Beneath the Stars

Chapter 11

Dipper's facial rash faded some and he breathed much more easily after Stan carried him back to the Stanleymobile. He put the muddy, unconscious Dipper in the back seat, where he lay on his side–"Eh, upholstery can be cleaned"–and he, Ford, and Tremaine crowded into the front.

Mabel had her phone out and as she slipped uneasily into the back seat next to her brother–she was just as muddy as Dipper–she hit the speed-dial for Wendy. "Mabes!" the redhead said urgently, "Is–"

"He's OK," Mabel said.

Mabel felt the redhead's relief in her voice: "Oh, thank God! Can I talk to him?"

"Not yet," Mabel said, fastening her seatbelt and raising Dipper's head while she shoulder-held the phone. "He's kinda out of it, but he's gonna be all right."

Gasping, sounding as if she were about to sob, Wendy asked, "You sure, now?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. We'll bring him back to you, Wendy. Don't worry."

As the El Diablo wove its way mostly downhill along the winding road, Mabel sat cradling Dipper's head in her lap until, halfway to the Shack, he opened his eyes and in a weak voice asked, "Where–where are we? What's going on?" He straightened up in the seat, unsteady at first, and fumbled until he'd fastened his seat belt.

"Welcome back to the land of the livin', kid!" Stan called over his shoulder.

"What happened?" Dipper asked, his head bobbing as though he were dizzy.

"You got zapped by some horrible buggy alien thingy!" Mabel told him. "Now we're taking you to the doctor to get checked."

Dipper squirmed. "Ouch! My butt really hurts."

"It's nothing," Mabel told him. "You just had a couple of shots, that's all. One of them from a gun!"

"Huh. Where's Wendy?" Dipper asked, as if the notion of being shot by a gun didn't even faze him.

"Waiting for you at the Shack," Mabel said. "I called an' told her you're OK. But, Dipper, you've got some apologizing to do. I'll tell you about it later. Your memory seems all wacka-wacka cuckoo! Tell me what you do remember."

"Um. Well, uh . . .." Dipper rambled for a few moments, but both Mabel and Grunkle Ford both soon realized he didn't really remember anything after his first climb down into the crater. Not the rain, not the explosion of green, not the struggle to climb back up or the car trip back to town, not even his first doctor's visit. Certainly not his hot exchange of words with Wendy that morning. Mabel didn't really know how much to tell him.

Stan bypassed the Shack and drove straight to the clinic, where Dr. Le Fievre took one look at Dipper and immediately hurried him into an examining room, leaving his current patient, old Mrs. Fritchler, sitting on the edge of an examining table in the room he had come from, clutching her purse, and complaining to nobody until a nurse Mabel didn't know came in to take her vital signs and her complaints about feeling all moogly, whatever that was.

In the waiting room, Ford and Stan paced, tracking up the white-and-gray checkered linoleum, but Tremaine, embarrassed by his muddy state, remained out on the porch, sitting slumped forward on an old rattan chair. Mabel, too, was a mess–linen shirt probably ruined, jeans ripped in the knees and split in the seat, palms bloody from splinters–but she couldn't sit down, couldn't rest.

She stayed on the porch with Dr. Tremaine, alternately pacing and standing on tiptoe to peer in through the window in the front door, catching glimpses of the nervously-walking Ford and Stan. After twenty unending minutes, she exclaimed, "There's the doctor!" and ran inside.

The young physician had his hand on Dipper's shoulder. Dipper still looked a little wobbly on his legs. "I think he's going to be OK," he said. "The urticaria is resolving."

"Urtiwhattia?" Stan asked.

"Hives," the doctor said. "That blotchy red rash. Symptom of a severe allergic reaction, very close to anaphylactic shock, I'd say. It's lucky you had an epinephrine pen handy. I've prescribed a strong antihistamine. Have him take a dose as soon as you pick it up, then another before bedtime tonight. It'll probably make him sleepy. Keep an eye on him for any sign of respiratory distress, and call my emergency number–here's a card–if that develops. I don't think it's at all likely. He should be fine by tomorrow morning. Who's Wendy?"

"His girlfriend," Mabel said immediately, as Dipper grinned foolishly and blushed.

"He really wants to see her. Might be the best medicine. Wait a minute, young lady. Let me look at your hands. You're Mabel, right?"

"That's me!"

"Mm, yes, I remember you from last year. Well, Mabel, these are spectacularly nasty splinters. And they're also filthy with mud, which is not a good combination. Have you had a tetanus shot recently? No? We'll take care of that. Come on, we're going to clean you up, yank the rest of those splinters out, and disinfect the wounds."

"Is it gonna hurt?"

"It will be excruciating," the doctor said, but he was smiling.

"Mabel can take it! Bring it on!" Mabel said, following him out. "So, Doc, are you single or do you already have a girlfriend or what?"

Their first stop after the clinic was the drive-through window at the pharmacy, where they picked up the prescription–and a bottle of water, because Stan insisted on Dipper's swallowing one of the capsules immediately. Then despite Dipper's urgent requests to go back home–to the Shack, he meant–they stopped at the McGucket house first so the adults could clean up and change clothes.

Mabel and Dipper washed as much of the spattered mud off their faces, arms, and hands as they could, but they couldn't do much about their grimy clothes or their gunk-matted hair. Then Stan drove them to the Shack.

"What happened to my backpack?" Dipper suddenly asked.

"I'll buy ya another one!" Stan snapped from the driver's seat. "We ain't goin' back to look for it!"

"Actually, I picked it up," Tremaine said. "I have it here, in the floor under my feet."

"Thanks," Dipper said. "I wouldn't want to lose the pup tent that Wendy gave me–wait, I didn't pack the tent, did I? Why do I remember packing a tent?"

"'Cause you've lost like a day and a night, Brobro," Mabel said, touching him gently on the arm with her bandaged left hand. "Stuff from yesterday and today is all jimbly-jumblied up in your head right now. But listen, I have to tell you something real important."

And Dipper's expression melted into shock and horror when Mabel told him he had cursed Wendy, had ordered her to go home, and had turned his back on her. He writhed as Mabel spoke of how hard Wendy had cried. "I did that?" he asked miserably. "She must hate me!"

"I don't think she does," Mabel said. "When you were gone, she missed you so bad she passed out."

Dipper's mouth fell open. "You're kidding!"

"Nope. She turned all pale, her eyes went funny, and she just sort of folded up like one of those carpenter's rulers. She fainted and was out for like three or four minutes, and when she woke up, she kept asking where you were."

"She fainted? Wendy?"

"Hey, Dip," Stan said as he turned into the driveway, "don't get a big head. I've made a few ladies faint in my day!"

"Yes," Ford said. "I recall that one blind date in high school. The young lady passed out the very second she laid eyes on you."

"Yeah, I was pretty stunnin' in those days," Stan agreed amiably as he parked the Stanleymobile. A tour bus and several cars already stood in the lot.

"Oh, my gosh," Mabel said. "How are we gonna get in? Dip an' me are both covered with dirt, and I just realized I've got a great big rip in the seat of my jeans!"

"We'll go 'round to the back door," Stan said. "Then your room's just down the hall, Dipper's is just up the stairs. None of the tourists will see you, so no sweat."

Dipper seemed to be slowly emerging from his daze. "Mabel! What happened to your hands?"

Mabel held up her palms and fingers to display their bloody bandages. "I got snagged on some sharp splinters, Broseph! Long jaggedy ones, lots worse than the ones I got up in the attic."

"I'm so sorry I caused all this," Dipper said miserably.

"You couldn't help it, my boy," Tremaine said. "I will tell you what I believe happened to you and why you weren't in control. But first you'll want to go and clean up and change your clothes."

They saw Soos in the distance, driving the tram toward the Shack–a tour was coming to an end–and they hurried around back. Stan guarded the doorway into the gift shop while Dipper and Mabel headed to their rooms.

But Wendy had seen Stan, and she abandoned her post and came over. "Stan, where's Dipper?"

"Upstairs," Stan said. "He's gotta–"

She grabbed his lapels. "You hafta take the register, Stan! I'm gonna go see him!"

"He's prob'ly not decent!"

"You think I care?" She pushed past him and took the stairs up two at a time.

Dipper had already stripped to his briefs when she banged into the attic bedroom. "Dipper!"

They were in each other's arms in a heartbeat. "I'm so sorry," Dipper kept moaning.

She was caressing his head, her face buried against his neck, her breath warm and moist on his bare shoulder. "I was so scared," she said. "I've never been so scared in my life. You got dirt in your hair, dude."

Dipper stammered, "Ma-Mabel says I was awful to you."

She sniffled. "Yeah, you kinda were, but I don't think you knew what you were doin'." Her hand glided down his neck and onto his bare upper back, warm on his skin.

Dipper shivered a little. "I didn't know. I don't remember any of it. But she said I cursed at you and–and—oh, Wendy, I'm so sorry."

"It's all right now." She pushed away from him. "Well. This is more'n I usually see of you, man! 'Cept at the pool." She wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. "OK, I know you're not dyin', I'll give you some privacy. But I want to talk to you soon as I'm off work!"

Dipper asked, "Will you be able to hang around after work? What about your dad?"

"Hell with my dad!" she snapped. Then she looked regretful and bit her lip. "I mean, I can handle my dad."

"No," Dipper said. "I don't want you to get in trouble again because of me. Talk tomorrow morning? Uh–during our–our run?"

She hesitated, but then said, "OK, man. It's a date." She turned in the doorway and looked him over from head to toe, pausing in the middle. "That's nice. I notice that you're real happy to see me, too, dude," she said with a grin, raising a mischievous eyebrow before stepping out and closing the door.

Dipper sighed. She noticed. I didn't even have a chance to cross my legs!

Mabel and Dipper both showered and washed their hair. Mabel came upstairs just to make sure Dipper was OK—he was still moving slowly and was just getting dressed, but he said he felt all right. Then Stan came up and asked, "Are ya decent? Good. Poindexter an' his visitor want to talk with you. I gotta go help in the gift shop. It's crazy down in there!"

As chattering, laughing tourists bustled in and out of the museum and gift shop, Ford, Tremaine, and Mabel all settled in the attic–the one fairly quiet place in the whole Shack–and Ford and Tremaine sat in the two chairs and explained to Dipper what had happened, with Mabel chiming in a little now and again. He kept shaking his head. He couldn't recall any of it, from the time he first started down into the crater.

He perched on the edge of his unmade bed, feeling sort of out of it from the drug, and Mabel sat next to him. She'd exchanged the gauze bandages for cartoony Band-Aids—about half a box of them—and she kept gasping at the story the men told.

"The green cloud that erupted from the object," Tremaine said carefully, "bore the spores of a M'nika-tzi, also called the Servant Who Opens the Way. However the true horror, the dread being, the Great Old One, lay dormant in the heart of the meteor. In order for that abomination to emerge, you would have had to stand over the meteorite and recite the Summoning Spell in the ancient language of Gru'rrn-hrrk. The human vocal apparatus cannot normally shape the sounds, but with the M'nika-tzi, the parasite, taking over your brain, you would have managed. Except you would no longer have been you."

"The alien creature would have spoken through you," Ford explained. "However, human and alien physiology are vastly different, and our biologies are fundamentally incompatible. Once the parasite had seized complete control of your nervous system, once it had tendrils threaded throughout your brain, your body would have died within two minutes, and so would the parasite–but there would have been time for you, or the being formed by the merger of the two of you, to perform the chant and set the monster free."

"And–and what would have happened then?" Dipper asked.

Tremaine looked grave. "Please understand that, properly speaking, the Old One was not physically present in the meteorite at all. Only his, or its, essence, as it were, rested, um, call it sleeping there. That's not really true, for the creature itself exists in a wholly different, well, let's say plane of reality–"

"You mean," Dipper said slowly, "I would have opened a rift into the monster's realm, and he could come through it into our world?"

Tremaine's shaggy gray eyebrows rose in surprise. "Exactly! That is a very succinct way of putting it. You are an extremely perceptive young man."

"So that was why we hit you with a powerful allergen," Ford said. "I knew enough about your medical history to realize that a concentration of–well, never mind what it was, but it's the reason you break out so badly when you eat certain kinds of seafood. Anyway, I was sure it would cause a serious allergic condition. We thought–we hoped, we prayed–that your body's natural reaction against the histamine would be strong enough to cause your system to fight anything foreign within it and to reject the parasite. Fortunately, it did."

"You should've seen it," Mabel said, wriggling her fingers. "Squishy and green and all warty and covered with yucky gooey yellow slime!"

"You usually think things like that are adorable," Dipper said in a shaky voice.

"Not when my brother pukes them up, I don't! And then it sprouted legs, like a great big insect's!" She held her hands a foot apart. "I mean this thing was yay long, Dipper, like imagine a cucumber that big, but soft, squishy, slimy, all bulgy and squooshy and moving! An' it started to scramble down into the crater, an' Grunkle Stan grabbed you, and we all ran like he–heck!"

"Meanwhile," Ford said, "Henry got a clear shot at the parasite just as it tried to climb down into the cavity where the remnant of the meteorite lay. He not only hit it cleanly and disintegrated it, but the ray blasted a lot of the soil away, and when the smoke cleared, we could see the very heart of the meteorite lay there, pulsating with green light."

"So we teamed up," Henry said. "We went far enough into the crater to be sure we could not possibly miss, we separated so we were attacking from different angles, took careful aim, and we both fired at once."

Ford resumed: "The quantum disruptor rays struck with full force. With a tremendous flash of light, the meteorite transformed instantly into some unknown kind of energy. It momentarily blinded us, but Mabel says it shot straight up into the air and vanished. Now, Henry, I can't tell you too much, but I have friends in the intelligence business, and I made a few calls. This is strictly confidential."

"I understand," Tremaine said.

"Us, too," Mabel told Ford.

Ford nodded. "Well, then, NASA tracked something hurtling away from Earth at immense speed–they think it was a small asteroid that had nearly hit the Earth, but instead had gone round in a tight slingshot hyperbolic orbit, picking up velocity. It's headed into deep space, at a sharp angle away from the planetary ecliptic, and it even seems to be gaining speed. Its path means it can't return to the Earth's neighborhood ever. The observers think that the apparent acceleration may be an illusion, a malfunction of their instruments, but indications are that it's already at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light."

Tremaine nodded. "That is not impossible for these things. It may well exceed the speed of light before long! Creatures and elements of that realm do not obey the physical rules of our time and space. It is returning. Going back to the cold darkness between the stars where the walls of Reality are thin. Well. Earth is reprieved, at any rate."

"Betcha nothing like this ever happened to you before!" Mabel said.

Tremaine looked thoughtful. "Oh, it has, it has," he murmured. "Let me see. Four, five, six–this is the seventh time, in fact."

Mabel looked disappointed. "Aw. I thought stuff like that only ever happened in Gravity Falls!"

Ford said that he and Tremaine had seen enough of the gaping hole they had blown in the floor of the crater to know the meteorite had completely vanished. "So," he said as the professor and he both rose to leave, "we lose a valuable meteorite–but we gain a future for the Earth and all its inhabitants. I'd say that was a fair trade."

Dipper and Mabel talked for a good while after the two men had left. By then late afternoon had come. Finally, they went downstairs, and Dipper said goodbye to Wendy as she left at six. Mabel told him that she had their Summerween costumes ready, but he wouldn't see his until Saturday morning. He ate well, went to bed early, and lay awake for a long time, just thinking.

He should have been happy, but the more he thought, the worse he felt.

Mabel refused to go to her room, but slept in her old bed. "The doctor said to watch over you," she reminded Dipper as she tossed her pillow and blanket onto the other bed in the attic. "Now take your pill and go to sleep."

He did take the pill, and he didn't have any further allergic distress, but that was a long night, full of falling asleep and waking up again an hour later, and then repeating the cycle. Every time he woke up, he heard Mabel's gentle snoring.

It failed to offer him much comfort. And he dreaded the dawn.

Because in the morning he had to talk to Wendy.

They ran the nature trail and on the way back they stopped, as they often did, in the bonfire clearing and sat on the log. "See," he said miserably, "the bad part is that all those things you and Mabel told me, the horrible things I said–I've really felt them! I mean, I've really been mad 'cause your dad's all hung up about you staying late, and sometimes before this I've thought that, well, everybody was plotting against me–not long before Weirdmageddon, I didn't even trust Grunkle Stan when he begged me to! If Mabel had listened to me, Ford would still be trapped in some alien dimension. I don't mean it, but I'm paranoid, maybe even crazy. I'm just the way I am, and I cause terrible things to happen."

"What are you sayin', dude?" Wendy asked.

Dipper sighed. "I don't know. Maybe–maybe we ought to re-think this whole thing. Our plans and all. You know how I feel about you, but—but somebody told me, and he might be right, I don't know–maybe I'm really not good enough for you."

Wendy stared hard at him. "Dude, don't say that! We have, like, a connection! I felt it when that monster inside you tried to drag you to that meteorite and kill you!"

"And you fainted," Dipper said, sighing. "You. Wendy Corduroy. And I caused that."

Looking deeply troubled, Wendy asked quietly, "Yeah, it never happened before, but—wait, Dipper. So . . . straight up, dude, tell me: what are you thinkin'?"

He took a deep breath. "Maybe we should just cool it. You know. Be friends, that's all."

"Can't go back, Dipper," she said, shaking her head. "'S too late for me now."

With mingled hope and worry, he asked, "You think?"

She leaned forward. "Dude, I'll lay it out: You want us to be that way, then I just can't work here any longer, can't see you every day an' not—not be . . . . I'll give Soos my notice. I'll tell Dad I'll go up to Steve's damn lumber camp. 'Cause I can't stand to be around you all the time an' not care for you the way I've come to do."

"You can't quit," Dipper said. "The Shack wouldn't be the Shack without you! Soos couldn't get by without you. But I don't want to hurt you, Wendy. You know that, don't you? I really went crazy back there. All those feelings–they really were inside me, part of me. I hate having them. I try to control them, but I don't know if I can always do it. Ford killed the parasite, but I don't know how to kill those bad feelings. I just don't."

"Dip, it's OK. It's OK, man. You're still growin' up and learnin'. Don't get me wrong, I know you're not perfect, but neither am I. And I know you're not gonna change. You live for chasin' mysteries, man! I respect that. I'll support whatever you wanna do, Dip. And I know you feel the connection we got, don't you?"

"Yeah," Dipper admitted. "I remember when I was coming to, I heard you calling my name just as plain as anything."

She grinned a little. "Yeah, dude, 'cause I suddenly somehow knew you weren't dead! What we already got is special, Big Dipper. Don't ask me to go backward, 'cause I just can't do it. But–if you want–we'll cool it, but just for a while, OK? No kissin' and junk. I won't like it, but I'll hold back. But if it's not workin' after a couple weeks, well, I'm gonna turn in my notice."

"Don't, please," Dipper said softly.

"We'll see."

They went back to the Shack side by side, but didn't speak very much. Dipper brooded for a good part of the morning. And when he had a chance, he asked Soos, "Dude, would you do me a big favor if I needed it?"

"Sure, dawg," Soos said amiably. "Whatcha need?"

"Could you lend me forty dollars?"

Soos laughed. "Any time, man! Gonna get a present for Wendy?"

"Uh, yeah. Something like that," Dipper said, forcing a smile.

Yeah, it's for Wendy, though she won't use it. But I need it for Wendy.

Forty dollars. With that much I can just afford it.

A bus ticket back to Piedmont.

Just for me.

The End