Sourmouth (17 page)

The
Tylers
stood in silence.
Both waited and watched the mirror as if expecting it to come stalking back,
but it never came. Riley turned to his wife with a look a look of bewilderment.

“I... What do we do now?” he asked as he rubbed his
eyes with his fists, trying to remember how he was supposed to blink.

His wife made large, exaggerated motions with her
mouth as she struggled to find something to say back. But nothing that she
could think of actually seemed to be fitting.

“I think we need to go see Anna. Or find
Poyam
. Or call the National Guard or the Mounties or
someone who can fucking help us,” she ranted as she paced towards the bed and
back.

“What... What did you think would happen if we broke
it? That we’d kill it?” Riley asked as he tried to stop his wife from stomping
a ditch into the floor. Violet just pulled away and kept pacing.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I
figured that we needed to do something. Hell, let’s still smash it. Let’s throw
something at it or take a hammer to it”.

“You think that’s really a good idea? I mean, you
tried to pick it up and then it tried to do that, too. What would happen if you
tried to smash it with it inside? Would it try to break the glass, too? Would
it get free? What would happen to us if it did?”

“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know!” she yelled.

“Stop yelling at me!” he replied.

“I’m not yelling!”

“Yes, you are!”

“I’m not... I’m not yelling at you...” she finally
admitted as she attempted to stop to breathe.

“I understand that you’re afraid. But taking it out on
me isn’t the solution. Let’s figure this out together,” he said as he stepped
forward and put his hands on her arms, trying to comfort her.

“I’m sorry. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do
here. I feel like...like we’re in danger here and I don’t know how to protect
us”.

“If you really want to be done with this, then I guess
we can just go. Let’s just get out of here and not come back,” Riley suggested,
stepping towards the door ready to leave without so much as grabbing a bag.

Violet wasn’t sure if he was faking his concern or
not. His abrupt change in attitude suggested that he expected her to call his
bluff. And unfortunately it didn’t take long for her to see the flaws in his
plan.

“And where would we go? We don’t have another place to
stay”.

“In the morning we’ll just go to the docks, take the
boat to Vancouver and just go home. This vacation has hardly been one that’s
advertised in the brochures, what does it matter if we cut it short by a few
days?”

“And even if we wanted to do that, what do we do right
now? Do we just go to bed and pretend that this never happened? Take turns
sleeping on the couch downstairs and hope nothing pops out to eat us?” she
posed to him.

“We’ll sleep in the car”.

“For the night? We’ll freeze to death if we sleep in
the car”.

Riley huffed and left the room without answering,
leaving his wife standing alone in the dark.

When he returned she noticed that he was carrying the
candle that had been underneath the cot in
Poyam’s
old room.

“With this we’ll be fine. I’ve heard that if you burn
a candle in an enclosed space, it can never get below freezing. It might not be
comfortable. But it’s not here, and if you’ll be happier then that’s good
enough for me,” he said.

Violet stood contemplating, watching her husband roll
the candle around in his hands. Running wasn’t a solution to their problem. But
it was all that they had. And the car was far enough away that it would suffice
until they were able to get on a boat and leave.

“Pack your bags. We’ll sleep in the car. And in the
morning we’ll leave when we can,” she stated as a matter of fact as if it was
her idea all along.

Riley nodded as he noticed that his wife seemed to be
choking back tears. She darted forward and wrapped herself around her husband,
hiding her face against his chest. And there she stood for almost a minute,
safely in her husband’s arms before they both rushed to get out of the house as
fast as they could.

Chapter 9

The night was a restless one. The
Tylers
awoke and fell back asleep constantly, shifting and turning as they struggled
to get to sleep despite the images racing through their minds and the gear
shift in their backs. Violet took the front passenger seat, retracting it
backwards as far as it would go to put herself in as close as possible to a
sleeping position as she could manage. Riley took the back seat, lying down
with his feet raised above his head against the window due to the lack of room
to stretch out. The candle burned softly over the driver’s seat dashboard,
flicking flames until the early morning when it finally burned out. Both of the
couple realized this during their routine wakeups, but agreed that they could
survive a few hours without their miniature fire.

It was around 8AM when they awoke for the final time,
sore from the lack of space and tired from the lack of sleep. Wordlessly, they
both practically fell out of the car onto their feet, shivering in the chill of
the morning air. It was almost absurd that the first thing they thought of was
how pretty everything looked, the greenery shining from the reflections on the
morning dew. And just as quickly as that thought came did they remember why
they were sleeping in the car and the urgency to leave hit once again.

Like a well-oiled two-man team they marched into the
house to grab their bags to get ready to leave. But more importantly, they went
in for their breakfast as they hadn’t eaten since early afternoon the day
before. Violet spread out one of their grocery bags from the previous day
across the counter in the kitchen, letting the meal become a free-for-all
between her and her husband. A few slices of bread thick with jam here and a
couple of stale granola bars there was enough to satisfy their uneasy
stomachs.   

             
It was Violet who broke the poor man’s feast first, “Last night, I was
thinking”.

             
“In between your snoring?” her husband jested.

             
“Seriously. I was thinking that maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to run”.

             
“Are you kidding me? After all that jazz last night?” Riley asked with a
mouthful of dry oats.

             
“No, I’m not kidding, which is why I said ‘seriously’. And yes, sure, we should
get off the island and away from this damned mirror. But why should we run away
from it completely? Like you’ve said, we’ve still found something really
important here. We’re on the brink of that fame and fortune that you’re looking
for, aren’t we?”

             
Riley groaned out and tilted his head backwards onto his shoulders, “Then what
do you want to do now? We’ve gone back and forth on this so many times that I’m
almost willing to pay a fortune for it to stop”.

             
“I know! I know. I’m sorry. It’s not like I was prepared to deal with all of
this. Please keep in mind that this isn’t as simple as us trying to argue about
what movie to watch or whether we should get a cat. I’m terrified of what could
happen if we choose wrong”.

             
“Yeah, I understand all that. But I thought we had decided on a single course
of action. Although I wasn’t fully happy about it, I was willing to leave for
you. I mean, we slept in the bloody car and everything. And now suddenly you want
to continue looking into
Sourmouth
? How am I supposed
to take all of
this?”             

             
Violet made an expression similar to someone sucking on their teeth, “Yeah. I
suppose you’re right. And I’m sorry for flip-flopping. But if you’re serious
about continuing down this avenue then so am I. I figure what can it hurt for
us to stop and dig into a bit more of its history? We can reach out to Anna
today with the book and see what she can figure out from it, then head back to
the mainland and call in someone who might be interested in the story”.

             
“Call in who, exactly?”

             
“The media or something. There has to be a reporter out there who is willing to
give the paranormal a shot. Maybe contact one of the big TV stations and see if
they want to turn
Sourmouth
into the next ghost
hunting reality show. We’ll figure it out when we get to that point”.

             
Riley just shook his head and smirked, “Is this something that I even get a say
in?”

             
“Of course you have a say. You’re my husband. We’re in this together, you
idiot”.

             
“You sure? It’s seeming like I’m being pulled back and forth. I get that you’re
scared, I am too. But if we’re going to do this we need to decide and stick with
it; there’s no going back”.

             
Violet cringed and cocked her head to the side, “I said that I was in this for
the long haul. And if I didn’t know better I’d swear you were talking about us
and not the thing in the mirror”.

             
“Not intentionally. But I suppose it would fit. Though it’s not exactly an
appropriate conversation for right now, is it?”

             
“Why not? If you don’t think that we can do this, or that we can’t work out our
marriage then I think you should let me know now before I’m willing to risk
dying beside you long before old age,” she said.

             
“I never said I didn’t think that we could work. But I’d be lying if I said
that I was sure we could. But the whole point of this vacation was for us to
bond again. And we’ve only been either arguing or investigating this bullshit
that then has us doing even more arguing. Where’s the part where we try to fix
our problems?”

             
“I thought just being here together was us trying. What do you want us to do? Put
a sign out in the front of the house and lock ourselves in a room until we’re
back to being newlyweds or starve to death? It doesn’t work like that; we need
time to get back to normal”.

             
Riley just stood there in the kitchen almost lifelessly. It was either the lack
of sleep or the emotional roller-coaster that they had been through in the past
two days but he was almost too exhausted to care.

             
“Let’s just go to town. Alright? We’ll talk about all of this later”.

             
Violet raised her eyebrows before simply nodding in response.

             
Without bothering to continue talking Riley walked past his wife and headed up
the stairs to the second floor with the intention of grabbing the little bound
book from its attic hideaway.

             
Violet mutely collected what was left of their breakfast in the grocery bag,
hoping that it was the last time she’d be seeing the inside of
Poyam’s
house. Of course she took the time alone to
envision their next steps. What could they do aside from run? Did she actually
think that they could turn this situation around into a run of good fortune? Or
was she merely deluding herself in effort to try to make her husband as happy
as she could without endangering them?

             
Riley came back down the stairs two at a time, the journal clutched tightly in
his right hand. While up there he had grabbed his last bag and a light
windbreaker from the master bedroom and threw both over his shoulder.

             
He walked straight to the front door and paused as he looked back with it half
open, “Are you ready or am I going alone?”

             
Violet heaved the grocery bag over her own shoulder and followed her husband
out as he locked the door behind them.

             
To anyone watching it might have looked like he was casually chasing her as she
nearly sprinted to the car. Of course while he wasn’t actually chasing her,
Violet couldn’t help but want to get away from him until she had the time to
calm down. Sadly for her desire for a moment alone, Riley immediately joined
her in the car.

             
Riley looked over and noticed the tightened jaw and the frown on his wife’s
face, “What did I do wrong now?”

             
“Nothing,” she said definitively.

             
“Nothing? You seem like you’re ready to smother me to death with that plastic
bag”.

             
Violet turned to her husband as she tossed the groceries into the back seat,
scattering them about on the floor, “You’d honestly deserve it if I did. You,
acting like a chump like this”.

             
“A chump? No, a chump is some loser on the corner bumming for nickels and
dimes. I’m a lot of things, but a chump isn’t one of them,” he defended.

             
“You’re a chump because you’re turning your back on me when we’re supposed to
be sticking together. Right now we’re in the shit. Knee deep in the fucking
shit. And I could use my husband right now, my fellow fucking soldier. But
you’re mentally AWOL on me and I’m all alone”.