Bridges
(Late July, 2014)
Chapter 7: Monsters of the Mind
The creatures' bodies were swirls of India ink poured into clear water, strings and clots and twirling ribbons of midnight in the morning sun, sketching humanoid forms that endlessly shifted and spun—
The three—ghosts, wraiths, whatever they were, ran from the base of the waterfall toward Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy. "Behind me, dudes!" yelled Wendy, brandishing her axe. "Dipper, get Mabel to safety!"
Dipper pushed his sister behind him, but he reached for two folded sections of the tent ribs, gripping one in each hand, like the eskrima sticks used in Filipino kali fighting.
The monstrous inky things, whatever they were, split, two going to the left, one to the right, as if to encircle the kids. Wendy had backed them away from the water's edge. When the closest one charged her, she swung her axe, decapitating it—
But the head tumbled like cotton candy on a breeze, and the body merely streaked to re-join it. "There's nothin' to them!" Wendy shouted. "Like fighting smoke!"
"Grappling hook!" Mabel snapped, firing hers through the belly of one of the other two, charging with wide-spread arms. Like Wendy, she split it—this time cleanly in two—and the torso went spinning crazily until the hips and legs ran after it, caught up to it, and they re-joined.
The third creature approached Dipper, ominous and silent, head lowered. Though it had no eyes, it somehow stared at him, and he knew it wanted him dead. It stalked toward him, slowly, stretching out a clutching long-fingered hand—
Wendy's axe swooshed through, severing it at the elbow!
"Back to back!" Wendy said. "Hold 'em off! Dipper, you got anything?"
"No spells or anything!" He took a deep breath. "Help us now!" he yelled.
It wasn't exactly a chant or a spell or a prayer, but he said it from the heart, thinking of Mabel and how good she could be, how she memorialized her favorite teacher and stood beside him and always had his back. And Wendy, resenting all the work her family forced her to do—but doing it doggedly, seeing it through. I'm the weak one, he thought. But if ever I tried to help others, help us now!
The inky shapes slowly circled them, almost as though goating, anticipating the kill.
The treetops began to thrash.
Dipper heard a roaring sound like the waterfall, but coming from high up, from the sky. The shapes froze and then turned and fled back onto the surface of the beaver pond, their feet making no mark on the face of the water as they rushed toward the waterfall—
"Yah!" Wendy had yelled, then turned and dived, her arms pushing both Dipper and Mabel to the ground, as a great wind slammed into the earth, whipping the calm surface of the beaver pond to churning white water.
Dipper caught his breath and grabbed Wendy's trapper hat—the wind had swept it off her head, and he barely caught it. Her hair streamed out like the tail of a comet—
The wind hit the trio of fleeing ink-shapes, ripped them apart, blasted the smoky shreds of them against the face of the cliff opposite—
And then everything went quiet—except for splatters of wind-raised water falling back into the pond. Wendy gasped, "You OK?"
"Everything hurts," Mabel groaned, but she sat up and retracted the line of her grappling hook.
Dipper pushed himself upright, gasping. "I'm OK," he said. "Here's your hat."
She clapped it onto her disheveled head. "Thanks, dude. Lucky yours stayed on."
"My head kinda pinned it to the ground," Dipper said. Wendy stood up and held out her hands to help the twins to their feet.
Mabel rubbed the back of her head and then waved, grinned, and yelled, "Hi there! How are you?"
Dipper looked at her. She was waving both hands cheerfully. He looked around—and thirty yards away, across the pond and standing beside the waterfall he saw the guy Wendy had described, bearded, wearing a ratty gray Stetson-type hat—and carrying a rifle or shotgun.
"Let's get out of here," he said.
They retreated up the slope and into the forest. "Man," Wendy said, "my hair's, like, a mess!" She tugged at the snarls and tangles.
"Not important right now," Dipper said, ducking to peek around a tree. "Getting away from here is."
"Is he following us?" Mabel asked.
"No. Just standing there."
"Come on," Wendy told them.
They struggled through dense woods that stood in heavy, soft leaf mould and shared the space with impenetrable stands of ferns, thick clusters of mushrooms and toadstools, vines, and other plants that Dipper didn't recognize. Wendy, though, muttered, "Boxwood. Salmonberry. Hawkweed. Man, this is real old-growth underbrush! And the trees—like they've never been harvested. I don't like this."
"Let's get back to the car," Mabel said. "Those ghosty things—I think they were after us."
"What did we do, though?" Dipper asked. "I mean, ghosts have a purpose! Like remember the Duskertons? All they wanted was to keep teenagers out of their store!"
"Yeah, and last year for us to clean up the mess we made," Wendy reminded him.
"No," Mabel corrected her. "Cleaning up was Dipper's idea. He offered. We were just gonna warn them that people were planning to bulldoze their store."
"But they didn't bulldoze it," Dipper said. "See, that's my point—the ghosts wanted to protect their store, and they did. They had a purpose. So why were those, I don't know, wraiths, whatever, after us? We haven't done anything!"
They reached a small clearing and stopped to rest. Mabel said, "Wendy, let me put your hair in a braid. Otherwise it's gonna keep snagging and picking up twigs and junk."
"We don't have time," Dipper said.
"Yeah, we do! I work fast."
Sure enough, in just a few minutes Mabel had plaited Wendy's long red hair into four braids, two of them making a kind of coronet around her head, then falling to join the others down her back.
Dipper couldn't' stop staring. "You look good," he said.
"Only thing," Wendy said, "I can't hide my axe sheath under it now."
"I don't think that matters," Dipper said. "In fact, if I were you, I'd just hold my axe out in plain sight."
"Good point. And Dip—here's the hatchet. Tell you what, we've worked downstream a good ways now. Let's get out of the woods and follow the bank of the beaver pond. The beaver dam shouldn't be far, and then it'll be just a mile to the car. The goin' will be easier out in the open."
They had to hack their way through a couple of fern jungles, but they finally came to the edge of the woods. The voice of the waterfall had become a distant, constant thunder. The beaver pond had broadened out, but its bank still remained grassy. "The beavers keep the trees trimmed," Mabel said. "Look, they made little hills of sticks in the water."
"Beaver lodges," Wendy said. "They live in those."
"Huh. Convenient to where they work. Good idea!"
Dipper kept looking back anxiously, but he could see only the upper part of the waterfall—rocks and cliffs now intervened—and he could glimpse no trace of the prospector, if that's what the man with the weapon was.
"There's the bridge in the distance," Wendy said grimly. "But look at it."
It looked—well, not new, but not ruinous, either. The roof held onto its sheathing of cedar shingles, and none seemed to be missing. The main structure wore a flaking coat of whitewash, and no tree protruded from the entrance. They'd have to go up a long, gradual slope to get to the place where Wendy had parked the Dart. Now Dipper could smell smoke as well as see the drifting columns—the sour tinge of burning oak.
Stands of tall grass and weeds, chest-high, still choked their way, forcing them to wind in and out, taking a tortuous path. They passed through a crowded thicket of alder saplings, squeezing their way through. Wendy stopped at one point and looked down. "Huh. Scat."
"What are you shooing off?" Mabel asked.
"No," Wendy said absently. "Scat. Animal droppings. Poop. In this case, bobcat."
"Bobcat?" Dipper asked nervously.
"Ooh, kitties!" Mabel said.
"Definitely not cuddly," Wendy told her. "Bobcats are wild animals, Mabes. Lynxes. Pretty rare, but I've seen a couple now and then. They grow up to about thirty pounds or so, and they're dangerous. One can take down a deer. You see one, avoid it."
"Shh! There's a deer," Mabel whispered.
Dipper held his breath. They had pushed through the thicket and now only a scatter of tall ferns lay between them and the crest of their climb. Just beyond the ferns, on the hillside and maybe fifty feet away, a doe grazed. Her head came up, long ears alert and turned in their direction. "Whitetail," Wendy whispered. "Young one. Lucky we're downwind of her or we'd spook—oh, my God!"
Dipper grabbed her arm, not believing what he'd just seen.
The deer's head had arched back—and then it thudded to earth, severed and the neck spurting blood, and he heard a horrendous crunch. Something had—had bitten the deer's body off from the neck back, had eaten the deer almost whole—something—
"It's invisible," Mabel whispered, sounding shaken.
They could hear something snuffling and grunting. They could see the grass stirring as unseen feet crushed it. The invisible creature seemed to shamble aimlessly. Now and again they heard the sickening crunch of bone being crushed between great heavy teeth. "This way," Wendy said. "Real slow. Dipper, hold my hand."
They edged as silently as they could back behind the ferns.
—Wendy, what's going on?
Don't know, dude. Some kind of evil creature. This is more your thing.
—It's crazy, it's not some ordinary monster—this and the wraiths are more like magical creatures, like the ones Ford and I fought when Probabilator came to life.
Come on—I don't hear whatever it is now. Car's right up here.
Except it wasn't. They couldn't even find the clear patch where they'd parked—saplings grew right up against the—well, the road was missing, too. Now it was only a rough-cut wagon track, weedy, deep-rutted, and muddy.
"We've gone back in time," Mabel said.
"I think you're right," Dipper agreed. "Wendy, remember we told you about Blendin Blandin and how we first met him? We got flipped back to, like, 1860. Wound up in a covered wagon."
"I taught Fertilia how to high-five," Mabel added helpfully.
"This—this sort of feels like that."
"Huh," Wendy said. "Well—this isn't the weirdest place I've been with you two. There was that funky cartoon-show dimension. I mean the ones where Gravity Falls was just a TV cartoon and we were so chunky and solid."
"And we all had five fingers," Mabel said. "I wonder what happened to Brad? He was nice. He made a good Soos."
"We have five fingers now," Dipper pointed out. "What are we gonna do? How do we get back?"
"You said there must be some purpose," Wendy reminded him. "We find what it is and, I don't know, fulfill it."
"Yeah," Mabel said, still hung up on the earlier subject, "but we just grew our fifth fingers recently! In that comic-con dimension, we always had them. Or the bodies we were in always had them. You know, winning the costume contest second place was fun, but we deserved first place!"
"Mabel," Dipper said, "aren't you worried? We got chased by those—black inky things! We just saw something huge and invisible bite a deer in two! We may be lost in time! And you're complaining about not winning a costume prize?"
"Arts and crafts," she reminded him primly, "are my life."
"What do we do, what do we do?" Dipper asked.
Wendy hitched up her jeans. "I say we go into the town of Plenty," she said. "If we really are in old-timey days, that must be where the smoke's comin' from. We'll be among people there, and safer, while we figure out what to do. And now we can cross the bridge, 'cause it's not falling-down rotten."
"But—it's the Bridge of Death," Dipper pointed out.
"It's just a name, Dipper."
"Wait a minute," Mabel said. "When we used Blendin's time-travel tape and wound up on the Oregon Trail, we kinda stood out. I think Dipper and I ought to change clothes."
And so—they did. Dipper took off his pine-tree hat and pulled on a long-sleeved shirt he'd brought in case the nights were cold. Like Dipper, Mabel was wearing jeans, but now she took off the colorful T-shirt and exchanged it for a plain white one of Dipper's. She also had Wendy braid her hair—two braids, falling over her shoulders and tied with ribbon bows, like the ones she'd seen in drawings of Native American princesses. Wendy hung her and Mabel's backpacks and the tent roll high in the canopy of an oak, the tallest one around, but Dipper kept his backpack—"Remember, Broseph, it's a haversack now," Mabel cautioned him—with a few necessities in it.
Then, cautiously, they emerged on the trail, Dipper gripping the hatchet, Wendy with her axe, Mabel with her grappling hook. They went a few hundred yards down the winding track—and ahead of them gaped the dark entrance of the Bridge of Death.
But between them and the bridge lay the severed head of the hapless deer, the eyes glazing.
And somewhere—somewhere nearby—
Something invisible and evil and deadly lurked.
