Ghost Consultant
Chapter 8: Nervous
(September 29, 2016)
On Thursday Dipper began to attract attention with his five o'clock shadow. His mom nagged him a little about his appearance, but he said, "I just want to look like a college student when I go up to Gravity Falls." She shook her head but seemed to accept that.
He definitely had a bristle of whiskers, and at school a couple of the girls gave him speculative glances, as if he had just materialized and they had not been aware of his presence before.
That morning at ten, Stan called the Pines parents with a request to fill out an assessment of needs form for him. "It's short. I got it from the college, and Sheila's showin' me how to put it in an email, so I'm sending it to you right now. Just download it, fill it out, ya know, ballpark figures, but be ready to back 'em up with tax return copies if the college asks, and then email it back to me as an attachment. A PDQ will be fine."
"PDF?" Alex Pines asked with a grin. It was one of his work-from-home days, a perk now that he had received another promotion.
"Yeah, that's just as good," Stan replied. "Look, this is one of those red-tape dealies, mostly just busy work but mandatory, OK? I mean, with his savings, Dip's already covered for college, though that dumb place costs a nominal egg. But they provisionally granted him a scholarship that'll also help, and this will just confirm that, and hey, don't look in a horse's mouth when he's got money in his pocket, am I right?"
"Nominal egg?" Alex asked.
"An arm and a leg," Stan said more clearly. "Email's sent."
The one-page document wasn't hard to fill out, so Mr. Pines quickly completed it and emailed it back to Stan, who printed it out and then crumpled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket. He told Alex by return email, "I filed it, thanks."
On that same Thursday at the Institute of Anomalous Sciences, Ford had lunch with Dr. Edward Carroll, who had made an exhaustive study of apparition and ghost phenomena for thirty years and who had written six authoritative books in the field. He was a stellar find for the Institute, an accomplished and respected academic already retired at fifty-eight, but bored in retirement, and he'd jumped at the appointment to the faculty when Ford offered it.
"I'm honored to accept, but I honestly don't know how many years of teaching I've got left in me," he'd warned Ford when he offered the job.
"I'll take as many as you have," Ford had replied.
Whatever, the work had rejuvenated a bored Carroll, who proved to be energetic, brilliant, and inspiring in his lessons and who now looked like he'd have at a minimum another twelve years of teaching left in him.
As they carried their lunch trays into the President's small conference room that noon, Carroll said, "Dr. Pines, I don't think I've yet properly thanked you for talking me into coming out of retirement. I must say, in thirty years in the field, I have never taught anywhere half as collegial, stimulating, and accepting as here. It's refreshing!"
"Call me Ford, please," Stanford said as they sat down. "Edward, I knew from the beginning that you'd be a wonderful professor. Your students speak glowingly of you."
Carroll, a short, slight man with a pepper-and-salt goatee and a fringe of graying hair, smiled. "My friends call me Ted. And that's kind of the young people. I find them hard workers. It will be difficult at the end of term to turn in grades that describe a perfect bell curve! They're all either exceptionally bright or industrious enough to make up the difference."
As he took the lid off his cup of coffee, Ford said, "Edward—forgive me, Ted— if you want to award every single student of yours an A in your classes, I won't bat an eye. If you give it, I'll know they deserved it."
For a little time they concentrated on their food. Both were abstemious eaters—a small salad for each, and then Ford had a cup of vegetable soup, a chicken sandwich on whole-grain bread, and a fruit cup, while Carroll ate a vegetarian lunch of lentils, steamed vegetables, and scalloped potatoes, followed by a bowl of cut melons, cantaloupe and honeydew.
While they ate, they discussed school concerns and needs, and then at the end of the meal, Ford said, "I know you haven't any classes scheduled until later this afternoon. Do you have a free hour to chat?"
"Certainly, Ford," Carroll said. "It's a bit early in term to have student appointments, and I put a note on my office door that I'm away at lunch. What is the subject of our chat?"
"A type of poltergeist, I think," Ford said. "But one with some disturbing elements. Ted—speaking now as Dr. Carroll, because I want your expertise and a straightforward assessment—how often does a threatening poltergeist actually resort to physical violence against people?"
Tilting his head back and tenting his fingers, Carroll said, "Interesting question. I could merely cite cases, of course, but you're as familiar with them as I am. You're asking me for a judgment call. Well, let me think. You're aware that some so-called poltergeist cases seem to be something different. The classic concept of a poltergeist is an annoying post-carnate ghost. A ghost that refuses to believe it is dead, that remains in its former habitation, and that resents living people as trespassers and intruders and tries to frighten them away. That type of poltergeist seems either incapable of doing serious harm, or else averse to doing so. Here's an obscure case from Germany, though: Are you familiar with the Leichenschauhaus occurrence in the year 1946?"
Ford repeated the name. "No, it's strange to me. I recognize the term, though—'Inquest house.' I believe that means 'morgue.'"
"Yes, it does." Carroll said. "It was in, if I recall correctly, a suburb of Mainz, I forget the name of the community. Anyway, the locale had suffered badly during the last year of the war, when an Allied bombing raid went badly off-course during bad weather and dropped its bombs there by mistake instead of on the military target thirty miles away."
"Tragic,"" Ford said.
"Indeed. It annihilated half the small community. As for the Leichenschauhaus, which was isolated, the building had been badly damaged, and following the end of the war, a group of people made enough makeshift repairs to establish a kind of communal dormitory where the morgue had stood, using just the shell of the original building. A poltergeist outbreak erupted there in the winter of 1946 January, if I recall."
"What were the manifestations?" asked Ford.
"Well, the two dozen or so men who slept there were mainly laborers—masons, glaziers, carpenters, and so on—who were struggling to rebuild the village with inadequate tools and supplies. The disturbances began as the usual knocking and pounding noises, keeping the exhausted men from their sleep. Some of them were Catholic, and they called in a priest to perform an exorcism. It failed spectacularly."
"How so?" Ford asked.
"The priest exploded."
Ford's jaw dropped. "What!"
Carroll nodded, his expression solemn. "According to the story, the priest had barely begun to pray when his body violently blew apart. There was very little left that was recognizably human. Three of the workers were killed and another dozen injured. They had been onlookers, you understand. The official explanation was that an unexploded bomb went off, but the surviving witnesses swear that the explosion came from within the poor man—as though he had swallowed a grenade, one of the injured men said. The building was immediately abandoned and later demolished and the area paved over. It is, I believe, a parking lot today. There have been no more sounds from the supposed poltergeist."
Ford adjusted his spectacles. "Supposed? It wasn't an actual poltergeist, then?"'
Carroll stroked his short beard. His voice became soft and musing. "No one knows. However, I believe it was not." He grimaced. "You see, I haven't told you the whole story. The place had a small prison during the war, and the morgue was part of that. Prison is the wrong term. It was a prisoner-of-war camp. The few hundred inmates were captured allies from France, Norway, England, and the United States who all shared only one characteristic. That all but guaranteed their death in captivity. Can you guess?"
"They were all Jewish," Ford said.
"I'm sorry, Ford," Carroll replied.
"Well—I'm not an observant member of the faith," Ford said. "Still—for someone like me, it hits hard."
"I know it does, and I'm sorry. Now, I would wager you've read the works of Peter von Bredow."
"Certainly," Ford said. "Every paranormal researcher has."
"They're classics. But if you've read every word von Bredow ever published, you've still never read his discussion of that case, for the simple reason that he never wrote it. However, I met him once in Cologne—he was quite old by then, in his nineties, but still sound of mind—and he told me the details of his investigation, which he performed a year following the priest's death. He concluded that the force behind the murders—no other term fits—was not a ghost at all, but what he called a rachegeist. It was not the soul of any individual, but rather a disembodied spirit that had never lived in a body, a type of elemental, one that was never human but that gained its existence, its power and purpose and a degree of sentience, from the formidable emotions of rage, despair, and terror. It could not or did not discriminate between good people and bad, but struck out blindly at any human within range."
Ford drew in a deep, nervous breath. "As you may suspect, I have a case in mind. And this is new territory for me."
"Fortunately, these manifestations are among the rarest," Carroll said. "Are you investigating personally?"
"No, no, it's halfway across the country, and time won't permit. I'm sending someone—well, a family member who's had some experience, but now I'm quite nervous about the prospect."
"I'll offer any help I can give," Carroll said. "I'd even offer to go myself, but—well, I made one terrible mistake ten years ago, and I swore off that kind of thing. I can pass on to you what Von Bredow told me about detecting and dealing with a rachegeist, however."
"Rachegeist," Ford said. "Spirit of revenge. How does one combat such a thing?"
"How does one fight fire?" asked Carroll, a smile quirking up his mustache.
Ford looked blank for a moment. "With . . . fire? I know the old saying, but how would that help in the case of—of—an emo-elemental?"
"I have some ideas," Carroll said.
Here is the difference between Dipper and Mabel at school:
Dipper had taken a state-wide first place in the hundred-meter dash. His teammates complimented him. But the next time he was at school, he walked the corridors and everyone around him acted as if they couldn't see him.
Mabel successfully tried out for the part of Eliza Doolittle. The next day in school, she couldn't go five steps without someone calling out, "Way to go, Mabel!" or "Gratz, girl!" Girls wanted her to tell the whole story: Had she been scared? Who was playing Higgins? Was he scrumpt? And so on and so on. Guys wanted to give her a fist-bump or even a hug. Lots of guys, lots of hugs.
Dipper didn't feel envious, exactly, but he did have a sense that the admiration was a little loaded in Mabel's favor. No matter. She had earned it.
And anyway—now the girls noticed he had scruff! A lot of the girls he knew only slightly paused in passing and complemented him: "Whoa, Dipper! Good look for you!" said Alma Westbrook as he walked into his calc class. And at lunch, Dewayneda (OK, her dad had wanted a son to name after himself) McCall came right up to him and caressed his cheek with a warm palm. "I love a short beard!" she told him.
Amazing. Yet—the look was temporary, and he had to admit that without the benefit of Mabel's little cosmetic stick, much of the effect would be lost.
True, he had to shave every day if he wanted to keep his face smooth, but a lot of the whiskers were so fair in color that they were hard to see without that brow-fluffer effect.
The teachers probably noticed, but they didn't comment. Unlike some other schools, Piedmont was pretty liberal on dress-code and grooming-code matters. Generally a few Senior boys tried out that kind of look, but almost always they gave it up after a week or so—they couldn't really produce a full crop yet, and their beards looked dismally patchy.
After school, Mabel drove Dipper to a hair salon (U.S. Hairforce) and hovered just behind the cosmetician as she trimmed and styled Dipper's hair. Dipper caught his reflection in the mirror—he looked a lot like he had done on the few times when he'd been Mr. Mystery, but his hair was swept back further and lay with a few natural waves. His birthmark was obvious.
He had plenty of the Pancote, though. In the car Mabel smoothed some on with her fingertips. "This stuff is amazing!" she said. "It would make a killer acne cover-up! Where'd you buy it?"
"I didn't," he admitted. "Grunkle Ford sent it to me."
"Tell him I want a steady supply!" Mabel tilted her head. "OK, Bro, a little constructive criticism?"
"Sure," he said, surprised.
"The cheeks and chin are looking promising, but keep shaving your neck, OK? Something about neck beards just shrieks 'Teen trying way too hard.'"
"I'll start shaving my neck the minute you get us home," he said.
Back home, another package awaited him: black suit, crisp white shirt, black tie, shiny shoes. All in his exact sizes.
He hung up the suit, tie looped around the hanger, and then went to the bathroom to take care of the neck stubble. He also wiped off the forehead makeup—it took a dab of Mabel's cold cream to dislodge it.
He tried on the clothes, Mabel admired them, though she did say they made him look like an apprentice mortician who catered to the Mafia. He carefully packed them for the trip the next afternoon.
Dipper did his homework, had dinner with the family, and then did his normal face-time chat with Wendy just past eight, catching her just after she finished washing the Corduroy dinner dishes.
And right away she noticed little changes. "Workin' on a new look, Dip?" she asked with a grin. "You got your hair combed back and you've showing kind of a five o'clock shadow. Not bad, man. I could get to like it."
It made him nervous, but the time had come. "It's kind of a disguise," he said. "Grunkle Ford wants me to help him with an investigation, and I have to pose as a trainee Agent to do it."
Wendy's expression immediately grew serious. And her voice sounded seriously concerned. "Dude, is this gonna be dangerous? One of those times when Ford underestimates the risk?"
"I don't think so," Dipper said. "Not as dangerous as that Holy Mackerel lodge ghost, anyway. It seems more like a poltergeist, one of those noisy, aggravating phantoms."
"Peeves, huh?" Wendy asked. She grinned as he blinked. "Come on, everybody's read those books Too bad he wasn't in the movies! Listen, I won't pry into it right now, 'cause I know Ford's got a bug about secrecy and all, but afterward, I want some details, OK?"
"You'll be the first to get them," he promised.
"Mabes going with you to investigate? Mystery Twins?"
"Not this time. It's some distance off," Dipper said.
"I'm likin' this less and less, man. Makes me nervous A.F. Nobody's got your back?"
"There'll be a regular Agent along," Dipper said.
She still looked dissatisfied. "Well—look, can I fly down and help out?"
He sighed. "Every part of me wants to say yes, but—that won't be possible, Wendy. I'm so sorry."
She shook her head. "All right, I won't argue. I'm gonna trust you to take care of yourself, though, man. What would I do if something happened to you just a month after I accepted your ring? I'd, like, turn into that Miss Havisham. Lock myself up and put a wedding cake on the table to rot!"
"I'll be extra careful," Dipper said. "I love you, Lumberjack Girl."
She gave him a melancholy, sweet smile. "Back at you, Big Dipper."
