Sourmouth (20 page)

             
“One last question,” Violet said.

             
“Shoot”.

             
“What’s your recommendation? Should we stay or go?” Violet posed plainly as she
stood up behind her husband, almost symbolically staring at the exit.

             
Bill looked at the bottom of his now empty flask, his face clearly wondering
where the rest of his drink went.

             
“My instinct says that I should tell you to run. But as an old man spending his
days playing with dead animals and sitting in unfortunate little bars with
other lowlifes, my heart says that you should stay. My heart says that you
should chase that thing down to the ends of the Earth until you feel like you
can’t do anything more. My heart wants me to tell you not to end up like me,
wondering why you’ve never done anything remarkable in your whole damn life”.

Bill quietly walked back over to his table and
gingerly took his seat, his hands shaking as he reached in between a collection
of jars to pull out another small bottle of whisky to replenish his supply.

“If you’ll please excuse me and see yourselves out,”
Bill started. “I need to get myself another drink”.

Chapter 11

By the time that they left the Skin N Bones the
weather had begun to change. The sunny skies were overcast with dirty looking
clouds, darkening the horizon and threatening with rain. The air was no longer
a chilly fall breeze but a stiff battering of cold wind.

The
Tylers
sat on the hood
of the car just outside of the shop, chewing on what was left of their
collection of granola bars. Neither of them bothering to talk as they both
mulled over the decision before them.

“Have we come to the same conclusion?” Riley asked.

“How should I know unless you tell me what you’re
thinking?” she answered through chunks of oat that rolled around her mouth.

“I think...that we should stay on the island. I think
that we should stay until we have a genuine reason to run away”.

Violet turned against the wind, holding her hair
against the side of her head in the wind.

“I agree”.

“Holy shit, have we finally decided on the same thing
at the same time?”

Violet nodded with a nervous leer.

“I’m afraid of what we might find if we continue with
this. But I’m also afraid of leaving it behind and being that psycho telling
people that they once saw Bigfoot,” she said.

“Like Bill said, the chase. The desire to not regret
missing what could be an adventure of a lifetime”.

“Exactly”.

“I was thinking of ‘
Sourmouth
’.
Is it weird that I’m starting to get attached to this fucking thing? Like an
annoying pet that you’re saddled with when a relative dies. You’ve had
interactions with the thing during family get-togethers and you feel like
you’ve got an obligation to make sure it doesn’t starve, but you don’t actually
want it or like it. That’s sort of how I’m feeling about ‘
Sourmouth
’
if that makes sense”.

“You’re a strange little man,” Violet said, as she threw
an empty bar wrapper at her husband, but the wind stopped it not halfway before
its target and blew it in the other direction.

He laughed, “Does that not make sense?”

             
“From everything we’ve heard, ‘
Sourmouth
’ would be an
extremely dangerous house pet”.

             
“It’s the dog that your crazy old grandmother keeps tied up in the backyard
because it keeps attacking the
neighbourhood
children. I never said it was a cuddly little fuzz ball”.

             
Violet shivered in the coolness, “Speaking of attacking. We never really talked
about the story that the old man told us”.

             
“Which old man specifically? This island is worse than Florida for old people,”
Riley asked.

             
“The old man of the old couple by the lake,” she clarified.

             
“Oh yes, that
Calgarian
. What did you want to talk
about?”

             
“He said that
Poyam’s
father was killed by an animal,
right in their house. What did the job most likely was that thing
Sourmouth
, the thing that currently lives in our mirror.
The question that I can’t help but be asking and I don’t see us getting an
answer to is how it got to him. Was it just chance that
Sourmouth
chose him of all people? And if it was
Sourmouth
, at
what point did it become something that could slaughter a man?”

             
Riley nodded, standing up and stretching out his legs, “And of course what
about
Poyam
? How did she survive when the creature
was just down the hall? Why didn’t it turn around and kill her?
Poyam’s
room had to be passed first for the animal when it
came up the stairs and had to be passed again on the way down”.

             
“More than that...how was she involved in the incident?”

“Involved?”

“Think about it. Who on this planet had more reason to
want her father dead? After hearing about the abuse that she suffered, I wanted
the prick dead too. It’s impossible to know whether it was drawn before or
after the attack, but she had all of that quote-unquote art on her walls about
the giant wolf. And then there was the book we found above her room with its
name written in it. So if she did all that she certainly knew about the animal.
I wonder how much she knew about it before her father became a chew toy”.

“You think that
Poyam
definitely did the drawings?”

“Who else would?”

“A friend?”

“She didn’t have friends as far as we know, especially
ones that would come over to the house,” Violet pointed out as she stood up to
follow her husband as he paced around the car.

“Alright. So she drew
Sourmouth
.
What does that say to you?”

“That maybe she set the wolf on him. Why else would
she be drawing the thing?”

“If I suffered what she did and saw my father torn to
shreds by some wild animal I think I would snap, too. Scribbles on the wall are
a rather innocent form of therapy if you ask me. It doesn’t at all suggest that
she caused it to happen,” Riley stated.

Violet wrapped her arms in on themselves to keep in
the warmth from her body.

“You think that she drew that afterwards? I have a
hard time picturing a 40 year old woman sitting on the ground and drawing on
the wall. I find it a lot easier to picture her as a young girl, hearing the
legends from the other kids around the lake and trying to will the thing into
existence”.

Riley finally decided that it was time to go and
opened the driver’s seat door, “The woman at the museum did talk about that
calling into being stuff. Maybe she did find out about
Sourmouth
and over time, over many years she found out more and more about it. And
eventually knew enough to...what? Control it?”

Violet made a low squeaking to voice her hesitation,
“It seems as plausible as anything else, doesn’t it?”

“Suppose,” he admitted.

“If we decided that that was the case...what’s the
next step?” she asked as she got into the passenger’s seat.

“Are we deciding that that is what happened?” he asked
with a laugh.

“I am. I don’t know about you”.

Riley leaned over to his wife and put his arm around
her shoulder, pulling her into a kiss.

“I think that if knowing about it is how you control
it, then we need to find out more about it. We should give this
Tsitusem
a call and see if he knows anything else. We need
to find out more than fireplace stories and old wives tales”.

Violet hung her arms around her husband, “Have you
ever thought about how lazy the person was who named it the ‘fireplace’?”

“That’s what you’re thinking about now? Can you not
concentrate on anything?” he laughed.

“Think about it. Somebody looked at it and went ‘it’s
a place with fire’ and just named it that. How uninventive is the English
language? Couldn’t they have come up with a new word, like ‘kitchen’ or ‘tree’?”

“Graveyard. Streetlight,” Riley pointed out.

“Shut up,” Violet responded plainly as she slinked
back in her seat with her eyes closed.

“Let’s find a payphone and give this guy a call,” Riley
said, looking out the window as if he was just going to spot one off in the
foliage ahead.

“I’m going to leave that conversation to you,” she
said as she continued to rest her eyes.

“Why do I automatically have to do it?”

“I don’t have very good luck. And so far we’ve had
some great luck in finding people who don’t think we’re absolutely insane. It’s
probably better not to push it and just have you do it”.

“It’s not luck. We’re researching a piece of local
cultural history. The people we talk to are locals. There’s no luck in that,
its common sense”.

“’Researching’? Since when is bumbling around the
island hoping to find someone to help us ‘research’? Don’t make us sound
fancy,” Violet teased.

“Just glaze over the fact that I’m right and you
should be the one making the call”.

“Hey! I’ll give you that it might not be my luck as to
why I shouldn’t have to make the call. But that doesn’t mean that I should have
to either”.

“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Point is that we’ve got
another lead and we’re going to follow it,” Riley chuckled as he fished the car
keys out of his pocket.

“Agreed. The question is what are we doing afterwards?”

“I think we should experiment,” Riley stated as he
switched on the engine with a choking stutter.

Violet giggled, teasing her husband, “Oh you. I don’t
think that this island has sex stores to buy those sorts of toys”.  

             
“You know what I mean. I’ll call this guy and see what he knows and afterwards
we need to go back to
Poyam’s
and figure out a way to
interact with
Sourmouth
. To let it know that even
though we’re staying in
Poyam’s
father’s room we’re
not actually its enemies”.

             
“And how do you want to go about that? Though, I do like the idea of you
barking at the mirror trying to talk to the thing one mutt to the other”.

             
Riley pulled the car from the Skin N Bones’ driveway and back onto the path to
the main road, not even bothering to look behind him due to the lack of traffic
in the woods.

             
“We need to try something new because right now we’re just having staring
contests. I’d like to be on its good side rather than end up filleted because
it’s gotten annoyed at us” he said as they drove along towards the island main
street.

“If you do get skinned you should know that I’d
probably miss you a bit,” Violet kidded as she leaned back in her seat and
closed her eyes.

“...That’s a consolation, I suppose...” 

#

             
The
Tylers
stopped at the grocery store again,
remembering that it had a phone booth at the front of the building near the
ATM. Violet took the time to do some additional shopping since they had quickly
run out of their previous food supply, her choices restricted by the lack of
much in terms of amenities at the house by the lake.

With his wife playing chef, Riley was left alone to
phone the number that Bill had provided and hope for the best. After a few long
rings the call was finally answered, the voice on the other end soft and rather
feminine, the words well-articulated and obviously educated.

             
“This is
Tsitusem
, to whom am I speaking?” 

             
“Hi. You don’t know me, but my name is Riley, Riley Tyler. I was given your
name by Bill”.

“Nice to speak with you, Mr. Tyler. But may I ask
which Bill this might be? That’s a pretty standard name”.

It was then that Riley realized that didn’t know the
man’s last name.

             
“Bowen Island Bill?” he said, his voice rising at the end of the sentence to an
uncomfortable degree.

             
“Would this Bill be the gay man that plays with road kill and practically lives
in seedy little bars?” he questioned.

             
Riley almost wanted to proclaim victory having guessed the man’s sexuality
correctly, but figured his stupid desire to be right wasn’t a pressing concern.