Sourmouth (31 page)

             
“Do you see that storm above us?” the ticket man asked as he looked through his
eyebrows to the sky.

             
The
Tylers
could feel the rain bouncing off of their
backs as they stood, neither bothering to turn around to give the man the
pleasure.

             
“Yeah...we see the storm,” Violet answered before her husband could blow a
gasket. 

             
“The boat is stuck at the docks in Vancouver. It isn’t safe for it to be
travelling in this weather for risk of being capsized. They’re expecting lightning
too, and it’s hazardous to make the trip as it is. So we’re turning back
everyone until the conditions ease up”.

             
Riley was biting his bottom lip so hard that he was expecting a torrent of
blood to come gushing out.

             
“Do you know if we’d be able to rent or charter a boat?” Violet asked as
politely as she could manage, hoping for an alternative option of escape.

             
The man scrunched up his face as he thought, his eyebrows twitching with every
breath.

             
“You could,” he answered.

             
“...We could?” repeated Violet as if she didn’t understand.

             
“You could. But it depends on whether you can find anyone willing to risk the
trip”.

             
Riley rested his palms on the counter and leaned his body in so that his head
was nearly through the window and into the booth.

             
“And where could we find these people that might be able to help?” he asked
through gritted teeth.

             
“How should I know? I only sell tickets”.

             
The man abruptly stood up and began closing the windowpane.

             
Riley had to pull his torso back to avoid getting his head stuck between the
sills. In anger, he punched the plastic glass which shook under the impact but
never came close to breaking. The ticket man barely reacted as he took his seat
again, passively staring at the counter in front of him.

             
The
Tylers
turned away, their faces barraged by the
rain as they headed back towards their car. The couple passed all of the other
cars with drivers who merely looked slightly annoyed by the inconvenience of
having to wait to return home. Evidently, they weren’t in the same dire straits
the
Tylers
were.

             
“What do we do now?” Violet asked with her voice
sombre
and deflated.

             
Her husband didn’t know how to answer. He was pondering stepping out of the
vehicle and screaming for anyone to help who could build them a raft.

             
“Maybe we should go back to the house,” replied Riley, falling back to the one
place on the island that at least felt familiar.

             
“The house? Why?”

             
“We can’t get to the city tonight. We should get back to
Tusem
on grounds that we know. And in the morning when the storm breaks we get on the
boat and get the hell out of here once and for all”.

             
“I don’t want to go back to that place,” she responded with her eyes hung low.

             
“What choice do we have?”

             
“We could always just stay here. Sit in a line all night with these other
idiots”.

             
"I don't know how smart that is. We have no idea if we're safe here. This
thing seems to go where it pleases," he theorized.

             
"You think that it could find us here? We're a long way from the
house".

             
"Who says it has anything to do with distance? Up until now it seemed to
be able to travel wherever it wanted as long as it was in a reflective surface,
right? Well, now that it's free, who knows what it's capable of? Reflective
surfaces could just be fancy doors for this fucking monster. All of these cars
that we're surrounded by? It could come out of any one of them for all we
know".

             
She shook her head dismissively, "It's not going to try and kill us in
front of all of these people".

             
"And you know that how? It's an animal. A hungry tiger will charge through
a village and pull people from their houses if it's hungry. Who's to say what
this thing would do? We could be putting everyone in danger just sitting
here".

             
"Then what the hell do you want to do?"

             
"We should go back to the house. And get
Tusem
.
We're stuck here for the night anyway. Maybe we can convince him to stay with
us. We can find a place without reflections. Or maybe just keep moving. Break
all of the glass in this shit car so the creature can't travel and we just
never stop driving".

             
His wife silently nodded. She knew he was right, but that didn’t mean that she
was required to like the answer. She reached out and grabbed her husband by the
hand. She gave him a small squeeze before letting him go to turn the car on.

             
Slowly the
Tylers
reversed out of the docks and
headed back up the mountain. This time they drove much slower than they did on
the way down. For some odd reason, the couple wasn’t as eager to return to
Killarney Lake as they were to get away from it.

Chapter 17

             
The
Tylers
pulled up beside the mailbox about thirty
feet from
Poyam’s
porch. Through the rain-dotted
windshield they eyed the field of carcasses leading to the decrepit house. It
was extremely dark out in the storm, making it difficult for them to see more
than five feet in front of them. For obvious reasons, the couple felt
apprehensive about exiting the safety of their seats. After a few minutes of
nervous anticipation the couple finally departed, heading towards the house in
a rushed but smooth manner. Occasionally in their hurry they would accidentally
kick one of the skulls on the ground, sending it sloshing through the sludge.
Or they would step on a leg bone with an audible crunch that was drowned out by
the pitter-patter of rain. In the shelter of the overhang, they quickly
stripped themselves of their cold and wet jackets, dropping their attire onto
the railings to be picked up again when they left, knowing that the clothing
wouldn’t get any drier in the dampness of the old house. Violet took the lead
and opened the front door, which strangely
Tusem
had
left unlocked when he went back inside.

             
In the house, they were instantly battered with a ghastly stench similar to the
one that they had experienced outside not too long before. It crept up their
noses like tiny insects, crawling and carrying the foul
odour
.
The living room was basked in the faint light from the one lamp that sat
innocently on the end table near the reading room, illuminating just as much as
they needed but nowhere near enough. More sinister was what was illuminated on
the floor by the foot of the couch.

On the barren hardwood laid a corpse, pale and
stiffening with the onset of rigor mortis. Dark red blood pooled around the
quickly bloating body, thick from coagulation and stinking like dirty pennies.
The clothing on the cadaver was tattered, wet and glistening with gore. The
man’s face was torn deeply with shreds of skin dangling off the bone in
ribbons, his hands still weakly clutching at his cheeks from trying to hold the
remains of his face together during the last moments of his life. His throat
had been torn outwards with protruding tendons limply dangling against the side
of his neck, leaving a macabre bouquet of sorts for the
Tylers
to find. The man’s torso had been heavily mauled, too. His chest cavity had
been crushed downward with splinters of his ribs jutting out in all directions
as what remained of his organs messily lay within their broken cage, half eaten
and regurgitated. The shining watch that sat on the man’s wrist, specked in
blood, told blatantly that this mutilated corpse was none other than
Tsitusem
.

Violet let out a shrill scream as her knees began to
buckle, as if she couldn’t possibly support her own weight. With reflexes that
her husband wasn’t aware he had, he caught her mid-fall, roughly placing his
hand over her mouth to silence the noise that she continued to try and make.

Riley had no proof that it was
Sourmouth
that done it, but there wasn’t a logical alternative. And if it was the wolf
creature that had killed
Tusem
out of sheer
circumstance, then it would be looking for them next now that they had
returned. He looked around the room, as it might have been hiding around the
dark corners, watching with sick pleasure as they reacted to its handiwork. But
fortunately they were alone, at least on the bottom floor of the house.

Violet continued to whimper from behind her husband’s
hand. She wasn’t even sure why. She wasn’t close to the young man. There wasn’t
an emotional connection there. And yet his gruesome death nearly crippled her.
Perhaps her reaction was to the realization that everything that was happening
had real and utter consequences. While
Tusem’s
end
was tragic and terrifying, she was more torn up about the fact that the
niggling fear in the back of their heads was not just immature imagination left
to run wild. She cried because she knew that they almost undoubtedly were going
to die that night.

Riley tried to tighten the pressure he placed on her
mouth. He was sure that they were alone on the main floor; he couldn’t know if
the basement and the upper floors were as vacant. And the only way to know for
sure was to check, which was not in the cards without a dozen Mounties with
shotguns as reinforcements.

Without completely removing his hand from her face he
pointed upwards to the ceiling to convey that the beast might be up there.

Violet closed her eyes and began rapidly inhaling and
exhaling through her nose, trying to steady her nerves. As hard as she tried,
she couldn’t stop herself from glancing towards
Tusem’s
body, absorbing every detail she could. She tried to take a mental picture in
her head of the way he laid, the shape of his twisted fingers, the amount of
blood leaking from his corpse, the look of sheer horror in his eyes. She did it
as if remembering him like that made the fact that he died the way he did any
better.

“We need to go,” Riley whispered as he rested his head
against hers.

She nodded. Violet wasn’t confident in her ability to
actually walk, but she did know that she didn’t want to be in the room with the
dead man for any more than she already had been.

“Can you stand?” he asked as he pulled his hand away.

She clenched her jaw and nodded again. Violet wrapped
her arms around her husband’s neck and used him to brace herself as she pushed
upwards to standing position.

“We’ll get to the car, get down that damn mountain
again and drive. We’ll drive until the sun comes up and we’ll get on that boat
and get the hell out of here,” Riley explained, his voice cracking as he rushed
to speak.

“Let’s do it,” Violet moaned as she readied herself.

Both of the
Tylers
looked
back at
Tusem
on the floor, or specifically what was
left of him. For a brief moment of reflection they felt guilty. It was their
fault that a young man was dead. It was their stupidity that put their lives at
risk. But there would be time to think about everything if they managed to
squeak out of everything and survive.

The couple quickly, but most importantly quietly, left
the house, closing the door silently behind them.

Riley fished the key out of his pocket and locked the
front door, which hopefully would buy them a little extra time if the creature
was still in the house.

Riley exchanged the keys in his pocket from
Poyam’s
house to the key to the rental car as they stepped
off of the porch and back into the downpour.

“Can we please get out of here?” Violet asked as she
anxiously eyed the car, kicking through the mud and animal pieces as she walked.

“We could...if it wasn’t for that thing,” Riley
replied as he abruptly stopped her by the arm, raising his free hand to shield
his eyes from the rain.

The
Tylers
looked out from
in front of their car to see the twistedly-shaped being which was stalking out
from the dense cover of trees.

Chapter
18

At first sight the couple figured that it was a
hallucination. They were praying that
Sourmouth
wasn’t truly there. But it was. It was stalking them from a distance. They
watched as the downpour bounced off its thick hide like bullets, matting its
fur down against its translucent grey skin and navy blue blood. Much clearer a
declaration of existence was its pungent smell. Even from afar, the
Tylers
were hit by its foul scent, overpowering the smells
that spilled from the trees and lake around them. The wolf’s musk filled the
air with an almost indescribable putrid
odour
that
was as
much sweet
as it was sickening. The creature
smelled like a rotting corpse in an old candy factory, a body left to mummify
in a vat of caramel.
Sourmouth’s
very presence could
be tasted thick on the tongue like a wretched mixture of candied blood and
bile.