A Taste of Ashes
Chapter 3: All in Your Mind
"C'mon, Dipper! Keep it up! Man, what's wrong with you this morning?"
Gasping as he put one heavy foot in front of the other and then did it again, Dipper gave Wendy a brief, apologetic smile. "Didn't—didn't get much—much sleep last night," he panted.
"Well, keep up with me. Winding down now, dude. We're nearly back to the Shack," she said, loping easily beside him, her long legs flashing as she ran, her red hair blowing in the breeze. Oh, man, those tight running shorts!
"Try to!" They were thirty-some minutes into a forty-minute run, and Dipper knew his speed that morning wasn't as good as it had been just the day before. He'd toughed it out through a severe stitch in his side—and at last that had faded—but now his legs were beginning to feel leaden and to wobble under him. He was gasping, too, the air burning his lungs.
Showing some compassion, Wendy slowed a little and said, "Okay, we'll cool down a little. But don't stop. You can do it, Dip. Don't give up on me, man!"
"Never!" he said, hoping he was showing spirit rather than plain old desperation. He forced himself to run a little faster, though he thought I'm gonna go sprawling on my face any second now! That or puke! Or both at once!
They were on the Mystery Shack drive now, and ahead of them lay the parking lot and the rambling Shack itself, a mess of original cabin, tacked-on rooms, and random side structures. In the morning sun, the triangular window in the attic gleamed like—well, like Bill Cipher, his eye staring down at them balefully.
Bill's gone. This has nothing to do with Bill!
True, Dipper had found the Bill stone a few days before, when he'd been roaming the woods in search of that elusive woodpecker-consuming tree. The triangular form had startled him at first—but then he remembered how it had all ended, with Bill jubilantly leaping out of his pyramidal corporeal form and into what he mistakenly thought to be Stanford's mind.
The misjudgment had cost Bill dominion over our universe, and—probably—his life. It was difficult to ascertain the exact state of existence of multidimensional non-corporeal entities with a Napoleonic complex.
Anyway, that stone effigy had been the only physical remnant of Bill Cipher—and today it stood partly buried in the forest soil, with grass sprouting all around it. It was cracked and lichens were spreading their slow way on it, and a pair of small birds, Anna's Hummingbirds, had built a miniscule cuplike nest, no bigger in diameter than a quarter, on the very top of the tall stone hat.
Dipper had left the stone figure standing and undisturbed. He had not wanted to touch it or even approach it—and nothing in the world would have made him grasp its outstretched stick-figure hand.
But no, whatever was robbing him of sleep right now had nothing to do with—
"Forty minutes. Now walk it out!" Wendy said beside him, and Dipper came back to some semblance of consciousness, realizing that they were slowing to a walk about halfway to the Shack. "I'm proud of you, Dipper. You didn't give up."
They walked the rest of the way, cooling off. Then Dipper let himself collapse face-down onto the grass. It needed a trim, which would probably be his job later that day. Right now, though, it felt soft and welcoming and smelled wonderful and fresh. If he'd been Mabel, he would have cheered, "Yay, grass!" and rolled in it, but that would have taken energy he didn't feel he had, and besides, he wasn't Mabel. "Try to do better tomorrow," he managed to tell Wendy, turning his head so he could speak.
Wendy hunkered down on the grass next to him and rubbed his back. "You got moxie, Dip! You know, now that we've got you broke in, it's actually bad training to go seven days a week straight. From now on we'll take two days a week off, OK? Let you recoup some of your stamina in between sessions. But we won't take the same two days off, just so's we keep your body on its toes, and they won't be consecutive. So this week, like, Wednesday off and then maybe Sunday. Next week, Tuesday and Saturday, and we'll back it up through the weeks. But I warn you, if you slack off even a tiny bit, we'll go back to seven a week!"
"I won't slack off," he promised, his voice a little shaky. She's touching me! She's rubbing my shoulders! Aggh! It's happening! I don't dare roll over right now. Maybe if I stay on my stomach it'll go away. "But I think I just need to lay here a little bit," he continued. "Uh, catch my breath, you know?"
"'Kay, dude. I'm gonna run in and grab a quick shower, then change for work. You gonna hang around the Shack today, or go out on some mystery quest again?"
"Don't know yet," Dipper said. "Probably stay here at least through noon. I'll have some yard work to catch up on. I'll let you know the rest of my plans when I find out if I can walk again."
She laughed and said, "Good deal!" Giving him a final encouraging pat on the back, she rose and went inside the Shack. Dipper lay still for a few more minutes until his problem had grown less rampant, and then he pushed himself up, slogged inside, showered, and changed for the day. Mabel had slept in and was just sitting down to breakfast when he came downstairs again. She was yawning and rubbing sleep from her eyes. "Morning," she said.
"Good morning," he returned.
She shook her head. "Nope. Nothing good about it. Just 'Morning.' Broman, why do you do this to yourself? Stay up all night, then get up before the sun—no wonder you have those big bags under your eyes."
"These aren't bags, OK?"
Mabel snorted. "Hah! You could pack for a trip to Bermuda with those bags!"
"No," he insisted. "They're just stress lines. And I get them because I worry about stuff."
Mabel looked at him with concern. "Yeah, you really do, bro. You haven't been contacting any more demons, have you? 'Cause I'm almost out of sock puppets."
"Bill wasn't a demon," Dipper said as he sat down with a bowl and reached for the box of Crunchy Banshee cereal ("So good you'll SCREEEEEAAAMMM for more!") and then the milk. "He was a being from another dimension."
"Yeah, who wanted to like destroy our world! And make all humans slaves. Why would an all-powerful interdimensional creature even want humans?" Mabel gasped. "Wait a minute! I'm a human! That's it! Bill did it all because he was secretly in love with me!"
"Way to make it all about yourself, Sis," Dipper said around a mouthful of crackly banshee-shaped cereal pieces. "Uh—" What had Wendy told him? "Dude, you and Mabel aren't as close since you're not sharin' a room any more. Try to talk to her more—and listen to her."
Even this morning, when every muscle ached and he felt as if any second he might flop face-down from sheer exhaustion and drown in his cereal bowl, having fallen fatally asleep? Make an effort to listen to Mabel? Really?
Yeah, really. Wendy had advised it. So Dipper said, "Uh, so what've you got planned for today, Mabel?"
"Planned! Hah!" Mabel sprayed a few soggy fragments of cereal when she laughed. "Don't you know me better than that? When do I ever plan stuff? I'm random Mabel! Random! Random! Random!"
"O-kay," Dipper said, wiping his face with a paper napkin. "So you're just gonna do, uh, random stuff? Want me to join in?"
"Aw, Dipper!" Mabel said in a softer tone. "Sure, that'd be great. Let's go play a few holes of golf after breakfast, and then Mabel will come up with some idea that we both will love!"
"Mini-golf right after I mow the lawn," he said. "I want to do that before it gets really hot."
Mabel cheerfully volunteered to help—she took the power mower, he took the old rotary push model—and they had both side yards tamed in about forty minutes. The back yard, in the shade of the forest trees, grew more slowly, so they gave it a pass. Mabel brought down a couple of beat-up golf balls and the putters, and they played nine quick holes. "You slaughtered me—as usual," Dipper said, totaling up the score. Twelve to twenty-two. How do you get all those holes in one, anyhow?"
Mabel shrugged. "Mm-uh. Just talent and practice." She grinned, leaning on her putter. "Uh-oh. I hear tourists coming!"
It was a little early for tourists, and sure enough, the car that rolled in proved to be Grunkle Stan's El Diablo, with both of their great-uncles in it. They got out, arguing as usual. Stanford said, "Stanley, you absolutely ran the red light!"
"Did not! It was clearly yellow right up until the hood ornament was directly under it!"
"But then it was red when the rest of the car went through the intersection!"
"Close don't count except in horseshoes, Ford!—Oh, hi, knuckleheads. How's it hangin'?"
"We just mowed the lawn!" Mabel told him. "Now Gompers is processing the clippings into mulch. That's a funny word! Mulch!"
Ford said, "Dipper, I think I have good news for you. Want to walk and talk?"
Well, no, not really, mostly because his legs felt as if someone had been whopping them with plastic baseball bats and the walking part was problematic, but he did want to talk, and so he said, "Sure."
They strolled out on the Mystery Trail that Stan had cut through the woods, where he showed tourists the strange and unique features of the Gravity Falls Forest, like the old and disused Outhouse of Mystery, which had the disconcerting habit of letting you out—after your private business had been settled—at a weird time. You might, for example, come out an hour before you went in. Then if you didn't return to it an hour later, horrible, unthinkable things happened to your digestive system. More usually, though, you'd come out an hour or two later that it should have been, which last summer had once prompted Stan to yell at him: "What are you doin' in there? Don't answer, you're a boy—I know!"
The other sights were perhaps less disgusting but not so very strange and weird, except to gullible tourists. When they had passed the outhouse, Ford said, "I re-checked the location of your magick-shop phenomenon this morning, Dipper, and the readings are down to normal, just a little background instability. No more than I'd find at the Shack, though."
"So—it's safe for me to go to the Arcade now?"
"I don't see why not. However, if the magic shop shows up again—by the way, how was the sign spelled?"
"M-A-G-I-C-K S-H-O-P."
"Hm. That figures. Well, at least it's not as bad as it could be. The 'K' shows us that the proprietor, whatever it may be, follows the Thelema Society convention of spelling the word with a final 'k' to differentiate it from sleight of hand and stage conjuring. The 'k' spelling is supposed to connote the real stuff. However, the fact that 'shop' is normally spelled is reason to think the proprietor may not be thoroughly evil."
"Uh—I don't understand." That was a confession Dipper did not often make—even when it was true—and speaking about his uncertainty even to his great-uncle Ford took some effort.
Ford shrugged. "Well, it could have been spelled 'S-H-O-P-P-E.'"
"Oh. And that would mean—?"
Grimly, Ford replied, "That the proprietor was not only unfathomably evil, but insufferably twee. The worst-case scenario, though, would be if the sign read 'Ye Olde Magick Shoppe.' That would be the mark of a truly sick, diabolical, and twisted mind. There's only one thing to do in a case like that."
"What?"
"Call Stanley in and have him burn it down."
Dipper gave a weak chuckle.
"However, I was saying if the shop shows up again, call me right away."
"Sure," Dipper said. "I will. Uh—could I talk to you about some weird dreams?"
Ford smiled at him. "Certainly. You can talk to me about anything. Oh, except for dancing and grasshoppers. I never learned to dance, and grasshoppers scare me."
"No dancing or grasshoppers," Dipper said, grinning. Then his expression became worried. "But, Grunkle Ford, a whole lot of death."
They sat on the log in the bonfire clearing while Dipper stumbled through a summary of his nightmare. Ford did not interrupt—nor did he look amused, or superior, or as if he were thinking of something else. That was, maybe, the biggest difference between him and Grunkle Stan: Ford always talked and listened to Dipper as one adult to another and never goofed around and joked at times when that might have made him feel uncomfortable.
"I see," Ford said thoughtfully when Dipper wound up his account. "Well, my first reaction is that your judgment was probably right when you thought that the funeral last week, together with your visiting the other grave sites, got you in that frame of mind. And there's Mabel's joking about wanting to date a vampire—"
"I . . . don't think she's joking," Dipper said.
Ford shrugged. "Perhaps not. She can be—indiscriminately enthusiastic in her pursuit of romance. However, in my experience true vampires are exceptionally rare, even in Gravity Falls. And if you do run across them, they tend to be saturnine and serious individuals who don't value levity. Speaking frankly, Dipper, I think Mabel's effect on a typical vampire would be roughly that of holding up a cross in one hand and a couple of cloves of garlic in the other."
"I hope so," Dipper muttered. "You know the weirdest thing? When I thought she was a vampire, and she jumped on me and bit my throat and I felt the puncture—well—Grunkle Ford, I—I kind of liked it!"
"That's the attraction of darkness," Ford said solemnly. "Believe me, I've felt the same thing. Those of us who explore the boundaries of mystery, who look great evil in the face and spurn it—we often feel a sneaking desire to give in to it. It's a kind of lure that we know we can't surrender to. Resist it. Be strong, Dipper. And, if I may make a suggestion, get your mind off mysteries and darkness and death for a few days. I think that will improve your mood more than you'd believe possible. Take a leaf from Mabel's book and just be silly and have fun. For example, I recently noticed a poster in the grocer's window stating that there's a dance on Friday evening in the teen center. Why not take Wendy?"
Dipper gave him a dubious glance. "I though you didn't know anything about dancing."
Ford laughed. "Well, in the sense that I can't give you instructions! But Wendy would enjoy it, and you'd be surprised how much better it might make you feel just to have one fun evening with someone you really like."
"I'll do it," Dipper told him.
Half an hour later, standing in the doorway of the gift shop, he told himself, I can't do it!
Wendy sat behind the counter, busily ringing up purchases—a couple of carloads of tourists had invaded the shop—and Soos in his Mr. Mystery garb and Grunkle Stan in his Hawaiian shirt were encouraging the customers to buy more merch. Ford had run into a forty-ish man who'd opened the conversation with "You know, this area has a sort of vibe to it. I didn't think there were any eerie places like this anywhere but in Indiana!"
"Oh? You're from Indiana?" Ford asked, sounding interested.
"Yes. Well, not originally, but I moved to a small, weird town there when I was a teen, and man, you wouldn't believe the strange things that I saw there."
"I'm Dr. Stanford Pines," Ford said, shaking the man's hand.
"My name's Teller."
"And what you said about my unbelief is not necessarily true. I study anomalies. Come and sit on the porch and tell me about your experiences."
And now they were out there chatting away a mile a minute.
After nearly three-quarters of an hour, the last tourist, clutching a big Mystery Shack shopping bag crammed with gewgaws, knickknacks, tchotchkes, and thingumabobs, smiled her way out of the shop, and Dipper nervously walked up to Wendy. "Busy, huh?"
"Tell me about it," she said, leaning back and rolling her eyes. "Whenever he's here, Stan, like, nearly breaks their arms to get them to buy. And he'll tell 'em, 'Why purchase just one chupacabra skull when you can get a second one half off? Think of what you could do with a pair!' And they, like, buy two! What can you do with a pair of chupacabra skulls?"
"Good point, good point," Dipper said. He coughed. "Ah—you know, or maybe you haven't heard yet, but there's a dance in the Center this Friday night. Or so I hear. So, I was kind of wondering, you know—"
Wendy raised her eyebrows and smiled at him in that way that made him feel everything inside his skin was melting. "Yeah?"
"I mean, we'd miss our movie night, you know, so maybe it's a bad idea, but then I was just thinking, and it won't upset me or anything if you don't want to, but—" Oh, man, I'm blowing it! Gotta stop babbling like an idiot! Say it. SAY IT! He took a deep breath. "I don't suppose you'd want to go with me?"
"Yeah, sure," Wendy said. "It's a date, dude."
Dipper ducked his head. "Well, that's OK anyway—wait, what?"
"I'll go with you, man."
His head had snapped back up, and for a second he stared at her with his mouth open. Then he smiled. "Oh. Uh. Great! Uh, Wendy? It's OK with me if when we're there you, you know, want to dance with other guys your age who're there and all. I'm not much good at dancing, I know that, and—"
"Dipper, stop talkin' yourself down, dude! We'll go and dance we'll have fun. I'll drive. Nobody's gonna judge you for actin' crazy on the dance floor! Everybody does it! If anybody tells us we're a weird couple, we'll smile and agree and just ignore them. And, hey, if it embarrasses you to have me drive you, we'll park around the corner and walk to the Center, OK?"
"It doesn't embarrass me," Dipper said, feeling oddly as if he wanted to cry. "Well. It's a, uh, it's—it's a date. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go outside and scream for a little while now."
Wendy laughed. "Just don't get itchy, man."
"I won't," he promised, finally grinning without forcing it.
He stepped out into the sunlight. A tour bus was just pulling in, and as the crowd spilled out, he called out cheerfully to them: "Hi, welcome to the Mystery Shack! Hey, have a great time, ma'am! You're gonna love this place. Take some souvenirs home! Kids, be sure to take the Mystery Trail tour! Tell 'em Dipper sent you! Enjoy!"
He chuckled as he watched them all crowd in. Then he spotted Mabel, out at the fringe of the woods, picking wildflowers, and walked over to her. "Hi, Sis. Hey, want to see the smallest bird nest in the world?"
Her eyes got big and round. "Does it have adorable birds in it?"
"Well, actually, I think the young ones have grown up and flown away. But the nest is so tiny, you won't believe it. Only one thing: It's stuck on top of the petrified Bill Cipher."
Mabel puffed out her cheeks and made her tongue go Pfbbbbbt! "I've seen that before. I'm not afraid of that!"
Dipper chuckled. "You're not afraid of anything."
"Nope. And neither are you. Mystery Twins!"
They fist-bumped. Dipper thought fleetingly about telling Mabel of his upcoming, incredible, very real, actual first date ever—but no, he didn't want to boast. Maybe he could simply mention the dance in a casual way and possibly Mabel could find a date, too.
Shouldn't be hard. She had two days. In that time Mabel could run through at least four potential romances.
So he brought it up, and she enthusiastically said she was sure she could find some boy to escort her, or better yet, she'd go alone and that way she'd have her pick of the wall-leaners. "There's always a ton of shy boys waiting at the edges. And that's where Mabel goes trawling for hotties!" she announced.
Dipper encouraged her, thinking what a surprise it would be for her to spot him and Wendy out on the dance floor. They walked down the path, around the Bottomless Pit, and through the woods laughing and chattering and it was like old times.
This is more like it, Dipper thought. The mysterious shop is gone, Mabel's her old self, the sun is shining. And Wendy's going on a date! With me!
Maybe I've turned a corner.
Maybe everything will be fine.