Sourmouth (6 page)

To the side of the window stood a large oak cuckoo
clock with rusted metal numbers. In the center of the ceiling hung a red string
dream catcher adorned with thin grey feathers from an unidentified bird. To the
West of the living room was the reading room that Violet had entered through.
To the East was the small alcove kitchen with a single range stove and the type
of fridge that advertised itself as being better than salting your meat and
burying it. In front of the kitchen area was a wooden dining table for two
without any chairs to actually sit down on. To the South was a stairwell that
lead to the second floor of the house.

“This place certainly has...character,” Riley declared
as he finally shut the door behind him, turning back to stare down the room
with disappointment clearly present on his face.

Violet’s eyes scanned back and forth between the
sparse objects, “The type of character that my mother warned me not to hang out
with. No wonder that old woman didn't want us to stay here. She was being
altruistic really”.

Riley stepped forward and grabbed his wife by the
hand, “Do you feel brave enough to look at the second floor with me? I don’t
want to go alone”.

She smirked, “Are you afraid there might be a wild
animal living up there? Perhaps a fuzzy
wuzzy
brown
bear?”

“Of course not. A bear would have enough taste to just
ransack the place and leave to find something better,” he answered as he
started pulling her towards the stairs. 

Each step of the stairs seemed to be a little bit of a
different shape than the last one with a brand new creak emitting from every
one of them. One step would be a bit taller than the last, the next would be
slightly angled to the left, the one after that would be dented in the middle.
The craftsmanship of the stairs put the structural integrity of the whole house
into serious doubt.

At the top of the staircase was a small landing facing
a blank
wall.
To the left of the stairs was a dead end
and a pale wooden rocking chair with a small red headed doll with saucer button
eyes and a soiled white wedding dress, similar in fashion to the old Raggedy
Ann toys. Just to the side of the stairs was a wooden banister to prevent
anyone from falling to the floor below. To the right of the railing was a thin
hallway no more than three feet wide with three closed doors and a small window
at the end of the hall overlooking the landscape. There were no lights on the
second floor except for the dull glow from the lamps downstairs and what fell
from the stars outside, which was just enough to allow them a general sense of
shape and direction.

Riley led the charge forward, approaching the first
door.

“Are we taking bets on whether there’s a grizzly in
here?” Riley asked with his hand on the metal knob.

“Just open it,” his wife answered with a serious hint
of exasperation in her voice that he hadn’t expected.

“What’s crawled into you?” he asked as he opened the
door a few inches inward.

Violet hastily pushed it open the rest of the way,
“I’m sorry. I’m just getting very tired and I’d like to get some sleep as soon
as I can. The sooner we can get this exploration done the happier I’ll be”.

The room was tiny, almost like a glorified closet. A
closet that was no longer than ten feet long and just around five feet wide. It
housed a little lamp on the floor and a spring cot with ruffled up blankets
that Riley was sure originally carried the small pox virus. With yet another
click that was quickly becoming a habit in the house, the lamp lit up the tiny
room with startling intensity. A small window was built into the back wall that
overlooked the outhouse to the back by the trees and dense foliage. Above was a
cord that hung from the ceiling which connected to a flap that seemed to lead
to the attic, from which a slow wheeze of air seemed to originate through the
cracks. On the floor underneath the cot was a stack of old books, a few
matches, a handful of half burned candles and a crusty stone bowl with ancient
remnants of what was most likely food. On the walls were crude hand painted
figures that sent chills over Violet’s arms.

The drawings on the wall seemed to depict some sort of
child’s interpretation of a massacre. In scribbles the bodies lay everywhere in
bits and pieces in pools of blood. Some were obviously supposed to be various
animals like deer and pigs, but others were observably human in shape. In the
center of the
Gacy
-like drawings of slaughter was
what looked like a predator, most likely the cause of the many deaths that
surrounded
it.
The beast was much larger than any of
the other figures, portrayed as being hairy with jagged lines in every
direction; it had large sharp teeth that protruded from its mouth and menacing
angled eyes.  

“I think that you found the bear that you wanted,”
Violet said, placing her index finger tip on the figure to see if it might rub
off.

Riley shook his head, “I’m not sure that’s a bear.
Maybe it’s a tiger or a wolf. It’s definitely something leaner. Or I guess it
could be a bear on a diet”.

“You’re going on the artistry of someone who was
probably five years old when this was made, I don’t think you can count on
accurate physical attributes. It could be a rabbit for all we know”.

“What makes you think that the person who drew it was
a kid?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Just guessing, based on the level of
skill involved”.

“You’re not much better with a pen, darling. This
could easily be from an adult who has a really creepy hobby,” he jested.

“Fine. It may or may not have been done by a child.
But let’s just imagine it is a bear for the sake of the discussion”.

Riley chuckled, “Actually, it’s a better picture if we
imagine it’s a rabbit”.

Violet backed away and clung to the doorframe, “Now
let’s focus on the why of the drawing. Do you think that the tenant slash
artist was just nature aficionado? This isn’t exactly typical bored sketching.
And I’ve seen enough true crime documentaries to know that this is some serial
killer type
behaviour
”.

“I don’t know. But I’m curious to see if there’re any
more murals of death around this house. Or
ya
know,
maybe a human skull”.

Riley turned back into the hallway and commenced their
exploratory trek. The second door they opened was the one to the right of the
hall, parallel to its counterpart on the other side that they had yet to try.
Inside the right door was the bathroom, or at least what was supposed to be the
bathroom. It was everything that it was supposed to be on paper; a sink, a
toilet and a
clawfoot
tub with a standing showerhead
and curtain. But everything in the room was filthy and destroyed. Absolutely
everything seemed to be covered in a thin layer of mold. The tub was cast iron
with the porcelain coating mostly worn off, which led to rusting inside and out.
The shower curtain with gaudy with animal figures and was torn in multiple
places with large gaping holes. The toilet no longer had a flushing knob and
was replaced with a homemade device using duct tape and a stick. The sink was
stopped up with gobs of torn-up cloths, which looked like they were covered in
dried blood.

“We’re totally in a murder house,” Riley commented as
he eyed the room again and again.

“I think I’m going to need to hold it in for the rest
of the week” Violet said with a grimace.

Riley attempted to turn on the tap in the sink, which
rattled somewhere in the walls from afar before spewing out water that looked
like it consisted of more mud than H2O.

“There is the outhouse in the back that we could use
if we really need it. Or I guess you could just go in the lake,” he meekly
suggested with a sneer.

“Just because I married the likes of you doesn’t mean
that my standards are that low,” she responded with a laugh as she strained her
feet to carry herself to the last door behind them.

With a foreboding screech Riley opened the door to the
master bedroom. A flick of the switch and on came two small lamps connected to
the same wall socket that were sitting on the floor just a few feet apart.
Their faint yellow emissions cast last shadows upwards onto the ceiling and
just barely over the furniture in the room. The room itself was heavily
decorated compared to the rest of the sparsely dressed house, though hardly
well decorated by any uses of the word. The same unfinished wallpaper from the
ground floor clung almost perfectly to every side of the room aside from a few
large slashes on the wall above the bed that tore straight through and into the
drywall. It didn’t take a genius to find it apparent that aside from the
redecoration with a knife the renovations on the house had started in the
bedroom. In addition to the lacerations the wallpaper had been stained a heavy
yellow from tobacco smoke, only made worse by the poor lighting. The fact that
everything was tinged from smoke was easy to see as there had once been
multiple objects that had been removed from the walls that had left large
whitish imprints in their absence. The largest of these missing pieces seemed
to have been a cross that hung crookedly above the bed, which was still
surrounded by half a dozen small picture frames filled with various paintings
of Jesus.    

The bed was queen sized with a wooden box frame that
sat on four posts about a foot off the floor. The posts seemed to have some of
the same slashing marks on them that had destroyed parts of the wall. On top of
the mattress sat a large blanket patterned with intricate cross-stitching that
would have looked good in any home décor magazine if it wasn’t for the
extensive tearing and the burn marks from many dropped cigarettes. There was a
dirty, full length mirror hung on the wall across from the bed encased in a
thin frame of pale pine. There was a window to the left of the bed across from
the doorway that seemed to have some sort of writing in another language
sprawled across the dirty glass surface. It seemed to have been written in the
same paint as the drawings on the wall in the other room.

Violet stepped into the room first, walking
immediately over to one of the two large off-white dressers that stood on
opposite sides of the room. Both of the dressers had all of its drawers pulled
out to various degrees with varying contents inside of them. The one in front
of Violet seemed to be filled with clothing, most of it old garbs for an
averaged sized man while others seemed to be clothing for a child. All of it
dusty and stiff with caked on dirt.

“Who the hell lived in this place?” she asked as she
picked up a pair of faded pink kid’s pants.

“Evidently it was a parent and child”.

“You think that woman...
Poya
or whatever was the mothering type?”

Riley began scanning through the other dresser, “I
can’t say much about her. But by the look of the other room the place might
have been inherited by another family member like an uncle. Or based on the
artwork perhaps a psychotic lodger”.

The drawers that Riley riffled through were filled
with scattered trinkets. A lot of which seemed like nothing more than junk such
as a plastic handheld mirror or a few stray cigarettes, a broken harmonica and
an empty whisky bottle. But there was one item that was clearly special.
Wrapped in a snowy silk handkerchief was a silver necklace and locket garlanded
with intricate floral designs, which contained a small black and white
photograph of a baby. 

“I think I found the owner of that scary doll at the end
of the hallway,” Riley said as he passed the necklace to his wife.

She rocked it from hand to hand as she examined it,
contemplating what to do with the curio.

“So,” he started, “are we sleeping in here tonight?”

She looked up from her examination and scanned the
room with distaste, “As much as I’d prefer not to, I don’t think we have much
of a choice, do we?”

Without much thought Violet dropped the locket onto
the dresser top with a metallic thud.

“You could always go and sleep in the lake. Just float
on your back and hope you don’t get taken away,” Riley advocated with a smile.

Violet mocked his eagerness with the sloppiest face
she could muster, “Isn’t that where I pee? What sort of woman do you think I
am?”

With a laugh he said, “You want to stay in this bear
habitat, don’t you? I’m pretty sure you
bearly
qualify as a woman. Get it? Bear...
ly
?”

With an even bigger laugh she responded, “I hope you
remember my lack of femininity when you want to roll on top of me this week.
You’ll have better luck getting off with an actual
bear”.    

Chapter 4

Riley awoke with a start, dripping in sweat despite
the cold air that engulfed his sleeping body. His mind raced to remember the
nightmare that was rapidly running from his memory like water from a cupped
hand. He recalled something about blood. He remembered that he was dreaming
something incredibly violent but nothing more than hazy vagueness returned to
him. Riley ran his hands over his goose bump covered arms as he looked down at
his still sleeping spouse, who like Riley, slept in her underwear with her
clothes as a cover instead of the filthy, cigarette stained blanket that was
provided to them.