Robbing the Memory Bank
(June 2015)
1: Out of the Vault
Dipper had carried the intent around in his head for months. He talked it over with his Lumberjack Girl, who said, "I think it's something we gotta do. I'm with you on this one."
However, what with Mermando's call for help and the mystery of the missing werewolf mommy, he had let it slide. The morning after he had given Wendy a copy of his book, though, he asked her if she thought they should start.
"Whenever you're ready," she'd told him. "Tonight's fine with me, after I cook dinner for my family and clean up the dishes. Hey, want to come and help?"
He did, and they did—the dishes, that is—so finally, on Saturday night, he and Wendy agreed to begin. To talk it over, they had gone out back to the boys' old swing set—Manly Dan had made it himself, of tree boles and logging chains, and it probably would last a thousand years—and, sitting side by side in the swings, they considered options. "Should we take Mabel with us?" Wendy asked.
Dipper shook his head. "I've thought and thought about that, and it's best we don't, at least not at the beginning. I know exactly what she would do, and it would only wind up depressing her. Maybe once you and I have cleared out some of the dangerous stuff, she might come along—but tonight, no."
"Yeah, you're right," Wendy agreed. "OK, how do we get in?"
"With this." Dipper held up the President's Key, which he wore on a string around his neck. Entrusted to him by the discoverer of Gravity Falls Valley himself, the 8 ½ President of the Several United States, Sir Lord Quentin Trembley III, Esquire, to whom Dipper still owed twelve dollars (never accept a negative-denomination piece of currency), the key would open any lock!
Um—any lock it fit, that is. Obviously, keypad locks and card locks and fingerprint locks and the locks of the Panama Canal were clean out of the question. So were modern padlocks, most door locks, and so on and so forth. However, the key would open any lock produced in the United States prior to the year 1860, and quite a few after that. Luckily, the architect who had built the Gravity Falls Museum of History had used antique doors for two entrances and had never changed out the locks. Dipper had already experimented, and the President's Key would get them in.
However, the Museum had a sophisticated security system. Dipper had made frequent visits every day since he and Mabel had returned to begin their fourth summer in Gravity Falls, though, and he had found a way to disarm the alarm.
That Saturday, then, after their chores and after dark, Wendy and Dipper donned—separately—their ninja costumes. Well, not really ninja costumes, but close enough: black turtlenecks, black tight jeans, black sneakers, clothing given to them by a clandestine Agency which operated on two principles:
1. This Agency investigates and combats any and all real or potential paranormal threats to the USA.
2. This Agency does not exist.
Anyway, Agents from the hush-hush Agency had cut Dipper's and Wendy's clothes off them (they were saving the teens' lives, not being pervy) and had replaced their normal wear with these togs. All that remained was for Wendy to find them black balaclavas, those over-the-head ski masks, and voilá! les parfaits petits ninjas, très adorables, n'est-ce pas? Sorry, sorry, got carried away with voilá, my heart is in Paris. I meant, "hey, they were perfect little ninjas! Quite adorable, don't you think?"
"Actually," Dipper said as Wendy parked the car around the corner from the Museum, "I looked it up, and we're not really dressed like ninjas. I mean, we sort of are? But ninjas don't wear black."
"Get out of town!" Wendy said. "Every movie I've ever seen a ninja in—"
"Yeah, movie ninjas," Dipper said. "Real ninjas usually wore dark blue, or else kind of a yellowish-red. Dull orange, I guess."
"No kidding? How come?" They quietly got out of the car and slipped behind a hedge that ran up toward the Museum's back door.
"Well, it turns out that black shows up more in a dim light than a dark blue does. And the orangey uniform resembled traditional farmer's clothes, so if a ninja was out in the daytime, he—"
"Or she."
"Right, she, could mingle with farmers and not be discovered."
Wendy gave him a mock shoulder punch. "Huh. Shatter my illusions, why don't you?
They reached the back door, Dipper took out the President's Key, and he silently unlocked and opened the entrance. They slipped inside a storage room, closed the door again, and locked it behind them. "The security system," Wendy whispered.
"I'm on it. Wait here." Dipper glided silently out into a hallway. The Museum didn't have a night watchman on staff—Gravity Falls was, by and large, a law-abiding town, which was fortunate considering the police force there, and most people didn't even lock their doors, except on nights when the Gnomes were having a scavenger hunt or the Night Nickers were in heat.
Wendy counted to five hundred, slowly, and then the hall door opened again, and Dipper whispered, "It's cool. Come on."
Wendy joined him in the hallway, lit only by a weak security light, and bent over to pet the security system. "How ya doin' there, Ripper? Who's a good boy?"
Ripper, a ninety-five pound Doberman, wagged his butt, his tail being only a stump so short it was more like a button. Fierce though his breed could be, Ripper was a sucker for chunks of steak, and Dipper had quickly become his best buddy and his connection. He contentedly padded along with the teens to the eyeball room, saw them through the secret door, and then, presumably, went on with his rounds, guarding the Museum against any wrongdoers, which Ripper defined as anybody who didn't have baggies with little steak bites in their pockets.
Months before, Wendy had organized the memory tubes alphabetically. "Got the popcorn?" Wendy asked.
"In my backpack. Got the sodas?"
"Ditto."
"Here we go." They sat on the floor in front of the viewer and Dipper picked up a tube.
The first set of memories that years ago had been stolen by the Society of the Blind Eye belonged to Alice Aarons, whom the teens didn't even know. Dipper popped the tube into the player, and they settled down as if it were movie night.
"This is an oldie," Dipper said, munching popcorn. Blind Ivan looked younger—though he didn't have hair even at that age—and the clothes seemed to be early 1990s vintage. "Alice Adams," Ivan intoned, sounding a little like the Star Trek captain on the old Next Generation shows, "what have you seen?"
"My underwear came alive!" the woman, about thirty-five, tall and plain, said. "It chased me all around the room!"
Her memory began to play out. She had a basket of clean laundry on her bed and began to sort it. She held up a pair of yellow panties with blue polka dots. "I don't remember buying these!"
And then the underthings revolted. The panties inflated, leaped out of her hands, and on its short legs began to run waddling around the floor like an animated balloon, gibbering. Then a garishly colored bra flapped its cups and flew into the air and dive-bombed her. And Alice Aarons ran screaming from her bedroom and from the house—
Then she was back in the chair, Blind Ivan looming over her. Caressing the memory gun, he said, "You will be troubled no longer," and a flash of light hit her. The screen faded to black.
"Creepy! What was that biz all about?" Wendy asked.
"Don't know," Dipper admitted. "Not the Shapeshifter. Maybe the underwear really was made of Flimsies. Those are kind of living sheets of bio-fabric material. They grow in caves on damp rocks, and then when they're mature, they peel off and can crawl around and fly, sort of. Like handkerchiefs blowing on the wind. They can have patterns, but why anybody would make underwear out of them—" he shrugged. "Keeper or lose it?"
"Dude," Wendy said, "if my underthings did that, I wouldn't want to know about it. Erase this one."
They had agreed: with the Society of the Blind Eye defunct, and with the citizens of Gravity Falls making a reasonable adjustment to the assorted weirdnesses, Wendy and Dipper would review the dormant memories, destroy the ones that seemed to be dispensable, and offer to the victims of the Society the chance to recover their lost recollections if the memories seemed to be important ones.
They'd earlier discovered they could do that with a minor one—Soos catching sight of something the Society did not want him to see—and had let Soos see, and therefore recover, that memory. Soos had laughed. "I'd, like, totally forgotten that, dawgs! I thought when we busted in that summer, that was the only time I'd ever seen those goofy guys. But it turns out it was the second time, 'cause they erased the memory of the first time, so the second time became like the first time—oh, man, remember that great song, 'Straight Blanchin'?'"
Dipper had to wrestle the memory gun out of Wendy's grasp.
Now they were going to watch a dozen or so memories every viewing night and judge whether to restore them to their original, uh, rememberers. "Should we have this power?" Wendy asked.
"With great power comes great entertainment," Dipper had pointed out. And it was true, the memories they viewed had them hanging onto each other and shaking with violent laughter. It was a little cruel, like those Japanese TV shows where the host plays pranks on unsuspecting victims, sometimes sending them into catatonic shock. However, what was done had already been done, and it sometimes was fun to watch people's reaction to what amounted to no more than run-of-the-mill Gravity Falls creepiness.
That first Saturday evening they watched twenty-four more episodes. None of them were important—a sighting of the Multibear, someone who got dizzy in the woods because of spinning rapidly trying to catch sight of the Hide-Behind, a guy whose male cat had, um, an intense and short romance with a Jackalope on his front lawn, stuff like that. An hour and a bit of this was as much as they could take. They erased all twenty-five memory tubes—none of them had been remotely important or life-changing—and then Wendy suggested, "Let's see if we can locate some memories that belong to people we know, make it more interesting."
"Well—Robbie had a lot," Dipper said. They had studied his recollections the previous fall, when trying to find out what was causing Wendy to have disturbing dreams of snakes. "Now, those he might want to have back. What do you think?"
"Mmm, let's let that one lie for a while," Wendy said. "I mean, he and Tambry just got married, they're pretty happy, no sense in getting' him all disturbed. Though some of the stuff, like the convenience store, I wish he'd remember. Except of course he'd learn that he ran off screamin' when all that ghost crap broke out and he went and hid in the ladies' room!"
Wendy had first viewed all of Robbie's memories alone, but then she and Dipper had looked through all but one of them together. Dipper shrugged. "Yeah, Robbie missed it, but on the bright side, he doesn't have any memory of me doing the Lamby-Lamby Dance, 'cause he didn't see any of that. Strange how the ghosts turned everything in the store upside down, but in the ladies' room, Robby just crouched on the toilet with his hoodie pulled tight shut with the drawstring and didn't get dumped on the ceiling!"
"Probably the Duskertons didn't want to dump toilet water onto their ceilings," Wendy suggested.
"Good point, good point. Anyway, OK, right, put the Robbie memories in the maybe-restore pile."
Wendy mischievously began to hum the "Lamby Lamby" song, and Dipper said, "Forget it! Not gonna happen."
"Aw."
They found six tubes marked "Bud Gleeful." Dipper stacked them near the viewer. "We'll watch these first next time," Dipper said. "I recall Bud saying they'd used the gun on themselves a lot. I guess we can find out what drove Bud to become a member of the Society."
"Isn't this the woodpecker's husband?" Wendy asked, holding up a couple of tubes. "Just two of them. Maybe we can learn what makes a man develop a passion for a bird."
"This is enough familiar people to start with," Dipper said. "We can mingle in some of the people we don't know—"
"Uh-oh," Wendy said from the last third of the big, long pile of memory tubes. "Dipper?"
"What is it?"
"Um—don't know if you even want to watch this one, man. It has to be your call. This is the only one, I think." She put it in his hands.
And he turned it to read the name of the owner of the bad memory, inscribed on the tube with a Magic Marker:
Pacifica Northwest.