Neighbors
(September 1-2, 2015)
2
"I don't think it's him," Mabel insisted.
"He called me 'Pine Tree!'" Dipper said. "Nobody but Bill ever calls me that!"
They had eaten dinner and were, theoretically, putting away their clothes. Actually, they sat in Dipper's room. Dipper had put enough of his socks and underwear in the bureau to have room for them to sit on his bed—his pants and shirts were still all jumbled up toward the head of the bed. He and Mabel sat cross-legged, almost in Yogic poses, on the foot. "But he seems like a nice little kid," Mabel said. "Quiet and polite and dorky. And his sisters are cool! I mean, they're young, they have a lot to learn—"
Despite the strain he felt, Dipper sputtered with laughter. "They're fourteen! Two years younger than we are!"
"No, see, we're juniors," Mabel said. "They're lowly freshmen. I think I'm gonna have to big-sister them through the first difficult days of high school. It's a jungle. A jungle!"
Dipper couldn't argue with that. Piedmont was not that bad a place. However, he remembered all too well how the first weeks were rough, before he'd gone out for track, before Mabel had found her footing as an outstanding art student. As Wendy had once warned Mabel, there had been times when the Pines twins had felt isolated, as if everyone hated them. The bullying wasn't as physical as it had been in elementary school—no wedgies in the hallways, no tripping in the aisles—but Dipper, small for his age back then, heard the word "Shrimp" being tossed around, and not in the lunchroom.
He didn't fit into any cliques. The nerds were loners. Not until his second term at school, when he began to win a few races, did he feel that he sort of had friends—though his teammates didn't have much to do with him except during practice and meets. Mabel, always more outgoing, found students who sat with her at lunch. He sat with them, too, but hardly said a word. Everyone was interested in his nutty, funny sister, not in him.
So—yeah, Mabel was right. It helped if you had someone looking out for you in high school.
But—Billy Sheaffer was still in elementary school. "I've got a bad feeling," Dipper said. "If Billy is Bill reborn, then—what happens? What are we supposed to do? Be afraid of him? Help him? Why didn't the Oracle give me a book of instructions?"
"Well, Broseph, you don't get a Living for Dummies book, you know. I still don't see it, though. He seemed like just a nice, ordinary little kid. He does have just one eye—but maybe that's a coincidence."
Dipper couldn't keep his voice down: "Coincidence? Bill Cipher, Billy Sheaffer? Yellow hair, yellow shirt? One eye? 'Pine Tree?' What'll it take to convince you? Does he have to call you 'Shooting Star' or lock you up in a bubble—"
"Shh-shh," Mabel warned. "Oh, I don't know! Look, say he is Bill Cipher somehow reborn ten years ago, even though back then we hadn't even been to Gravity Falls and had never heard of Bill Cipher and Weirdmageddon was still seven years in the future. You said something about a blank slate, right? He wouldn't even know us!"
"He didn't seem to recognize us," Dipper admitted. "Not like Bill."
Mabel put her hand on top of his. "Yeah. Bill would start with a hearty laugh and greet us warmly and then try to turn our bodies inside-out or something."
"I just wish—I wish the Oracle would give us some kind of hint."
"Well-it's still early in the game, Dipper."
"I guess."
And that was where they left it. For a few hours, anyway.
Three o'clock in the morning is the dead low ebb of night. When you wake up—for no reason—at three in the morning, the dark and the loneliness center on you and you feel that you may be the last living thing on the planet. Nothing behind you but the dark, nothing ahead but a deeper dark.
That's the way Dipper felt when he woke up and though it was breakfast time already before he saw the glowing numbers on the clock radio near his bed.
Three A.M.
Grunting, he rolled over in bed and yipped.
Something stood beside the bed, like one of the spirits in A Christmas Carol come to show Dipper Pines the many errors of his ways. A pale figure, indistinct but faintly glowing, stood staring down at him.
And then he recognized Mabel. "What the heck!" he yelled, sitting up in bed. In his underpants and nothing else. He tugged the sheet over him. "Mabel, are you nuts?"
She stood beside the bed, wearing her faded old sleep shirt over short pajama bottoms. And somehow—she glowed.
Mabel stretched out a hand as if in slow motion. "Touch my hand and we will go," she said. It was her voice, but not her normal intonation.
"Mabel, cut it out. You're scaring me," Dipper said.
"I am not Mabel at the moment, Dipper Pines," Mabel said solemnly. "I am only borrowing her body. You asked me for a hint. Come and I will tell you plainly what you must do."
"You took over Mabel's body?" Dipper asked, shivering, remembering the puppet-show calamity. "Is—where is Mabel? Is Mabel OK?"
The glow vanished, and Mabel said in her normal voice, "Oh, wow, this is so weird! Like I'm being taken for a ride in my own body, but someone else is chauffeuring! Brobro! Back to tighty whities? Hey, lady with the eyes, make him put something on! I don't want to be seen in public with my nearly bare-assed brother!"
"Mabel!"
Her voice changed again: "Clothing means nothing where we are going, Dipper. But if it will make you feel more secure, dress quickly."
He pulled on jeans and tee-shirt, but then Mabel, or Mabel's body, linked her arm through his. "Close your eyes."
Dipper pulled away. "Can you give us one reason to trust you?"
"Dipper!" Mabel again, unmistakably. "Come on! Do what the nice monster lady asks!"
"It is for your benefit," she said in that calmer, softer voice.
Dipper put a hand to his head. "Wait, wait, it's confusing when there's two of you in there! Can you give me some sign when Mabel is talking?"
"OK, Dipdop, how's this? I'll start my sentences with a pet name."
"But . . . are you really Mabel?"
"Dipster, I'm ninety-nine per cent sure of it!"
"Let me test you." Dipper thought for a minute. "I don't think we ever told anybody about this. On Valentine's day in fifth grade, what did you do?"
"Aw, Brobro. I bought a whole pack of cards ahead of time and addressed them all to you and signed them with twenty fake names."
"And how many cards did I get in all?"
The Mabel figure sniffled. "Twenty, Broseph," she said softly.
"OK, sorry. If you want to go with the Oracle, I'm on board." He put his arm through hers. "Don't cry, Sis. It's one of my best memories of elementary school."
"This," Mabel said in the Oracle voice, "is why you have been chosen."
In stories, it's all very nice to be the Chosen One. All the way through, the audience knows you're going to bust loose at some point and kick serious ass. All those people who put you down and belittled you and laughed at you will learn to look at you with respect and awe, if you're the Chosen One.
Yeah, but.
Up until the end, over, oh, seven books or so, you get your own ass handed to you on a regular basis. Your relatives pick on you and give you things like one sock for your birthday. You're on the way to school and a snotty little horror tries to recruit you into a gang of thugs. You walk into the classroom, and the teacher glares at you and in a hostile, whispery voice, more or less suggests that you die.
Or you volunteer to take the ring back to the store and toss it into a volcano, and you make all these friends who promptly start to quarrel and fight and make your life miserable, and there are bees and spiders and, man, you are scared witless for about five hundred thousand words of story. And at the big moment something nasty bites off your favorite finger.
Or you sign on with a captain who lost a leg before the story even starts and he wants to have a word with the whale that took it off, so you go on this perfectly rational sea voyage to find him, and your whole crew gradually dies off and then the damned whale snags the captain and drags him under the water to drown, and if your best friend in the whole world hadn't had his coffin ready, you would drown, too . . ..
And awful things happen all the time, and even your friends blame you. But, hey, that's OK, you old Chosen One, you!
Yeah, your life's gonna suck for the whole foreseeable future, but just wait, man! You'll get such a pay-off!
And then . . . the story just ends, right? Except maybe for an epilogue that leaves half of the readership fuming.
Dipper had all that in mind as the Oracle, in Mabel's body, said softly, "Close your eyes. This may be disorienting."
Dipper felt as if the floor beneath him had opened, and he fell straight down for 1947 feet. He counted. Then he was on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and blasts of withering heat and bursts of freezing cold hit him as it swept him from hell to Antarctica and back again. He couldn't breathe and suspected that was because here, wherever here was, no air existed to breathe.
And then things steadied down. "You are here."
"I kept my eyes open," Mabel announced proudly. And promptly threw up.
"Mabel!" Dipper said. "You spoiled the carpet!"
"Never mind that." The Oracle—now a separate being, the hooded, seven-eyed woman that Dipper had seen before in a dream or vision—snapped her fingers, and the whole carpet vanished, to be replaced by a different one—a patchwork carpet, with question marks, pine trees, shooting stars, spectacles, six-fingered hands, a bunch of—fish, whatever that thing was on Grunkle Stan's fez was, bags of ice, pentacles, and broken hearts, all woven into the complex design.
The pool of barf had vanished.
"Here," the Oracle said, handing Mabel an hourglass-shaped cup of something pink with sparkles swimming through it. "This will settle your stomach."
"Thanks, lady!" With no sign of caution, Mabel chugged the whole cupful down in a long series of swallows. "Mmm! Tastes sparkly!"
"Something for you, Dipper?"
"Uh, no, thank you. Where are we?"
It wasn't the infinitely huge, infinitely tall structure he had visited before, something like the Roman Colosseum built by contractors with an unlimited budget and delusions of grandeur. Instead, they seemed to be on a mountaintop, standing in front of a castle—the summit grew lush with tall blue-green grass, and all around them billowed tall white clouds, like the ones he loved to watch when at the window of an airliner. Through occasional breaks he glimpsed a beautiful wooded landscape far below.
"This," the Oracle said, "is what Stanford Pines called Dimension 52. It is my world."
"Kinda lonesome, isn't it?" Mabel asked. "Pretty, though."
"I have visitors every now and then," the Oracle said with a smile. "A gentleman with bad digestion and a grandson shows up occasionally, asking me to hide him from the law. There is this young couple with some interesting scissors. Others. I know when they are coming, and I know what is best to do for them."
"Do you . . . do it?" Dipper asked.
"No." When he looked shocked, she said, "Often times, it is best they work out their own destinies. At most, I give them a little push. The two of you . . . are rather different. Let's go inside."
By the time she pronounced the word "inside," there they were, in a room with a tapestry and . . . floating bubbles? They rose from around ankle level and soared upward. Some of them became luminescent and furnished light. Others popped out of existence.
"I keep my eyes on all dimensions," the Oracle explained before Dipper could ask about the bubbles. "I believe you have met the Axolotl." She gestured toward the tapestry, which showed a friendly-looking albino . . . salamander?
"Don't remember that," Mabel said. "But he looks adorable!"
"Your meeting happened," the Oracle said, "and then the Axolotl unhappened it."
"That makes me unhappy," Mabel said, but she was giggling. "Get it?"
"I knew she was going to say that," Dipper muttered.
"Well—in Dimension 52, sensitive people gain a limited prescience."
"Lady," Mabel said, "I like your house, but how's about another cup of sparkle juice?"
"Certainly," she said. "Dipper, you do need to drink something."
"Uh, just—plain water?" he said.
The Oracle handed another pink, sparkling drink to Mabel and immediately turned and gave Dipper an hourglass-shaped cup of clear water. It had just materialized and felt icy in his grip. He sipped it and his eyes widened. "This—it's—it brings back Gravity Falls!"
"Glacial water," the Oracle said. "I brought it from ninety thousand years before your present day, when the whole Gravity Falls Valley was a sheet of ice. The alien ship rested on the surface of the Valley then. Only when the ice melted and formed a lake did it vanish beneath the silt layer that became the soil of Gravity Falls."
"This even tastes like Gravity Falls!" Dipper said, blinking. "And I don't even know how that's possible!"
"Gimme," Mabel said, grabbing the cup and sipping. "Hey! He's right. There's . . . let's see . . . cunning and greed, that'd be Grunkle Stan, and, mm, the icy-blue taste of thought, Grunkle Ford and maybe Old Man McGucket, whoa! Peppermint! Wendy, definitely Wendy, and in the mood for—"
"That's enough," Dipper said, snatching the cup back from her. "Drink your sparkles."
The Oracle watched, seemingly amused. "Our time here is infinite," she warned, "so let's be quick. I will answer three questions each. Mabel, what is your first?"
"Can you buy this stuff in California?" Mabel asked, holding up the cup of sparkly stuff. "'Cause, Lady, it is delish!"
"No," Jheselbraum the Unswerving said with a smile. "Dipper?"
"Is Billy Sheaffer really Bill Cipher?"
"Yes. And also no."
Mabel shook her head. Nothing rattled. "Wait, can you explain that?"
"Yes, I can."
They waited. "That's the answer," she said.
Dipper groaned. Mabel was down to one question, and he only had two. "What do you want us to do with Billy Sheaffer?"
For a long time, he didn't think the Oracle would answer. When she did, she preceded her words with a deep sigh. "I am not the Axolotl. He resides in the space between dimensions and knows and sees much more than I. My impulse would be to end Bill Cipher. I believe he has forfeited his right to exist. But I bow to the Axolotl's wisdom. What should you do with Billy Sheaffer? Befriend him. He will grow into knowledge of who and what he is. He is not yet there. He will get there. Before he does—you and Mabel must teach him to be . . . human."
"Is he gonna try to end the world again?" Mabel asked.
"That depends," the Oracle said.
"On what?" Dipper asked, forgetting that this would be his last question.
"On you two." Before they could speak she raised a blue-gray hand . . . and pure light shone from its fingers. "I will watch. If necessary, I will try to send help when you most need it. You two do not know how rare your hearts are. Use what you feel in them to help the boy Billy Sheaffer learn to act with compassion and not with a thirst for power. Teach him to laugh, but not at others' misfortunes. He has one life to prove himself worthy of redemption. Teach him to lead it so that when he leaves it, the world will for his presence there be a kinder and happier place." She reached out with both hands and touched both Dipper and Mabel's heads as though in blessing. "It's a small favor you can do not for Billy or for Bill, but for the Axolotl. And for your world. Now close your eyes."
Three A.M.
Grunting, Dipper rolled over in bed and yipped.
Something stood beside the bed, like one of the spirits in A Christmas Carol come to show Dipper Pines the many errors of his ways. A pale figure, indistinct but faintly glowing, stood staring down at him.
And then he recognized Mabel. "What the heck!" he yelled.
Wait a minute—he was wearing a tee shirt and jeans. "Mabel?"
Mabel crawled into his bed. "Dip? Did—did that really happen? I mean, the weird seven-eyed lady?"
"I . . . think it did," he said.
"Rats. She gave us three questions and I blew it. Move over."
He moved over beneath the cover, and she stretched out beside him on top of the cover. "Mabel," he said, "this makes me uncomfortable."
"Nothing creepy's gonna happen, Brobro. I'm going back to my room in a minute," she muttered. "I just—I gotta—gotta think this thing—wow. Just wow. So, I guess I'll volunteer to babysit Billy when the Sheaffers need it. And you—maybe you can, like, tutor him in math or something."
"I guess," Dipper said. Inside, though, he felt a strange revulsion at the very thought. What if I screw up?
"Damn," Mabel grunted. "I wasted my most important question."
"What was that?" Dipper asked.
She got up. "What kind of car are Dad and Mom gonna give us after we pass our license test next Friday. Goodnight, Dippingsauce."
"I guess we're saddled with this," Dipper murmured.
"Looks like it. One bright side to it, though."
"What's that?"
"We beat Bill Cipher three times," she said. "If we gotta—we'll do it again."
Mabel left his room, closing the door softly.
Dipper hoped she was right. Still—
He didn't get another wink of sleep for the rest of the night.
