Chapter One: Beetle Juice
"How did it come to this?"
The words reverberated, echoing off the enclosed walls at an almost eerie wavelength. The intricately carved subterranean granite reflected each syllable, relaying the sound from one image, one symbol, to another.
Columns of hieroglyphs and pictorial stories closed in together. Gods preserved in the stones of time; Anubis, Bast, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Ammit the Devourer, and most of all, Ra. The divine solar entity perpetuated the small chamber, signifying that this was a crypt of kings.
And yet the king himself was nowhere to be found.
Dipper Pines's eyes had thoroughly scoured every inch of the dust-shrouded chamber, and yet he could not find any clues as to why this burial chamber was so empty of typical burial chamber items. Neither sarcophagus nor shabti were to be found anywhere. Still, Dipper figured that it must be a burial chamber. After translating the hieroglyphs almost five times over, he found no evidence that suggested otherwise. And with those rather macabre canopic jars clustered furtively in one corner, there was almost no doubt.
Still, there was definitely something here that kept drawing him back, again and again, like a fish on a hook, to this room, rather than any of the other chambers in this majestic labyrinthine tomb. But why? What was here? What had he overlooked? What had happened in this room?
How did it come to this?
Dipper sighed. The air gushing from his mouth rippled through the hypogeal atmosphere. He leant back against the wall behind him, scuffing the creases of his shirt as he slowly slid down into a crouching position. His fingers simultaneously ran down the hewn granite, tracing the outlines of individual bricks, noting the transition between rough exposed stone and the smoother patches where colour had been applied. Halfway down, however, he stopped.
His digits hit an anomaly in the wall, a place that, for all intents and purposes, should not exist. A rift between the bricks, free of mortar, creating a gap that Dipper could just about squeeze his fingertips into.
Brown eyebrows furrowed as he turned to look, keeping his hand in place. At first the block looked just like any other in the room. But as Dipper traced his fingers around the edges, it became clearer and clearer that this single granite block was not at all like the others. Faint, mostly concealed grooves at each corner indicated that the block had been used as a type of lid or cover in order to plug a gap. But just what was worth hiding so delicately? Dipper had to admit that the opening was hidden well. It was impossible to distinguish by sight alone.
Curiosity immediately consumed him, but he held himself back. The loose block could well be concealing some sort of booby trap, or a nest of scorpions, or…
It's best to take precautions. Just in case… Dipper decided as he pulled himself up from his painful squatting position.
"Wendy!" The call echoed alternately along the walls; an audible zigzag. "I think I've found something!"
In direct contrast to Dipper's shakily ardent yell, the response came as a series of relaxed, casual footsteps. A redhead archaeologist entered the chamber, her hands shoved deeply into the pockets of her beige capris. She blew a stray lock of auburn from her face, simultaneously adjusting the rim of the wide bleach hat she wore. "Yo, Dips. What's up?" Wendy greeted, punctuating her words with a friendly (although painful) punch to Dipper's forearm.
Dipper grinned in a feeble attempt to mask his wince of pain. "Hey, Wendy. I was hoping that you could help me out. I think I might've found something!" His voice was shaky with anticipated fervour.
Even Wendy, with her typically relaxed demeanour, reacted with surprise. "Seriously?" she proclaimed, auburn eyebrows ascending. "Prof Ford drags us out to this desert, telling us that there's all sorts of strange unsolved mysteries and stuff, but since we dug up the place nothing's happened here." She shrugged. "I mean, yeah, the architecture's cool and whatever, but -"
"Yeah, yeah, I agree completely," Dipper interrupted. "Look right here. At this block. Can you see it?" He gestured towards the architectural anomaly.
Wendy squatted and leaned in towards the wall, frowning. She hummed as her fingers traced the edges, experimentally tapping the block, observing, waiting.
"Yeah, dude. There's definitely a hollow cavity behind here," she concluded after several moments had passed. She braced her hands around the edges and prepared to pull.
"W-wait!" Dipper yelped. "Are you sure you should be pulling it out right now? What if it's part of the wall's support system? What if taking it out causes the whole thing to collapse on us?"
Wendy glanced over at him in bemusement. She shook her head, chuckling lightly. "Nah, dude. I don't think so. I'm an archaeologist. I know this stuff."
That statement was not much consolation to Dipper, however. As Wendy hefted the stone with strength befitting that of a lumberjack's daughter, he could not push the nightmarish possibilities from his mind – scorpions the size of cats, the roof disintegrating; heck, even the mummy of the long-lost pharaoh could appear, groping limply and disgustingly towards him...
Seriously? Dipper chided himself. That's like something from a children's cartoon.
The cryptologist's frantic imagination went into overdrive as Wendy finally prised the heavy block from its prison. She set the stone to one side, exhaling in exertion. But otherwise, there were no malignant side effects.
"Dipper," Wendy called, still slightly breathless. "There's definitely something here. But I think it's more your field…"
Said brunette blinked. "Really? What did you find?" As he spoke, he moved eagerly towards the gaping hole in the tomb wall. Wendy moved aside to give him viewing space.
Several tiers of characters, symbols and digits, some familiar, some arcane, were carved in a dizzying spiral about metre into the wall from the opening. There were a few hieroglyphs, but otherwise the inscriptions were totally out of place; Dipper picked out Korean characters, Roman numerals, occult glyphs and some even stranger items. The esoteric gibberish surrounded the central figure of a large single eye set within a triangle; something Dipper immediately associated with Illuminati and Freemason iconography. But something was different about it. Surreal. Almost comic. The triangular figure sported arms and legs, in addition to what appeared to be a bowtie and top hat. The figure was intricately carved and appeared to emit golden pulses of light from its optic epicentre; the kind of eerily kitsch illumination one would associate with Hollywood-grade CGI.
"I… I think the symbols here are some sort of red herring," Dipper muttered after a few moments.
"You think so?" Wendy glanced at him, one eyebrow askew.
The cryptologist nodded. "Even if it does mean something, it's been enciphered with such complexity that even those who knew what all the symbols meant and were privy to the secret would have a hard time decrypting it. It's… impractical. Plus, it's just… the way it's written, in that spiral shape. Is that a trademark? Or is it just an additional feature that helps draw attention to it?"
"So, what you're saying is…" Wendy began.
Dipper met the archaeologist's eyes. "The true clue is elsewhere. And it's probably something that's only meant to exist for a few moments after someone pulls out the block –" He stopped. "Oh, crap! It could be gone already!"
"Relax, Dipper." Wendy abruptly thrust her head into the cavity, pushing the brunette roughly out of the way in the process. "Mmm," she hummed, her voice distorted slightly by the enclosed walls of the aperture. "Yep, I think I've found what you're looking for."
"R-really? Is… is it still coherent?" Dipper was at this point visibly shaking. "Wendy, Wendy, let me see."
Said redhead moved out of the way and Dipper crawled into the vacated space. "Just look up," she instructed.
Following that vague command, the cryptologist tilted his head towards the roof of the narrow interstice. He gasped at what he saw.
A scrambling tribe of scarab beetles carpeted the ceiling with iridescent carapaces. Some were rapidly on the move, exploring the world that they had only now just been exposed to with adventurous zeal. However, most remained collected into particular formations against the rock, only slight ripples of motion undulating through them as they woke up out of hibernation.
As Dipper watched, these ripples became waves. The beetles were on the move, and their message would not last for much more than a few fleeting minutes. The cryptologist swallowed, adjusting the angle of his head so he could read the characters that the beetles' bodies had formed. The entomological message read:
BV DSL DRHS GL HFNNLM GSV YROO XRKSVI GIRZMTOV:
Z ULINZGRLM LU VRTSG DZC XZMWOVH
ZG HRCGVVM GSRIRB-GDL
QFORFH, XZOO SRH MZNV
ZMV SV HSZOO ZKKVZI.
Dipper read through each line as quickly as humanly possible. All the while, his brain, almost unconsciously, attempted different methods of decryption, discarded them, and tried again. His thoughts came in rapid succession: Latin letters. A Caesar shift? No, doesn't work. Not possible. Affine, then? Atbash substitution… "Ye who"… Yeah, we're getting something here.
From there, it was almost overwhelmingly easy for the cryptologist. The message was decoded in a matter of seconds. If truth be told, he had expected something much harder, but given the fact that he was on a time limit, he wasn't exactly complaining about it.
He scanned through the receding characters again to check he had decoded it correctly. But he was fairly certain; although the decrypted message was still rather obscure, at least it made sense.
Dipper backed out of the hole, fumbling for his blue biro and clicking the nib into action. He rapidly scrawled the deciphered message onto his palm before it could dissipate from his memory.
It was only then that he allowed himself to release his pent-up breath.
He glanced up at Wendy and smiled in blissful relief. "I think I've got it, Wendy."
"Great. Spill it." The redhead leaned forward eagerly.
The cryptologist cleared his throat, as through preparing for a grand speech. "Okay. This is what it says.
'YE WHO WISH TO SUMMON THE BILL CIPHER TRIANGLE:
A FORMATION OF EIGHT WAX CANDLES
AT SIXTEEN THIRTY-TWO
JULIUS, CALL HIS NAME
AND HE SHALL APPEAR.'"
Dipper exhaled deeply as he spoke the last syllable. The last of the adrenalin receded, and yet his intrigue remained. It was only once he had read the message that he could fully comprehend it. And it truly was bizarre.
"Don't know what the fuck that means," Wendy commented, "but hey. Anything interesting is totally cool with me." She chuckled lightly. "It's funny, actually. When you said 'Julius, call his name' I thought you were talking about my ex-boyfriend."
"O-oh," the cryptologist blushed slightly, returning the chuckle. "Well, anyway. I guess we should show this to Grunk – I mean, Professor Ford."
"Yeah, you could do that." Wendy made to move back into the excavated crevice. "While you're doing that, I'll take some snaps of those weird beetles before they scurry away."
"Yeah…" Dipper's tone was much calmer than he felt. The dynamy of his thoughts was almost beyond description. There were too many questions… just too damn many. It had always amazed Dipper to see the coolness and nonchalance that Wendy maintained, even in situations like this. Wasn't she even the least bit concerned as to why, or even how, that message existed?
The tomb had been buried under a valley of sand until just a couple of weeks ago, and yet… the message most certainly was not of Ancient Egyptian origin. The Atbash cipher had originated from the Hebrew alphabet, for starters. So what was it doing here? Everything seemed impossible. But that only gave Dipper a stronger incentive to find out just what was going on.
As he gazed down at the scrawled letters on his hand, the ink already running from the sweat beading on his palm, a single thought crossed his mind.
How did it come to this?
