass prison, its head slightly nodding as it rocked on its feet.
Violet looked at Sourmouth’s face, which reflected nothing but its utter indifference. She was hoping that it was just daft. But thus far it was more than likely that the book wasn’t going to do anything.
“Tusem, I think you should stop”.
“What? Why?” her husband asked confusedly. He had been so wrapped up in what Tusem was doing that he hadn’t read the situation the same as her.
“Should I continue?” Tsitusem said, his question directed solely to Riley as if he were the orchestrator of their macabre show.
Violet was somewhat offended that the young student had decided to take direction from her husband and not count her opinion equally, but she didn’t see the offence as something big enough to matter at the time. There were more important troubles at hand.
“Look at this thing. Does it look like it cares about you reading from that infernal book?” she persisted as she cautiously backed away from the scene.
Tusem closed the book around his finger to not lose the page, “What do you suggest then? I thought that our only stratagem was to see what happens when we read from this book”.
“Whether it was our only plan or not doesn’t change the fact that it’s not working”.
The guys gawked at Sourmouth who complacently stared back, its mouth cocked in a tiny smirk at their expense.
Riley huffed and stepped back too, pacing around the room fretfully and around the unmoving statue that was his wife.
Tusem closed the book proper and tossed it to Riley, who caught it and threw it on the bed.
“What next?” Riley enquired to the group as he tried to run a groove into the ground.
“If we cannot elicit a response from the wolf, we elicit a response from the people that we want to impress,” Tusem answered.
“What the hell does that mean?” Riley asked in a grimace.
“The end goal was to bring Sourmouth to the people at large, right? One way or another, that ends up being the media. You wanted to go down in the annals of history. That means we need documentation. If we can’t bring the creature to them, we bring them to the creature. Let us reach out to some of the local news stations in the city and see if we can get a crew here to film it”.
“You saw how hard it was to get you here. And you were already interested in Squamish lore. How do you think we’re going to fare trying to get a news team here? ‘Excuse me mister anchorman, but would you happen to want to spend the day travelling to visit a decrepit house in the boonies to see a mythological wolf creature that lives in our mirror?’” Violet said to try and debunk the idea. She realized that it was hypocritical that she would shoot down the student’s idea given that she and her husband planned something similar. Having heard the plan fall from the mouth of someone else helped to expose a few flaws in their previous idea.
Tsitusem understood her trepidation, more than she could ever understand. It was a well-known secret that the native population didn’t have the respect of the people that they shared their land with. And if they couldn’t get the police or government to pay them any attention when they needed it, then they would surely have difficulties trying to bring the news to them over something as farfetched as the paranormal. But this time Tusem had a trump card:, two wholesome white Americans.
“We take them evidence. We take them the book and a photograph of the creature. We give them enough to hopefully garner notice, if nothing else as a special interest piece that they can tack on at the end of the sports segment when they need to fill time. Why they get here does not matter. Because when they arrive they will surely change their minds about how much attention they should be giving the story”.
“That’s actually not bad. But who’s to say that they are going to have any interest at all in listening to us about this?” Riley asked.
Tusem took a few seconds to pause and think, “You approach them with the angle that you have evidence about an unsolved murder that took place here. About the father of the girl Violet told me about. Say that you’re detectives from the States or something and you have figured out who the murderer was. It does not matter why they come, as long as they come”.
Violet nodded in tentative agreement. It was a much better plan than trying to convince anyone of some sort of supernatural beast. At least the better plan until they could think of something else.
“But what’s your part in this? Were you our Sherpa or something?”
Tusem shook his head, “I have no part in this until you get back and convince them that Sourmouth is not just a smoke-and-mirror trick. As soon as they see me involved you are going to run into trouble getting them to believe you”.
“What do you mean? The more witnesses the more credible our story is going to seem,” said Riley.
“Not here. We natives have a...stressed history with the white locals. Racial and political tensions are still rife here. It is better if you two went alone. Trust me”.
The Tylers weren’t convinced that they were better off without Tusem’s involvement, as they didn’t have the level of knowledge about Vancouver that they might need. But it didn’t seem like convincing Tusem was an option.
“So are we dropping the idea of the book and the photograph altogether and going with the evidence of the murder?” Riley asked as he began to gather his wits about him to switch mental gears.
“Maybe you should take those anyway as a backup plan”.
“Slight hiccup in that though, we don’t have a photo of Sourmouth. We don’t even have a camera or anything to take one,” Violet pointed out.
Tsitusem looked at the Tylers like they just grew extra arms.
“Where are you from, the 1920s?”
Tusem reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black sliding smartphone. The young man turned around towards the mirror where Sourmouth stood hunched over. For the first time since the group had entered the room did it seem even slightly disturbed.
When Tsitusem extended his arm to aim the camera at the wolf, it began to growl. The sound filled the room like a thin mist, itching across the trio’s skin.
Without time for objection, Tusem clicked the button on his phone to take the picture.