I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them.
The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
1: Little Things Scream a Lot
(July 9, 2016)
Traditionally, the business meetings of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, Columbia River District East Chapter, Lodge 618, Gravity Falls, occurred on the second Saturday of every month at seven P.M. The July 2016 meeting fell on the ninth, and it was routine. They heard the Secretary's Report, approved the minutes from June, heard the Treasurer's Report, heard the Charity Committee's report, heard this and that and the other report, and within half an hour they were ready to fold up the tents.
Then as New Business was about to close, somebody said, "Wait, I got something." He rose ponderously to his feet, brandishing a calendar. Sheriff Blubs said, "Fellow Mackerels, I feel I just gotta ask, can we postpone the date of our next meeting to the week after? August 20th? It's urgent."
Vice-Wahoo Stanley Pines, subbing for Supreme Wahoo Milt Befufftlefumpter, who was out of town, asked why. Well, technically, he asked, "Aw, for corn sakes, Daryl! Not again. What kinda cockamamie question is that? Why'd we wanna change the date?"
"Because look at what it is!" Blubs said. He held up the calendar, which had the second Saturday in August circled in red. "Look here, y'all. The second Saturday in August is the thirteenth!"
Deputy Durland, who'd been sitting next to the sheriff, jumped up, his face pale with alarm, and drew his sidearm. "Whut! Whut? Friday the Thirteenth comes on a Saturday next month?"
"Now, now," Blubs said in a comforting tone, patting Durland's shoulder. "Holster your weapon, Deputy. That is an order."
"Is it OK, Sheriff?" Durland asked. But he put his sidearm back in the holster. "Were you just joking?"
"Naw," Blubs said. "It's for real. The next meeting falls on the thirteenth of the month! Gentlemen, I put the question before you: do we seriously want to risk calling down the wrath of bad luck on our Lodge?"
The Gravity Falls contingent of the R.O.H.M. numbered thirty-three, which was a Royal Number and typical of smaller Lodges. The last time they had inducted a new member had been back in 2012, when old Mayor Befufftlefumpter died. They'd tapped his great-grandson, Milt, who ran a modest but profitable concrete and asphalt paving business, as the late mayor's replacement, and he'd come in as a Small Fry, progressed rapidly through the ranks of Sierra and Streak, and then had become a full-fledged Wahoo. No Lodge could have more than one Supreme Wahoo. Stan had been hoping for the honor, since he'd been a Wahoo Second Class for twelve years, but—well, Milt had charisma. So he'd gained the dot in the fish's mouth on his fez, and as a Supreme Wahoo, he also was entitled to wear the gold tassel.
Stan almost quit in disgust, but then he reflected that Milt often had business out of the valley and so very often he, Stan, the only other Wahoo (Wahoo Second Class, though) would serve as the chairman's substitute, the vice-Supreme Wahoo, would hold the gavel and conduct the meetings and be important and all, so he hung in there.
Now he banged the gavel. "Ah, come on, Darryl," he said. "Every time the date's the thirteenth, you move that we postpone, and we never do, and then you skip the meeting and nothing happens! This is gettin' stupid. Are we gonna believe in dumb superstitions? I for one say we should believe only in smart superstitions!"
Durland thought this over and said, "He's got a point. I withdraw my objections."
Blubs vacillated. "Well, I still don't like it," he muttered. "Could we take a sense-of-the-meeting vote?"
"Is there a motion on the floor?" Stan asked.
Durland looked sheepish. "Naw, I think that's just where I stepped in some dog poo and tracked a little in."
A merciful Tyler Cutebiker said, "So moved."
"Tats" Chin seconded.
"All right," Stan said, looking around the room. "Everybody who says to ignore the thirteenth and go ahead with our monthly meeting for August as scheduled, signify by raising your right hand."
A forest of hands went up, and Stan said, "Help me count 'em, Bud."
Bud Gleeful stood up and pointed as he counted. "I make it twenty-seven," he said.
"So do I. OK, those who wanna cancel and re-schedule, hold up your hands." Stan face-palmed. "Wait, those who wanna have the meeting as scheduled, you guys put down your hands. Now, those who wanna cancel and re-schedule, hold up your hands and let us count."
"Six," said Bud.
"Yeah, I make it six, too," Stan said. "But we only got twenty-nine here at this meeting. So who voted twice, aside from Durland?"
Tad Strange was one. "I'm of two minds," he explained. Tyler was another. "As Mayor, I hate taking sides." Durland must have felt he owned an explanation, but after trying to think of one, he said instead, "I forgot the question?"
But Blubs, Poolcheck, and Horace Ornrey had voted only for re-scheduling. Poolcheck was superstitious, like Blubs, and Ornrey always voted against the majority just on principle.
"OK, make it, um, twenty-three to three to three, motion carried." Stan whacked the gavel. "The next business meeting of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel will take place as scheduled at seven P.M., August thirteenth. Note that in the minutes, Woody. And for Pete's sake, leave your wife in her cage for that meetin'. Meetin's are for Lodge members only, not for woodpeckers."
"Don't hurt her feelings," Woody Ecker whispered, but he made the note. From her perch on his shoulder, his wife the woodpecker looked down at his notebook with interest. She liked the taste of Number Two pencils.
"There, any further business? No? Goin' once, goin' twice, gone. Do I hear a motion to adjourn?"
Somebody in the back said, "So moved," and Roger Blunch, the oldest member now that old Mayor Befufftlefumpter was gone, woke up and said, "Seconded."
"Any opposed? No?" Stan whacked the gavel again. "July meeting stands adjourned at eight oh one P.M. Let's have our ribs dinner, and then—who brought the cards?"
The R.O.H.M. met in its Lodge Hall, the big long room above the Skull Fracture. The Hall, according to the rules in the R.O.H.M. Guide for Members, was formally known as the Fishing Grounds. The front wall sported a huge dark-yellow banner on which the Sacred Symbols were properly blazoned in the correct colors: the Holy Horns of the Water Buffalo, the death mask of the Pharaoh Bate-Ur-Hoek, the Golden Crown of the Kingfish Mackerel, and the three Stars of Inspiration.
OK, the symbols didn't make a heck of a lot of sense as symbols of a lodge named for a saltwater fish, but when the first American lodge was founded by Quentin Trembley in 1833, those were the only items he could get at the Gentlemen's Lodge Supply's remnants sale, so they were stuck with them.
Anyway, the lodge hall occupied half of the top floor of the bar, the eastern half. The other side had a storage room, a small office, a toilet, with LODGE MEMBERS ONLY on a plaque on the door. Back around 1945 somebody had pencil-scrawled under it "members, ha!" Nobody had ever bothered to try to erase the addendum because probably nobody got the off-color implication. Adjoining the bathroom and sharing its plumbing was a small, smelly janitor's closet. Finally, there was a door that opened to the stair leading down to the first floor and the bar. It was a narrow stair, wide enough for one person at a time.
Stan, Durland, and Ecker lingered behind for a few minutes, Durland mopping the floor where he'd left a series of brown left-shoe prints, Ecker locking the Secret Sacred Proceedings of the Sacred Secrets of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, Eastern Columbia River Division, Gravity Falls School, Lodge 618, in the Secure Secret Repository of Sacred Secrets (a dime-store tin lock-box they never locked because in 1952 somebody had lost the key), and Stan waited impatiently to close up.
"All done?" he asked at last. "Durland, be sure to rinse out that mop before hangin' it in the janitor's closet. Let's go get us some ribs!"
He ceremonially locked the door to the Hall and hung the key on a hook beside the door. Somebody had once lost that key, too, and for a year the members had to climb up a ladder from the parking lot up to the Hall's one window to get in before a vacancy opened and they voted in a locksmith, who was promised rapid promotion if he re-keyed the door without charge. Since then, the door to the Sanctum of Secrets sensibly hung not a foot from the doorknob.
The Brothers of the Lodge had a good meal, and more than half of them hung around for the poker and the blackjack and the hearts and what-have you that began at nine. By midnight, Stan came out ahead—thirteen bucks, not bad for Gravity Falls.
But Sheriff Blubs shook his head at that, too. "Thirteen again!" he said. "I tell you, it's an omen!"
"One of them guys that marries a dozen wives?" Durland asked.
"No," Blubs said patiently. "That's 'Mormon,' and they don't do that anymore."
"Look, Daryl," Stan said, rubbing his eyes. "It ain't an omen, it ain't a sign of evil, it ain't nothing but superstition, OK? Come on, we're Mackerels! We don't believe in supernatural crap! Remember the Membership Oath, where we swear that we don't harbor any superstitions by the Ghost of the Pharaoh Bate-Ur-Hoek?"
"Well," Blubs said reluctantly. "All right, I guess. But I'm gonna wear my lucky rabbit's foot!"
"That the one you got off the rabid rabbit?" Durland asked.
"It wasn't rabid! It was just a screwy rabbit!" Blubs said. The two walked off, quibbling. Stan shook his head, said goodnight to Tats, who was not only bouncer but the night watchman and had a little bedroom and bathroom to himself in the back, and Tats locked up after him.
In the parking lot, Stan stretched and yawned. It was barely midnight, but it had been a tiring week—he and Ford had traveled to Las Vegas for several days, where Stan had won a nice pot of dough at the tables of various casinos. There'd been a little disagreement with one of the joints' strong-arm guy, but that blew over. Next meeting and ceremonial gambling party, he thought, would go on longer, because people would be over the Fourth of July craziness, the late hours for fireworks and all.
He unlocked his El Diablo, the one everybody in town called the Stanleymobile, and got in. Before starting the engine, he glanced up at the window on the top floor of the Skull Fracture, the only one in the Lodge Hall. It was dark, as it was supposed to be. Tats grumbled if they forgot to turn off the light and ran the electricity bill up by seventy-five cents.
Stan yawned again and then blinked. He thought—naw, couldn't be. Just a trick of the light, some random reflection or some deal.
"Well-p," he muttered, "Sheila's waitin' up for me. Startin' the engine, doo de dah doo." He backed the Stanleymobile out into the alley, and then headed for his new home, where he and Sheila were still sort of settling in, only a mile from town. He could have walked that, easy. Heck, Dipper and Wendy ran that, as well as a full circuit of the town and back to the Shack again, practically every morning. Four miles a day they did.
Stanley had never told them, but he was proud of them.
Singing a narration of the trip, as was his habit ("Now I'm drivin' through a red light, 'cause ain't no traffic or cops around, and now I'm turnin' on the road to the Shack . . ."), Stan leaned back and drove home happy, sober, and thirteen bucks ahead of the game.
Tats was already in bed, not asleep but propped up on a couple of pillows, reading Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft on his Kintel tablet, his brow furrowed. He muttered, "Well, yeah, but if you reject empiricism, how do you objectively test your conclusions?"
Upstairs, in the darkened Lodge Hall, something moved.
Something that shone with a faint, blue glow—the kind that a decaying fish sometimes shows. If you walk along a beach far enough on a dark night, you'll probably see some dim shining glows of greenish-blue. Funny thing, if you look straight at it, it goes away. You can only see it from your peripheral vision, this postmortem fluorescence. If you get very close, you'll smell it and then go away fast. Dead fish are not roses.
It didn't come from a fish, but that was the kind of phosphorescent light given off by the—well, not even a shape, really. But it, some sort of low-power glow, floated around a little in the Lodge Hall.
It pulsed as if trying its strength. If an observer had been there, holding his or her breath, listening hard, the observe might have heard something that sounded like crazed, terrifying, screams, but very faint, very distant, like a speaker with the volume turned all the way down to one, or like the sound of the neighbor's TV from three houses down the street.
However, no one was there to see or hear, and the glow and screams faded and died, leaving the R.O.H.M. premises in the silent dark. Or the dark silence, they're pretty much the same thing.
But if an observer had seen it—one like Dipper Pines, maybe—that observer would have had an uneasy sense that something had begun.
And a strange foreboding that the weird light would return.
Perhaps in a month.
On the thirteenth.