Work Text:
The Woman with the Cipher Tattoo
By William Easley
(June 2013)
Chapter 1: Back Again
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Saturday, June 15, aboard the eastbound Speedy Beaver Bus: After more than nine months away from Gravity Falls, I am at last returgincnd –
"Mabel!" Dipper said, exasperated. "Stop joggling my arm!"
"You didn't say I'm returning, too, Broboat!" Mabel wailed. "Where's the love? Where is the love?"
From the seat behind them came a deep grunt. The driver yelled all the way back: "Keep the pig quiet!"
"See?" Mabel said. "You're troubling Waddles' sensitive nature, too. Or is it Waddles's? Did we have that in English class? Maybe I should write a letter to the Board of Education."
"You do that," Dipper said. He reached in his pocket. "Here's a pen. Here's a pad."
"First," Mabel said, "a portrait of Waddles!" Tongue sticking out, she started to sketch a pig.
Dipper sighed, crossed out the last word he had written, and began again: xxxxxxxxxxx returning to continue my investigations into the weird, the unexplained, and the mysterious. What new challenges await? Only time will tell.
He closed the notebook and looked past Mabel and out the window. The hilly countryside of middle Oregon seemed to drift past beneath a blue sky dotted with white clouds. Like—he shuddered a little—like lambs marching 'round the daisies. Mabel was humming happily, adding glasses and a fez to her sketch of the pig, which really did look a bit more like Grunkle Stan than Waddles.
Grunkle Stan, Dipper thought. He and Grunkle Ford had set off the previous fall to explore some strange anomaly in the north Pacific. They'd sent Christmas cards from Juneau, Alaska. The cards had been mailed on November 29 and had arrived in Piedmont, California, on December 27. Since then, nothing. Mabel wasn't worried—"He'll be there, or my name isn't Magilicuddy Q. Frogmurder," she'd insisted when he had mentioned his doubts. But then she was always an optimist.
At least Wendy will be there, Dipper assured himself. Once he'd received his cell phone from his parents—a belated thirteenth-birthday present—the two of them had texted constantly, and she'd sent him some very, very romantic postcards. Well, not romantic exactly. More like—"Friendly," Dipper murmured under his breath. Yeah. Friendly postcards. But at least she'd caught him up on all the important news in Gravity Falls: Thompson had made himself a furry belt from a roadkill possum, but found it attracted zombies and had to get rid of it. Robbie and Tambry had been busted at school for PDA's and had to spend a week in after-school detention. Together in the same room. "Torture, right?" Wendy had texted, adding a winking smiley-face emoji. All the big news like that.
Other than these bulletins, Gravity Falls seemed to be wobbling along the same as it always did, with little weirdnesses popping up now and again—a band of Gnomes raiding trash cans here, a talking squirrel racing through town while squeaking "Doom to the hunters! DOOOOM I say! Got any nuts?" there. A little girl's stuffed rabbit got into the fridge late one night and ate all the strawberry jam and a leftover half of a pizza, leaving behind a note: "NO MOR ANCHOVIZE!" They knew it was the rabbit because the little girl herself could spell "anchovies." Just a normal abnormal year in Gravity Falls. . . .
Dipper yawned. Sixteen hours on the bus from Piedmont, and they'd started the previous night at ten. They'd arrive in Gravity Falls sometime around one in the afternoon. Another ninety minutes, and he hadn't slept very much the night before. Settling in, pulling down the lumberjack hat that Wendy had traded for his old pine-tree trucker's cap, Dipper took a few deep breaths and dozed. It seemed to him he'd just closed his eyes for a moment when Mabel's sharp elbow in his ribs brought him to attention. "Huh? Whazzit?" he muttered.
"We're here!" Mabel squealed. "Look, there's the Shack!"
Dipper rubbed his bleary eyes, and his heart bumped. "There's Wendy! And, and Soos! And—Grunkle Stan! He's there, too!"
"Yup," Mabel replied happily. "Just call me M. Q. Frogmurder from now on, Dipsydoo."'
They and the pig were the last remaining passengers. The bus driver pulled in, announced "All out for Gravity Falls." Mabel led the way, Waddles took the middle, and all the rest of the aisle, and Dipper brought up the rear, struggling with his suitcase plus Mabel's extra case of sweaters for every occasion.
He said as he passed the driver, "Hope the pig wasn't any trouble."
"I've seen worse, kid," the driver told him. "Have a fun summer. See you in August."
Mabel had already bounded off the bus, dropped her luggage, and had thrown herself into Grunkle Stan's arms. "Hiya, knuckleheads!" Stan said, chuckling. "Hey, I missed you, sweetie!" Then he glanced at Dipper, and his grin split into a bellow of laughter. "Dipper! You've had a growth spurt. Mostly in your face!"
Wendy and Soos were laughing, too. "Good look for you, dawg!" Soos said, taking his suitcases.
Wendy also couldn't stop laughing, but she said, "Somethin' tells me you fell asleep just before you got here, dude."
"Uh—how did you know?"
"Here," Mabel said, opening her purse and taking out a compact mirror. "I improved you."
Dipper stared at his reflection. Mabel had used him as a sketchpad, giving him bushy black eyebrows like Grunkle Stan's, round eyeglasses, a curly black mustache, and a triangular soul patch. "Mabel!"
"It'll wash off, Dip," Wendy said. "Or it'll wear off if it doesn't. Maybe by the end of July."
"It'll come off," Dipper said grimly. "Even if I have to use sandpaper!"
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford are taking us out to dinner tonight, and Soos, his new wife Melody, and Wendy are all coming along.
Ford helped me out with my face decorations. He found some hand sanitizer that got most of it off, then followed that up with vinegar. Now everything's gone, but the place where the mustache was is sort of pink. Mabel says I should moisturize. I told her she should soak her head.
Soos has the attic room ready for us. Grunkle Ford wondered if we should be sharing a room, now that we're thirteen. I assured him it would not be a problem, but Soos rigged a wire and a hanging curtain that separates the attic into two narrow rooms—I have one side, Mabel the other. I think Mom and Dad would be okay with that. I just wish Waddles would stay on Mabel's side.
While we were hanging the wire and the curtain, Soos told me that he's worried about Fiddleford McGucket. Fiddleford's pretty rich now, he says, from selling all sorts of patents to the government and to industry, and he has the whole Northwest Mansion to live in and build his lab in—"But he's not happy, dude," Soos told me. "When he kinda recovered after that Bill Cipher thing, about the first thing he tried to do was get back together with his son Tate, but Tate won't have anything to do with him. I think the old dude's pretty close to being clinically depressed, to tell you the truth. Maybe Mr. Pines and other Mr. Pines can help. They're staying there as his house guests this summer."
So I found Grunkle Ford a little later and asked him if there was anything we could do to help. I mean, Fiddleford stuck by us during Weirdmageddon, and his Shacktron either took out Bill's minions or kept them occupied while we got into the Fearamid. We owe him something. Ford sighed and told me, "Dipper, I wish there was something we could do, because I feel responsible. My Portal was the reason for Fiddleford's nervous breakdown that started his whole slide into madness—and then what happened afterward drove a wedge between him and his son that has lasted for many years."
"What happened afterward?" I asked him.
He shrugged. "I don't know. Remember, for most of that time I was trapped in alternate dimensions. I remember when Tate was born and then later seeing him as a little toddler, but that was before all the trouble. Perhaps Stanley knows more."
That was when I realized that this was a mystery—and I, Dipper Pines, was back on a case! I had witnesses to interview. Wendy was first on my list. Unfortunately, she could tell me very little. "I dunno, Dip. He was always Old Man McGucket, the crazy old coot, as far back as I can remember. I didn't even, like, know that Tate was his son until a couple of years ago."
I couldn't concentrate. She was wearing my old pine-tree cap. So I got my nerve up and asked in my manliest voice, "Uh, Wendy? I love this hat of yours. You, uh, you wanna trade back? Just for the summer? And then before I have to go back to California in September, we could, uh—"
"Way ahead of you, dude," she said, grinning. She swept off the lumberjack hat and swapped with me before I could even move. But then before she put the hat on, she stopped and said, "Seriously, now, Dip, am I gonna get boy cooties from this cap?"
"Absolutely one hundred per cent not," I assured her. "Teen cooties if anything. Remember, I'm technically a teen now."
"Cool," she said. "You might've picked up some lumberjack girl cooties from mine, though."
"If they're yours, I'd love to have 'em," I told her.
She made a face. "Aw, Dip! Man, we gotta work on your pickup lines!"
So that gives me something to look forward to. Then I tackled Grunkle Stan. "Sure, whattaya want to know?" he asked when I brought up the subject of Fiddleford and his son.
"What's between them?" I asked.
"Ahh, it's family trouble," Grunkle Stan said. He'd been touring the Shack, admiring all the little changes Soos had made in the months since he'd been in charge. Stan settled down in his old TV chair with a sigh. "My butt thanks you, my old friend," he said to the chair. "Good to be back again. That idiot Soos has added all kinds of exhibits—which is good, 'cause he's fleecin' the other idiots like there's no tomorrow! Hah! Where were we?"
"The problem between Fiddleford and Tate McGucket," I reminded him. "
"Aw, that. Yeah. Well, Ford's probably told you that Fiddleford helped him with the Portal and then got seriously freaked out by it. He invented that mind-wiper thing to help him forget. After him and Ford split up their partnership, Fiddleford opened an electronics shop in town here."
"Still here?"
"Naw, long gone. McGucket'd already met and married a local gal, Mayellen Tate, and I think their son was born before the accident with the Portal. Anyhow, between the freak-out and the constant brain-wiping, Fiddleford started to go off the tracks. I mean so far off the tracks he couldn't even hear the train whistles any longer, ya know? His business went bankrupt, he an' Mayellen had epic arguments, and then she separated from him. He built this flyin' pterodactyl thing to take out his frustrations, and it kinda got out of hand. There used to be a big stone tower on the top of Mount Treacherous that was a kind of tourist attraction. The pterodactyl ate it."
"Ate a stone tower?"
"You should see what it kept droppin' over the town. Think a seagull takin' a dump on your shoulder is bad? Wait'll a flyin' monstrosity passes a small boulder right overhead! Anyway, everybody in town finally got together and managed to take the thing down. But that must've been the last straw. Mayellen McGucket left town one night and never came back."
"How'd she leave?" I asked. "Bus? Car?"
"Dunno, you'd have to ask somebody else that. Anyway, she left young Tate behind—he was, I guess, maybe six? DHS came and inspected and declared that Fiddleford wasn't in any shape to be a parent, so they fostered Tate out to D.D. Granger and his wife. D.D. was a park ranger, see. Tate looked to him as his dad when he was growin' up. Fiddleford seemed to forget about him most of the time—just when he caught sight of Tate, he'd sometimes remember he had a son. I dunno how many times the old coot tried to make up with Tate, but Tate won't have any of it. He blames Fiddleford for his mother's death."
"Wait, what? She's dead?"
"Everybody assumes. I'm not sure, but I think after she'd been missin' for seven years the Grangers had her declared legally dead. Which I'm gonna be if I don't get dinner soon. Let's roll, Dipper! Chow time!"
Dinner was—well, really good, and I enjoyed being with everybody, and I got to sit next to Wendy. But I was holding in a sense of rising excitement. A missing woman. A family torn apart. This was a case all right. A case for Dipper Pines, boy detredkja
"Mabel!"
"And his beautiful assistant!"
Dipper struck through the messed up word and wrote: "…boy xxxxxxx detective, and his beautiful but wacked-out assistant Mabel."
"Is that okay?" he asked Mabel read what he'd written.
"Wacked-out. I'll take that as a compliment! Bom-bom-bommmm!"
"Then get on your side of the room and go to sleep. We're gonna hit the bricks tomorrow!"
"Why? What'd they ever do to us?"
"Mabel!"
"Sheesh! Good night already!" Dipper tucked his Journal under his pillow, lay down, and muttered, "I'm too excited to sleep."
But he'd had a long, mostly sleepless bus ride, he was full of good food, and the attic room felt even more like home than his own room back in Piedmont did. And before he knew it, he was deep in dreams of adventure and monsters and—for some reason—Wendy Corduroy, who smiled at him beautifully.
Chapter 2: Woman of Mystery
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Sunday, June 16-Mabel was more help than I thought she'd be. This morning she persuaded Grunkle Stan to take us out to the lake. We got here two days late for the annual Opening Day for Fishing, but there'll be plenty of people out in boats on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Soos said we could take his boat, but he and Melody would stay to run the Shack because there were tourist buses due in—it's one of Wendy's days off, but her family had something planned, and she couldn't come with us to the lkde
"Mabel!"
"You're being too matter-of-fact, brobro! You gotta put your heartbreak in every line! What's a tragic unrequited love if you don't let people know it's even there?"
Dipper had to snort at that. "Tragic unrequited—what would you suggest?"
Mabel stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and looked upward as she thought.
"Hmm . . .write this: 'Wendy couldn't come with us, yet I yearn for her with all my heart, all my soul, all my being! I feel isolated in an unfeeling, cold universe! I sure wish she was here so we could smooch.'"
Instead, Dipper crossed out the mistake and went on:
xxxx lake. I miss her.
When they got to the lake, Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan boarded Soos's boat—he claimed it had been repaired, but as far as Dipper could see, that meant he'd salvaged the steering wheel from his old one and had installed it on his new one. Well, not new, exactly. It was used, but seemed in decent shape.
While the two older Pines twins took it out in the lake for some fishing, Dipper and Mabel, using the excuse that they wanted to visit with some of their old friends, stayed on shore. They made a beeline for the ranger station. Tate McGucket was there, as usual, in his olive-drab Lake Ranger uniform, his trucker's hat pulled low over his eyes—so low it was hard to tell he even had eyes. For a few minutes Tate was busy selling bait to some out-of-towners, but once they had paid and left, there was a lull.
Mabel broke the ice: "Hi. I really like your sideburns. They add a touch of rebellion to your regimented uniformed appearance. Want to spill your guts about a cold case?"
"Very subtle, Mabel," muttered Dipper as Tate stared down at Mabel as if she were a centipede waving cheerfully up at him from his morning scrambled eggs. Dipper cleared his throat: "Mr. McGucket, you probably don't remember us—"
"Sure I do," he said shortly. "You're the Pines kids. Last year when all that craziness broke out, you and your uncles rescued the rest of us." But he didn't smile or sound exactly warm.
"Yeah, well . . . you know we couldn't have done it without your dad's help."
"Huh."
Dipper rubbed the back of his neck. "Look, sir, we know that things aren't smooth between you and your dad—"
"My dad's dead," Tate said flatly. "David D. Granger. He and his wife took me in when my father abandoned me and drove my mother away. They both passed away a few years ago."
"Yeah, see, that's kinda what we want to talk about," Mabel said. "We'd like to find your mother for you."
"Nobody's found her in more than twenty-five years," Tate snapped. "You kids can't do anything."
"Maybe not, but there's at least a chance," Dipper insisted. "Look, even if we can't bring her back, wouldn't you at least like to know what happened?"
Tate just shook his head and turned his back.
"Wait," Mabel said. "Mr. Tate, do you at least have a photo of your mom that we could see?" The ranger sighed, dropped his chin, and finally reached into his hip pocket for his wallet. He opened it and showed them a picture of a woman holding a baby. Dipper stared at it, trying to memorize it. He vaguely recognized the baby as a much younger Tate McGucket. The woman wasn't beautiful—sort of pretty, in a fresh-faced, small-town way—and something beside her had been trimmed out of the picture. Fiddleford, Dipper suddenly realized. Tate cut his dad out of the family picture.
"What's this on the back of her right hand?" Mabel asked, pointing to a small, hardly visible mark.
"Dunno," Tate said. "Birthmark maybe. I can remember she had it, but no details. Now I have work to do. Get out of the station and don't ever talk to me again unless it has to do with the lake or with trouble."
Outside, Dipper hurriedly made a sketch in his Journal. "Mabel, am I crazy, or did that mark on the back of her right hand look like this?" He showed her.
"It's a triangle," she said. She slapped her palms to her cheeks. "Bill Cipher?"
Dipper shook his head. "All I could see of it was just a little blue-outlined triangle. But if it was an image of Bill . . . well, that would mean there was something really fishy about Tate's mom."
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: On the drive back to the Shack, I asked Grunkle Ford if he remembered Mrs. McGucket having a tattoo on her hand. "No," he said slowly. "If she had one, I never noticed it. Why?"
Mabel blurted out that we were planning to try to learn what happened to her—why she ran away, where she went, and where she is now.
Grunkle Ford turned around in the passenger seat of Grunkle Stan's car to look back at us. "Kids, I know you mean well, but at this late date I don't think there's a thing you can do. The police looked for her and turned up no clues."
"Wait, wait," I said. "I thought she disappeared after you went through the Portal."
"Better tell him, Poindexter," Grunkle Stan growled.
Ford sighed. "Very well. Dipper, I know because I asked about her last fall, after the town had settled back to normality—"
" Hah!" roared Grunkle Stan. "That's a laugh!"
You know what I mean," Grunkle Ford said. "I knew that my old assistant and friend Fiddleford was still unhappy, and I learned why. Sheriff Blubs let me look at the old records. Law enforcement in Roadkill County was better in the old days, and I found a missing-person report and follow-ups. Nobody could learn anything. Mrs. McGucket was there one day and gone the next, and there was no hint of how or why she left. It was just a dead end."
Was there a description?" I asked. "Did it mention the tattoo?"
"There were photos and a written description," Ford replied. "I don't remember a visible tattoo in the photographs, and I'm sure the description didn't mention one." He smiled sadly. "Believe me, kids, I really appreciate what you want to do, but you might as well give up."
"Never!" Mabel yelled.
"Atta girl, Pumpkin!" Stan said.
Grunkle Ford grumbled, "There you go, Stanley, encouraging them to go on pointless and maybe dangerous quests."
Yatta yatta yatta," Grunkle Stan shot back. "Mabel, Dipper, you go right ahead. You have ONE grunkle's blessing."
That evening as the twins washed and dried dishes after dinner, Dipper said, "I think we have to do it. We have to go question Fiddleford himself."
"I like him," Mabel said. "I don't want to upset the poor old guy."
Dipper shrugged. "I like him, too, but we'll be careful not to hurt his feelings. We'll walk up to the old Northwest Mansion tomorrow. Maybe he can tell us something about the tattoo, anyway."
"Tomorrow?" Mabel wailed. "I'm s'posed to meet Candy and Grenda tomorrow! We've got a whole school year to catch up on! Can't we do this Tuesday or Wednesday instead?"
Dipper stared at her. "Well . . . OK, I'll go see Fiddleford on my own, all right? You have your reunion party with your friends, and then later we'll get together and I'll tell you whatever I've learned."
"If anything!" Mabel said, pointing dramatically toward the ceiling in emphasis.
That happened to be the night that the attic of the Mystery Shack was invaded by about three thousand dancing (and talking) mice, but with Mabel being diplomatic and Dipper being logical, the Mystery Twins were able to placate the Queen of All the Mice (who was actually a cat—mouse by adoption, though) and relocate the annual "Time to Raid the Humanz Pantriez" concert and ball to a better location. (Like stuffed bunnies, mice can't spell, and it's a side issue, so we'll skip it.)
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Monday morning: Wendy was a little late getting to work, but I talked Soos into letting her drive me up to the old Northwest Mansion anyway.
"Thanks," I told her as we climbed into her battered old green car. "Um—just checking, but you do have your drivers' license now, don't you?"
"Absolutely," she said, firing up the engine.
"And you've had it for long enough that you can drive with a teen in the car even though there's no other adult, right?"
"Positively not!" she said, stepping on the gas. We tore out of the Mystery Shack lot, throwing up a rooster-tail spray of dust and gravel. "You want me to come pick you up later, dude?" she asked.
I was holding on desperately. "Um, no, that's all right. I've got some other things to do downtown. I'll walk back."
"'Cuz it's no bother," she said, as if I hadn't answered her. "An' Soos is like, 'Sure, dawg, if it's for Dipper.'"
The old car had no air conditioning, but she had the windows rolled down. I loved the way her long red hair whipped in the breeze. "You're looking awfully good, Wendy," I told her.
"Well, that's about a half step up from 'I'll treasure your cooties always,'" she responded cheerfully. "Seriously, Dip, thanks. I'm feelin' good. School's out, Dad's eased off on my bein' a lumberjack, and best of all, you guys are in town again. And, hey, don't think I haven't noticed that you've grown up a few inches. You're gonna catch up to me before long, dude!"
"I wish. I thought you seemed extra cheerful today."
She laughed at that. "Well, I'm a little more upbeat than Tambry, maybe." After a moment of silence, she shrugged. "I always feel a little happier after we visit my mom."
"Wait, what?"
"In the cemetery," she explained. "Me and Dad and the boys. We go four times a year to tidy up the graves and bring special flowers. And I know it's kinda dumb and all, but we each have a little alone time at Mom's grave, and I sit and talk to her. Catch her up on things, you know? I feel better afterwards. Dorky, huh?"
" I don't think so," I told her. My voice sounded softer than I'd meant it to.
She cut a donut in the broad brick-paved courtyard in front of the old Northwest Mansion and let me out. "Catch ya later, dude!" she called as she made the tires squeal.
I stood watching her go bucketing down the hill. Mabel is right. I'm not over Wendy yet. I don't know if I'll ever be. I don't even think I want to.
Dipper saw that Fiddleford had posted a sign above the doorbell: IFFEN YOU ARE SELLIN' I AIN'T BUYIN! IFFEN YOU ARE A FRIEND, COME IN! YOU WILL KNOW HOW TO AVOID THE DEADLY TRAPS. Dipper rang the doorbell anyway, but found the door unlocked and pushed it open. "Uh—hello?"
No answer but echoes. He stepped inside and the door closed behind him. "Doc McGucket?" Now that he was actually in, now that the door was closed behind him, the vast house seemed to absorb his voice completely, now letting it die away without even an echo. "Fiddleford?"
A chair walked toward him. "Halt," the chair ordered in a dignified sort of Queen Anne voice. "Identify yourself, please."
"Uh—I'm Dipper. Dipper Pines."
"Dipper Dipper Pines, to verify your identity, complete this phrase: 'When Gravity Falls and Earth becomes Sky—'"
"Uh, 'fear the beast with just one eye?'"
The chair arms suddenly bristled with what were possibly weapons. And its accent changed to pure hillbilly: "You askin' or tellin'?"
"Telling! It's 'fear the beast with just one eye!'"
The weapons disappeared and the chair arms did a complex hambone-type slapping on its cushion, ending up by smacking one leg. "Heehee! We done kicked his butt good, didn't we? Pass, Friend. Fiddleford's yonder in the West Wing."
"Thank you, sir—or ma'am. What do I call you, anyway?"
"Miaow."
"Uh—come again?"
Back to the vaguely British accent: "Fiddleford adopted a stray cat and let her name me after he invented me. I'm a chair man. You can call me Chair Man Miaow."
"O-kay. I think I'll go over here now." Dipper opened a number of doors and went down half a dozen corridors before he found the right one. In what was once an enormous kitchen—used, no doubt, for the Northwest family's famous parties—Fiddleford had set up a fully-equipped lab that looked as if it were capable of everything from quantum experiments to intricate chemical investigations to advanced electronics tinkering to baking a chocolate cake.
Fiddleford had been sitting on a stool, doing something with a soldering iron. He looked up—Dipper saw that his odd bronze-rimmed specs now had two green lenses, not just one—and his bushy beard split into a grin. "Dipper Pines!" he said in his hillbilly creak of a voice. "Come in, come in. How you doin', boy? Good to see you."
"Uh, thanks," Dipper said. "You—you're looking pretty, uh, much yourself, too."
"Got my teeth all fixated up!" Fiddleford announced, showing a mouthful of choppers a Great White might envy. He sighed "Didn't do much good, though. The townsfolk still think I'm a kook." He shrugged. "I don't mind so much. They leave me mostly alone, at least. Set down, set down, I got some work to do, and then we'll jaw a little. Over there's fine."
Dipper went to the corner, where a chair—not, he hoped, a robot in the form of a chair—stood beside a little round table with a framed photograph on it. He sat in the chair and looked at the photo. It was a wedding picture of young Fiddleford and his bride. They both looked happy—though happily awkward. Unfortunately, he couldn't see the back of her right hand at all, but he studied the face. It was a little younger than the one in Tate's photo, still not beautiful, but the joy of a wedding gave a special light to her eyes. Dipper glanced over—Fiddleford was leaning so far toward a printed-circuit board that his big nose nearly grazed the workbench surface—and then took out his cell phone and made three quick photos of the picture.
"There, now, by cracky!" Fiddleford announced, hopping off his stool. "Your uncles told me you'd be a-visitin' this summer. Say, I found some local lore you might want to investigate. I'll get the file together for you later. What time is it? You had breakfast, Dipper?"
"Yes, thanks."
"Well, I ain't. Come with me an' I'll rustle up some grub for myself and you can have some orange juice or somethin'. That sound good?"
"Fine," Dipper said. "Uh, sir? This is a very pretty lady in the photo with you. Who is she?"
Above the white beard, the color drained from Fiddleford's face. "Uh—I, I—I can't rightly recollect. All them hits with the memory gun, I—I—oh, shucks, Dipper, I done fergot. I can't visit with you today. I got stuff ta—you can find yore own way out, can't you?" The old man shuffled off rapidly, vanishing through a door in the far wall.
Dipper grimaced. "'I'll be careful not to hurt his feelings,'" he muttered, feeling a pang of regret. "Sure I will. I blew it." He left the lab. Miaow met him in the hallway and led him out. Before he opened the front door to leave, Dipper said, "Just as a matter of curiosity, the cat who named you wasn't Queen of the Mice by any chance?"
Not that I am aware, sir."
And then Dipper was out on the portico of the mansion, wondering what to do next.
CHAPTER 3: All Roads Lead to Gnomes
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Wednesday, June 19: Since yesterday afternoon, Mabel has been trying to cheer me up. I guess I should be grateful. Still, her idea of a happy surprise was to hide a live chicken under my pillow last night. The peck marks on my face should clear up in a few days. I hope.
Mabel was off with her friends for most of yesterday. All that afternoon I just hung around the Shack, talking to Wendy and Melody, who's really nice. I've noticed more changes. Soos is running the Shack as if it were a church and he were the high priest, and he takes way better care of things than Grunkle Stan ever did. I mean, it's the same old place, but Soos and Melody worked all through the winter sprucing up, repairing, painting—the bathrooms for tourists now look modern instead of like something from the 1920s, for example, and the stairs up to the attic have been put in pretty good shape, no broken boards or big splinters or gaping holes any more, though they still creak like crazy. "Wouldn't be the same if I made them quiet, dawg," Soos told me cheerfully.
I suppose that since he's not saving money to repair a trans-dimensional portal like Grunkle Stan was, Soos can put a big part of the profits right back into improving the Shack. Grunkles Stan and Ford aren't charging him any rent at all. Well, a dollar a year, "Just to make it legal" as Stan says. Grunkle Ford technically owns it, though they had the deed altered so both Stan and Ford show up as owning the house and land (Stan is the owner of everything on ground level and above, Ford everythiing underground, meaning the basement labs, crazy Gravity Falls deed there), but Soos carries the insurance on the place and shows Stan the business account books every month, but I don't think either Ford or Stan much cares.
See, Grunkle Ford found out last fall that he's actually rich because a lot of his patents from the eighties paid fat royalties into an account all the years that he was away, and Grunkle Stan unearthed some kind of treasure on their voyage last winter—he says he'll tell me all about it when the statute of limitations runs out, whatever that means. I know he also is a very lucky gambler, because from time to time he and Ford go off to Las Vegas, and though Stan often loses, when he wins, he wins big enough to offset the losses by a reasonable few thousand. He brags that they haven't been banned from any casino so far.
But I'm off the subject, avoiding it because I've been so depressed about my bungling the investigation. Let me face up to it now.
So OK, this morning when Mabel came dashing up the stairs—I had skipped breakfast because I'm still mad at myself for mishandling my interview with McGucket, and anyway I don't have Mabel's appetite (of course nobody but Gompers the Goat does, either—last winter Mabel tried to eat a feather duster), so I was sort of brooding in bed, just lying back with my pillow covering my face, shutting out the light but smelling like a mad hen.
And then came the creakity-clomp of Mabel's approach. The door slammed open and she yelled, "Broseph! C'mon! The Chit just got real!"
"WHAT?" I asked, tossing the pillow aside. "Did you just say—"
"Chit's the chicken's name, dummy! I got back from taking her back to the farmer's flock and was talking to Wendy, and now I think I may have found some witnesses who were the last to see Fiddleford's wife! And nobody's ever interviewed them! C'mon!"
So I got into my sneakers, grabbed my phone, and pounded down the stairs after her. To my surprise, we headed deep into the western forest . . . .
"Mabel!" Dipper yelled, his eye stinging and watering from where a silk-tassel twig she'd pushed aside had sprung back and lashed across it. "Are you out of your mind? We're heading right for—"
"I know, I know!" she called back over her shoulder. "Turns out Wendy's dad built a little house for the McGuckets out this way, not knowing what lived just behind their place. This could be crucial! Ooh, look! Butterflies!"
Dipper wiped his streaming eye, ran into Mabel's back—she had stopped dead in her tracks—and then tugged her away from a whole cloud of fluttering, brown-speckled orange Pacific Fritillaries. "Mabel! Don't get distracted. You're talking about Gnomes, aren't you? Are you sure they'd help us?"
"Am I what for the which now?"
With a deep sigh, Dipper said, "Give it up. If you mean Gnomes, you know they're never gonna help us. Let's just go home."
To his surprise, she caught his arm. "No! This is our chance! Yes, you're right—the McGucket house was nearly in Gnome territory,on the far side of it from us, right at the very edge of their borders. And one thing we know about Gnomes is that they're nosy! They must've spied on their neighbors! C'mon, let's at least ask them."
Hesitantly, Dipper replied, "I don't know. Gnomes aren't exactly trustworthy."
Mabel's eyes narrowed. "Right. But we can get the truth out of them if we ask the right way. And remember one thing."
"Which is?" She grabbed his vest and put her face right up in his.
"It's Gnome man's land, Dipper."
He blinked as he smelled the cedar-like scent of her breath. "What have you been eating?"
She looked somewhat embarrassed. "Number two pencils. They're so yellow! C'mon, help me at least find where the house was."
Dipper was the one who first spotted the remains of the cabin—now all that was left was just a squarish depression in the earth and a few charred, rotting logs overgrown with twining nightshade vines. Part of a stone chimney still stood, a brick well, boarded over, was past that, and you could sort of see where a driveway had been bulldozed through the forest, though now saplings ten feet tall and more were reclaiming it.
"Up this hill," Mabel said. "Gnome territory starts up there."
They climbed to the top of the wooded hill, and Mabel cupped her hands around her mouth. "Hey, Gnomes! Is Jeff around? We want to talk to you! It's Dipper and Mabel Pines!"
For a few minutes they stood there. The morning sun grew hot on their faces until they stepped into the cool shade under the trees. They heard only the drumming of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the woods, some scattered birdsong, and occasionally the distant whine of a truck changing gears as it toiled up the steep slope that led to the mouth of the valley and the main east-west highway past town. The forest air smelled fresh and ferny, and underfoot the soil, made up of centuries-old leaf mold and dotted with the knots of whitish-tan pine mushrooms, felt soft and springy.
Then some underbrush rustled, and a brown-bearded humanoid creature who seemed to be constructed mostly of a conical red hat, a big head, two small arms, and two legs, sidled out. "Well, well, well! What fresh trouble are you bringing us, Pines twins? Gotta tell you up front, Mabel, the queen job has been filled. And don't ask us to go up against anybody armed with a dog whistle!"
"Oh, a queen! I'm so glad for you!" Mabel said. "Was it a big wedding?"
Jeff the Gnome shrugged. "Comme ci, comme ça."
"Wait, you speak French?" Dipper asked.
"Not really. I just sort of picked that up on the honeymoon. We all went to Paris."
"Oooh!" Mabel crooned. "Romantic! You guys went to France?"
"No, Paris, Texas," Jeff replied, looking puzzled. "Who wants to go to France? We'd have to travel in the baggage hold of the plane!"
"So how did you get to Texas?" Mabel asked.
"Rode in the baggage cars of Amtrak trains." A couple of squirrels came scuttling up to Jeff, but he waved them off. "Not right now, guys. Take an hour off, okay?" They climbed into the tree canopy and vanished.
"This queen," Dipper cut in, trying to keep his voice neutral, "did she marry all thousand of you of her own free will? You didn't, like, kidnap her? She, uh, wouldn't be a human, would she?"
"Not hardly," Jeff shot back. "We learned our lesson. Humans are too handy with anti-Gnome air cannons and pain-whistles if you ask us. Yes, as far as we could tell, she married us willingly. And no, she's not human. We thought it through carefully. Our last queen was eaten by a badger. That meant the badger was tougher than the queen, and toughness is good in a leader, so instead of going after a human, we married the badger."
"Mazel tov!" Mabel shouted joyfully.
"Hold on, wait a minute," Dipper said, rubbing his eyes. "So a thousand of you Gnomes are married to one badger. Do—are you going to have—how can you—are you starting a, you know, family with her?"
"With a badger?" Jeff said, looking shocked. "Look, kid, this is real life, not some Internet furry porn site! No, we have Gnome wives for raising families. Our Queen is different."
Mabel asked, "Hey, how did you know about Internet furry—"
"Word gets around, okay?" Jeff insisted hastily. He dropped his voice to a confiding tone: "Since you asked, let me explain how it works. We marry the Queen so we can be sure of her loyalty to us, that's all. See, most Gnomes aren't that good at independent thought. New, unfamiliar situations confuse them and they're apt to freeze up, unable to act, and just baulk until they perish. Most of us need to be given orders and direction, and the Queen is the one who leads us and makes all the important decisions. Because of our weakness at thinking outside of the baulks, we developed the tradition that a Gnome Queen is never a Gnome."
Dipper was still trying to wrap his mind around it. "You married a badger."
"Sure. Badgers have very level heads. Nearly flat on top. And attractive facial markings."
Suspiciously, Dipper said, "She makes the decisions. So . . . how does that work?"
Jeff shrugged and looked surprisingly modest for a guy whose ego outweighed his body. "Well, through me. I'm her right-paw Gnome. Whenever we have a problem that requires action, I ask her for a decision. She communicates her commands to me, and I pass them along to the Gnomes."
"She talks to you?"
"She's a badger!" Jeff repeated, rolling his eyes. "Whoever heard of a talking badger? No, I read what she's thinking in her body language, the way she looks at me, and the way she swishes her tail. It's not words, and I have to interpret her meaning, of course."
"I . . . see." Dipper cleared his throat. Must be a nice job for Jeff, he thought, but aloud he said, "And all the Gnomes follow the . . . badger queen's orders?"
"Well, all the civilized ones do, yes. There are lots of underground feral Gnomes, you know. Loners who separate from the colony and live mostly as hermits in burrows out in the woods. We don't have much to do with them. They don't usually survive very long, to tell you the truth. A Gnome on his own is pretty dumb, I'm afraid."
Dipper thought, Gotta get back on track here. "Uh, look, Jeff, we don't want to take up your time. Down the hill—right there where the old chimney is, see?—there used to be a human cabin. Do you remember that?"
"Of course," Jeff replied. "That red-bearded giant built it. The inventor, his wife, and later their kid lived there. They abandoned it, it got hit by lightning and it burned to the ground, and that's all that's left of it now, bada-boom, bada burn. So what?"
Dipper took out his phone and found the photo gallery. "This the wife?"
Staring hard, Jeff screwed up his face in concentration. "No. That's a picture."
Mabel asked, "Does the picture look like the wife?" Jeff shook his head.
"Not really. She was very big, and the picture's smaller than I am."
Dipper mentally counted to ten. "If the picture was the same size as a person, would it look like her then?"
"Oh, absolutely," Jeff said helpfully. "Yep, she's the woman who's the subject of the picture, no question. Shame about her."
Dipper felt his heart thud. "What do you mean? What happened to her?"
Jeff squirmed. "I could get into big trouble if certain parties found out I talked to you about this."
"I love parties!" Mabel exclaimed. "Hey, that gives me an idea. Why don't you Gnomes have a party on us? There's a half dozen of Lazy Susan's pies in it for you if you help us out."
Jeff's eyes got very round. "Pies? Uh—strawberry? Blueberry? Apple?"
"Two of each," Mabel said. "Come to the Shack for the payoff tomorrow afternoon and we'll hand them over. Bring a few Gnomes to help carry them. About four per pie would do it."
"Make it a dozen and it's a deal," Jeff said with some show of crumbling reluctance.
"You got it!" Mabel said.
"Okay, I'll tell what I know. But you're not going to like it."
"Spill it," Dipper said, setting his phone to "record."
"Spill it?" Mabel yelped, giggling. "Pffbbbt! What, have you been watching old cop movies on TCM?"
"Mabel, just let him tell the story, okay? Jeff, what do you know about the woman's disappearance?"
"Well, I didn't see it myself. You want me to find you a witness?"
Dipper clicked the recorder off. "Please."
"Wait right here." Jeff bustled away into the underbrush.
Mabel started to ask questions, but Dipper just said, "Please, no. Not now. Let's just listen to the silence."
Ten relatively quiet minutes passed, and then Mabel said, "Uh-oh."
"Oh, no," groaned Dipper as he recognized the white-bearded, wall-eyed Gnome trailing along behind Jeff. Together, the twins moaned, "It's Shmebulock!"
Jeff came up to them and said, "This guy saw the whole thing. Tell 'em!"
"Shmebulock!"
"Dandy," Dipper said. "That's all he ever says!"
"Yeah," Jeff replied, "I know what you mean. What we have here is a failure to communicate, right? Want me to interpret?"
"Can you?"
"Does a bear go in the woods? Watch out where you're stepping, by the way, a bear went right there by your right foot yesterday. Anyhow, if I can translate for a badger, I can do it for a Gnome. Shmebulock, tell us about the last time you saw the inventor's wife. Used to live in a cabin down the hill, you know? What happened to her?"
"Shmebulock!"
Jeff nodded and thought for a second. "Okay, he says the family was in some kind of trouble. The parents used to quarrel at night. Then the dad went away somewhere on his own and was gone for like weeks. Months, maybe. Just visited now and then, sometimes took the boy off for a day. Then one day the mom—"
"Wait," Mabel said. "What happened to the boy at the time she vanished?"
"His dad had him for the day, we think. Like I said, sometimes he'd come and take the kid out places, fishing or picnics or whatever, and bring him back in the evening. Anyway, the last time any Gnome saw this woman, she walked into the forest alone. Nothing unusual there. She often did that when she just wanted to be by herself and think. We'd have even protected her if she'd stayed in our territory, because we liked her. She glimpsed us now and then but didn't freak out, and sometimes she left food out for us."
Dipper was recording again. "Did you see where she went?"
"Shmebulock!"
"Uh—he's scared," Jeff explained. "He doesn't want to say."
"Please," Mabel said softly, taking Shmebulock's tiny hand in hers. "It means a lot."
Shmebulock looked at her with big, sad eyes. Then he sighed and said, "I am Groot."
"Wow, slow down!" Jeff said, waving his hands. "I've never heard you jabber like that before! No wonder you were scared! Okay, okay, he says the woman went through Gnome Grove to Wicked Creek—that's our western border-and crossed it on the Slippery Stones, then walked right on through Creepy Hollow—I'll tell you one thing, I wouldn't go near that place for a million pies—and Shmebulock heard later from a woodpecker that saw the whole thing that the woman seemed to want to explore. She went into the Gack of Doom and never came out again!"
"Wait, Gack of Doom?"
"It's like a crack in a stone cliff, but looks like a mouth going 'gack.' It's the opening to a cavern. Nobody knows what's inside."
"Why not?" Mabel asked.
"Because nobody who's gone into it has ever come out again, that's why!"
"Shmebulock," agreed Shmebulock, shivering with apparent fear as he nodded.
For a moment Dipper and Mabel just stared at each other.
Then she said, "Dom-dom-DOMMMMMM!" and that seemed just about to sum it all up.
CHAPTER 4: What Grunkle Ford Said
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Wednesday, June 19: It's pretty late at night, and I'm continuing to write this as I sit up in bed with a flashlight focused on the page. Mabel is asleep and snoring on the other side of the curtain, though she swears she never snores, and since the noise alone would keep me from sleeping, I might as well finish the entry for today.
I'd never heard of anything called the Gack of Doom, or Creepy Hollow for that matter. Shmebulock clammed up when Mabel and I asked questions, and Jeff refused to answer, claiming that we'd had our dozen pies worth already. Once we got back to the Shack I dived into the Journals but found no references to either of the two terms.
Meanwhile this afternoon, Grunkle Stan came over to visit for an hour or so, and right away Mabel hit him up for some money, then after Stan had left, Mabel called Greasy's Diner and ordered the pies from Lazy Susan, who was thrilled with the order. She does make good pies, but I think SHE thought they were for Grunkle Stan, whom she still sort of wants to marry.
After she hung up, Mabel said Susan had told her the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, although Mabel added, "I'd think it would be right through the sternum. 'Course, you'd need an axe."
Anyhow, once the call was made, Mabel got out her yarn and needles and started knitting a sweater. I knew that would keep her busy for the rest of the day. So at about four I borrowed Wendy's old bicycle, which she keeps here at the Shack, and rode over to the McGucket mansion. I found Grunkles Stan and Ford out back, both of them wearing Hawaiian shirts and lounging beside the pool, arguing about something or other.
I used to worry about all the quarreling they do until I realized that's just their way of kidding. It's what they do instead of awkward sibling hugs. Fiddleford was nowhere to be seen. Grunkle Stan said he mostly stays in his lab these days. For a while I just sat between my Grunkles, staring into the rippling blue water, smelling its chlorine aroma, and thinking.
Finally, Grunkle Stan got up, stretched, and said it was too hot and he was going inside for a nap. That gave me a chance to talk to Ford about what we'd learned without Stan getting all protective. "Grunkle Ford," I started, "what do you know about Creepy Hollow?"
He shrugged. "Just the name, really. That's one of the places I always meant to investigate, but somehow I never quite got around to it. It's a small bowl-shaped valley, and it runs from Breaker's Ridge right up to the base of the bluffs west of town. That is unfortunately just about all I know for sure. The townspeople shun it because they have a silly superstition that visiting it brings bad luck. I gather there's some supernatural activity of a low order that's common in the Hollow."
"Low order? What's that?"
He shifted his weight in the sun chair. "Well, merely illusions and the like, nothing as real and solid as a gremloblin or a unicorn. You know what a Will o' the Wisp is?"
"Kind of a light phenomenon, isn't it? Like, in the Middle Ages in Europe, travelers at night would see dim lights and think they were lanterns held by other people, but when they tried to approach the lights, the glows would flitter off farther and farther until the travelers got completely lost?"
"Something like that, yes," Grunkle Ford said. "Mischievous, you see, but not actually dangerous. Well, in Creepy Hollow people say you see shapes around you—nothing with a definite physical body, just vague shapes, shadowy and strange. But you can only glimpse them in your peripheral vision. When you look directly at them, they're just not there. And these visions are supposed to make those who see them jumpy and prone to bad decisions. However, as I told you, I've never witnessed any of that myself. What with our discovery of the crashed and buried alien ship and our work on the Portal, Fiddleford and I never found time to look into the Creepy Hollow phenomena. Why? Are you thinking of exploring?"
Well, yeah, sort of," I confessed.
"Hmm. I'd say you'd be safe enough if you went during daylight and got out of there before sunset. You'd have to remember to pay no attention to anything you might think you see or hear in there. Illusions can't really harm you, but they might cause you to bring harm on yourself by, oh, accidentally walking off a cliff while being distracted, for instance."
"Would you want to go with me?"
He chuckled. "If I were twenty years younger, I'd jump at the chance, Dipper. However, I've come to dislike strenuous long hikes with no definite goal in mind. And at the moment, I'm very busy writing up an account of our voyage in the Stan O' War and my analysis of the Pacific Anomalies we discovered. I'm afraid I'll have to take a pass this time. Hey, look at that! You know, you see those only in Gravity Falls?"
I looked where he was pointing. One of the orange butterflies was surfing the breezes a few feet overhead, bobbing along as it rose and fell. "There's a lot of them around this year. We saw some in the Gnome Grove," I told him.
"Yes, they're fond of wooded areas. They're not Monarchs, you know," Ford said, "though they superficially resemble them. That's a kind of butterfly called a—"
"A fritillary," I said, watching the butterfly swoop away over the privacy fence and out of sight.
Ford chuckled. "You're quite a reader! It always surprises me that you know so much about so many things! You remind me of me when I was your age. Dipper, anytime you want to reconsider being my apprentice, let me know. I may have slowed down, but I have no plans to retire."
"Thanks," I said.
After a moment, he murmured, "Creepy Hollow. Funny. It's been over thirty years since I've even thought about the name. How did you even hear about that place, anyway?"
I told him that Mabel and I had talked to the Gnomes. He threw his head back and roared with laughter. "Yes, I investigated the Gnomes and got to know several of them pretty well. Dipper, a word of advice: Gnomes really aren't too bright. They have a sort of hive mind, if you know what that is. Like bees. Most of them have to be told what to do and when to do it. The few brighter ones control all the others, and like bees they have a central ruler who keeps them all focused. Any individual Gnome will invariably mislead you, not by intentionally lying exactly, but by telling you things that he or she mistakenly believes to be true."
"I sort of know that. Anyway, if Mabel and I want to explore Creepy Hollow, that would be all right?"
Grunkle Ford thought for a few minutes. "I believe so. But please don't tell Stanley. You know how he frets about these things. Of course, he'd blame me if he knew you were going—as if I could stop you if you're really determined. So just be careful. And remember what I said: If you go at all, get there in the morning after the sun is well up, and make sure you return at least an hour before it sets. Illusionary phenomena always seem stronger and realer at night."
I promised that I would follow his advice, and that if Mabel and I went exploring, I'd report back to him. Before I left, Grunkle Ford thanked me for giving him copies of his three Journals. "Now that Bill Cipher's gone for good, I don't really need them," he told me, "but it's good to have them again. When you told me Bill had incinerated the originals, I thought they were gone forever. One day you and Mabel are going to have to sit down and tell me the whole story of how this Blendin Blandin character and the Time Baby were able to rescue them from the past."
I told him I would and then got up to leave. So I rode back to the Shack with a lot to think about. I suppose Grunkle Ford's right. Whatever it is that scares a Gnome shouldn't bother a normal human at all. But when I think about "normal human," I also have to think, "and then there's Mabel."
Chapter 5: Mabel's Morning
On Thursday morning, Mabel came bouncing downstairs and into the dining room, where Grunkle Ford, Grunkle Stan, Soos, his Abuelita, and Melody were just sitting down for breakfast. Grunkle Stan chuckled. "Full of pep this morning, Pumpkin?"
"You betcha!" Mabel trilled. "Don't get up, Melody, I'll get my own cereal."
She bustled into the kitchen, hesitated between a box of Overly Sensitive Owl cocoa clusters and Paranoid Panda choco-vanilla doubles, and then poured a bowl half and half of each. She splashed in some milk, poured herself some juice, and went back to claim her place next to Stan.
"You look especially pretty today. New sweater, Mabel?" Melody asked.
"Yeah, thanks for noticing!" Mabel hopped up onto her chair, held out her arms, and modeled. The sweater was a deep purple, the orange butterfly design on it contrasting nicely.
"Good job, dawg," Soos said. "You're, like, aces at knitting!"
"You certainly have an eye for detail. Very accurate depiction of Boloria varytita," Ford observed.
Mabel curtsied before hopping off the chair and sitting down again. "Thank you, Grunkle Ford." She tilted her head and made a face of bewilderment. "Also, whaaa?"
"Poindexter always uses French to show off," Stan said with a grin.
"Stanley, it isn't French. That's the scientific name of the Gravity Falls variety of Pacific fritillary," Ford said in a huffy voice. "It's a species of butterfly. Hmm. Odd. Dipper brought up the subject of those insects just yesterday."
"Speaking of which, where is Dippy?" Grunkle Stan asked. "Not like him to miss breakfast."
Mabel had been industriously shoveling sweet cereal into her mouth. She paused, chewed crunchily, and swallowed. "He's sleeping in, I think. He was up crazy late last night writing in his—" she crooked her fingers into air quotes—"journal."
"He's takin' this investigation of his really serious," Stan said. "Maybe we should go on a family outing to get his mind off it. Trust me, nothing good's gonna come of his tryin' to learn what happened to Mrs. McGucket."
"Oh," Soos's grandmother said, "that poor woman."
Mabel blinked. "Do you know something about her, Abuelita?"
The old woman sadly shook her head. "I did not know her, but I heard about her. Mr. McGucket, he went wrong in the head. They fought over nothings. And then one day she just vanished from their house. So sad."
Ford sighed and poked at his scrambled egg with a fork. "I blame myself. After Fiddleford walked out on his job, I should have followed up. But I was just so obsessed with my work then—I'll never ignore a friend's pain again."
Dipper still had not come downstairs when they finished breakfast, and Melody and Soos's Abuelita wouldn't hear of Mabel's offer to wash or dry the dishes.
"Okay," she said. "Then I'm gonna go out for a little bit. Soos, if Dipper asks, tell him I'm gonna be where we went yesterday."
"Will do, Hambone," Soos said. "Have fun."
As she sped toward the gift shop door, Mabel almost collided with Wendy, who took a step back, laughing. "Hey, Mabel, chill, girl! Don't mow me down."
"Sorry!" Mabel said, skidding to a halt. "Hey, Wendy, if Soos forgets, tell Dipper I'm going to the same place we went yesterday, okay?"
"You got it. Nice threads, dude!"
"Thank you!" Mabel said, holding the front of her sweater out and looking down admiringly at the butterfly. "It's a Boloney very ti-ti!"
"Coulda fooled me, man. I thought it was a butterfly. Ciao!"
"No thanks, already ate!" Full of sugar and pep, Mabel sped off around the corner and into the woods near the Shack. It was a fine cool morning, with the sun shining down through a thin, high overcast, so that shadows lay blurred and soft beneath the trees. The birds were busy—chirps and cheeps rang out on all sides, and a few squirrels skittered off the path ahead of her now and then. One of them completely lost his little furry mind and couldn't decide which side of the path would be safest, so he spun in an insane little circle, increasingly frantic, until Mabel just stopped and pointed to the right. "That way!"
The squirrel stopped, looked at her, and immediately ran off to the left. Mabel laughed. "Good for you! Always choose your own path!" Then she hurried on, humming a tune. She passed the glade where, if you did the right chant in the right low-register voice, you could visit the unicorns. She didn't even give it a passing glance, but muttered, "Jerks!" under her breath as she passed by.
Once unicorns had been her absolute favorite animals, but after having talked with them, bargained with them, been fooled by them, and fought them, she had to admit her admiration for them had faded. At the moment she thought the orange butterflies were much cooler.
She came to the site of the ruined McGucket house and walked over to the edge of the depression. Looking down through the tangled vines that had twined around the fallen timbers, she could glimpse evidence of the old fire, nearly shapeless charred remains of crisscrossed beams and joists, crumbly-black and streaked with white ash. Pale white toadstools had sprouted on some, and under it all was the greenish surface of stagnant standing water. Mabel closed her eyes and tried to imagine the house as it must have looked before the fire. It would have been small—but foundations of ruined houses always look smaller than the buildings themselves. She pictured it as two-storied, or maybe a lower floor and an upper loft. That would be where Tate McGucket would have slept. Maybe as a little boy he'd spent anxious frightened nights up there, hearing his parents' voices speaking in low but furious tones as they fought. Maybe he'd pulled the covers over his head and wept and shivered in the dark.
Mabel sighed. She'd been there when Fiddleford McGucket had begun to recover his lost memories. She remembered how he stood there, just starting to understand his past and the fears he had been desperate to forget. She had felt the waves of despair radiating off the poor old man like heat.
The sun broke through the high clouds, and a warming beam struck her. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes—and then laughed her gurgling chuckle. The orange butterflies, a whole flock of them, air-danced up on the crown of the ridge behind the ruins of the house, right on the edge of Gnome territory. She hurried up, her feet slipping in the dewy grass, until she stood in the midst of the whirling cloud. "Hello, baloney very ti-tis!" she yelled, raising her arms and spreading her fingers.
To her delight, the butterflies seemed to be attracted to her sweater. Some alighted on the sleeves, one on her shoulder, and five or six on the big knitted image of their kind. "That's right!" she said. "I made a picture of you! Who's the cutest little butterfly species in Gravity Falls? You are!"
She felt a tickle. One of the butterflies had lit on her left hand, on the tip of her index finger. Cautiously, slowly, she lowered her hand so she could look at it close up. It had a long, spring-like proboscis, deep purple faceted eyes—nearly the same shade as her sweater!—and wings that lazily folded and unfolded. It began to creep along her finger and then down the back of her hand, and Mabel leveled it so she could continue to study the insect. Even more of them were landing on her now. She could feel some clinging in her hair, and her sweater was almost completely orange with a coating of live butterflies.
"There are a lot of you, aren't there—ouch!" Involuntarily she shook her hand, and the butterfly on it flew off. At the same time all the others leaped into the air and bobbed away in an orange airborne stream winding into the forest. The back of her hand throbbed a little. Had the butterfly bitten her? How could it have? It didn't have a real mouth, just that tube-like proboscis for slurping up nectar!
But the back of her hand had a small, angry pink welt on it. Maybe I'd better go back to the Shack for some antibiotic, she thought. She ought to go. And yet she didn't want to go.
The sun felt warm, the air made her pleasantly drowsy, the woods were shady, a good place for a quick nap. She'd feel better if she just went into the forest, maybe as far as the little shallow trickling creek, and found a nice mossy bank to lie on. Just a little way in—
"Mabel!"
"Hmm?" It was as if someone in a dream had called her name. She looked down the hill. A boy was climbing toward her. She frowned and then after a short mental struggle recognized him.
"Dipper," she murmured. He caught up to her.
"Are you out of your mind? You heard Jeff—it's dangerous to go that way. What's wrong with you?"
She hid her left hand behind her back. "I—nothing. Want to go to find the Gack of Doom? I feel like going there."
"Not today!" Dipper snapped. "We'd have to prepare! I need to make a checklist, get supplies and weapons ready—hey, where's your grappling hook?"
"Hmm?"
"You never go into the woods without it! Why are you so pale? Have you got a fever? Come on—I think you might be a little sick."
"Umm—okay."
Dipper took her right hand and led her downhill. She kept her left concealed from him, without really knowing why. But as they made their way back to the path that led to the Mystery Shack, as the pain eased into a kind of tingle, she took a quick look at it. The pink mark was fading, but it was leaving a sort of dark purply-black outline.
A little . . . triangle.
Chapter 6: Pacific Overtures
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: I didn't know what was wrong with Mabel. She talked and acted oddly—well, she always does, but I mean oddly even for HER. It was like, I don't know, like she was sedated or something, or feeling disoriented and far-away. She talked in such a low voice that I could hardly understand her, and she moved like she was sleepwalking.
I was so worried that by the time I got her down the hill, I called Grunkle Ford and asked if he could drive to meet us. We followed the old drive to the highway—it wasn't all that far, really, but the brush was really overgrown, chest-high and tangled. Mabel kept fretting about butterflies "Where ARE they?" she wailed more than once—I don't mean she shrieked, because it was all in that weird soft voice, but she sounded miserable.
"I don't know," I told her. And it was true. We saw a dozen or so butterflies, but they were the wrong kinds—black ones with orange and white spots, brown ones, yellow ones, some small white ones, but none of the orange ones with the dark brown markings. Mabel had to be pulled along, but at least she didn't struggle. We got to the highway and started to walk toward town. We spooked a deer that was grazing on the shoulder of the roadway, and we saw some rabbits. Ordinarily Mabel would coo and ooh and ahh over wildlife like that and even try to pet them. I mean, once she even tried to smuggle a young bobcat into our family car! But she just stared dully at them as we passed by.
We had been walking along the side of the road for only a few minutes when I heard a car engine, and a moment later Grunkle Ford's black Lincoln came over a rise. He was at the wheel, and Grunkle Stan was beside him in the passenger seat. Grunkle Ford pulled over, I led Mabel across the road, and with Grunkle Stan's help we got her into the back seat. I climbed in beside her, trying to answer both Stan's and Ford's questions: What had happened? Was she hurt? Had there been an accident? "
No," I said when they finally quieted down enough to listen. "She's sick or something. I don't know. She's not acting like herself."
"Wanna go back," Mabel muttered. Her eyes looked heavy. In a few minutes she nodded off to sleep.
"Take us over to Hirschville," Grunkle Stan said. "They have a walk-in clinic. Hit Route 35 and turn south—"
"I KNOW, Stanley," Grunkle Ford snapped. "I lived here for years, remember?"
"Yeah, well I lived here for THIRTY years, which is more than you can say! An' I keep tellin' you, you should let me drive. I got a driver's license!"
"Stanley, I'll get a license as soon as I feel comfortable with all the traffic laws. I forgot some during my time away."
"Well, the main one is to stay to the right of the center line! And slow down!"
Please, guys," I said, and they both quieted down.
Maybe because great-uncle Ford is still getting used to driving again, it took about half an hour to get to the clinic. The whole time I just sat in the backseat beside my sister and worried.
The doctor had a French name—Dr. Jean le Fievre—but he sounded American: "Call me Johnny. Everybody does." He was young, probably in his early thirties, with tousled, wavy black hair and bright blue eyes—any other time, Dipper thought, Mabel would be gushing over him and developing a crush. But she remained apathetic.
Dr. le Fievre listened to her breathing and her heart, looked into her eyes and used a tongue depressor to stare into her mouth, felt the nodes under her jaws, and took her temperature. "Doesn't seem to be much wrong," he said. "In fact, I can't really find anything. I'd say take her home, put her to bed, and let her rest for a day. Call me tomorrow if she's not any better. I suspect this is one of those childhood maladies that goes as quickly as it comes on. Watch what she eats—no heavy or rich food today, maybe soup if she feels like it, plenty of water. No milk or dairy today, just in case it's an intolerance issue. I wonder—is she allergic to anything?"
"Just pollen in the spring and then again in the fall," Dipper told him. When the doctor raised his eyebrows, Dipper explained, "We're twins. Our allergies act up together."
The doctor chuckled, looking at the two great-uncles. "Twins run in your family, I see." He did a double take. "Except one of these gentlemen has polydactyly."
For the first time Mabel showed a spark of interest. "Poly-dactyl-doodle all day," she murmured, giggling a little. Then she just stared into space, her head sort of wobbly.
"I do have an extra finger on each hand," Grunkle Ford said.
"Toes, too," Stan put in. "He can count up to twenty-four!"
"I've seen a few cases," the doctor said. "It's not as uncommon as you would think. About one in three thousand."
"Yeah, yeah, but Mabel's gonna be all right?" Grunkle Stan said impatiently.
"I think so. Kids are tougher than you think. But I see she has the normal juvenile complement of four fingers, and so does her brother—wait, what's this?"
Dipper felt the breath catch in his throat. Dr. le Fievre had taken Mabel's left wrist in his hand. On her skin Dipper now saw a black outline of a triangle. Just like in the photo of Mrs. McGucket.
Mabel looked as if she were trying to focus. She giggled again. "That's where a butterfly bit me," she said. "Like the one on my sweater."
Only then did it register with Dipper that the knitted butterfly's orange wings, superficially similar to a monarch's orange wings, had odd markings. In a semicircle at the rear of each hindwing brown spots were curved in a line—six on each wing. Each spot was a perfect brown equilateral triangle. In the car as they drove back to Gravity Falls, Dipper said, "It's Bill's symbol! He might be back!"
From behind the wheel, Grunkle Ford said, "Don't jump to conclusions, Dipper. Bill was erased from this dimension. He can't be here—certainly not physically, and I don't think it would be likely even in the Dreamscape. Anyway, these triangles lack the eye symbol. I don't believe they're related to Bill. Still, I wish I knew more about these butterflies. I'd like to examine a specimen."
"Preston Northwest," growled Grunkle Stan.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Preston Northwest. That rich jerk collects butterflies. He probably has some of this kind pinned up and on display."
"Hmm. I might go visit him."
Grunkle Stan laughed. "Yeah, good luck with that, Poindexter. Northwest wouldn't give you the scrapings off his shoes after walking through a stable!"
"Pacifica might," Dipper said.
"Huh?"
"Their daughter, you know. Stayed in the Shack during Weirdmageddon."
"Wore a potato sack!" Mabel added with a giggle.
Dipper went on: "At the end of last summer, she came over and gave us birthday gifts. I haven't seen her this year, but I think she feels kind of friendly toward Mabel. I could ask her if her dad has a specimen."
"That's actually a good idea," Grunkle Ford said. "Do you know where they live now?"
"Uh—no." Of course the Northwests had moved out of their mansion—they'd had to sell it after losing most of their wealth, and the newly rich Fiddleford McGucket had bought it—but neither of the twins had been in touch with Pacifica.
"They owned a farm about three or four miles past the town limits on the High Bluff road. They used to raise ponies there. They've moved to the farm full time. Do you want me to drive you?"
Dipper thought. "No, I think I'd rather borrow Wendy's bike. Attract less attention, you know?"
"We'll take Mabel back to Fiddleford's. There's plenty of room there, and Stan can get her settled. Then I'll drive you over to the Shack so I can pick up some clothes for Mabel, and you can take it from there."
Stan shifted in his seat and pulled out a wallet. He produced a fat sheaf of bills. "Stop at the bike shop," he said, half-turning in the seat to hand the money back to Dipper. "Let Dip at least get a boy's bike."
"This isn't like you, Grunkle Stan," Dipper said, feeling a little dazed, as though Stan's offer of money had been a sock full of damp sand and had hit him a good one upside his head.
"Meh," Stan said with a shrug. "I ain't buyin' fancy-shmancy electronics to fix a Portal these days, and I got plenty of dough from our ocean voyage. But be sure you bring me back the change!"
Dipper relaxed a little. That sounded more like Grunkle Stan.
An hour later, mounted on his shiny new twelve-speed, Dipper pedaled along High Bluff Road, a winding country road lined on either side with old-growth trees. Once he had to pull way over as a loaded logging truck grumbled past, but otherwise he saw very little traffic. Three and a half miles after he passed the town limit sign, the trees fell away to the right, and he spotted the farmhouse and paddocks in a broad meadow.
"Yikes!" The Northwests were no longer the richest people in town, but they'd salvaged a lot, from the look of it—the farmhouse wasn't the modest little country cottage he'd imagined, but a rambling, rustic three-storied white frame house with a long cobbled drive curving to its front portico, bordered by flower beds colorful with geraniums. The stables clustered near the barn didn't look occupied at first, but then Dipper heard the sound of hoof beats and saw Pacifica in a paddock beyond the barn, riding a white pony. No one else seemed to be around.
Dipper pedaled down the drive, the front wheel clattering over the cobbles, and up to the fence. Pacifica, dressed in hot pink riding togs and helmet, was on the far side of the paddock. She made the turn and as she urged the pony into a trot she finally noticed him. Her eyes flew wide open, but she reined the pony in and walked it over to the fence.
"Dipper," she said, looking down on him. "I didn't know you were back in town."
"For the summer," Dipper said. "You're looking good, Pacifica." It was true. The riding outfit was sort of tight, and it showed visible evidence that she definitely was a girl.
"Well, of course," she said. But she swung off the pony and led him toward the stables. "I've got to have him rubbed down," she said. "Meet you inside."
"I'll tag along." Dipper went around to the front of the barn and stepped into the cool, dim, horsey-smelling interior.
He heard Pacifica saying, "Give him a good rubdown, Phillips."
"Yes, Miss," came an elderly voice, and Dipper saw a scrawny-looking, short old man leading the pony into a stall.
Pacifica walked toward him, taking off her fawn-colored riding gloves. "I've just got Desperado now," she said with a sigh. "We had to sell my other ponies."
Dipper smiled. "Most kids don't have any." At last Pacifica broke down and smiled back.
"Well, that's one way of looking at it."
"It's really good to see you," Dipper told her.
The smile grew a little wider, a bit warmer. "Well, I—I don't mind seeing you again, either. And you're looking good, too. Taller, I think. So where's Mabel?"
"That's why I came out," Dipper said. "She's kind of sick." He sketched in part of the story for her, leaving out the investigation but telling Pacifica that the doctor wondered if Mabel were allergic to something, and the only new thing she'd been exposed to seemed to be the butterfly. "Grunkle Ford wants to look at a specimen," he finished. "Grunkle Stan says your dad is a collector, and we thought maybe he might have one."
"I'm sure he does," Pacifica said. She checked the time on her cell phone. "Father and Mother are away for a few hours. It's good you picked this time to come-Father still holds a grudge because his deal with Bill fell through or whatever, and I think he blames you Pines. He can be so stubborn. Anyway, all of Father's butterfly collections are stored away in the attic. Come with me and we'll see if we can find the one you want. You know what it looks like?"
Dipper nodded, and Pacifica led him into the house. "I understand that hillbilly bought our old place," she said in a cool voice as she handed her gloves, riding crop, and helmet to the same quiet butler Dipper had met when he had worked to banish a ghost haunting the old Northwest mansion.
"Dr. Fiddleford McGucket, yes." Dipper hesitated and then added, "Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan are house guests there this summer. They took Mabel there to keep an eye on her." He looked at the floor. "I'm sorry you lost your house."
"Why?" she asked, sounding genuinely surprised. "It's just a house. My parents liked it a lot better than I did. This place is better, if you ask me. Just as comfortable, smaller, and I'm close to my pony."
She had led him up to the second floor. "Here we are," she said. "Come on in." She actually grinned. "Father would have an absolute fit if he knew I let a boy visit me here in my rooms. Especially you, Dipper." She winked at him.
Rooms, plural. Pacifica had a little suite—a sitting room, a dressing room, a bedroom, and a closet about the same size as the attic at the Shack. "You wait here while I change," she said.
Dipper settled into a chair in the sitting room. He heard the sound of a shower, then some minutes of rustlings and movement. When Pacifica opened the door again, she was wearing gray leggings, tan ankle boots and—the cream-colored llama's hair sweater that Mabel had given her during Weirdmageddon. She blushed when she saw him staring at it. "Okay, I kind of got to like the dumb sweater," she said. Then she smiled a little. "Tell her that, will you? Might, I don't know, cheer her up or whatever."
"Of course." They went up to the top floor, and in an expansive attic storage room Pacifica located about a hundred framed shadow-boxes, each containing a display of a dozen or more butterflies. Some were exotic, huge insects from South America or Asia or Africa, and others were more modest, displays of Red Admirals, swallowtails, painted ladies, Luna moths, and other American species.
Finally, Dipper spotted a frame with a brass label that read "Forest Butterflies of Oregon." The center one in the top row looked exactly like the one Mabel had knitted on the front of her sweater. "This is it."
"It might be fragile. Better take the whole frame," Pacifica said. She bit her lip. "If—I don't know if I can, mind, but if I can manage it, do you think Mabel would be OK if I came to visit her?"
"Sure she would," Dipper said. "Hey, she actually likes you."
"Oh," Pacifica said. Then, in a strangely choked voice, she said, "I'm glad one of you-glad she does. Well, you better go before my parents get back. Don't worry, they won't miss that. Father never even looked at them when they were all up on his study wall. I'll get a bag for you to put it in. Tell Mabel I said hi, okay? And I'll come and see you two if I can."
"Yeah, she-we'd both like to have you visit," Dipper said.
The bag Pacifica found was a padded canvas carry-all with leather straps and a designer's name stitched onto it. It probably cost more than his bike had. They wrapped the frame in tissue, taped it, and slipped it into the bag. It fit into the bike basket just fine. "Well," Dipper said, "thank you."
Standing next to the bike with her arms crossed, Pacifica said, "Oh, don't mention it. I don't even like the butterfly collections. They look so creepy." She shifted her weight from foot to foot awkwardly for a moment, then as if on impulse hugged Dipper, her breath warm against his neck. "I missed you. And, uh, tell Mabel that—say—oh, say I like her, too. Now get out of here, will you?"
Though she gave him a little shove before she turned and ran back into the farmhouse, Dipper didn't climb onto the bike right away. His face felt hot for some reason. She hugged me, he thought. And then she didn't even offer me a bribe not to tell anyone. How weird is THAT?
Wondering why he felt so strange, Dipper got on the bike and headed back to Grunkle Ford.
CHAPTER 7: A Most Peculiar Specimen
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: When I got back to the McGucket house, I left my new bike in the drive and hurried inside and up to the room where Mabel was in bed.
As I approached it, Grunkle Stan stood in the hall outside her door and held a finger to his lips and whispered, "She's sleeping." Well, not exactly whispered. When Grunkle Stan whispers, it sounds like a cement mixer with strep throat.
Fiddleford McGucket edged quietly out of the room, closed the door noiselessly, and nodded at me. "She's restin' comfortably, an' that probably will help her as much as any medicine could do. That mark on her hand is worrisome, though. I've seen something like it before." I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking him questions, but I did say, "You don't sound as folksy as usual."
McGucket shrugged and, under his bushy white whiskers, gave me a kind of grin. "Shucks, that there rantin' and roarin's mostly for public consumption. When people think you're an unpredictabobble wild-eyed hillbilly hootenanny jobbernowl with a raccoon fer a spouse and probable homiocideral tendencies, they gives you a wide berth, an' I likes bein' let alone, by cracky!" He did a little hambone patting and then stamped the floor—but lightly, soundlessly—with his right foot before smacking his leg. "Now cut that out!"
" McGucket is as sane as I am," Grunkle Stan said. "Not that THAT's any great recommendation. Speakin' of sanity, McGucket, what's the real deal with the raccoon?"
McGucket chuckled. "Well, for a long time there, ya know, I didn't have any regular income. Now, in Gravity Falls there are laws about various things. Some few years back I found this bad-hurt young raccoon kit. Knew it wouldn't survive in the wild, so I took it in. But there's a hundred-dollar fee for getting' a license to rehabilitate wildlife. A marriage license is only two bucks. So I claimed I was gonna marry the critter and saved myself ninety-eight dollars. 'Course really she's just a pet, not a wife, but it just goes to show you that even when I was fer-real nutso I was smart enough to find a nice legal loophole."
Stan slapped him on the shoulder. "You're my kinda guy! Hey, Dip, whatcha got there?"
I showed them the wrapped shadow box. "The specimen that Grunkle Ford wanted."
"He's in my lab," McGucket said, "researchin' on the Internet. He still ain't too good at it, if you want to know the truth. The dimensions he was stuck in for thirty years didn't have no connectivity, I reckon."
So I took the shadow box with the butterflies down through the maze of hallways to the former kitchen, where I found Grunkle Ford hunched over one of Fiddleford's many computers. He looked up when I came in. I held up the box, and his expression changed from annoyance to relief and happiness . . . .
"Good work, Dipper! I trust that Mr. Northwest raised no objections to our borrowing the specimen?"
"Uh, nooooo," Dipper said, unwrapping the frame. "He didn't say one word against it."
He handed the shadowbox over. Stanford tilted it to view the specimens inside without any glare on the glass. "Let me see—yes, here it is, in the top row. It's frustrating, but the computer network of information barely mentions this particular subspecies. Here, let me carefully remove the one we're interested in."
He put the frame on a lab table and removed the glass. Once it was off, Dipper could see that each butterfly had been identified in very faint ink and in extremely tiny handwriting. Beneath the orange fritillary in the top row, someone had written, "Boloria varytita. Gravity Falls Oregon June 6 1953. Periodic."
Dipper leaned close, a musty odor in his nostrils, and read it aloud. "What does that mean, 'periodic?'"
Stanford Pines had removed the pin holding the specimen in place and, using forceps, had transferred the insect to a platform beneath a six-inch-diameter magnifying glass. "Ah. That means that the Gravity Falls fritillary shows up in great numbers about once every twenty-nine or thirty years. Then there'll be two or three years when they're abundant, as they are this year, and afterwards the numbers taper off dramatically and for years you can find only one or two out in the woods."
"Isn't that kind of unusual?" Dipper asked.
His great-uncle Ford had removed his glasses and bent close to the magnifying glass to peer at the butterfly. "Well, for Lepidoptera, yes. Common in cicadas, of course—you've probably heard of seventeen-year locusts, which aren't locusts at all, by the way. However, periodicity isn't unheard of. Some of the nymphaea exhibit the trait—that is, like our friend here, they can be abundant one year and scarce the next. However, a thirty-year period is unique, I think. I don't know if the caterpillars hibernate over the winters for all that time as they slowly mature, or if it's a variation in food supply or what. Frustrating. I'm frankly surprised no one's done a paper on them. You'd think entomology grad students would jump at the chance. Hmm. Now, this is very strange."
"What is?"
"Look through the glass and I'll point it out to you." Dipper took Ford's place and gazed at a much-magnified image of the orange butterfly. A needle pointer came into view. Grunkle Ford said, "Here. Look very closely." Dipper looked at the spiral proboscis, looking like a flat spring. The needle—so magnified that it looked as if it were the size of a chopstick and trembling—pointed out the very end, where the tongue-like organ ended in a tiny arrowhead shape, somewhat curved to a wickedly sharp point, shiny and dark brown.
"What about it?" Dipper asked.
"Well, it looks as if this butterfly is adapted not to sipping flower nectar through this, but to piercing something—berry skins, perhaps, or conceivably even animal or insect flesh, though that would be unheard-of—to feed. A typical butterfly proboscis is just a hollow tube. The insect sucks up flower nectar and dew through it—sometimes it will also probe the ground with the tip, searching for minerals, especially sodium, that it needs. That's called 'puddling,' by the way. Or it doesn't have to feed exclusively on flowers, of course—a butterfly will feed on burst or rotten fruit, like peaches or grapes, or even on urine and dung."
"Mm-hmmm," Dipper said, making a mental note never again to touch a butterfly unless he was wearing thick leather gloves.
Stanford used the needle to probe the sharp point, moving it a little "This one, though—well, maybe that little arrowhead-like sheath could pierce a grape or the skin of a piece of fruit."
"Or human skin?" Dipper asked.
Ford smiled. "Dipper, in the whole history of the entire natural world no butterfly in existence ever feasted on human blood."
"Does the entire natural world necessarily include Gravity Falls?" Dipper asked.
With a sigh, Ford agreed: "Good point. The rules of nature don't always apply here, do they?"
Dipper stared closely at the sharp-looking tip of the specimen's proboscis. "Grunkle Ford, if that could pierce skin, do you think it could leave a mark like the one on Mabel's hand?"
"Possibly," Stanford replied slowly. "Of course, a puncture wound from something like this would be minute, scarcely visible to the naked eye. Unless, perhaps, the butterfly could move its little needle very fast, like, oh, a sewing machine. Then I suppose it might outline a triangle."
Then he adjusted the specimen on the viewing platform and murmured, "Speaking of which . . . these markings on the wings are eerily regular, aren't they?" The needle barely touched one of the dark-brown triangles on the lower wings, under magnification made up of richly-colored overlapping scales with oddly toothed edges. "The marking looks less like something natural than something man-made, or something printed. Almost as if sketched out with the aid of a ruler."
"A ruler? Like Bill Cipher?" Dipper asked.
His great-uncle shook his head. "No, I simply mean a straight-edge, a guide so the lines will be straight and even. That kind of ruler, not a crazed demonic dictator."
"Still—triangles. Bill. Just a coincidence?" Dipper asked.
"I don't know, Dipper. I just don't know."
"Great-uncle Ford, do you think this fritillary might have, I don't know, some kind of venom? Has Mabel been poisoned?"
"Doubtful, Dipper. Once again, no butterfly ever recorded has been capable of producing poison. They are not preying insects. For one to evolve such a capability would be unheard of."
"So what's next?"
"Well, I'm going to take some microphotographs of this specimen. I'll also try a spectroscopic reading of the proboscis, just in case there's any trace of unusual chemical substances. I'm in touch with some noted entomologists at Oregon State University and U.C. Riverside. I'll send them my findings and we'll see what they say."
His heart beating a little too fast, Dipper asked, "Is Mabel going to be all right?"
Ford put a reassuring hand on Dipper's shoulder. "I'm sure she will be. Even assuming the worst, an insect this size couldn't possibly inject her with any venom that would make her seriously ill. And unless one is severely allergic, even a hornet's sting is at most a source of acute discomfort. Mabel will probably wake up completely well, but just to be on the safe side, I'll continue my research. I'll have to write Mr. Northwest a note of thanks."
"I'll run it over on my bike," Dipper said quickly.
Sounding half lost in thought, Stanford replied, "Thank you. Yes, sir, this is an extremely interesting butterfly. Most peculiar indeed. Harmless, I'm sure but a most peculiar specimen." Dipper could only hope that he was right.
Chapter 8: A Flash in the Night
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Thursday, June 20. It's only nine p.m. but I'm too tired to write much. Mabel didn't wake up the whole time I was over at McGucket's.
I got back to the Shack at six, had a little dinner that I didn't feel like eating with Soos, Melody, and Soos's Abuelita, and then just climbed up the stairs to the attic and lay back on my bed. I'd pulled back the curtain dividing our room. Looking over at Mabel's empty bed made my chest feel empty and achy. But then a little after seven, she called me.
"Hey, Broboat," she said, her voice sounding really tired and draggy.
"Mabel! How are you?" I asked. "I'll come right over!"
"No, no, that's all right," she told me. "I think I'm OK. Just, you know, pooped. So I'm gonna stay here and try to get a good night's sleep. Maybe I'll be my old self tomorrow. Come and have breakfast with me?"
"You got it, Sis."
"Okay. Eight o'clock."
Eight. I'll be there."
"Awkward sibling goodnight?"
"Sincere sibling goodnight, Sis. Sleep well."
"You too, Dip."
Well, she did sound more normal, only sort of slowed down. Maybe she really was just tired, or maybe it was a touch of some mild bug. So . . . . Goodnight, beautiful assistant. I miss you.
Dreams.
They happen in what Grunkle Ford called the Mindscape, in the place inside all of our heads, that otherworld of imagination and joy, of wonder and terror.
Dipper had known good dreams and bad ones, and the bad had included some doozies with Bill Cipher as the featured player More often than most people, Dipper had lucid dreams, the kind in which he knew he was really asleep and dreaming. When he was lucky, he could even control a lucid dream. That's how he once persuaded Wendy Corduroy to tell him she had fallen hopelessly in love with him.
However, most of the time his dreams were the ordinary kind that everyone had, though he was better at remembering the details than other people. That night he had just disconnected flashes of dreams, nothing in sequence, nothing like a story, but just images, really. He heard something tap-tap-tapping at the window and when he opened it about a million of the butterflies swirled there, hurling themselves at the glass until he slipped up the sash and gave them a way in, and then they flowed in like an orange flood. They seemed to settle on him, covering him, and he felt himself growing weak and faint.
Then that was gone, and somehow Pacifica was making fun of him because he didn't know how to ride a pony and fell off every time he tried to get into Desperado's saddle. He stubbornly tried again and again, winding up covered with smelly, mucky mud, until Desperado looked back over his shoulder and said, "You're a loser, kid."
Next time had passed and the summer was over and school in Piedmont had started again, but when he walked over to the bus stop and got aboard their schoolbus, he realized that the seat next to him was empty. Mabel was gone.
"No," he groaned, tossing in his bed. For some time, Dipper floated just beneath the surface of waking.
He had seen a TV show about a magician attempting a daring escape from a sealed trunk dropped through a hole in lake ice. He had made it out of the trunk, only to find that he had drifted from the hole, and the frozen surface locked him away from the life-giving air. It was like that with Dipper, suffocating, not fully asleep but not able to wake up. Now he heard voices, two of them sounding distant but clear, urging him: "Help her! Help her! Wake up and go help her!"
"Mffgh," Dipper moaned, trying to break through the barrier and into consciousness. One of the voices said, "Shh, let me try. Dipper! This is twin telepathy! Mabel's in big trouble. You gotta go help her, man!"
As though he had touched a live wire, Dipper convulsed and rolled out of bed, landing with an echoing thud on his hands and knees. For a moment his chest heaved, but he couldn't get his breath. Then it came with a deep gasp. He tore off his underwear—the only thing he had been sleeping in—and grabbed a fresh pair from his suitcase, which he still hadn't unpacked. He pulled on walking shorts, a T-shirt, his old Navy blue traveler's vest (though it was short on him now), then socks and shoes, and finally he grabbed his trucker hat and rushed out.
But Soos met him on the stairway. "What's up, dude?" he asked. "You like shook the whole place there. Drop something?"
"Soos!" Dipper panted. "Listen, I know it sounds crazy, and I don't know how I know it, but I do—Mabel needs me, man. I gotta get to the McGucket house. Can you help me, please?"
Soos didn't hesitate. "Go get in the Jeep, dawg. I'll pull on some pants and be there in a second."
"Thanks, man!" Dipper took the stairs down two at a time, raced out the back door and over to the Jeep, and climbed in. He was taking deep gasping breaths of the cool, pine-scented air, but his heart refused to beat more slowly. Dipper fumbled with the seat belt, but even before he had it buckled, Soos came hustling out, now wearing his old question-mark T-shirt, brown shorts, and brown cap.
He slid into the driver's seat and fired up the engine. "Belt fastened, dude? Hang on!" The Jeep's tires spun, and Dipper heard the spattering of gravel into underbrush as the wheels fought for traction. Then they lurched forward, fishtailed as they made the hard turn onto the road, and headed for town.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Dipper said over and over again, apologizing not to Soos but to Mabel.
"Calm down, Dipper," Soos said, drifting the Jeep into a long curve. "What happened, dude?"
"Oh—I'm not even sure. I just have this strong sense that Mabel needs me. See, I had this weird dream," Dipper said.
"Oh, man, I saw a TV show about this," Soos replied. "It was all about twins, like you and Hambone, and how they got this special occult mental connection or some junk! Like there was this pair of twins, one was in New York and one was in Germany, and the one in Germany broke his leg and the one in New York woke up with his own leg all swollen up like a super-big bratwurst and he knew something had happened! And there were these other two, they could be miles apart, but no matter what the distance was, if one of them ate an ice cream, the other got brain freeze! Spooky stuff! So what was yours, Dipper? Broken leg or brain freeze?"
"Neither one, actually. I just heard a voice telling me that Mabel needs help, right now."
"Her voice?"
"No, a boy's voice. It—well, it sounded more like mine. Sounds stupid now that I'm talking about it. It may be just a dream, man."
"No worries, bro. We gotta check it out."
Dipper mentally kicked himself for not having picked up his cell phone before leaving the Shack. Soos hadn't brought his, either, but he made good time, blowing through the stop signs in Gravity Falls. There wasn't much danger. Nobody was out at two a.m. on a hazy Friday morning. Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland were more than likely off-duty and fast asleep. Or on-duty and fast asleep. It didn't seem to make much difference either way.
Anyway, aside from an odd deer or two way off on the shoulder, they saw no sign of life. Soos took a short cut through a neighborhood where all the houses were dark, except for one in which a dim yellow light outlined one upstairs window. Somebody's sick there, Dipper thought.
And then, from nowhere, another thought: No. Somebody's waiting there to die. He started to shiver. How did I know that?
Soos braked in the curved drive of the mansion, and before the Jeep had even stopped moving, Dipper jumped out and raced up the front steps. The door stood open. He tore inside, yelling, "Grunkle Stan! Grunkle Ford!" By the time he was on the stair to the second floor, lights were coming on up there.
Grunkle Stan came shuffling out of his bedroom, rubbing his eyes. "Dipper! Hot Belgian waffles, kid, what's wrong?"
"Gotta check on Mabel," Dipper gasped, opening the door of her bedroom.
Behind him, Grunkle Stan said, "Soos! You too? This better not be a flash rave or whatever!"
Dipper didn't hear Soos's reply. He stood in the doorway, feeling relief. Across the darkened room Mabel lay under the covers. "False alarm," he said. Or . . . was it? Mabel wasn't making her usual nighttime "mum-mum" noises. Dipper crossed the floor and put a hand on her shoulder. Too soft. He ripped the covers back. A pillow had been left beneath the coverlet, but—no Mabel. The light flicked on, and Dipper turned, fighting back panic. Both Stanford and Stanley stood in the doorway, and behind them loomed Soos.
"She's gone!" Dipper said. They checked the bathroom down the hall. No luck. Dipper told them that he had found the front door open.
"She must have gone out," Grunkle Stan said. "She musta got dressed, but didn't take her shoes." He held up a pair of black slip-on flats. "Socks either."
"Well, she can't get very far barefoot," Ford told them. "Come with me." He led them to a small room on the third floor, full of electronic equipment and monitors. Ford turned them on, found the monitor labeled "Main," and pointed to it. At the moment it showed the view toward the street from above the front door of the mansion—Soos's Jeep was the main feature. "I'll rewind this." He did. Soos's Jeep appeared to back away and out through the gates—always open these days. Then a little further on, a small figure seemed to jog in a jerky way back down the drive and up the steps.
Ford put the recording back into forward mode. The camera was set for night vision, so everything was blurry and had a green tinge, but they saw Mabel, unmistakable even in that distorted image, hurrying down the steps, then away down the drive. Ford checked the time stamp. "She left not long after midnight. Where does she think she's going? Back to my old house?"
"Dude," Soos said, "she's not going to the Shack, because we would've passed her, and we didn't."
"Creepy Hollow," Dipper said. "That's where she's going. To meet the butterflies."
"You can't know that," Grunkle Ford said.
"I do know it," Dipper insisted.
"Be reasonable, Dipper—"
"You be reasonable, Poindexter!" Grunkle Stan exclaimed. "Hey, you told me that you knew the instant Mom had her heart attack, even though you were in some alternate dimension place."
"That was different—"
"I don't think so, Dr. Pines," Soos said. "Dipper and Mabel are like super close. They kinda feel each other's feelings sometimes. Trust him."
"If we hurry, maybe we can head her off, get there before she does," Dipper said.
Soos nodded. "We'll go in the Jeep. Uh, dude, where is Creepy Hollow?"
"I'll give you directions," Dipper said. "Come on, let's go!"
"Give me five minutes to get some equipment together," Stanford Pines said. "Stanley, you go pack some food for us—anything portable, fruit, crackers, bottled water, anything easy to carry. Throw it into one of Fiddleford's grocery totes. Oh, and one more thing, Stanley—"
Grunkle Stan had been heading out the door. He turned and growled, "Yeah?"
"Put some pants on."
"Ooh," Grunkle Stan said. "Hoity-toity!" He headed out again and ran smack into Fiddleford McGucket.
"I heard enough," the old man said. "I'm a-goin' too! And I'm a-bringin' Old Betsey!"
"No firearms," Ford cautioned.
"Who said anything about dang firearms?" McGucket brandished a baseball bat.
"Dude! Now you're talking' my language!" Soos said. "Got a spare?"
"Shore! C'mon an' I'll fix you up! We'll meet y'all at the Jeep!"
It took a little more than five minutes, but not long afterward the Jeep, with its four passengers hanging on desperately, lurched out through the gates, hung a tire-squealing left at the first intersection, and tore off through the night toward the unknown.
Chapter 9: Creepy Hollow
As he took the road west, Soos asked Stanford to call Melody and let her know where they were going. "I feel like a real dum-dum," Soos said apologetically. "I mean, my phone was docked right there next to the bed and all."
"Don't worry about it," Grunkle Ford said, thumbing in the number. "Amazing things, these cellular phones. Stanley, did you know that one of my patents made possible the development of these devices?"
"Do tell," grumbled Grunkle Stan. "Whoop-ti-do!"
"Yes," Stanford said absently. "The amount of royalties it's brought in really astonished me—hello, Melody? Listen, this is Stanford Pines. Soos is driving, but he wanted me to catch you up on things." Quickly, Ford gave her the details, winding up, "We'll be starting at the site of the old McGucket house, heading west from there. I'm afraid that's all we really know at this point. Yes. Yes, of course." He held the phone away from his ear and said, "She loves you, Soos."
"Cool," Soos said. "Tell her I love her too."
"He loves you—oh, you heard. Yes, we'll be in touch. No, no, you couldn't do anything, really. In fact, we're not even sure what might have to be done. Yes, thanks. 'Bye."
Squeezed between Grunkle Stan and the bony Fiddleford McGucket in the back seat, Dipper chewed on his lip and worried. He kept a sharp lookout, but the Jeep's headlights showed no sign of a thirteen-year-old girl. Don't let us be too late, Dipper mentally begged the Fates.
After a few minutes, when they were close to the spot, Grunkle Ford said, "Hey, I know this territory. This is where I ran into the Gnomes—I interviewed one named Shmebulock, Senior, for my Journal."
"Yeah," Dipper said. "The Gnomes told us about Creepy Hollow and the cave in the bluff, the Gack of Doom."
"That, I've never heard of," Ford said.
"Me, neither," Stanley agreed.
"It sounds right fearsome," mumbled Fiddleford.
"Hey, we've faced worse," Stanley said encouragingly.
"And this time we're all together. One team!" Stanford added.
As he turned into a curve, Soos said, "You know what we need? Like, our own team song, dawgs! And maybe trucker hats with our logo on them! And jerseys! And we could have, like, trademarked plastic water cups, too!" Perhaps fortunately for them all, they reached the overgrown drive before Soos could think of any fight-song lyrics.
The Jeep jounced over uneven ground, weaving between the bigger saplings, crushing the smaller ones. Overhead the sky flared with light now and then, distant lightning, not close enough to roll its thunder over them yet, but bright enough to outline the rim of the bluffs enclosing Gravity Falls Valley. "Rain's a-comin'," Fiddleford said. "My wrist has always hurt in rainy weather since I busted that bone in m'arm."
"Actually," Stanford said in a lecture-hall voice, 'there's no objective scientific evidence—"
"Hey, Egghead," Stanley cut in, "try listenin' to your friend with your ears, not your brain, okay?"
"Yes, you're right," Stanford said. "Sorry, Fiddleford."
McGucket acted as though he hadn't heard. "You know, I been tryin' to remember jest where our old house was, and I just now got it. Not far now. It's gonna be rough on me to see what's left of it."
"There's not much," Dipper said softly. "Just some burned timbers and part of a stone chimney."
"Jest a ruin," Fiddleford muttered, shaking his head. "Same as my life."
Soos braked when the headlights shone on the sad remains of the log cottage. They all climbed out of the Jeep as Soos killed the engine and the lights. Ford switched on a powerful flashlight and shone it across a stretch of grass that had grown more than knee-high. "Fiddleford, I'm so sorry," he said as the beam painted the broken chimney, pale gray stone pale against the dark canvas of the night.
A flicker of lightning showed Fiddleford standing at the edge of the old cellar with bowed head. "It warn't your fault. It was mine. I jest wasn't—wasn't brave enough t'face my fears. Took the coward's way out of fergittin'. Makin' myself fergit!" Another flash of lightning, and he straightened his shoulders. "Well, no more o' that. Where do we go from here, Dipper? You take the lead."
"Up this hill," Dipper said, switching on his own flashlight. "This is where the Gnomes live, but they won't hurt you. Probably. Come on!" He scrambled upward.
A distant growl of thunder threatened storm, and the air smelled of approaching rain. It can't be too far, Dipper thought. Not more than a couple miles. Maybe we'll catch up to Mabel— He heard the others floundering up the hillside behind him, but he didn't slow. "Hey, Gnomes!" he yelled. "This is me, Dipper Pines! Anybody here seen my sister tonight?"
The wind in the trees and the anxious-sounding crickets answered him, but that was all. Dipper kept flashing his light at the ground, but he could see no footprints, no sign that Mabel had come this way at all. Could I have been wrong? Could we have missed her back on the road here? He tried to reason it out. Mabel had about a two-hour start, probably. With that, if she walked fast, she could have reached the site of the old McGucket house by the time they had left in the Jeep. It had taken twenty minutes or so for them to get to the ruins of the house, and in that time she might have gone a mile on foot—probably less, because in the woods the ferny undergrowth would have hindered her. Half a mile, maybe? And she was barefoot, and that would have slowed her. . . . after a long downslope, Dipper reached a spot where the hazel trees came to an abrupt break.
Ahead of him, across a very shallow, narrow, rocky stream, the ground flattened into what looked like the bottom of an immense bowl. A streak of lightning, followed by an earth-shaking boom of thunder, showed him the land ahead was indeed a depression, sandy ground spiked with random, scrubby brush. Beyond it the bluffs rose almost sheer. "This must be Creepy Hollow!" Dipper yelled back.
Faintly, he heard his Grunkle Ford's voice from off behind him. "Dipper! Wait for us!"
But Dipper couldn't even see the beam of Ford's flashlight. "I'm going ahead!" he yelled back. He half-stumbled, half-skidded down the embankment into the semi-barren depression—It's like a time-eroded meteor crater, he thought—and immediately yelped. Something had his legs. No—he was sinking! "Help!" he yelled. "Quicksand!"
Someone grabbed his flailing wrist and pulled hard, and Dipper toppled forward, his arms outflung. The ground he hit felt solid. He asked the darkness, "Mabel? Is that you?"
"Not quite," said a whispery voice.
"You!" he shouted.
"Hurry up, Ford!" urged Stanley.
"I am hurrying!" Stanford snapped. "We're off the trail here, if you haven't noticed!"
Soos had forged a little ahead. "Dudes! I see his flashlight!" He waved his own and yelled, "Dipper! Over here, dawg!" After a moment, he said, "Oh, yeah, here he comes!"
A few seconds later, Dipper stumbled out of the ferns, an arm raised to shield his eyes. "Hey, guys, don't blind me!"
"Sorry," Soos said, lowering the beam of his flashlight.
"Listen," Dipper said urgently, "I ran into some of the Gnomes. They told me that Mabel came this way not too long ago. She went straight across Creepy Hollow—the Gnomes say we'll see and hear spooky stuff, but it's all illusion and can't hurt us—and then into the cave they call the Gack of Doom."
"Good work, Dipper!" Ford said. "Lead on!"
"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "Let me catch my breath. "Here's the thing, guys—the Gnomes say there's a monster inside the cave. Not an illusion. A real monster. They don't know what it is, but they call it a dragon. Get this: It controls butterflies, the orange ones with the triangle marks. It sends them out to find victims and mark them. And once the victim is marked and the outline turns blue, the dragon can call the victim to it and into its home."
"Let's go!" Soos said. "Mabel's in there with a dragon!"
"Wait," Dipper pleaded again. "Guys, the Gnomes told me the dragon doesn't kill its victims. It keeps them prisoner inside the cave and somehow feeds on them without killing them. It has a woman in there now, but she was taken years and years ago."
"That totally has to be Mr. McGucket's wife!" Soos exclaimed.
"Mayellen?" McGucket said, his voice choking. "All this time I thought she'd run away from me, an' instead she was captured by some supernatural critter? Come on. I mean to kill it!"
Dipper led the way out into the sandy floor of the broad, bowl-like valley. "The cave opening's on the far side," he said. "Nearly straight across."
A flashlight beam enveloped Dipper, and Grunkle Stan said, "Am I crazy, or have you shrunk?"
"Trick of the light, I guess," Dipper said. "We have to get under cover before the rain hits us!" Thunder sounded like a runaway train rumbling across the sky above them, and he said, "Let's go before the storm breaks! Straight across, and don't listen or react to anything you hear or see!" He rushed across the sandy, rocky expanse. He pulled up short, his flashlight beam focused on a wind-lashed scraggly serviceberry bush ahead. "Is that Mabel's hair ribbon?"
"Yeah," Stanley said, pushing him aside and reaching for the fluttering lavender ribbon. "I recognize—what th'!"
He thrashed. To the others it looked as if Stan had suddenly gone crazy. He twisted and jerked and cursed, his arm still thrust in among the branches. To Stan, the brush had come alive and had seized his wrist, tightening its trip, threatening to break his bones. "Sleeve caught?" Ford asked, stepping forward to help.
He froze as he heard an all-too-familiar voice: "Well, well, well, well-well-well-wellwell! Hiya, Fordsy!"
"Bill Cipher!" Ford shouted, turning in a tight, frantic circle. "Show yourself!" Bill's high-pitched laugh mocked him, and the demon taunted, "I can stay right behind you all night, Fordsy! Don't have eyes in the back of your head to go with your six fingers, do you?"
"Bill, let me see you!"
"Hey, hol' on, hol' on, old friend. What are you talkin' about?" Fiddleford asked.
"That voice! It was him!"
"Warn't no voice!" Fiddleford yelled back. "This's one of them hullabalusion tricks Dipper said the Gnomes tole him about!"
"Stanley!" Ford yelled. "Close your eyes!" He closed his own—and the sounds of Bill's taunting laugher faded to nothing.
"Hey, I got my arm back!" Stanley said.
"Looky here," Fiddleford said firmly. "Stanford, you grab aholt of my belt in the back. Stanley, you grab onto his'n. Soos, you take a holt onto Stanley's shirt. Dipper, you walk right beside me an' close your eyes iffen there's any trouble. I'll lead the way acrost!"
"But what if you run into an illusion?"
"Shucks!" Fiddleford said with his old wild laugh, "I do it all the time! Don't you worry none—I done learnt to ignore 'em!"
"Keep an eye on Dipper!" Stanley warned.
"I will! C'mon—we got a dangerous wilderness t'cross!"
Chapter 10: Things That Go Bump in the Night
They slogged through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or something so much like that they could tell no difference.
Most of them didn't look—didn't dare look—but they could hear, and that was just as bad. Soos heard— The voice of his father, screaming in agony, begging for his help. Son! Save me! They're torturing me, Soos! They're killing me! Come and help your father!
"You're not there, you're not there, you're not there!" Soos said, fiercely squinting his eyes tight shut. "Leave me alone, just like you always have!" And the sound of the voice died away in a long, agonized, gurgling wail . . . .
They stumbled along in single file, eyes closed, holding onto each other, all blind, groping in the darkness behind their eyelids. Gusts of damp wind buffeted them and howled in the tops of the trees behind them, and the sandy, rocky ground threatened to overthrow them at the least misstep. The whipping wind threw whole handfuls of coarse sand against their skin, stinging faces and arms like birdshot.
Stanley Pines spat crunchy grit from his lips and heard— Loser! Ya never dared show your face here again, did ya, ya bum? So ya found your brother, big deal! Thirty years! Thirty years, ya worthless punk! And his mother: I'm glad you left and never sent word, you ingrate! What, did you think I'd miss you? Hah! I never loved you half as much as I did Stanford. You hear me? I'm glad you never came back to us!
And though he didn't say it, Stanley thought, Pa, Ma, you're dead! Go back to resting eternally and leave me the hell alone! That's not you—I know it's not you! I don't have to prove myself to nobody—least of all you! Get out of my freakin' head! His grip tightened on the baseball bat he carried, and his other hand clenched into a fist. He had always been able to fight his way out of trouble—but how can you fight disembodied voices? How could you punish the empty air?
Ahead of him, his twin Stanford heard a familiar, horrible taunting voice, high-pitched and mocking: Told you we'd meet again, didn't I, Fordsy? Remember the tune? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! You know you're walking right into my trap, don't you? Clever to bait it with the little girl, wasn't it? You're too slow, Fordsy, too slow! I'm getting a little bored now. In fact I think . . . I'll kill her . . . if you're not here . . . in—GUESS HOW MANY MINUTES, YOU SIX-FINGERED FREAK! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
But the words rang hollow, and Stanford assured himself, "It isn't Bill. It can't be Bill. It's an imitation, a mockery. It's not you, Bill Cipher! You were exterminated from our dimension by my brother Stanley, you one-eyed demon! My brother Stanley beat you at your own game, and get this, Bill—I love him! You got that? Chew on that for a while, something you can't understand, something I think you even fear—I love my brother!"
As for Fiddleford McGucket— Well, the horrors he heard, the awful things he saw, were terrible enough, no doubt. Gibbering things assaulted him, worse than any of the unimaginable, fiendish creatures in the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by the half-demented artist Hieronymous Bosch. They capered and threatened, reached for him with horrible claws. Fiddleford saw and heard enough to drive any ordinary man mad with stark terror. However—
"That yer best shot?" he cackled. "I done seen worse than that, you dang hullabalusions! Lots worse! Heck, ya think ya kin drive ME crazy? I been there before, buddy, and let me tell you—you don't have the chops!"
The wind tore his cackling laughter into rags and sent the shreds of sound spinning away into the night. Right beside Fiddleford, in the lead, Dipper Pines kept his head down against the fitful wind, shivering, trembling as he took one agonizing step after another. Whatever might have assaulted him, whatever fears might have lurked in Creepy Hollow for the youngest member of the party, he seemed to ignore them, focused on one thing and only one thing. As if murmuring an enchantment that held back the worse horrors, he repeated one word with each step: "Mabel. Mabel. Mabel."
But somewhere ahead of the struggling group, off in the darkness, somewhere in the wind, a burly ghost, a lumberjack with bristling, glowing beard and an axe embedded in his head, rumbled some advice to Dipper:You need to take a message for me. You're the only one that can do it. . . .
Creepy Hollow might not have been a huge place—probably no more than a mile across, as they had estimated—but crossing it seemed to take forever. At last, though, Fiddleford McGucket yelled back, "We're a-gonna climb now, fellers! Steep slope! Hands an' knees!"
They all fell forward, scrabbling up a hard-packed hill of broken rock and treacherous sand, scree, rockfall from ages past at the base of the western bluff that enclosed the valley of Gravity Falls. But as they did, blessedly the tormenting visions faded, and even the taunting voices fell to nothing. At last the only sound was the wind, now moaning and rushing overhead. They reached a level summit of solid stone. Something smacked the ground hard, then another and another. The storm was breaking overhead, and the clouds that were visible as a witches' roiling brew only when the lightning flashed were opening up now, pelting the earth with scattered raindrops like bullets. "Open yer eyes!" Fiddleford yelled. "Yonder's th' cave! Run fer it afore this busts wide open!" Ford's flashlight showed the entrance to them: it was indeed shaped like a mouth frozen in an expression of disgust, complete even to a central "tongue," a rounded boulder that protruded five or six feet out from the cliff wall.
"Dam . . .p! Damp sand in a sock! That drop hit me like a rock! Better get inside!" Stanley shouted. They hurried in, but Dipper stopped them just inside and spoke loudly: "Hey, hold on, stop! Listen, let's wait here until daybreak."
Except for Fiddleford, they were all panting and shaking. "Might be a good idea," Stanley said. "After that last mile, I'm in no shape for combat."
Soos sat on the ground, staring out into the darkness. "I heard some wicked evil stuff out there. I feel pretty bad, dudes," he admitted.
Then the wind outside kicked up again with a deep, booming howl, lightning and simultaneous thunder broke right overhead, and as if the bolt had pierced the clouds, rain began to bucket down. It was like a whole fleet of firetrucks up on the crest of the bluff had opened up with all their hoses. The crash of water filled the world, and in the bright glare of Ford's flashlight it looked as though they had sheltered in the cavern where Fiddleford McGucket once had built a submarine monster robot. "What about Mabel?" Stanford shouted over the noise. "We have to find her!"
Dipper nodded miserably. "I know, she's in danger—but the dragon won't kill her. It will keep her alive, in fact, because for some reason it needs a human. It won't hurt her to wait, and it may even help. The Gnomes say the creature is weaker in daylight—and it's deaf and blind. It won't even know we're here until the butterflies wake up and start flying out of the cave and see us."
"The butterflies are its scouts?"
Dipper nodded. "It only sees what they see."
Ford stared hard at him. "The Gnomes told you all that?"
"Yeah," Dipper said, looking downward in the glare of Ford's light. He took off his pine-tree cap and wearily rubbed his forehead, ruffling his brown hair.
Stanley and Stanford Pines gave each other a glance. They'd both seen the birthmark, shaped like the Big Dipper, that had given their grand-nephew his nickname. "It's him, all right," Stanley said quietly. "Not an illusion." Stanford knelt on one knee. "All right, Dipper, we'll trust you. Did the Gnomes tell you how to defeat this—this so-called dragon?"
"No," Dipper admitted. "I just know a little about it. They say it's not from the Earth. It came here from another world millions of years ago. It was collected by an alien race from a distant planet, but when their ship crashed where Gravity Falls would be one day, this specimen escaped and holed up in this cave because it couldn't stand the light. Or maybe its ancestor did. The Gnomes have legends, but they don't really go back that far, so maybe it's just a story."
"I wish I'd known that earlier," Ford said. "We could've gone to the crashed ship and found some weapon to use against it."
"Reckon it's somethin' we found traces of in th' ship?" Fiddleford asked.
"A dragon? I don't recall anything like that, but of course we didn't find every single mystery. But it's possible. We know the aliens had collected specimens from strange planets, like the Shapeshifter—you remember that creature, Fiddleford, and the trouble it gave us. Hmm. I wonder if—but it might be too dangerous, even if it worked."
"What are you thinkin' of, Poindexter?" asked Stanley.
"Well, there's a chance that I could summon one of the ship's automated containment pods. It's tricky—they're nearly identical to the security pods, and Dipper will tell you how one of those nearly took me to some far-flung planet that might not even exist any longer!"
"Uh, yeah," Dipper said. "That—that was pretty scary."
"But the containment pods were meant to retrieve any specimen that escaped. I'm not absolutely sure, but I think that unless they're shut down once the creature is acquired, they're programmed to take anything like that back to the home world where it was captured."
"That's what I made o' their strange fantastical writin'," Fiddleford agreed. "Iffen I figgered out their language good enough."
"You did," Stanford said with a smile. "I had enough proof of that! This might have been after we parted ways, but I once was able to modify one of the pods to capture the Shapeshifter when it broke free. Then, fortunately, I contained it in a cryonic chamber, freezing it."
"How can you, like, summon one of these pod things, Dr. Pines?" Soos asked.
Ford fumbled in his pocket for a moment and produced a keychain—with something that looked like a toy flying saucer dangling from it. "With this. It's a miniaturized communicator, and it uses tachyonic transmission, so it's instantaneous. However, I haven't tested it, and because it might call the wrong kind of pod, I'll have to wait until we actually see the creature to try it."
"If it'll save Mabel," Dipper murmured, "do it."
"As a last resort, perhaps," Stanford said. "Let's hope we can just find her and get her out of this place."
"We got hours to go before dawn," Stanley said. "Might as well try to get some rest. Let's take watches while the others settle in. I'll do the first one. What time is it now, Ford?"
"Three-seventeen and eleven seconds," Stanford said.
"Oh, thanks loads for includin' the seconds. Well, that gives us about two hours until sunup. Okay, half-hour turns. First I'll watch, then Soos, then Fiddleford, and Stanford goes last 'cause he needs rest the most."
"What about me?" Dipper asked. Stanley clapped a hand on his shoulder.
"Kid, you got moxie, but I want to keep you safe. So you stay here."
"I won't stay behind while you look for Mabel!"
"Yeah, well, we'll argue that out in two hours. Now lay down and try to get some shut-eye!"
Time crawled past like a half-dead bug. They rotated watches with nothing happening—no monster appearing, no threat visible or audible. At first the lightning outside split the night with jagged streaks of molten-white light, and the thunder pounded so hard that the earth shook. Then the rain outside slacked to a mere torrential downpour, and eventually the lightning and thunder grumbled off to the east, but the persistent deluge continued. The air drifting in from the cave mouth turned unpleasantly damp and cool, though it smelled of fresh rain. Then, as the night outside began to lighten faintly—not yet daylight, far from it, but rather a kind of visible gloom—Stanford, standing his turn on guard suddenly gave an urgent, rasping whisper: "Something's coming!"
They all leaped up, alert, both Soos and Stanley brandishing their weapons—but Stanford said, "No, not from deeper in the cave—from outside!" They turned, nerves twanging. And, from the fading night outside, emerging through the gray curtain of rain—something lurched in!
Chapter 11: In the Lair of the Beast
Stan and Soos both leaped forward, raising their bats and yelling "Yahhhh!"
The figure from outside also brandished a weapon, an axe, and charged forward— Ford shone his light— "Wendy!" Dipper yelled. "It's us!"
Wendy Corduroy, her long red hair rain-plastered to her, her green eyes wide and blinking, said, "Guys? I totally tried to call you, like, a hundred times!" She shivered a little in her soaked, sopping clothes. "Melody phoned me and told me where you were goin'. Man, I thought I'd go crazy followin' you—spooky crap out there in the dark! Why didn't you answer my calls?"
"No phone reception around here," Ford said.
Stan turned on him. "What! When were ya plannin' to share that little news bulletin with us, genius? Ya mean we can't even call for backup?"
"Yeah, and what about that space-shippy doodad, dude?" Soos asked. "If there's no reception—"
Ford raised his six-fingered hands. "Now, now, calm down! I told you, the communicator works on tachyonic principles, not like a phone—I mean, tachyons are faster-than light particles, except when they behave like waves—"
Wendy pushed past them. "Dipper! Where's Mabel, dude?" "Back in there somewhere," Dipper said, backing away from her. "Don't hug me, okay?"
Wendy stopped in her tracks, and when she spoke, she sounded hurt: "OK, dude. But I'm real glad to see you. Uh—why no hug?"
"Because I couldn't stand it," Dipper said miserably.
Off to one side, the two adult Pines twins were arguing hotly as Fiddleford and Soos listened to them. Dipper jerked his head, and Wendy followed him a few steps away from the others. Then, so softly that only Wendy could hear him, he said, "I—I never got over you. I guess you kind of know that."
"Yeah. I guess I kinda do," Wendy said, giving him her crooked, beautiful smile. "It's cool, Dipper. 'S OK, man."
Dipper swallowed hard. "That—remember the dance, when Soos DJ'ed and Pacifica won the popularity contest? Remember, we were taking tickets? Wendy, I wanted so bad to ask you to dance. Just one time. But—but I was too scared. I'm sorry I'm such a loser."
"Don't sell yourself short, dude," she said softly. "You're, like, an amazing guy, you know? But—don't we have something kinda important to do?"
Dipper squared his shoulders. "Yeah. But—if something happens, Wendy, I just—just want you to remember that I'm so sorry we never danced together just once. That I was such a chicken."
"It's OK, dude, really."
Stan and Ford were still quarreling. "All right!" Ford said loudly. "Yes, I should've told you, but there was nothing we could do about it anyway. It's getting light. Let's go find this beast and rescue Mabel."
"I'm with you, Mr. Pines," Soos said.
"Me, too, by cracky!" echoed McGucket.
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Stan growled. "Just one thing, bright boy: Let me take the lead this time. I don't think whatever lives here's gonna be much impressed by your IQ."
"You lead, we'll follow. You'll need this," Stanford said, handing over the flashlight. Though gray light had seeped into the cave entrance, the way beyond lay pitch-dark.
Stan looked around and then glared at Dipper. "Kid, you stay here and guard the rear. If it sounds like it's goin' bad, you get out of here and run for help, understand? Ford better give you his phone, just in case. Soon's you get a signal, call for help. Wendy, I don't guess there's any use in tellin' you to hang back here with him."
"Nope," she said, running a thumb over the cutting edge of her axe.
"Okay, okay, but you stay behind me. Can't really tell because of this rain, but the sun's up. Must be by now. Let's roll out."
As they edged cautiously into the darkness, Stan flashed the light all around. The cave looked as if it had been worn by eons of water—they had to weave between stalagmites that were taller than Stan and Ford, and overhead stalactites hung down and looked shiny and oozy in the flashlight beam. They gleamed with dull colors, ochres and faded oranges, creams and a kind of reddish purple the hue of rotten plums. "Jeeze, it's as wide as a cathedral!" Stan muttered. That was true for the first section. However, maybe a hundred yards in, the surroundings changed. The cavern shrank down into a rounded tunnel, smooth-sided, no stalagmites or stalactites at all, and only ten feet or so in diameter—it was as if a gigantic drill had cut a smooth, winding passage through solid rock, though scatters of water-smoothed loose stones lay underfoot and threatened to trip them at every step.
"What's that?" Wendy said suddenly. In the beam of Stan's light something floated toward them, dark and undulating. Stan raised his bat—
"Butterflies!" McGucket said. "A cloud of 'em!"
"Don't let them land on you," Ford cautioned. "Remember, they can stab you with their proboscises!"
"I don't care if they got stilettoes!" snapped Stan.
"Butterflies wear heels?" Wendy asked.
Faintly, though not from far away, came a voice: "Who's . . . there?"
"That's Mabel!" Stan yelled. "We're comin', Pumpkin!"
"No . . . no . . .go back. . . ." Before they could even move, a small figure charged past them all, running all-out.
Stan yelled, "Dipper! Get back!" But it was no use. Dipper had pulled ahead. He rounded a bend and yelled, "Mabel!" The others followed as closely as they could. For a few seconds it was impossible to comprehend just what they saw: The beast waited in its lair. It seemed huge, thirty feet or more in length, a heavy-bodied, coiled, serpentine thing but with multiple sprawling legs and a long, lashing tail. Except for the head and claws, its whole body bore gleaming orange scales. The head swayed, just a dark-brown rounded nub, showing no features, no eyes or mouth or nose, but a squirming mass of tentacles, a dozen of them or more, black and writhing. One of these had stretched taut, and at the far end of it lay Mabel Pines, a thin strand of the tentacle wrapped around her neck as she strained to crawl toward her brother.
"Dipper," she murmured, sounding not upset, not happy. The tentacle pulsed. Dipper reached her and pulled at the tentacle, then he—bit through it. Dark fluid gushed, the monstrous body thrashed, Mabel screamed, and the tail of the beast whipped round like a gigantic scorpion's sting— The sharp, chitinous blade at the tip of the tail plunged into Dipper's back and burst out his chest. He had been speared like a fish.
The tail thrashed, sweeping him into the air and then hurling him face-first into the stone wall with a sickening crunch. Stan, screaming in fury, slammed his bat against the thing's head. Wendy chopped through a striking tentacle—but another seized her wrist. Hot anger boiled in her—the tentacle throbbed—and the beast jerked as though scalded, dropped its hold and scrabbled away, backing frantically. Its scales fell off and took to the air—no, not scales, but butterflies.
They flashed past the attackers, not striking at them but in a panic-stricken rush heading for the cave entrance. Naked in the light, the creature was an enormous, jointed, insect-like thing, its body thicker than a man's thigh, its carapace the shiny dark brown of a roach's wings, its five pairs of jointed legs ending in claws, its menacing whiplike tail spur dripping some greenish venom. But—it backed away, scraping against the tunnel wall, then backed itself completely into a small dark hollow, and there it seemed to crouch in fear.
Mabel clawed the remnants of the tentacle from her throat and started crawling to where Dipper had fallen face-down and still.
"Seal it up!" Ford yelled. "Quick! Get loose rock, anything you can find, and pile it in the entrance to that hole! We have to trap it!"
Soos and Fiddleford hurried to carry out his orders, grabbing the biggest chunks of smooth rock they could find. The creature writhed in its lair, but it couldn't seem to get any further away from them, and it couldn't get its stinger into play to strike at them. It shrank from Ford's flashlight, and he held it pinned in place with a lance of light until the other two had closed up the two-foot opening.
"No," Stan was saying from where he knelt on the cave floor. "Oh, no, no, no!"
"Dipper!" wailed Wendy, holding his limp form. "Come on, man, you can't die!"
Mabel had crawled far enough to grasp Dipper's outflung hand. She lay face-down, sobbing bitterly.
"Let me through," Ford told them. He knelt and placed two fingers against Dipper's neck. He stood, shaking his head. "No pulse," he said softly.
"Aw, no!" Soos groaned. "Don't say that, Dr. Pines! Not Dipper! I wish it had been me!"
Stan grabbed Ford by his coat lapel. "Come on, smart guy! Think! There's gotta be somethin' you can do!"
"There's nothing," came a woman's voice. It sounded unspeakably weary. Stan shone his light. Half-lying against the far wall was a woman, gaunt and pale, dressed in faded rags. Fiddleford said in wonder, "Mayellen?"
"Nothing you can do," the woman repeated, her voice flat and lifeless. "Nothing anybody can do."
The reality settled on them like the darkness of the cave. This was no phantasm of Creepy Hollow, no nightmare out of the Mindscape, no illusion. It was too real. It was final.
Dipper Pines was dead.
Chapter 12: After a Death
Ford tried to talk, gasped and sobbed, and then said, "Stan—Stanley, you—you get out. Take the others and—and get—Dipper out. I have to stay to make sure this—thing doesn't escape. As soon as you're clear, I'll send for the pod to collect it and dispose of it."
His brother shook, grief and rage twisting his face. "Not on your life! Soos, you get 'em out! I'm stayin' with my brother."
Ford could barely talk: "Stanley, please. I'm begging you, please, do you hear me? Save Mabel. Leave me to finish this."
Stan shouted, "So ya send for a pod, and what happens if the wrong one comes? Is it gonna kill you, too? Ford, I—I can't handle it!" He broke down, shuddering with grief, unable to speak.
Stanford put a hand on his brother's shoulder. He took a deep breath, but his voice was husky: "Stanley, listen to me. You have to do this. You have to hold it together. The kids need you. Now, I really think I have a good chance of containing this thing—but we have to work fast. I don't know how strong it is, or how easily it might break through our rock barrier. You've got to get Mabel and the rest to safety. I depend on you, Stan. I trust you. Do Dipper this last favor. Get him out of this place. Please."
Stan swallowed hard, hugged his brother, and groaned, "Ya better not die, ya bum. See you outside. I—I love ya, man."
"Stan—I can't take this. Go now, please," Ford whispered.
Soos, his face dripping with tears, said hoarsely, "Please let me carry Dipper. Mr. Pines. You take Mabel. She needs you."
Fiddleford was crying, too, collapsed on the floor, sitting with arms and elbows jutting, shaking his head as the tears ran. "I never wanted anything to happen to the boy. He—he was a good man, and I—I—I caused all this—Stanford, I'll stay by your side if you'll let—"
Ford shook his head. "Fiddleford, you have a responsibility now. And my brother will need your help and support. Especially if—if this doesn't work out. Please go. It's better that way. Take Mayellen and get her to safety."
Fiddleford got unsteadily to his feet and slipped his arm around the woman's waist. She seemed unsure and unsteady on her feet. "I never thought I'd see you again," he told her, his voice cracking.
She sighed, staring at him in wonder. "Fiddleford, is that really you behind that awful beard? I know something sad's happened, but I can't feel it—it's like some story I read. Oh, I—I wish I could feel something. I've been drained, Fiddleford. It's been so long."
Softly, hoarsely, he said, "Come on, darlin'. We'll talk later." They took a few tottering steps together.
Mabel could not hold back her racking sobs. She clung tightly to her Grunkle as he lifted her as easily as if she were just a baby. Her tears fell hot on his neck and shoulder. "Dipper! Oh, Dipper—why?"
"Dipper's at rest. It's over for him, sweetheart," Stan rumbled, patting her on the back. "I know how you feel, Pumpkin. Go ahead and cry. Let it all out. You're safe. Grunkle Stan will never let you go."
Off to the side, a white-faced Wendy shook with a storm of grief. "Like hell it's over! Dipper—he—why don't we kill it right now?" she asked. She balled her fists. "Dr. Pines, pull away the rocks and I'll chop that damn thing into kindling!"
"Earthly weapons won't work on something like this," Ford said firmly. "No, we have to do this my way. Wendy, if you've ever felt anything for Dipper, help the others get his sister to safety!" Wendy looked defiant and tried to talk, but even she broke down in sobs.
Stan put his free arm around her shoulders, and she slumped against him as he and the others started trudging back to the cave entrance—and then from the darkness ahead of them came a tentative voice: "Uh, guys?"
Stan took his arm from around Wendy and jerked his light that way. A boy stood on the fringe of the beam, a familiar face, though drawn and troubled. Stan fumbled the light, trying to steady it, and almost dropped it as he staggered with surprise. "Dipper! We saw you—I mean—how did—are you—"
"Dipper!" Wendy pushed past Stan, hugged Dipper, lifted him off his feet, and swung him around. "Oh, my God! Dipper! Is this really you, dude?"
Dipper gasped and felt dizzy, and not just from being whirled in a circle. "Y-yeah!"
"Brobro!" Mabel squirmed out of her Grunkle Stan's hold, leaped down, and threw herself on Dipper and Wendy. The three hugged, laughing like maniacs.
Wendy just would not let go. "Dipper, man, don't ever do that again! I really thought I was gonna die! How'd you do it? What did you pull off, man?"
Dipper shrugged in her embrace. "It wasn't my plan. Well, not exactly. Guys, Soos is carrying Dipper 4. He named himself Quattro. And back behind me a little way is Dipper 3, Tracey."
Someone stepped into the cone of light, a boy with his arms behind his back, and it was—another Dipper!
"Garoo?" Mabel asked.
"But who is this I'm carryin'?" Soos asked. "I mean, I'm glad to see you, Dip, but—but this kid died!"
"I think Tracey should explain," Dipper said softly as Wendy finally let go of him.
Now that they stood side by side, the others could see differences. "Dipper 3" was inches shorter and looked younger than the real item—and in the beam of light he looked oddly faded, his skin tone and clothes in muted hues. He stood with his left arm behind Dipper. He sighed. "My brother there, the one Soos is holding, and I are clones. Or copies. Dipper created us a year ago when—" he grinned weakly—"he made this elaborate scheme so he could dance with you, Wendy. There were lots of other clones, too, but I guess they're all gone."
"Yeah," Dipper said sadly. "Tyrone was the last one. And even he didn't get through the whole night."
"Quattro and I were really lucky. We got a whole year. Once when it started to rain, the way it's doing now, we hid in this cave and found what the dragon was doing to this lady. We figured it out, but we didn't know how to help her. We're fading, see. We're not much good at making new plans."
Mabel said, "That thing was taking away all my feelings!"
"Yeah," Tracey said. "It lives on the energy of emotions. It absorbs them through its feelers. Steals them from its victims and leaves them unable to feel anything."
"A sentivore," Ford muttered from the rear edge of the group. "A creature that devours feelings!"
"We think it started out small and attracted little animals and birds that it attacked. That scared them, and each time one was scared the dragon absorbed the fear and grew a little. Then somehow it became the host for the butterflies. They scouted for it, and in return it produced some kind of liquid that it dripped from its skin. The butterflies nested on the creature at night and fed on the liquid. The butterflies marked victims with a triangle symbol, and through that the dragon sent out some kind of lure, some signal, that drew the victims to it."
"A remarkable symbiotic relationship!" Ford said.
"Quattro and I are immune to the dragon's powers," Tracey went on. "Because we don't have real emotions, just copies, imitations of them, it didn't sense food in us, so it let us alone. But over the last year, we two had developed some kind of telepathy. Quattro and I could even communicate mentally—and we were always at least vaguely aware of what Dipper was doing. When he started to look for the McGucket woman, we decided our time had come. We could get into Dipper's mind just enough to give him hints and suggestions. But we had to capture him outside the cave so the thing wouldn't catch him and we could carry out our plan. We did, and Quattro took his place. Dipper and we two got into the cave ahead of the rest of you and hid. Sorry about that."
"Wait, what plan?" Ford asked.
Tracey said, "Well, think what it's like when any kid gets too much candy or ice cream. He gets really sick, right? We figured if we could overwhelm the monster with enough powerful feelings, it would be temporarily stunned. With all of you in the cave, we thought the strongest emotions would come if you saw Dipper die. My brother volunteered to take Cooper's place. I couldn't."
"Why not?" Stan asked.
In answer, Tracey sadly held up his left arm. It ended as a stub at the elbow. "We dissolve in water," he said. "I got careless last spring and fell with my hand in a puddle. I couldn't impersonate Dipper."
"Oh, my God," Wendy said, looking shocked. "That's why the little dude didn't want me to hug him! I'm soaked to the bone!"
Mabel was staring at her little—in the true sense of the word now, since he still looked twelve—brother. "It hurt so bad to think Dipper died," she whispered. "I felt like I was torn in half."
"I'm really sorry," Tracey said. "But Quattro and I knew we were running out of time. We're fading, and we can't avoid water forever. If we had to go, we thought there was no better way to go than saving Mabel. We can't love you as much as the real Dipper, Sis, but we feel our own echo of his love for you." He smiled, looking a little teary-eyed. "Awkward sibling hug?"
With only one and a half arms, it was truly awkward for him, but they hugged, and the taller Mabel leaned to whisper, "Thank you both so much."
"OK," the real Dipper said, "now we really have to get out of here. Great-Uncle Ford, if you're gonna capture this animal, let me stay and help."
"No!" Wendy said. "Dipper, you get out, man. I'll stay. I'd rather die myself than go through that again!"
"Nah, kid, I'm an old man," Stan said. "If I gotta die in some weird way, I might as well do it side by side with my knucklehead brother. I'll stay with you, Ford."
"We'll all stay," Mabel said firmly. "All Pines can stay. The rest of you go."
"Not me, girl," Wendy said, hefting her axe. "I'm not leavin' Dipper and you."
"Soos," Stan said, "I'm givin' you the responsibility for getting' McGucket and his missus out. And take care of the dead boy, son. As a favor to me."
"Yes, sir," Soos said. "C'mon, guys, follow me."
As they started out, Tracey asked softly, "Soos, can I carry my brother?" Soos still mourned the clone's death. In a teary voice, he asked, "Dude, isn't he too heavy for you?"
"We don't have to go very far." Soos helped the maimed Tracey put his brother's body into a fireman's carry. They went on to the mouth of the cave. Outside a steady, steely-gray rain still poured. Tracey stopped and took the pine-tree cap from Quattro's head. "Here, this is the real Dipper's," he said, handing it to Soos. "Get it back to him, okay?"
"Sure thing, little dawg," Soos said between sobs. "Hey—you Pines guys are—are real brave dudes. I just wanted to say that."
"Thanks, Soos. Now if you'll all wait about five minutes, I'm just going outside with my brother. I may be some time. Don't watch, okay?"
They turned away. They heard him step up to the edge of the opening, pause, take a deep breath and a few steps into the rain, and then . . . silence. When Fiddleford, Mayellen, and Soos left the cave, no sign of the two clones remained. And curiously, when they descended into the valley of Creepy Hollow, they heard and saw nothing but the sound of drumming rain and distant thunder, the sight of the flooded ground and the crashing raindrops. No terrifying visions. No fears to face.
Except one. "Dudes," Soos said solemnly, "Now I wish I had stayed behind. Man, I really hope they all come through this okay."
Chapter 13: What It Means to Feel
After the others had walked away in the steady rain, Ford, Stan, Mabel, Wendy, and Dipper huddled. "Stanley," Ford said, "I've got a very important job for you. Will you promise to do it, no questions asked?"
"Whaddaya mean, 'No questions asked?'"
Ford raised his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Well—like that one, for instance. Look, I'm serious. I need you to stand guard. If this works, a space pod, a silvery orb about thirty feet in diameter, is going to come speeding right up to the cave entrance. If we're lucky, it can trap the creature. Then when the orb leaves, it's going to create a terrific shockwave that would be dangerous for anyone too near it. I want you to go out of the cave, walk about a hundred yards into Creepy Hollow, and just wait. Don't approach the cave while the orb is hovering in front of it, and if any of our friends—anybody else, really, even including the Gnomes—comes out into the Hollow, warn them away! Their lives depend on it."
"Send Dipper," Stan said.
"No good," Ford replied. "Dipper, I'm sorry, but this is a tough job and may call for muscle. You're the only one who can do it, Stanley. Please—I need you."
Stan gave him a lopsided grin. "I don't like it. But since you said 'please,' okay, I'll do it."
"Right," Ford said. "Now, this is going to be unpleasant, I know, but once the orb arrives, you lie flat—yes, on your belly in the mud! Stay that way until it leaves and the shockwave passes over you. Press your hands over your ears. It'll help if you keep your mouth open, too. You'll know when the wave has passed, and then you can stand up again. We'll be out as soon as the orb has gone."
Stanley shook his head. "I'll do it, but you and the kids get your butts out as soon as you can—or else I'm gonna come in after ya, and I'll punch anything that moves."
"Will do. Thank you, Stanley."
Stan rubbed his nose, about the size and nearly the color of a ripe strawberry. "I still can't get used to hearing you say those words. Good luck, bro."
"Hurry. I'll give you ten minutes to get to your station, starting . . . now!"
Stanley paused just long enough to hug Mabel and Dipper. "You take care of this egghead, kids. He's got brains, but you knuckleheads have better sense." He turned and hustled away.
Ford had clicked a stopwatch app on his phone. "All right. Wendy, you take this light. I've adjusted it to extreme illumination. It's brighter than 150,000 lux—that's 1.5 times the intensity of noontime sunlight near the Equator during an equinox. You have to keep the beam aimed at the creature, no matter how it moves. Since it fears light, I think you can keep it pinned down until the orb gets here. Then the alien craft will send in a transport beam to pull the specimen aboard. We have to get out of the way so we won't be swept up, too. You'll know when it starts. When it does, like Stanley, you all have to hit the ground. I mean fall flat and hug the rock. Understand?" They nodded. "Very well. I'm going to begin removing the stones," Ford said. "Wendy, turn on the light."
Even though the beam was aimed away from them, they had to squint in the sudden brilliance. Ford shielded his eyes until he could turn his back on the flashlight. Then he knelt by the pile of stones and began to shift them. "Grunkle Ford, no!" Mabel wailed. "You can't be so close! You'll be caught in the transport thingy!"
"I have to take that chance," Ford said. He moved a boulder the size of a bowling ball, and they heard the creature inside the cavity skittering as a lance of light struck it. "You stay back."
"No!" Mabel ran to him, her shadow on the stones seeming to rush to meet her. "You haven't touched it. I have. Grunkle Ford, it's not evil! It's just sad—it's so sad!"
"What?" Dipper came up and took Mabel's hand. "Come on, Mabel," he said, tugging her. "Let Ford take care of this."
"You don't understand!" In the fierce glare of light, tears glistened on her cheeks. "It wants emotions because it's lonely! It's the only one of its kind in the whole world! And it's been in this cave for millions of years, in the dark, all alone!"
"Mabel," Dipper said, "it could kill us all!"
"You don't know. You didn't touch it." She pulled away from Dipper, fell to her knees, and held her hand out to the small opening Ford had made. "I'm here," she said. "I know you don't understand words, but I'm here!"
A quivering gray tentacle as small in diameter as a pencil appeared, questing left and right. Mabel closed her hand on it. "Guys," she whispered, "put your hands on mine. Feel it." Dipper hesitated, but put his palm over Mabel's hand. Grunkle Ford cupped his big hand beneath hers. And—
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: And we felt its terrible loneliness, its ache and its sorrow.
It was not of our world. It didn't understand us except as the only good source of the food it needed. Somehow we all got mental flashes of its existence, of its life cycle. It had begun as a microscopic thing, spending a million years preying on tiny alien life forms.
Then when strangers from another world explored its home planet, the creature had been captured, and later on it had survived the crash of the spaceship on our world. From the wrecked ship it had escaped and had found the cave—the cave smaller then, millennia ago, but the creature was small, too.
It crept into the sheltering darkness and lured prey: Earth creatures that could feel very little, only a yearning to live and a fear of pain. Then millions more years passed, the creature growing less than a micron a year, as it was able to find larger and more complex creatures whose emotions it could absorb. It found it could control butterflies and could see the world through their perceptions. It domesticated them and bred them, and they mutated to become its servants. And finally, a few thousand years ago, it trapped its first human.
It did not kill any of the creatures it kept and fed off—really, it nourished them, too, with the same secretions that fed the butterflies, keeping its captives alive and healing any diseases or wounds so they would continue to live and to feel and to feed it. Creepy Hollow is really the creature's protective shell, like that of an oyster: a projection of pure fear, stored from all of its victims over all the millions of years, that it sends out to buffer itself from any meaningful threat. Only those marked with the triangle symbol—or those like McGucket or the clones, whose feelings are on a different plane—are immune.
By making other creatures afraid to approach, the alien creature can maintain its host human and feast on that human's feelings. But humans wear out. After decades of having their emotions drained, their feelings become dull. Then the Sentivore, as Grunkle Ford calls it, sends out the butterflies to find new prospects. Generally the old one, released from the Sentivore's hold, simply lays down and starves to death, too worn out even to care about living or dying.
That's why the butterflies' cycle is once every thirty years or so. When one human host wears out, the Sentivore encourages the butterflies to multiply and go hunting for a replacement. If Mabel had remained trapped, in thirty years she would be as listless and unfeeling as—well, as Mrs. McGucket. And the Sentivore would toss her aside and seek stronger food.
But we learned, or we felt, that it didn't intend to hurt us. It didn't know or understand what we are and didn't even realize we were as sentient as it is. It really wants what every living thing wants: to survive. Just to survive.
Only now, only after feeling the bombardment of emotions it triggered in the others by killing Dipper 4, or I should call him Quattro, does the Sentivore dimly realize that we are more than animals. And now it fears us. And as we held hands, we felt it wonder at Mabel, whose emotions are so real and so deep that as it absorbs them, it has begun to change. I'm not sure—I can't ever be sure—but I think my crazy, goofy, silly, wonderful sister has taught this alien thing how to feel something new, something like mercy, something like compassion.
Something very much like love.
"We mean you no harm," Grunkle Ford whispered. "We want to send you home."
"Home," Mabel said, her voice breaking. "Home."
"We hope you understand that," Dipper said, feeling how his sister's hand trembled.
The tentacle reluctantly pulled away from Mabel's grasp and slowly withdrew into the dark crevice. Mabel stood. "It's okay now, Grunkle Ford. You can move the stones away now. It won't hurt us."
"Mabel, are you sure?" Wendy asked. She held the light in one hand, and her axe in the other. Dipper went to stand beside her.
"I felt it too," he told her. "Yeah, we're sure."
Ford bowed his head for a moment. Then he said, "Wendy, there's a dial on the butt of the flashlight. Turn it counterclockwise until I tell you to stop."
She sheathed her axe. "Okay, man. I hope you know what you're doing."
"I think I do." The light began to dim. "Another turn. Another one. One more . . . stop."
Then the flashlight's glow was barely as bright as a candle flame.
Wendy argued, "If it attacks, we can't see it well enough to fight back."
"It won't attack." Ford pulled away all of the rocks, then held out his hand. "Here we are. Come on, we won't hurt you. Trust us."
Dipper couldn't see much of what was happening, but he knew the creature briefly slipped a tentacle against Ford's six-fingered palm. Then it was slowly pouring itself out of the small hollow where it had been coiled.
He heard Ford say, "Yes, yes. Home. Home. I'll call for your transport now." Ford stood and turned away from the creature before fiddling with the keychain fob. For a second it glowed blue. Ford edged away from the jointed, indistinct sprawl of the Sentivore. "Kids, get back against the walls. The orb just launched. It'll be here in—"
Dipper grimaced as a high-pitched screech made the stones of the cavern vibrate. "Correction," Ford said. "It's already here. Now I'm identifying the Sentivore as the target. If this works, if I'm right—yes!"
A pulsating beam, not quite green, not quite purple, throbbed into existence. It enveloped the Sentivore, and then the creature—vanished. "Down!" Ford yelled. "Hands over your ears! Mouths open!"
Dipper hit the stone floor hard. A second later he felt as if a giant fist had pounded him. Air whooshed out of his lungs, and the whole world shuddered. An explosion too loud to really hear blasted through the cavern. In the darkness toward the mouth of the cave things crashed and splintered. Then there remained only a throbbing in their heads.
Ford got up, helped Wendy to her feet, and turned the flashlight back to a bright glow. "Everyone OK?" He had to say it again, shouting at the top of his lungs to break through the ringing in their ears. They all nodded and then they stumbled out. In the main cavern, stalactites had fallen and had shattered into gleaming shards of stone. A cloud of fine dust still floated in the air, making the flashlight beam seem as solid as the rock around them. They stumbled to the mouth of the Gack of Doom—and saw a mud-coated Stanley Pines running toward them, splashing and stumbling. He skidded to a sloppy halt as they nearly tumbled down the slope to meet him. "Hey, I'm glad to see you!" Stan yelled.
Ford cupped his hand behind his ear. "Say again?" Instead of speaking, Stan hugged his brother tight. Ford protested, "Stanley, please! You're all muddy!"
"Spread it around, I say!" Stan yelled back. He reached with a goopy hand to ruffle Mabel's hair, smear the back of Dipper's neck, and even brush war-paint stripes on Wendy's cheeks. "Now you look like a warrior!"
She grinned and used her finger to remove a streak of mud right down the center of his bumpy orange-red nose. "Thanks, you old codger!"
The rain had become a miserable, cold, steady drizzle. Mabel was limping, and Grunkle Stan picked her up, ignoring her protests. "Ya can't walk through this sludge barefoot," he told her. "Pumpkin, next time you run away from home, for Pete's sake put on your shoes first!"
They slogged through the mess, nearly losing their own shoes in the sucking, clinging muck—but now Creepy Hollow was just a scraggly, dismal, overgrown patch of soggy, empty ground with no fearsome phantoms to haunt it. On the far side, the creek had swollen, but it was still shallow and rocky, so instead of wading they more or less splashed across through ankle-deep water. At last they reached firmer ground and the forest—and Jeff the Gnome melted out of the underbrush.
Standing as if poised to run away, Jeff asked, "Is it gone?"
"It's gone," Dipper said. "Hey, man, thank Shmebulock for us. And thanks to all you guys for helping, uh, Dipper 3 and Dipper 4 understand what we were up against."
"You killed it?" Jeff asked.
"Sent it so far away it can never come back," Mabel told him.
"Good. How about Tracey and Quattro? We like them. Where are they?"
Dipper shook his head. "They . . . won't be back."
Jeff looked hard at him, and then his small face writhed into a mask of sorrow. "Oh. I—I see." He wiped his eyes. "We'll have a memory feast for them. It's not much, I know, not nearly enough, but . . . well, it means something to us Gnomes."
Mabel reached for his small hand and squeezed it. "It means a lot to us, too," she whispered. "Thank you."
With a sniffle, Jeff said, "Oh, I'm supposed to tell you the big guy is waiting for you. He took the others away in the car and then he drove back alone. You can find him at the ruins of the old house." His shoulders drooped. "I'll go and tell the others about the other Dippers. I—we're all sorry."
"So are we," Ford said. "So are we."
Chapter 14: Rethinking Everything
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Wednesday, June 26: It seems like way more than a week and a half has already gone by! I missed writing for a couple of days, so I need to catch up: On Monday Mabel wasn't feeling well. We were down in the gift shop, trying to keep Waddles from breaking into the vending machine (he's developed a taste for ChockaMonkeys and keeps trying to root them out by sticking his snout way up in the drop tray), and when we finally got him outside, Mabel was laughing and playing with him when suddenly she doubled over, clutching her middle.
I helped her inside and told Wendy to call a doctor, quick. Wendy asked a couple of questions and then said, "Chill, dude, I got this. Dipper, watch the register. You come with me, Mabes."
So for half an hour I sold junk to tourists and wondered if Mabel had some kind of infection or some lingering effect from the Sentivore's feeding on her emotions. Then Wendy sauntered back in, shot me a grin and a thumbs-up, and I gave her the cashier's seat back again. "Is Mabel OK?" I asked.
"She's fine, man."
"But what's wrong with her?"
Wendy sighed. "I don't know that I'd call it anything wrong. She's thirteen, Dipper. Her body's changin'. You do know about stuff like that, right?"
"Stuff like—oh. Oh."
With a shrug, Wendy said, "Yeah 'oh.' First time can be painful and scary. Dipper, dude, let me warn ya: From now on, maybe for a few days every month, Mabel may not be her usual self. She'll prob'ly be kinda cranky, but she won't mean anything by it, so ride it out. Happens to all girls." She chuckled. "Hey, you remember last summer when I broke up with Robbie an' you an' Stan offered to give me a ride and I got like all freaky and yelled, 'What is it with MEN?' It was kinda gettin' to that time of the month for me, if you get my drift. She's the same Mabel, Dipper. Still your sister. But she's growin' up, man." She punched my shoulder. "You're blushin', dude! It's natural. Get over it."
I'll try, but later Melody said she thought Mabel might be more comfortable sleeping downstairs in the new guest room that Soos added on back in the spring. Mabel looked kind of embarrassed, but I told her it was all right. We'd still see each other all the time, only now it would be like home in Piedmont, where we each have our own rooms. Anyway, Mabel went to lie down, which is not like her in the middle of the day, and I hung around in the gift shop with Wendy. When she had a break, we went up onto the roof. I sat on the edge with my legs dangling over, and she stretched out in the lawn chair. "You still bummed about Mabel?" she asked me quietly.
"Yeah. No. I don't know." I sighed and thought, well if I can't tell Wendy, who CAN I tell? So I blurted out, "It's everything that happened. It started out when I wanted to be a detective and track down Mrs. McGucket so Fiddleford would cheer up. But look at how it turned out! Mabel got captured by a monster and could've been killed, I put everybody in danger when they went to rescue her, and my copies and Grunkle Ford had to step in and bail me out. And my copies DIED. I never wanted that. I just wanted to help, but I screwed it all up."
Wendy laughed and said, "You're kiddin' me, right? C'mon, dude! Think about it—YOU started this whole thing, did you? Really, Dip? Think about it! How many years have the police totally failed to, like, solve the case? And you an' Mabel tracked down Mayellen McGucket in just a few days, man! So what if you had help? You think we resented doin' that? C'mon, you're smarter'n that. You know that's what friends are all about, right?"
I rubbed the back of my neck. "I guess."
With a gentle smile, Wendy said, "Something else, dude. Quattro like gave his LIFE for Mabel and the rest of us. He was a copy of YOU, Dip. Which means that he wouldn't have done that if you weren't willing to do the same thing. You're not a failure, man. You're one of the good guys. One of the best."
I thought about that. It helped at least a little. "Thanks, Wendy. Hey—look, here comes Grunkle Stan's car."
We went back down and learned that Grunkle Stan had driven Fiddleford and Mayellen McGucket over. They all came in, and while Fiddleford and his wife chatted in the parlor with Soos and Melody, Mrs. McGucket's long, tangled gray hair had been cut and styled, and instead of the ragged dress we had first seen, she wore a new, simple blue dress. Grunkle Stan stayed in the gift shop and shot the breeze—that's what he called it—with a bus load of tourists. I think Stan must've turned on that weird annoying charm of his because I kept hearing the cash register ding as Wendy made sale after sale. Soos looked really happy. Mabel heard us talking and came out and gave Fiddleford and Mayellen a hug.
Fiddleford told us that Mayellen was beginning to feel just a little tiny bit more like herself. "We're goin' to the lake," he said quietly. "I think that'll help her. 'Course it might not be the best thing for her. But I gotta take the chance. Would you kids please come with us?"
"Sure," Mabel said at once. "Just let me get my grappling hook."
"Mabel!" I said. "Why would you need that?"
"You never can tell, Brobro," she shot back. "Grappling hook!" Still, I could tell she wasn't feeling all that well.
Stan said he'd hang around the Shack, so Fiddleford took the keys of the El Diablo and drove his wife and Mabel and me to the lake. I sat beside Mabel in the backseat, where every once in a while she made a face from the discomfort she still had. I told her Wendy had explained what was going on. "How do you feel about it?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Scared. Worried about what will happen next. Sad that we can't share the attic."
"We can share our lives," I told her. " That's better than the attic."
She punched my arm. "You've been taking BS lessons from Grunkle Stan!"
"I could do worse," I said, and I put my arm over her shoulder.
She leaned against me and whispered, "Thanks for understanding."
At the lake, well, I can't write very much about what happened at the lake. Maybe Mabel could, she's the one who knows all about feelings, but I feel sort of strange about it all. I don't mean what happened was bad, though.
It was good. It was good.
Fiddleford led Mayellen into the ranger station, and when Tate McGucket turned around, he first saw Fiddleford and started in an angry voice: "Dad!"
"Son," Fiddleford said firmly, "Lookie here. I found her. I've finally brought your mama back to you."
Tate's mouth hung open. "Mom? Mother? MAMA!"
They all three hugged. Then when they stepped apart, Mrs. McGucket put her hand on Tate's cheek and just stared up at him—he's a head taller than she is. She whispered, "My little boy. Oh, my little son. You're a fine man now." And a tear ran from her eye.
Mabel tugged my sleeve. "Let's go now."
We hung the "CLOSED" sign on the door and stood guard outside to protect their privacy. Mabel had her grappling hook ready, and nobody came toward us. By now I guess most people in town know not to mess with Mabel. But both of us knew what was going on.
Mrs. McGucket is really starting to feel emotions again. And I think the family may just be okay. When they all came out, they kept hugging, and Tate said, "I'm off duty on Sunday. You come to the lake. We'll do some catching up and have a good time."
"Kin I bring my raccoon?" Fiddleford asked in his hick voice. I wasn't sure if he was seriously insane again, but he caught my puzzled look and gave me a wink.
"Sure," Tate said. He was grinning.
"Fine fiddle music!" Fiddleford exclaimed, doing a little jig. "It's a deal! Save her an inner tube. She loves floatin'!"
And Mayellen McGucket actually laughed. Just a chuckle, but Mabel reached over and squeezed my hand and gave me a big, wide grin.
Yes, I think the McGuckets are going to be all right.
Tuesday Mabel stayed mostly inside, because she was still uncomfortable. This morning, though, she challenged me to a pancake eating contest. She won. She always wins eating contests. But then Soos sat down at the table and broke her record with his first helping.
And meanwhile, something mysterious is going on. I don't know what, but everybody's being secretive. Finally Melody told me I'd find out soon enough. I just have to wait until Friday evening, she says. Gravity Falls. Always another mystery . . . .
In the cool of early Friday evening, Soos led a blindfolded Mabel out of the Shack, and Wendy did the same for a blindfolded Dipper.
"Soos!" Mabel complained, "where are we going?"
"We're already there, Hambone," Soos said cheerfully. "Okay, dudes, take 'em off!"
Dipper reached to untie the bandanna that covered his eyes. He blinked at—well, at almost everybody in town! They all stood grinning on the lawn of the Mystery Shack, from both great-uncles to Fiddleford and Mayellen to Grenda and Candy to Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland to Lazy Susan, Bodacious T Determined to Shandra Jiminez and Mayor Cutebiker—everybody, Gideon Gleeful and his parents, Robbie and Tambry (they were kissing. She had her arms around his neck and was texting behind his back) and Lee, Nate and Thompson! Thompson! Thompson! And—and all the others, Manly Dan and his three boys, Mr. Poolcheck, doing one-armed pushups with a smiling Tad Strange sitting on his shoulders, all the others. Even Pacifica Northwest, though her parents were nowhere to be seen.
And hanging from the totem pole all the way to the Shack was a gigantic, colorful banner: WELCOME BACK DIPPER AND MABEL!
"It's totally a party, dudes," Soos said. "A celebration just for you. Melody's made some scrumptious snacks, we got lots of soft drinks, and I'm gonna DJ!"
"All right!" Dipper said, giving the big guy a high five.
And then everyone crowded all around, laughing, high-fiving and talking a mile a minute. A little later the music began.
As couples started the first slow dance, Wendy made her way to Dipper. "Hey, man," she said, "I love this song."
Dipper rubbed his elbow and smiled awkwardly. If only I was any good at talking about how I feel! If only I was more like Mabel. He swallowed hard, straightened up, and said, "Yeah. I—I don't suppose—I really can't do it, I don't know how, but—would you like to dance?"
"Dude, I thought you'd never ask me!" She reached for his hand. "This hand goes in the small of my back, and keep it right here, OK? And with this hand you hold mine, and I put my other one on your shoulder. Now just listen to the music and move to the beat."
If there were other dancers around, Dipper didn't notice them. If he took awkward steps and sometimes bumped toes with Wendy, she didn't complain. He let the music flow through him and soon it began to feel natural, to feel right. She was warm in his arms, and she smelled wonderful—not floral, but like a forest in high spring.
However, as they danced, he thought, This isn't what I imagined it would be like at all. It's way, WAY better!
Only when the music ended and they broke apart did he notice that Mabel was cheerleading for him, and her two friends were joining in. He said, "Aw, Mabel! Cut it out!"
"'S OK, man," Wendy said, laughing. "Let the girls have their fun. Hey, Dipper, seriously, I liked that dance."
"Can—can we do it again? I think I can learn to be better."
"Sure, Dip, only later, not right now," Wendy said. She leaned to kiss his cheek and went on softly, "Dude, I'll level with you. I think we just possibly may be startin' something here. But let's keep our cool and just let it just develop naturally, OK? Not try to rush it? We have time."
"Yeah," Dipper said, melting inside. "We have time."
"But right now look over there by the drinks table," Wendy said. "See Pacifica? She's all dressed up, Dipper. She even wore a dress, man! Lake-foam green. She looks so pretty, but also pretty lonesome, just standin' all by herself. And so far nobody's danced with her."
"What—what are you suggesting?"
Wendy said, "Well, I'm gonna go have a Pitt's and maybe hang with my friends for a little while. I'll catch you later. But think about it, Dip. You know what it's like to have a crush on somebody and not have the guts to tell her, right?"
"Yeah, but I don't feel that way about Pacifica."
"That's not what I meant. Get a clue, dude!" Wendy raised her eyebrows and made a familiar gesture—sealing her lips and flicking away the key.
Dipper started to ask, "What do you mean—" Then light dawned. "You mean—Pacifica? You mean me?"
Wendy shrugged, smiled, and walked away. For a moment Dipper tried to sort out his feelings. But if Wendy was going to hang with kids her age—and Mabel had Grenda and Candy—and if Wendy was cool with the idea— Aggh! I may have to rethink everything!
He wound his way through the crowd. "Hey, Pacifica."
"Oh—uh. Hi." She sniffed. "I didn't realize there'd be such a mob here. I just wanted to drop by long enough to welcome you both back. I probably should just say a quick hello to Mabel and then go."
"Oh," Dipper said. "I thought you might want to dance."
For a moment Pacifica's blue eyes were wide and surprised-looking. Then she smiled—a surprisingly timid and shy smile. "Well—I—uh. This is kind of a nice song. I guess that would be all right."
Dipper took a deep breath. "Be patient with me. I'm just starting to learn. Now, my arm goes around your waist," he said. "And we hold hands like this. . . ."
Chapter 15: The After Party (June 28, 2013)
So after Soos played the last dance at midnight, all the oldsters—those who hadn't already gone home for early bedtime—left for their homes and most of the teens took off for the lake. Pacifica's butler—in the reduced circumstances of the Northwest family, he also doubled as chauffeur—coughed and reminded Miss Pacifica that her father might miss her and they'd better be on their way. Pacifica said goodbye to Dipper, hugged Mabel, and left.
Mabel was having Grenda and Candy in for a sleepover. Dipper said his goodnights, but instead of going up to the attic, he climbed to the roof and sat in Wendy's lawn chair, lying back and gazing up at a sky full of stars.
Wendy came up so quietly that when she asked, "So how did it go, man?" he jumped a little.
"Oh," he said. "I thought you'd gone out to the lake with the others."
"Nah," she said. "Not in the mood."
Dipper got up. "You can have the chair. I'd rather sit here." He settled on the edge, his feet dangling.
"Thanks, dude." The chair creaked as Wendy sat in it. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
"No, it—it's cool. I danced with Pacifica. We went out for a walk around the Shack. Sat on the log in the bonfire clearing. I asked her if she'd had a good time. She laughed and said—"
Pacifica squeezed his hand. "I had a really good time. Maybe we could do this again?"
Dipper felt a strange sense of déjà vu. The summer before he and Wendy had sat on a log, just like this. But then—
"Pacifica," he said, "look, I'm flattered. I mean, you're a beautiful girl and you're as brave as anybody I know. Back when the ghost was being a bother and I tried to help, I know how after I was turned into wood you opened the gates and let everybody in and broke the spell. And I know you did that even though your father was telling—ordering you not to do it."
"How do you know all that?" Pacifica asked, kicking at the ground. "You were wood."
"I heard later," he said. "From people who came in to the party. And from—well, from your old friend the ghost."
"You banished him!"
"No I didn't. You gave him closure, which was what he needed. You made him free to go on to—to wherever ghosts go when all their business on earth is done. But he didn't go. He wanted to stay in the forest he loved. He's out there now, somewhere. When we were going to get Mabel and crossing Creepy Hollow, he—he helped me. I was having horrible visions, and all of a sudden there he was in my head. He wanted me to tell you that you're the best of the Northwests. He wanted me to tell you that he wishes you a long and happy life filled with love. But, Pacifica—I can't be the love in your life."
"You hate me."
She had let go of his hand. Dipper took hers. "You know that's not true. I like you a lot, but I'm just too different for you. You know that, don't you?"
"No."
"Okay, let's try it like this: I can date you, but I want you to change. You're going to have to be more like Mabel and Grunkle Stan. You're going to have to loosen up and take things with a laugh. Will you make that change for me?"
"I—I don't think I can."
"I know you can't," Dipper said. "Now think about me. Is there any little thing that might make me more of a real prospect for you?"
"Oh, you'd have to dress better, and get a decent haircut, of course, and it would be nice if you cared about—about—the things that I . . . care . . . about." She sniffled. "I see what you did there."
"Yeah," Dipper said. "We're just too far apart. You deserve somebody who's closer to you and who can make you happy. I know you can make him happy. I guess I'm being a big dope and a dork and whatever else you want to call me—and it hurts me to say it—but we'd both be better off."
She took a long shaky breath and then chuckled a little. "I've broken up with a couple of guys," she said. "I never thought someone would break up with me."
"But we're not breaking up," Dipper said. "We're just understanding each other. I don't hate you. I like you a lot, just as I said. How about you? Do you hate me?"
"No, I can't." She punched his arm. "But I'm mad at you!"
"Ow!" Dipper rubbed the spot. "That's okay. Friends can get mad at friends, but it blows over. Friends?"
"I guess," Pacifica said. "Yes, okay, friends. I do like you. And I'd like Mabel to like me, too."
"That's no big deal," Dipper said. "She already does. So—could the three of us maybe hang out some this summer?"
"I'd like that."
"Me, too." He leaned over. "Just friendly," he said, and lightly kissed her cheek.
"For now."
"All right, for now. Thank you, Pacifica."
"For what?"
"For the dance. For having guts. For making me feel like the world's luckiest guy and the world's biggest dope all at once."
"Oh, shut up."
—"And then," Dipper said to Wendy, "she told me to shut up. So we walked the rest of the way around the Shack, and about that time Soos was playing the last song."
"How do you feel about it, dude?" Wendy asked.
"Like an insensitive jerk," Dipper confessed.
"Hey, you didn't do bad. You let her down easy."
"Yeah," Dipper said, smiling into the night. "Well, I learned from the best."
Wendy laughed. "Okay, I'm glad you got through that. So about us—I'm still too old for you, man."
"You're sixteen, I'm thirteen."
"Yeah, well, three years is a lot."
"It isn't three years," Dipper said. "I was born in August, and you were born in May. That's two years and three months."
"Two years and four months."
"Two years, three months, and eleven days," Dipper corrected. "Hey, I can do the math. I'm not a Gnome."
Wendy laughed again. "Okay, I give. But, dude, you're not even in high school yet. So here's the deal: You manage to come back here every summer, okay?"
"I'll do my best. I think it'll be easy. Our folks like having summers to themselves. They get to go on trips and stuff."
"Cool. So I solemnly, like, vow not to have any serious boyfriends until this goes one way or the other. How about you?"
"Oh, I won't have any boyfriends, either."
"Dude!" Wendy rolled out of the lawn chair, threw Dipper to the rooftop, and tickled him until he begged her to stop.
"Okay, okay, straight up, now," she said, relenting at last and lying on her side next to him, her head propped on her palm. "Will you promise not to have any serious girlfriends until we get to a spot where we can make a mature judgment on what we got goin'?"
"Wendy," Dipper said, "I couldn't have any serious girlfriends if I tried. I'd always be thinking of you."
"Aw, man!" She playfully kissed the tip of his nose. "Where'd you get that line?"
"Dunno," Dipper said. "It's just the truth, that's all. Mabel thinks I've been taking BS lessons from Grunkle Stan. I think it's just telling you what I feel. And that's not—not easy for me."
"Stick with the truth, man. That'll make you special."
"So—it's cool if you and I hang out this summer?"
"I'd totally destroy you if you didn't want to do that with me. I'd toss you right off this roof."
"And it's okay with you if Mabel and Pacifica and I also sort of hang out now and then?"
"Fine with me, dude. I know if anything changes you'll tell me. We're testing our feelings, remember?"
"You are the coolest person I've ever known," Dipper said.
"Yeah, yeah."
Dipper sighed. "Okay. I'm not going to say it, Wendy, because it's not yet the right time. But you know what I'd like to tell you, right?"
She patted his hand. "Yeah, I know what you'd say, Dipper."
They sat up. In the moonlight he mimed zipping his lip and tossing away the key.
She smiled and zipped hers.
And then she hung the key inside her shirt and close to her heart.
A Gnomish After-Piece: Jam for Three and Four
The Gnomes usually scurried, red-hatted squirrels zipping across a hot blacktop highway. Or they slunk, so quiet you'd never know they were around until they stole your picnic. Gnomes never, ever marched. Except on high occasions. Coronations. The birth of a new Gnome.
Funerals.
And Gnomes rarely ever made much sound. Some of them could speak Human. Jeff, the Queen's interpreter, was best at it. He knew well more than twelve words. Gnomes, by the way, really are bad at math and are rotten at simple counting, too. They know how many of them live in the civilized colony: A thousand. Exactly. Except if a human census taker happened by and was interested in an accurate count, "one thousand" in Gnomish turns out to mean "a whole bunch of us." It could be five hundred by human count, or thirty thousand.
On that summer afternoon—they don't number their days or name their months, being Gnomish, but basically designate time as "The day that was," "The day that will be," and "Maybe another day, who knows?" The old queen died "the day that was," more than a year earlier, eaten by a badger. The new queen—the same badger—had been crowned "the day that was." If they needed more clarity, it would be "the day that was when the badger ate the queen" and "the day that was when the badger that ate the queen became the new queen." It gets complicated.
Where was I? On that summer afternoon, a train of Gnomes ten wide and certainly hundreds long marched, three times around the circumference of their domain, Gnome Man's Land. They sang as they marched. Well, for a certain value of "sang." It was throat-singing, oddly deep and twangy for their size. They sounded like a colony of disgruntled bees complaining about poor nectar conditions in the clover.
Not all the civilized Gnomes marched. The police force lined the route to keep the procession orderly and to protect it against any outside threats. Granted, all the other civilized Gnomes were actually in the procession, but on the odd chance that one was missing and meant mischief, the policegnomes kept guard. Except there weren't that many of them, so they were spread out, about one Gnome every mile. As a protective force, they could offer all the resistance of a facial tissue in a blast furnace.
The procession went around Gnome Man's Land three times, ending up in a great clearing, under the sky. Stars were already shining above them.
The Gnomes had once been a subterranean race. Their myths said the sky was a dome of anthracite coal far overhead, with diamonds stuck in it, and those were the stars. If you asked a Gnome why the dome wasn't visible in the daytime, he or she would very patiently explain, "Shut up!" Jeff, the Queen's interpreter, and the Queen herself (a badger wearing a rather fetching crown) led the march and took their places in the center as the others slowly coiled in and formed a broad circle around them. The mood seemed solemn, but Gnomes never almost take off their red hats. Ford thought they might have pointed heads under them (they don't), but he wasn't sure. If you ask a Gnome, you get pretty much the same explanation of the hats as the one about the dome of the sky and the diamonds that are stars.
When everygnome was present, they all fell silent as Jeff spoke: "You all know why we mourn. Last winter we met Dipper 3, Tracey and Dipper 4, Quattro, who told us they were copies of Dipper Pines. You all remember him and his sister Mabel. She was almost our queen, but she fought us off with an anti-Gnome air cannon. Do we hate her for that?"
All the others—except the badger, who had curled up for a nap—said in unison, "No! We honor her! Honor to the queen who got away!"
"That's right," Jeff said. "Whose fault was it that she did not become our Queen?"
"It was our fault that she did not become our Queen. We were not worthy!"
From the back of the crowd came faintly the last syllables of the word "Shmebulock!"
"Did we bear any ill will toward Tracey and Quattro?"
"No, we bore them no ill will. They were our friends. They helped us in the winter. They gave us advice on where to find unguarded human food. We honor them!"
"-ulock!"
Jeff took a deep breath. His voice came out shaky: "They have left us. The rain has taken them. We mourn their passing."
"Oh, we grieve," they all repeated in unison.
"-ulock!"
"Yet we know their spirits are at rest. They died nobly, protecting their friends the humans from the monster in the Gack of Doom."
"Eek!" all the Gnomes repeated ceremonially.
"-ulock!"
"They passed away as heroes, and for their friendship and their bravery and their sacrifice, we honor them."
"Hooray," all the Gnomes chanted.
"-ulock!"
"Let us eat the ceremonial jam in remembrance of our almost human friends Tracey and Quattro." From some pocket beneath his beard, Jeff produced a little earthenware pot. He took of the lid and raised a tiny spoon. "Ready! Spoon! Eat!"
For a few moments the sound of tiny lips smacking filled the night, attracting the attention of an owl that happened to be flying over from somewhere outside the valley of Gravity Falls. It perched high in a giant chinkapin tree, from where it gazed down on the hundreds and hundreds of little tiny bearded men and their tiny little women, all wearing conical red hats, all digging into what looked like raspberry jam, all of them chanting in unison "Yum" after every bite, except for one that kept saying "Shmebulock," and the owl decided then and there that the roadkill it had eaten earlier must have gone bad. Though night was its usual time for hunting, and though these creatures were the right size for food, it simply tucked its head beneath its wing to sleep it off.
When the jam pots had all been emptied, Jeff said, "Farewell, Dippers Tracey and Quattro. May your spirits know the freedom of the wind and the joy of the leaping fire. May they travel as smoothly as the running streams and rest as peacefully as the fallow ground in autumn. Our—" he cleared his throat and when he spoke again, his voice had become hoarse—"our thoughts go with you, and our hope is that one day we will meet again when our own spirits go beyond where the sun rises."
Many of the Gnomes were gulping back tears and blowing their noses. Unfortunately, this was often on another Gnome's beard. Funerals usually ended in Gnome brawls, for sugar acts on them a lot like alcohol on humans or boy bands on pre-teen girls. However, this time something strange happened. None of them even felt like fighting. Instead, the congregation of Gnomes broke up into small, weeping groups.
They went back to their homes, or into the Gnome taverns, and there they told tales of how the two Dipper clones had befriended them in the time of cold and scarcity. These stories tended to grow with retelling and were not strictly true, but they carried the weight of belief and affection. In time they would become a myth of the Twin Giants, towering benevolent beings who protected the Gnomes and who were always around, invisibly. It was a comforting story, and it did a lot of good over the coming centuries. At least to Gnomes.
But that evening, as the others scattered, Jeff remained, head bowed, standing in the center of the clearing beside the sleeping Queen and quietly weeping. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up. "Shmebulock," said the only other Gnome remaining in the clearing.
"Me too, old friend," Jeff said, patting him on the shoulder. "My heart is hurt, too. I wish you healing."
"Shmebulock."
"Thank you," Jeff said. "That means a lot to me—excuse me, I'm sorry, but I never can remember your name."
That was when the first and only punch of the evening was thrown.
The End