"-sh Wheel had the hugest hair, you should have seen him, Dipper! Almost as big as Gideon's!" As Wirt climbed downstairs, staring at the white void where his feet should have been, he started to hear the girl's voice.
Greg wasn't watching them yet, though; he seemed transfixed by a mounted fish on the wall that a gift shop customer was watching. The customer, a little mustached man, kept pressing a button and giggling when the fish started to sing.
"I thought we were listening to Dipper and Mabel, Greg."
"Just a sec! I don't know what this salmon's selling, but I'm buying," Greg said. Wirt harrumped and walked to the twins to hear them easier.
"Now that could be a game show all in itself." Dipper, perched on a barrel near the check-out counter of the gift shop, balled a fist and deepened his voice. "Two huge hairdos fight for dominance! Two 'dos enter, one 'do leaves!"
"The winner shaves the loser's head!" Mabel narrowed her eyes. "After they kill them."
"Too dark, Mabel, dial it back a notch." Dipper laughed.
Mabel giggled. "Sorry, sorry. You know game shows always bring out my bloodlust." She tried to make her voice scary and failed miserably.
"Hard to believe you and Stan are related."
"Sarcasm's not your strong point," Mabel said. She was playing with the hooves of a chubby pig that Greg began fawning over once the salmon shut up. The tour group was thinning out by now and the few remaining customers gave Mabel an odd look, but a pig running around indoors was just more of the hick charm of this place. Or so Wirt guessed.
"Why is there a pig inside?" he still asked Greg tiredly.
Greg shrugged. "Why is there a frog inside?" He held up Jason Funderburker for emphasis.
As a customer left the shop, Dipper pulled his book from an inner pocket of his vest along with a pen. Mabel groaned. "Can't you leave that thing alone for one day? It's got us in enough trouble."
Dipper clicked the pen a few times. "We've got some downtime now, right? And I still haven't written about the Bill thing. I want to do it while it's fresh in my mind."
Seeing his chance, Wirt hurried to Dipper's side. But Greg had the same idea and they were squished against each other for a second-or, more accurately, through each other. They still couldn't touch anything as ghosts, and their body parts phased through. It was weird and uncomfortable and Wirt scooted back, leaving Greg to stare at the book as Dipper flipped through it.
"Dinosaurs!" Greg said, sticking a finger in between the pages.
"Wait, really?" Wirt said, trying to get a better look, but the page was already covered up. Instead, there was a page covered in pink handwriting with a disturbing caricature of Dipper, if Dipper was a ticked-off priest stuck in the middle of a tornado. "Woah," Wirt said at the same time Dipper did.
"You wrote an entry about him?" Dipper said to Mabel, stunned.
Mabel stopped playing with her pig and turned away. "Yeah, it was just… it was really scary. And I knew you'd want to write about it but you were asleep, so…"
Dipper scanned the page. He seemed to be a much faster reader than Wirt. Before Wirt had finished the first page, Dipper drew his hand across the open book. Wirt grit his teeth, annoyed, since the hand covered most of the text.
"You didn't have to do that." Dipper sounded touched.
"Yeah, well, just read the last bit."
Dipper's hand moved again and Wirt nudged in closer, reading over his shoulder. There was a note taped in the book, and once he'd read the first two sentences, Wirt said, "Greg, don't read this" warningly.
"I wanna see!" Greg said.
"No way, you're too little for this," he said, feeling cold as he read some of the more horrifying bits of the note. It was written by someone else, someone who wasn't Dipper or Mabel-and it seemed obvious to Wirt that Bill was the one describing his possession and intended suicide. Definitely not kid stuff. "Go investigate the pig or something."
"If there were clues, they would be hidden in a pig," Greg agreed reluctantly.
"Wait, wait, it says something here-'his mental form will wander in the mindscape forever,'" Wirt read cautiously. "Is that what happened to Dipper? And to us?"
"Dipper's not wandering anywhere forever," Greg disagreed. "He's right here."
"Right. He managed to figure out a way to get… un-possessed. But we weren't possessed." Wirt's spirits sank. This felt like a dead end. "This isn't anything like our situation."
Dipper spoke then. "You owe me ice cream sandwiches?" He closed the book.
"For a week starting now," Mabel confirmed.
"That is something I would have killed for in the mindscape." Dipper put his book away again, though he kept his pen out, chewing on the cap idly.
"What was that like, anyway?" Mabel said slowly. "Could you, like, see me the whole time?"
Dipper shook his head. "Part of it? It was like I was a ghost. Just, y'know, floating around. I couldn't feel anything or touch anything, and my feet were all white? I couldn't even touch myself.
"When I made the deal with Bill, he just yanked me out of my body. At first I was just following him around to try and keep him from stabbing me with forks or whatever. Then I was mostly floating around town 'cuz it's not like ghosts can ride in cars."
"I dunno, I read this one story on the internet where-" Mabel started.
"Okay, mindscape ghosts can't ride in cars," he corrected. "I wasn't dead or anything though. I mean, I don't think," he said with a frown. "I didn't get any special ghost powers like the Dusk-2-Dawn ghosts."
"You got sock puppet powers!"
"Well, yeah. So I was following Bill around and then I tried to find you, but Bill said I couldn't be heard without a vessel, so while you were busy with the play…"
"You missed the first act?" Mabel asked, hurt.
Dipper deflated. "I mean, I think Grunkle Stan was recording it?"
"We're watching that whole thing asap," she said decisively. "And then I'm posting the recording on your Guide to the Unexplained channel."
Dipper considered the idea. "As long as I get to edit it."
"We'll see!"
As Dipper and Mabel talked, Wirt looked over at Greg with a huge grin. "Did you hear that?"
"Yessir, loyal sidekick!" Greg said, watching the pet pig intently. "But what does 'snort oink' mean in human language?"
"No!" Wirt shook his head. "Dipper was saying that a g-something like us could be heard through a vessel! And the book kept talking about possession…"
"Possessel a vessel?" Greg wrapped his tongue around the unfamiliar words.
"No, possessing a vessel. A vessel is, well, technically it's anything you carry something in, like a vase is a vessel for flowers and water. Or sometimes it's a ship. But I think in this case it's talking about a body. And possessing means to hold something, but, like, I'm pretty sure this Bill guy took over Dipper's body? But Dipper got back, and I think he found some other body to take over to talk to Mabel about it for help," Wirt thought out loud, gesturing, as Greg floated away from him. "I wonder if that means we could talk to them? And have them hear us, I mean, and they could figure out how to get us home. But we'd need some kind of body and it would have to be empty because I don't think I could stand the ethical ramifications of overriding a conscious being's will, even temporarily. But it is an emergency, but then again, we've done just fine for ourselves so far, and… Greg?"
But Greg, as usual, wasn't there anymore. Wirt was about to call for him, but he was cut off-and so were Dipper and Mabel, deep in puppet-related conversation.
"I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."
Dipper and Mabel looked up at the same time. "I thought Tyler was our last customer," Mabel said, glancing around the empty store.
"He was," Dipper said, coming out from behind the counter. "Hello? Gift shop's closing soon!" he said, pushing aside clothes in racks to find their hidden guest.
"I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'." The mounted fish craned its neck away from the wall with a motorized squeal, its mouth flopping open and closed like a puppet's.
"There's no one over there to push the button, Dipper," Mabel pointed out.
"Don't tell me that thing's broken." Dipper dragged his hand down his face. "I'm not spending the next week listening to the freaking salmon. I'm taking the batteries out."
"I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'." The fish stared straight forward through cheesy plastic sunglasses.
"Not for long, you're not," Dipper said, prying the salmon off the wall and pulling an AA battery out of its compartment. "Ha!" he said, tossing the battery toward the trash can and missing.
"I'm the singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin'."
Dipper and Mabel looked at each other wordlessly. Both were confused. Dipper brought the salmon to the shop's counter.
"That's… weird…" Mabel said cautiously.
She reached forward, but Dipper grabbed her hand. "Maybe, maybe don't push that button?"
The singin' salmon craned its neck forward again. Its sunglasses fell off, leaving the Hawaiian-shirted fish's dead eyes to bore into Dipper's and then Mabel's, unblinking.
"Dipper," it said slowly, agonizingly, with a mechanical screech. "Mabel." Wirt barely recognized it as Greg's voice underneath a haunting echo.
In identical high pitches, Dipper and Mabel screamed.