The Northwest reunion redirected itself to the underground chapel, a place that the deranged man had designed himself - all in the name of his own crooked, desperate worship of that triangular, top-hatted demon. Preston had never really thought about the fact that Bill's clothing fit perfectly into what was considered 'respectable' in Nathaniel's day.
Did he wear a loincloth in the stone age? A tri-corner in the Revolution? Really, it was a wonder that top hat even stayed on. Truth be told, the more he thought about it, the less it made sense.
What did make sense, however, was that the latest developments in the family saga had been…poorly received by the returning Patriarch. In fact, it was fair to say that Nathaniel was distinctly ticked off.
The usual reverential peace of that grand underground space had been thrown to the four winds by the pioneer's fury, tremulous rants, foul words and roaring streams of spit
"YER A THUNDERIN' USELESS BASTICH!" the rotting old man roared, ripping out one of the chapel's pews. "I CAN'T BELIEVE-"
"Sir, please!" Preston pleaded. "It wasn't my fault, I-"
Nathaniel was a deceptively tough creature for one so marbled and gnarled by the ravages of time. He grabbed Preston by his lapels and glared into his eyes with his own bloodshot, yellow oculars. They were so glassy they almost looked like the man was going to cry.
"How th'hell did you become one of our blood?!" He seethed, peppering Preston's face with spit.
Preston tried not to think about the fact that mouth had been full of raw rat earlier, and found himself stammering. "I'm - I'm a Northwest through and through!"
"A real Northwest woulda seen ta it that the Pines boy'd be outta the picture! A real Northwest woulda made a deal! All of this -" He gestured wildly at the numerous pieces of triangular paraphernalia, "Centuries of it! And ya gets ta meet him… And ya gets put off by havin' yer facial holes swapped?!"
"It was - it was horrific-" The meeker man tried to protest.
"It should be an honour!" Nathaniel roared back. "I'd'a dreamed'a havin' mah orifices swapped if it meant making a ton of Weirdness bonds!"
"They were practically useless when-"
THWACK! A boney hand slapped against Preston's distinctive jawline. "Ah ain't gonna hear it!"
Priscilla cleared her throat. "Sir, Great-Grandfather, you must understand, times have changed!"
Nathaniel whipped his head around and sneered. "So you ain't so willing to get your hands dirty? That's fine. Ya gets a freelancer. Ya gets a man who don't mind havin' his hands dirty instead. Ya gets mobsters, ya gets lumberjacks, ya gets demons, ya gets manotaurs."
Preston, still nursing his sore jaw, adjusted his tie. "We try to avoid the occult if we can-"
"Avoid it? ...Avoid it. Ya try to avoid the dark stuff huh…" Nathaniel began chuckling, quietly.
The crooked, distinctly rotten-smelling man dropped Preston back to his feet, spun on his heel and turned his back to his descendants. Preston and Priscilla glanced to eachother with concern as he rocked his shoulders.
They briefly wondered if he was crying.
Only a moment later, they distinctly wish he had been.
A strange sound erupted from the man. A gargled, fierce laughter that grew louder and louder. He clenched his hands into fists, still standing as stiff as a board, and bellowed into an uproarious cackle that echoed across the chapel's pounding walls, reverberating into a cacophonic choir of pure insanity that sent shivers down their spines.
"YA AVOID THE DARK STUFF?!" He finally yelled in Preston's face, speckling the man in thick, sticky globules of century-old saliva, "THEN HOW THE HELL DO YOU EXPLAIN ME?!"
"I- I admit there's a bit of a dearth but-"
"If you're really this outta kilter with our ways, ya're gonna have ta THINK like me!" Nathaniel retorted, tapping his head. It pitted slightly under his finger, as if he was poking plasticine in place of bone. "Ya needs ta get savage! Get calculated! Get ta our glory days! D'ya think JP Morgan's nose was a health condition?! It was demon's curse! In exchange for his moustache!"
Preston stammered. "What do you-"
"If you wanna make people's lives hell, you gotta put hell on Earth, dag-dummit!"
"Elaborate. Uh- please, great-grandfather."
Priscilla rolled her eyes at Preston's subservience. It was all rather unimpressive, thus far. Sure, they had raised the dead - but this was a particularly rude, grotesque, unpleasant rendition of the dead. No vampires, no legion of loyal doom-creatures, no pleasantly dressed lawyers, just this increasingly unpleasant, increasingly erratic individual with a bit of a god complex and weird-old-timey misogyny.
"That laboratory's got just-a-bout the most significant cross-dimensional weakness this side'a Florida!" Nathaniel spattered. "I kin sense it on account'a mah clockwork demonology implant!"
"There…is an awful lot to unpack in that sentence." Priscilla ventured.
"An' a lot ta unpack in mah brain-meat!" Nathaniel replied, sniffing his finger. "Mah brain would take yer average alien sixteen years ta decipher on account'a the clockwork-doohickies in there!"
"We're struggling enough." She murmured, though she was sure to be quiet. It was probably unnecessary. She was pretty sure that was a maggot in his ear canal.
"Now looky here, and I'll explain." Nathaniel stood up straight as he approached the still-petrified corpse of Cornelius Northwest. "This-here traitor is like a miniature battery. Come, come and look to it, look into his eyes!"
"I'd rath-" Preston didn't get to finish before he was roughly manhandled by his great-grandfather to the desiccated, lightly stained corpse. The middle-aged patriarch winced as he took in those drawn, pitted details of the body that had once been the whistleblower.
Heh. Whistleblower. Because… because trains.
It was a miserable, awful, drawn shape. Void of eyeballs, void of flesh on its jaw, void of viscera and muscular form. Hanging wide open, slumped in slowly rusting shackles that hung from the gigantic cylinder that had once been his prison.
It was no resting place. No mere coffin. It was a terrible place of torture, of fury and angry that defiled every fundamental human right and tenant of existence.
"Cornelius was near-useless in life." Nathaniel said, with more than a tinge of twisted pride on his tongue. "So we turned him inta just about th'most useful part of our common goal! He's like a great big energy bank to finally bring in a bonafide, life-time connection between our worlds! I call it… Bizarrogeddon! A festival of chaos an' money!"
Preston's eyes widened as he stared to his wife, who just held the bridge of her nose between a perfectly-manicured finger and thumb. "No, no, Great-Grandfather, Bill Cipher's already been here. You need to drop this. It isn't the time, nor the place."
"You ain't the boss of me, woman!"
"And you aren't the boss of me!" Priscilla snapped back.
"Ya little bastich, why I oughta-"
"Now, now, let's calm down!" Preston barked, stepping between them, a hand on his great grandfather's bizarrely spongey chest. "We need you a lawyer and witness, Nathaniel, not as a - as a priest of weirdness. If you help us? Our family could retake power! Get our daughter - the future generation - back into our arms! We could-"
"We could be a family again!" Priscilla piped in, this time with a little desperation.
Nathaniel turned to the two and cracked his knuckles. "Y'all need your evil great-grandaddy to git them townsfolk back in order? Fine. But ya can't get in the way of fate. This town is overdue its great cataclysm, boy howdy, and ya can't stop it."
Nathaniel Northwest, sincere as he could possibly be, plucked one of the enormous books from the Cipherous lecterns that peppered the chapel. He leafed through each page, until, finally, he ended upon a certain pair of sheets - and turned it to face Preston with an all-too-horrific, toothless smile.
There, spread across two gigantic pages, written in suspiciously deep red ink, there was a drawing. A detailed, unpleasant, cross-hatched drawing of the entire town's valley, that circular terranean cove, plunged into a deep pit - as if were a colossal clod of detritus plunging down a drainpipe, from a gigantic several-mile-wide-gutter. Railroad lines, seemingly deep underground, wrapped around the resultant hole like a colossal choker, wrapping around the horrendous black hole that led nowhere and halted for nobody. Writhing, slippery plants seemed to burst in all directions like ethereal poison ivy.
"Fer hell on Earth? Ya gotta open it up. There's a strange saucer-like object down there that could spread this town's weirdness across the world. Thinka it, Preston. Thinka the weirdness bonds. Thinka the speculative markets, the cash, the suffering, the terror!" He spoke with an increasingly frenzied nature, spitting with every consonant, guffawing at the prospect of what he believed he could raise.
Preston's eyes widened as, in the centre of it all, being reached by those blue, ghostly plants, a gigantic, cyclopean triangle sat, a towering top-hat adorning his pointed head, hands grasping tiny stick figures and crushing them between his fingers like they were his favourite luxury truffle-flavoured Chipackers.
"Bill Cipher gets his prey, we gets our money, and the world gets weird. We use the railroad, the bottomless pit that's down in the woods, Cankerblight's sticky blue fluids, and by God - you'll get the most beautiful cataclysm this danged world is ever gonna see. And our family?"
Nathaniel beamed as he gestured towards the hand-painted family tree that hung in the chapel, every name and identity gently picked out in the finest inks and oils.
"Fundhausers. Northwests. The Rumpterfrabbles. The Montogomery Pickle Consortium. Oprah. The… Dippin' Dot fortune? It'll all be there. It'll all be us. It'll all be ours."
His fragile, half-moulded chest puffed up with pride as he looked up to the towering extremities of the cavernous building. The crooked, leering, darkness-soaked corners and buttresses were drenched in shadow and web, occasionally perforated by the now common sight of glowing foliage that seemed to burst through from the Oregon clay. He turned to Preston and wiped a dusty tear from his glassy, yellow eye.
"Don't you want that reality, Preston? Eternal riches and power? A world-renowned name? An endless grip upon your people? Of course, you'd have your daughter back, too. She'd have nowhere else to turn."
Preston paused and looked to Priscilla. It was, to his selfish mind, a beguiling offer. It was a pregnant silence. Deafening. Almost unbearable. It was hard to deny that, at heart, it was exactly what he wanted.
His place.
This house.
That all-important stature.
His family.
His daughter.
He clenched his hands together, took a deep breath, and, with not an insignificant amount of hesitation…
"I'm sorry." He said, quietly. "I simply won't."
Things fell very, very quiet as Nathaniel Northwest clenched the book tighter and furrowed his already deeply ploughed brow. "You… won't?"
"I won't."
The regenerated degenerate twisted his thin blue lips, moistening them with a deep, purple, furry-looking tongue. "You won't…?"
The younger man's hands were quivering. It was as if he was fighting the rawest in Northwest conditioning - that belief that, no matter what, his ancestors were always right. "I won't. It isn't right. We may have made many fierce moves, unscrupulous, even, but to destroy the entire town…? To unleash something so… powerful? To let the entirety of America be overrun by gnomes…?"
For a brief moment, Nathaniel considered beating his great-grandson. For but a moment, we considered wrecking the chapel, and dislodging a buttress to cause the two young ingrates to be buried alive under cinderblock and limestone.
But instead, he mimicked the unexpected behaviour of the Northwest patriarch. He took a deep breath, glared at him and spoke with a voice that dripped with so much venom that it was - if anything - scarier than his tremulous, property-destroying rants. "...Fine. But I'm only agreeing to this because you're family. And I know you'd be useless without me."
Preston and Priscilla exchanged a glance. But could do little, save for taking him at his word. All they had to do was get the man to wear shoes, and things would be off to a decent start.