What Crawls Below

2 § Lamb Raised for the Slaughter

The walls of Cross Fellowship were slashed over in several layers of graffiti; after a fresh coat of paint, they just kept coming. The perpetrators--whether it be the many churchgoers who had since chosen different domains to serve their faith or someone else--went unapprehended.

Tuesday Hale had stopped bothering to cover it up several weeks ago.

The sight of the crude remarks never failed to stop her in her tracks. When Tuesday was able to compose herself, she entered the church, where an unimpressive gathering was waiting for her late father's successor to preach. As she settled into a pew, choosing the furthest one back, she couldn't help but keep glancing behind her at the door. The space she saved beside her never filled; the doors did not open again.

She had stopped coming here for prayer as soon as she'd ripped the cross from her neck and denounced God. It had become a habit, from then on, to support the people she'd grown up around; her purpose evolved again when Cyrus left her alone on Manhattan Beach, saying he had something to attend to but he'd reach out again soon.

Somewhere close to a month had passed, and all she had was radio silence. Tuesday knew he wasn't going to suddenly show up now. For all she knew, he was dead in a ditch somewhere.

Something in her, though, insisted this couldn't be true. The dreams that had randomly come to her every so often as she grew up--only frequent enough that she hadn't forgotten them entirely when she would suddenly be revisited by them--had stopped. Maybe they would come back, but something about the last time had felt final. Seeing Cyrus die--that had felt final, but he couldn't be dead, not after all that had happened.

He couldn't have left her alone.

She stared down at her feet, tuning out the sermon as everyone else bowed their heads and shut their eyes. Blood, from the things that had killed her mother and then died themselves, had soiled her old pair of tennis shoes. She'd quickly gotten to marring the squeaky clean surface of her new Chuck Taylors with more poetry. "I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night", something by Sarah Williams, was scribbled in sharpie across the toes. Tuesday didn't know then if she agreed with the sentiment any more.

They weren't practical for the weather, but they felt familiar, and there was great comfort in familiarity. It was maybe the only comfort she had those days.

Tuesday couldn't make herself close her eyes in prayer; every time she did, a twisted recap of everything she'd lived through played against their backdrop, a horror movie she didn't remember auditioning for—and yet, she'd played the supporting role willingly enough. Even if she kept them open though, the memories attacked her in flashes. The one she spent the most time dwelling on was the night she'd lost her best friend.

To think that day had started off so nicely.

She'd been on the floor beside her bed, unable to turn off her racing thoughts as the dance replayed in her head. Tuesday hadn't slept in her actual bed since her father had died; any traces of what had happened were gone, but she could feel the ghost of him weighing her down any time she attempted to sleep there. So she lay wide awake on the carpet, staring at the posters above her bed of all the places she wanted to see--and that's when she heard it. A knock on the front door.

Tuesday remembered sitting up to read her alarm clock--it was a little past midnight--when her mother let out a guttural scream.

She'd only heard screams like that in movies, and they didn't do this one justice. It pierced through the otherwise quiet house, reverberating off the walls and bouncing back at her seemingly from every direction. In just a second it cut off, and the silence returned. Tuesday had sat in the darkness, not daring to move a muscle, swearing she had been able to fall asleep after all and it was just part of a wicked dream.