"If this is some kind of prank..."

"I swear," Pacifica implored, grabbing onto Dipper's shoulders. "I swear I'm not making this up. I think that a few days ago, I was cursed."

Dipper sighed and tried not to roll his eyes. He was curious, how couldn't he be? And he was concerned, because Pacifica seemed like she was telling the truth...but who really knew with her? "Alright, look, start from the beginning."

"Okay," she began, wiping some sweat from her brow, "it was over the weekend. My friends and I had decided to take a trip to Ashford to go visit the fair, and- wait, didn't you say I could get some water? If you really do need the money so badly-" she reached into her pocket and took out a leather wallet before Dipper put his hands up.

"No, it's fine, you don't have to pay, just come in. We can talk inside, there aren't any customers today. Just keep it down, Mabel's trying to sleep."

Pacifica rolled her eyes as she put her wallet away. "Darn, I guess my primal screaming exercises will have to wait." She had regained some of the haughtiness he'd come to expect of after their first few meetings, but for a second, though, her usual venom was gone, and he could see something approaching gratitude in her expression. "Thanks, though."

She followed him inside, where Tambry and Wendy looked like they were in deep conversation. Both jerked towards the door when Dipper opened it, and both looked surprised to see the blonde in tow, looking more disheveled than either could recall ever seeing her, walk in and towards the counter. "Wow," said Tambry dully, "to what do we owe the honor?"

Again the wallet came out. "I'll give you twenty dollars to forget I was ever here."

Wendy snorted, but then saw Tambry snatch the twenty out of Pacifica's hand. In response to her friend's amazed look, Tambry shrugged. "I'm not above that."

"Did Soos finish with the kitchen?" Dipper asked, ignoring the exchange.

"Yeah," Wendy replied. "He popped in to say he was going to do some work on the pipes."

"Okay, thanks. Come on, Pacifica, this way." He led her away to the kitchen as the teens looked on.

"That kid does all right for himself," Tambry remarked.

"Hm," Wendy answered.

Pacifica looked around the Pines family kitchen, trying to hide her interest. She couldn't remember having been in a kitchen before; she was accustomed to waiting in dining rooms and only caught rare glimpses of the places her food actually came from. Dipper pulled out a chair for her and fetched a glass from a cupboard. He paused and eyed her momentarily. "You can drink tap water, right? You won't melt or anything?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I suppose you'd just love it if I did, huh?"

He turned away from her and filled the glass from the sink faucet. "No. At least not in here, we just cleaned." The memory of Mabel's pained look came back to him for a second. He forced it down as he handed Pacifica the glass. She took it, and put it to her lips.

And stared.

In an instant, it came back. The water, it was everywhere

"Hello? Earth to Northwest?" Dipper said, waving a hand in front of Pacifica's face. She blinked and faced him.

"Huh?"

"You spaced out there."

She realized she'd been holding onto the glass so tightly her knuckles were probably white from the strain. She eased up and set it down, somehow losing her thirst. "Sorry, I...this hasn't been an easy day."

Dipper's brow furrowed in concern. "Just take it easy and tell me what happened. I don't know if I can help, but I'll try." He immediately had second thoughts about agreeing to help without knowing what the problem was, but Pacifica looked so distraught that the words came out of his mouth unbidden.

"Okay," she started, "so my friends and I went to the fair at Ashford-"

"I can't picture you at a fair," Dipper interrupted.

She glared at him. "Oh, because you know me so well? That doesn't jive with all the years you've been observing me? Your wealth of information about my personal-"

"Alright, alright," he conceded. "I get the point. You went to the fair with your friends."

She was quiet for a second. "Well, I went. On my own. My friends aren't as into mini-golf as me. Anyway, point is, after winning the mini-golf competition, I wandered around the fairground for a while, not really looking for anything. That's when I saw this tent, some 'Madame Defarge,' or whoever, you know? A psychic.

"I've never believed in all that occult stuff, but for some reason I really wanted to go in there. It was like..." she drifted off, and her eyes became unfocused, "...it was like being in a dream, where you're kind of aware you're dreaming, but the 'you' in the dream can't do anything except what the dream tells you to do, you know? Like...like a straight line along curved space."

"A what?"

"Ugh, nevermind. The point is I went into this tent, but I can't really tell you why. Inside, the air was so thick with this incense that I could barely see. I had trouble breathing at first, but then I saw this lady, and...and somehow I knew that I couldn't leave even if I wanted to. She had this gray, straw hair, and her skin looked like really old paper. And her eyes had these tiny pupils, like someone poked a needle through a cloth."

I sat down at her table. I'm not sure what I said to her. She knew my name, and she said she could tell me what I needed. She got out this deck of cards-"

"Tarot cards?" he asked. "With pictures on them? Named The Fool, The Heirophant, Death, stuff like that?"

She nodded vigorously. "Yeah! She told me to shuffle the deck, and I did. I feel like I did it for a long time." Her hands started to mimic the motion of spreading cards around on the kitchen table. Dipper wasn't sure she knew she was doing it, as her eyes were fixated on some point on the wall. "She dealt them out in this weird pattern, and explained what it meant."

"Do you remember what she said?" Dipper asked. He knew a little bit about fortune-telling through tarot cards, as his mother had showed him and Mabel her own deck several years ago.

Pacifica was wide-eyed. "She said a lot of things. That I was lost. That I wouldn't find the way without help. Something about...an iris."

"Like, the eye? Or the flower?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head forlornly, "Just something about...she said to follow the iris to the iris below. Does that mean anything to you?" He shrugged. "She said to tell him it's too late, and that they're already in."

At this, Dipper tensed up. He leaned in, fighting the urge to interrupt her and run upstairs. She didn't seem to notice his sudden apprehension. "I think I asked her what she was talking about, and she said to listen for the whispers in the city." She snatched the glass of water off the table and gulped it down, privately wishing that it was some of the bourbon she'd sneaked out of her father's study a few times. She faced Dipper and grew nervous when she saw how intently he was watching her. "Don't you believe me?"

He thought about it. "I...maybe." He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling, towards where Mabel was (hopefully) resting. "Listen, can you wait in the living room for a bit? I think I have something that...can you just wait a minute?"

Pacifica nodded, and stood up from the table. "I'm not going back out there," she said resolutely. She started to leave through the open doorway to the living room when Dipper cleared his throat behind her. She turned around. "What?" she asked, confused.

Dipper bit back a sigh. "Nevermind," he said as he grabbed the glass off the table and put it in the sink. "I'll be right back."

Pacifica walked into the living room as she heard Dipper begin to ascend some nearby staircase. The dim light of the room didn't do much to hide the fact that the old man who lived here wasn't too concerned with how his house looked. Or smelled, for that matter. Accustomed as she was to her own home, kept pristine by a legion of rarely-seen housekeepers, the dingy furniture and decrepit television set fascinated her on some level. Were those actual "rabbit ears" on that thing? It was straining her suspension of disbelief just to imagine that the thing worked.

If it actually did. Gripped by a perverse curiosity, she glanced around the room for the remote. She couldn't recall the last time she's seen an image on a television...what did they call a pre-HD TV? In fact, she might have never seen one in real life at all. Her gaze wandered around the living room, (she wouldn't be caught dead sitting down in a place like this), and suddenly she realized how very quiet it was.

She couldn't hear Dipper or Mabel upstairs. The girls out in the shop area were either gone or just couldn't be heard in here. She was alone.

As alone as she had found herself just...it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes ago, she had written off the whole experience at the fair as just some weird effect of smoke inhalation (who knows what those plebs used as "incense"), but after what had happened in town, there was no denying it: either she had gone totally insane, or something incredibly bizarre was going on. Although technically, there was nothing preventing both from being true.

Casting around for the remote, her eyes landed on some small spots on the dull white carpet. At first, she thought they might be cigarette burns, which would have been odd, because she didn't see any ashtrays and or smell any smoke. Against her better judgment, she knelt down and squinted at the spots.

Up close, she could see they weren't the black of burns. Living with her mother, she knew what cigarette burns looked like up close. These, however, were a deep red. In fact, she could almost swear they looked like-

As he climbed the wooden staircase to the attic room he and Mabel shared, Dipper thought he could hear something over the creak of each step as he put his weight on it. A sharp, raspy, barking noise, coming from the direction of their room. He increased his pace and threw open the door when he got to it.

Mabel was in her bed, wrapped up in a swaddle of blankets, with only her head and one arm outstretched. She was coughing into the crook of her arm, hard. Glancing around, he saw Waddles at the foot of her bed, looking concerned. Or at least, that was how he interpreted the pig's posture. Mabel feebly turned herself around so she was facing him. She looked pale.

"Oh, hey, Dipper...what's up?" she asked weakly.

"Mabel!" He went over to her bed, but stopped when she waved him away. "Mabel, you look terrible!"

She laughed a little. "Thanks, Dipping Sauce. You look great too. I don't feel that bad. Really."

He stared at her, frowning. He wanted nothing more than to sit down next to her and tell her that she was going to be fine...but her pallor and coughing gave him pause. "I think we should call Gruncle Stan and get you to the doctor."

"I'm sure it's nothing too serious," he said. "Summer cold, maybe. How are you feeling?"

"I'm..." he paused, and found himself rubbing him his right arm, recalling the odd twitching from earlier. "I don't feel like I have a cold."

Mabel looked like she was about to say something, but before she could, she shoved her face against her arm, her body wracked with deep coughing. It sounded painful, a rough bark within her throat. "You-" she stopped, her voice cracked and her eyes watering. "You shouldn't stay here too long. You might catch it too."

He wanted to go over to her, or at the very least, to say something. He tried to think, tried to form some phrase that might ease his sister's pain, if only for a second. Nothing came to mind. Besides, Mabel had already turned around again.

Sighing inside, Dipper turned toward his bed. From underneath it, from its place in the ancient dust on the floor, he pulled the journal. The journal he'd discovered shortly after his arrival in the town of Gravity Falls. He'd looked at it a few times, had wanted to study it in more depth, but most of it just didn't make sense. He would spend an hour poring over a single page, trying to figure out just what in the name of-

Mabel coughed loudly again in her bed. Dipper tucked the journal under his arm and headed for the door. Before he opened it, he paused. "Hey."

"Yeah?" Mabel asked faintly.

Have you been twitching at all lately?

"What is it?" she asked.

"Do you...want anything from the store? Wendy has to go out today to run an errand, so if you want, I can ask her to pick something up..."

Quiet.

"Smile Dip?"

He grinned. "If they have it, sure. Haven't seen it around in a while, though."

"A small town like this, maybe they've got a reserve somewhere," she said, and gave a short laugh.

"Well, I'll ask. Get some sleep now. See you later."

He left the room, thankful she hadn't seen him take the journal. Mabel didn't like the journal, didn't like the strange things written in it, and didn't like the odd symbols and half-finished sketches drawn in seemingly random places throughout it. If she'd seen him grab it, it might have worried her, and clearly she didn't need anything else to worry about at that moment.

He took a moment at the top of the stairs to inspect the book's cover. It was bound with brown leather, thick and faded. Emblazoned in the center was a relief of a six-fingered hand, with a "3" etched deeply into the metal. Or at least, Dipper assumed it was a 3. Given the symbols within the book, some of which looked almost, but not quite, like recognizable letters and numbers, he couldn't be certain.

He walked down the steps, quietly in case Mabel had already drifted back to sleep. As he reached the foots of the stairs, he peered into the living room and saw Pacifica kneeling down, looking intently at-

"Hey," came Dipper's voice, and Pacifica lurched to her feet, nearly losing her balance in the process.

"Geez, you nearly gave me a heart attack!" she caught her breath and ran her fingers through her lustrous hair. Her hand caught on a knot, which she began to tease apart as she turned away from him. "What's that stain on the floor?"

Dipper glanced down at the spot she had been looking at and frowned. "That's...blood."

Pacifica's hands slowed. "Whose?"

"Mabel's, she-"

Pacifica whirled around, her hair forgotten for a second. "Is she okay?"

She looked surprisingly worried. "Yeah, she's fine, just got a little cut. It was right before you got here. Thanks for spotting that, I'll clean it later."

"Hmm," she replied, and went back to working out the knot. As she finished, she glanced at the book he was holding. "What's that?"

In response, Dipper sat down on the carpet and began leafing through pages. "A book I found. Something you said..."

He trailed off as he searched. Pacifica bent down to look over his shoulder. She wasn't sure what she had expected to be written in a book that looked as old the shack itself, but she hadn't expected this.

'a puppet, a pauper, a pawn, a king'

'they had that gum I liked'

'feels placed, arranged, ceremonial, a sacrifice?'

'I told you this would happen'

'it looked back at me'

'five minutes and up the ladder she sings'

'we've met before haven't we'

'you find your hole and then you can't look away'

'fear of blood tends to create fear for flesh'

'yonagumi'

'no tomorrow no tomorrow no tomorrow no tomorrow no tomorrow no tomorrow'

'one chants out between two worlds'

'YOU'RE NOT ME'

'help'

'please help'

The pages flickered by so quickly all she could glean were fragments, but there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the arrangement of words on the yellowed pages. Placed at odd intervals were drawings, usually small scribbles, the sort she might have drawn on the margins of a notebook out of boredom. Others were elaborate, purposeful depictions of...some looked like bugs, one some kind of map, some like lizards, at least one looked like two people hugging, like the time she'd stayed up too late when her parents were away and she'd gotten around the parental controls on her family's TV.

"What is this..."

He stopped flipping pages and faced up at her. She was taken by how serious his eyes looked, and how close he was to her. "I found this journal when I first got to Gravity Falls. It was hidden in...it looked like no one had touched it in years. So I didn't just make this up to mess with you. But something you said...what did the psychic tell you again?"

"She said that I wouldn't find the way without help, something about irises, that I should tell someone it's too late, they're already inside, something about whispers in the city." As she spoke, she could feel a nausea rising inside her. "What does it say?"

He turned the page.

This was a sketch over two pages, more detailed than the others. It looked like a professional anatomic drawing. The title, apparently, was 'if they get inside it's too late.'

The sketch was of a long, thin, wormlike creature, its sides dotted at regular intervals with some sort of protrusion. At one end was what could only be a sort of mouth, a wide opening inside which was a smaller hole surrounded by row after row after row of what looked like tiny, sharp fangs.

What disturbed Pacifica more than the sight of the thing however, was that the artist had chosen to draw the creature inside what was unmistakably a human brain.

To clarify some canon issues here, the Pines have not encountered any blatantly supernatural things here yet. So no gnomes, no Bill, no mantaurs, etc. Events from the show have played out without the weirdness, i.e., there was a party at the Mystery Shack where the twins met Pacifica, but there wasn't a magic photocopier. I'm a firm believer in horror stories requiring some veneer of normalcy.