Tiff pulls at the top of the dress again, adjusts the skirt, and tries not to feel all the discomfort she has at being here again. She isn't sure why she agreed, just that she did. Maybe it's just that she would agree to anything to make her grandfather proud.
Rather than sit with her immediate family, who she's pretty sure she's not supposed to be near anyway (she can see her parents sitting in a front pew, straight-backed and perfect, with Andy wilting and tugging at his tie next to them), she's near the back with Uncle Mike, Aunt Samantha, and Matt. It's more comfortable back here— but it's still hard to find comfort in a different view of a space she once knew well, in Aunt Esther's sundress over her legs, in the dead girl's leather still on her arms, of all of this.
From the podium, her grandfather's voice is hypnotic; the hymns she hasn't sung in years lull her into uneasy security. It's terror and nostalgia on a beige metal chair. It's feeling right at home and wanting nothing more than to bolt out the door.
Like she did when she was a child, she reads the hymnal until church is over. It's ancient; it's older than she is. She traces the lines of music and imagines playing them on the French horn. When she looks up in that non-focusing version of focus, Andy is tugging at his tie again, rows in front of her. He was never all that comfortable with church clothes. Then again, neither was she.
Church isn't the worst thing in the world. It's uncomfortable, but it isn't as bad as she remembers it being. Once she's over the hill, it's just kind of neutral. Then church is over and everyone else filters out of the chapel, leaving Matt and Tiff alone. It's like they're kids again, debating whether or not to skip Sunday School. (They never did. Neither of them had the guts or the lack of faith.)
Tiff leans forward on the pew in front of her, arms folded, cheek resting on covered skin. In front of her, Matt keeps doing what he should: cleaning up the remainder of the sacrament supplies, fighting the decorations of poinsettias by the window, muttering under his breath to his white shirt and discarded suit coat.
"Is this really the best time to talk to Peepaw?" Matt doesn't look at her.
Tiff keeps looking out the window to her immediate right. There's a bird in the grass out there. "What do you mean?"
"Couldn't you pull him to the side when you're at his house for lunch or for dinner?"
"Lunch, maybe, if we get there in time— but I plan to be long gone by the time dinner rolls around."
"How come?" He barely looks up before he goes back to his work.
"I don't want to run into my parents." She sighs, keeps looking out the window. She thinks of palm trees bending in hurricane winds; she thinks of pine needles biting into her hands. "I just don't know what to say."
"You could give them a chance? Or give yourself a chance, as it were?"
"I'm trying to keep the peace," she explains. "I— I don't want to be the reason Sunday dinner goes wrong. What's one more without me, right? And I'll be there for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner anyway. I'm not missing that much."
"What are you going to do instead of lunch? Or— Shoot. Dinner?"
She shrugs, as much as she can in her position. "I guess I don't know yet. I might crack open that journal and see why it's blank. I guess I'll see when I get there."
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"No need. I'm the research guy, anyway."
That hasn't been true in a long time. She may still be the member of her small group of friends who does the most traditional forms of research and she does enjoy hitting the books— but she isn't sure if she fits that role anymore. She did when she was sixteen and they were fighting the Oneiron.
She has changed so much since then. A church is a place of baptism and rebirth, but it's also a place of repentance— a place where you go back to who you used to be when you were righteous.
The door far behind Matt and the pulpit draws her attention when it opens and familiar figures step out of it, all exchanging farewells. Brother Hooper, a tall man with thinning hair, adjusts his suit coat on his way out of the office. When he sees Tiff in the second row of pews, he raises his eyebrows in a look of pleasant recognition. "Tiffany May! It's nice to see you again. I had forgotten about you."
She tries her hardest not to cringe at that. "It's nice to see you, too, Brother Hooper."
"I trust you're doing well?"
"Of course, sir."
He nods, puts one hand on the side exit of the chapel. "God be with you, Tiffany May. Until we meet again."
"And you, too," she says, somehow unable to complete an exchange she knows well. The words won't come out of her mouth.
He nods, pushes open the door to humid air and the smell of threatened rain, and disappears toward the parking lot.
He's a man she once knew well. She knew his daughter, Alice; she was a few years younger than her. She knew his wife, who led the girls' youth group activities for a time. It's like they barely know each other anymore. Maybe it's a lack of interpersonal object permanence on Tiff's part— or maybe everything has changed over and over again, and the thing she always feared as a child is coming true: not that nobody knows her, but that they are actively pretending they don't. It's a silly, paranoid thought, but something about it sets off the bells in the back of her head.
She still rests her head on her arms. None of it matters all that much anyway. The church is putting her on edge. That's all it ever was. It should be easy to jostle her leg and convince herself that she isn't feeling what she's feeling. It doesn't work, of course; the mind isn't so easily fooled. The attempt is better than nothing.
Peepaw goes to step out of his office once Brother Hooper is gone. Tiff snaps her head up and blurts, "Peepaw, I need to talk to you."
"Here and now?" The confusion is evident on his face as much as his voice.
She nods, rises from the pew. "Could we?"
"I guess it has been long enough since we had a chat, not as family, but as members of the congregation. How about you step into my office and we speak for a moment before lunch?"
She nods. It sounds good enough to her, as she climbs the stairs to the area behind the pulpit. It makes her heart beat a little quicker than it should be when he gestures for her to shut the door behind her.
It's a nice enough office. It was last remodeled in the seventies; Tiff heard somewhere that the desk had to be replaced in the nineties. The office itself, like the chapel, has been around since the real first chapel was abandoned and lost.
The hands of the man who uses this space are evident in the decoration: sparse, conservative, and overly-concerned with those who came before. Ancient gilded-paged Bibles and books of history line shelves broken by portraits of ancestors, of Biblical figures, and of Christ himself. Eyes watch her from all around the room. She tries not to notice; she tries not to feel seen.
Tiff takes a seat in the chair across the desk from her grandfather's. Hers is a metal folding chair— the beige paint and the banality of faith. She can't shake it.
Peepaw Zacharias leans back in his old chair, high back stretching up above his head. "What seems to be the issue, Tiffany May? Does it have to do with your faith while living out in the world?"
She shakes her head.
He doesn't seem to hear what she means with that. He continues prattling on and on about righteousness. She can't think of anything to say in response. She just folds her hands in her lap, picks at her fingers, lets her mind wander. All she can think about is how uncomfortable she is in this skirt (and how uncomfortable it is to hold all her questions inside like they're about to come pouring out of her). There have been two skirts over the past two and a half years: a tight leather skirt borrowed from Kay for Halloween; a day dress conjured in the Dream World; and that's it. She wishes to god she were wearing dress pants, if she had to be here at all.
"And I suppose," Peepaw Zacharias says, by way of conclusion, "that we will have to concoct a study plan for you to follow when you head back to Lake Wonder."
"Yeah," she stammers, "sure. If you say so."
"I do. Perhaps we can speak after dinner tonight."
She doesn't know how to tell him she won't be there. She can't. He won't be disappointed. He will be angry in a terrifyingly smoldering way— a way she has never known how to deal with. Instead, she says, "We can work on it before I head back after Christmas."
"Or through email," he suggests, sounding for all the world like a slightly-out-of-it grandfather and not a man who genuinely believes in the religious cult he's leading post-retirement. "I know how to use e-mail."
"Yeah, we could do that."
They will never do that. If he tries, she will ignore every single email from him until the guilt gnaws at her stomach lining like too much ibuprofen. He probably won't do it anyway. He had every opportunity to email her when she wasn't here. He either didn't care or was doing the semi-shunning thing.
The latter seems more plausible when he smiles at her and says, "It's nice to have you back in the fold, Tiffany May. This congregation isn't complete without you."
She isn't sure why it hurts. She isn't sure how to articulate it. It just aches, deep down in her chest where she can't heal it. All she can say is, "Thank you, Peepaw."
"Can I help you with anything else before we head off to lunch?"
She considers it. She didn't get a chance to ask when they were fishing. If she doesn't say it now, she fears it will never come out of her. "I— Yes. Yeah. I know you traveled when you were younger, because you drove a truck cross-country, but you never moved, right?"
"I have lived here all my life. All our family has. Does that answer your question?"
"Yes. Yeah. It was kind of a lead-in to a different question, because— it stands to reason that you would have been a young man in the 1970s, right? So— was there ever a girl there, a girl who lived here— maybe someone related to us, even— who went missing?"
"This again, Tiffany May?"
She ignores his accusatory tone. "Her name would have been, uh..." It hits her, that she has to pretend to know less than she does. "Something starting with a P, I think. Priscilla? Primrose? Something like that, I think?"
"I don't know," he says, seeming to think it over. "I would have to check my journals."
But there's something about what he says. Maybe it's how he leans back in the chair, or something in his eyes, or how his voice is way too smooth compared to what it had been before. Maybe it's the way his eyes shift. But the alarm bells go off in the back of his mind and she knows: he is lying.
She doesn't know why. She doesn't know what would possess him to lie about someone he once knew. Maybe it's a grief thing. She wants to believe that he is a good man at heart, if a little brainwashed and misguided. He has to be a good man. It has to be grief.
She's quickly distracted from the lead by something else entirely. The window has been open the whole time, letting in the smell of the rain and the flowers under the windowsill, of old white paint and new lichen from the greenery at the edge of the property. Now, though, she smells something entirely different. It's nostalgic, in a bad way: the scent of fertile rot and bone marrow.
And she smells smoke.
Not woodfire smoke, not candle smoke, not the burnt food of her many attempts at cooking. Cigarette smoke.
It was bearable when it came from Eliza. It was bearable when it came from Drake. It was bearable when the smoke was Ant's and she knew how not to breathe it in. But she's in Fort Reverence now, and all she can do is wrinkle her nose and try to soothe her jumpy nerves. She can't tear the fear out of her.
"Peepaw, did you start smoking again?" she asks, because it's the first rational explanation she can think of. Maybe it's wafting over from his coat by the door.
"No," he says, looking at her with a small measure of concern, "I haven't in years."
"But you smell it, too?"
"I do." Frowning, he rises from his chair and crosses to the window. She thinks about joining him, but she can't see anything from where she's sitting and she doesn't think that such a minor change in perspective would grant her some new insight into the world beyond the window and its ancient, rust-trapped screen. It would be better to actually head outside and see what she can see.
Wordlessly, Tiff slips out of the office, grabs her bag from the pew where she had been sitting, and rushes out the side door to the small patch of land beyond the back of the chapel. Her hand instinctively goes for her bag, but she isn't sure if it's for her camera or for a ray gun that just isn't there.
It's unseasonably cold, but she feels it on her skin less than the threat of rain. What she expects, on a rational level, is some teen trying their hand at rebellion by smoking behind the church. It's a bad idea— she can't think of a single parent around here who would have a healthy reaction to something like that. It's an instinct she can admire, noting the paint under her fingernails. If that is the case, they certainly have a lot of guts and not a single ounce of common sense.
It isn't some shithead kid. It isn't a person at all. When she looks up and around, trying to find some sort of flesh or church clothes, she finds something wonderful and fascinating instead. Off to the left of the window, where she can see her bewildered grandfather, there is something that's only two feet shorter than the roof of the chapel— several feet taller than Tiff herself.
The bone creature is back: hulking, constructed from bone and shadow. It must have followed her here, with its six bowed legs, gator mouth, and glimmering eyes made of pure darkness— at least twenty, at least thirty. Shards of periosteum jut out at impossible angles, complicating its form. She can see through the cage of its body to the nebulous mass of organs beneath, deep black and dripping a substance between the viscosity of tar and fresh blood.
In the light of a clear afternoon, it's like nothing she has ever seen before. She wants to observe it. She wants to watch it move, wants to understand where it came from and how it works. In the moment that time freezes, she raises the small point-and-shoot digital camera from her jacket pocket and snaps three pictures in quick succession. She sees it through the viewfinder at the top, clear as the day around her. That is the smell of smoke.
The grass folds under her old boots with every step she takes toward it. They aren't great church shoes, but at least they aren't falling off.
"Tiffany May, what are you seeing?" Peepaw Zacharias asks through the window's screen.
"Um— nothing. I thought I saw something but— I didn't. Just a, uh... a neat flower."
"Tiffany May, are you lying to me?"
"No, sir," she lies, still unable to look away. She watches the creature and it watches her.
She can't tell him. This kind of thing is exactly what made her parents send her away. Granted, the Skunk Ape incident was a little more involved and she didn't expect that they were still going through her diary (she was sixteen, she should have been allowed to have some privacy), but this is right in front of her. This would be harder to hide.
She doesn't know what it wants. If she did, she might be able to look away. She might be able to shoo it away like a cloud of flies.
Peepaw Zacharias lets out a terse, angry sigh that upsets the dirt on the screen. "I guess I'm heading out there."
She doesn't get the chance to object. If he's on his way out here, she doesn't have long. If he sees the bone creature, and he knows that she saw it, these things will not end well. And if it doesn't end well, then how can she remain here? There's one week until Christmas— how can she remain here? How could she ever come back?
No, shit. That's silly. She doesn't want to come back here. Not forever. Not to live. She isn't a terrified, shaky sixteen year old looking for a way back home and waiting for her parents to say, "We get it. We were wrong. You can come home now." Now she's eighteen. It's a little more pathetic to hold out hope for that same thing, no matter how much stock she puts in it.
She steps forward, left foot first, and takes off running. Seconds. She has seconds.
Tiff waves her hands at the creature as it towers over her, trying to scare it off like a raccoon in the trash. "Leave," she hisses. "Get out of here."
For a split second, it doesn't budge. Desperately, she pushes on one of its legs, breathing in the scent of rot and smoke even though she despises the latter. Its legs clack and clatter to keep its balance, but it gets the memo. After a long, worried moment, it takes off on its six spindly feet, clacking and clattering, dripping black on the winter's green grass. It runs toward the trees beyond the chapel.
That's the moment that the side door of the church opens. Peepaw stumbles through it with the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up. Matt steps out behind him, reaching for something in his pocket. The two of them freeze, watch it run, take it in like a comet or an eclipse— awe, she thinks. Or is that fury on her grandfather's face? She can't tell. She wishes she could.
She looks closer and knows it as well as she knows anything. He's beyond pissed. His rage is something deeper. Something older. Something rooted in tradition and ancestry. She has seen this look before, but not to this degree.
Something climbs up her chest and catches in her throat. It isn't the fear of what's happening. It's the fear of what could.
Peepaw Zacharias turns and mutters something into Matt's ear. He nods, then nods again; Peepaw Zacharias leaves to join the church once more, through the chapel.
Before he heads back inside, he gives Tiff a look. It's one she knows well. They will talk about this later.
She hopes to god they don't get the chance. She knows, in her heart of hearts, that hoping will do nothing.