Beware the Banshee
Chapter 14
"Wish I'd understood the banshee when she was talking about how to communicate with the animals," Dipper muttered as the car rumbled over the rough old overgrown logging road, barely a dirt track between half-grown firs and pines, so narrow that at times pine boughs brushed both sides of the car.
"You don't remember the word, Dip?" Wendy asked, hanging onto the dash with one hand as the car bounced and slewed.
Dipper was gripping his seat and the door handle. "No. Ford said it was 'kings' or something."
"That other word that you told us Russ said," Wendy said, "is it spelled like—oof! Hit every rock in the road, why don'tcha, Stan?—spelled with a v? V-o-s-s-e-n?"
Blushing, Dipper said, "Uh, I think so. Maybe. Yeah."
"Thought that was it. I looked it up online," Wendy told him in a kind of insinuating tone.
Dipper turned a bright red. "So did I."
They rumbled over a bare, rocky patch, a washout a little lower than the rest of the road. "So what's it mean?" Stan asked.
"Never mind what it means. It's a verb," Dipper said. "It doesn't help."
Now Stan's voice took on a suspicious note: "A verb, OK, I know what that is. But what I want to know is what's it mean?"
Wendy said delicately, "Stan, dude, it's like a foreign word. I've heard you yell out the English version once or twice, like that time when you hammered your thumb puttin' up some shelves. Point is, it's not a polite word, get what I'm sayin'?"
"Nah. You're confusin' the issue. Make it clear," Stan grumped, steering to avoid a deadfall tree. "What the heck does it mean? Come on, we're all alone in the car. You can tell me."
"Uh—you'd yell at us if we did," Wendy said. "I mean, it's a word that innocent teens like Dipper and me ain't s'posed to know. 'Cept I've known it since I was, like, six."
"Same here," Dipper said. "You see it written on men's room walls a lot—please slow down a little!"
"I won't yell at you!" Stan insisted. "Come on, we're all emotional cripples together here! That oughta mean somethin'! Tell me plain, OK? Or at least give me a hint!"
"It's a synonym for 'making love,'" Dipper said. "That's all I'll tell you."
"Yeah, Dip's right, but it's kinda vulgar," Wendy added. "Very vulgar, I guess. An' most of the times people yell it, I don't think it refers to havin' sex."
"Wendy!" Stan yelped.
"Told ya, dude! C'mon, me an' Dipper know the facts of life. Don't turn purple, we're not up to anything! Like I say, that word's vulgar. In fact, it can be like, extreme vulgar if you yell it at somebody and add the word 'you' after it."
Stan frowned as his gray eyebrows rose. "You're tellin' me—that Russ guy—you mean he dropped the f-bomb, right?"
"You got it, man," Wendy said. "High five, Dip! We did it!"
They cleanly missed each other's hand because at that moment Stan almost lurched the car right off the logging road. "An' that Russ guy used that nasty word in front of Mabel? I'm gonna pound him into pulp!"
"Whoa!" Dipper yelped as the El Diablo jounced so hard the shocks bottomed out. "Grunkle Stan, don't do that! To be honest I think I misheard the word. Or misspelled it. But it doesn't help either way. Uh, maybe we'd better stop. I don't think we can go much farther."
They had reached a wide place, one where the soil showed some signs of having been chewed and plowed to a messy expanse of mud years back. Now it was just a hummocky, tussocky, ragged mass of uneven ground, though it was like a cul-de-sac, hemmed in on all sides by trees.
"Yeah, you're right. End of the line. I'm gonna turn the car around here an' park it headin' out. That'll help if we need to make a quick getaway, so hang on."
Stan had to jockey the long car back and forth over the uneven ground, but finally he had it heading back down the track. They got out, and he took a key off his keyring. "Here ya go, Wendy," he said, handing it to her. "I can't believe I'm doin' this, but in case I don't make it back, this is a dupe key to the Stanleymobile. I don't come back, you an' Dip get the, what was it? Get the fossen outa here, y'understand?"
"Gotcha," Wendy said in an unusually quiet voice.
And she went paler than normal when Stan gruffly added, "Dipper gets the car when he's old enough to drive." He went around to the back of the vehicle and opened the trunk. From it he took first a backpack, which he shrugged into. Then he reached in and took out the rifle-sized quantum destabilizer. He hefted it and then hung it over his shoulder on a Safari sling. "Hope this crazy thing works the way Poindexter said. Sight in, center, and fire. Sight in, center, and fire. One shot an' then five minutes to recharge. I think I got it."
He stood beside the car waiting as Dipper dug out his backpack. Stan looked—well, not like himself at the moment. He was wearing heavy khakis, brown hiking boots, and his olive-green fishing vest over a short-sleeved blue shirt, plus a sweat-stained canvas bucket hat. Wendy had left her trapper's hat in the car and instead pulled on a brown trucker's cap. She also reached around and tied her hair into a ponytail, then took off her flannel shirt and put it back on with the ponytail inside. "Less snags this way," she said.
Meanwhile, Dipper got into his own backpack. Stan seemed impatient: "You guys ready?"
"Almost." Dipper turned to Wendy. "Here, this one's yours. Take it, please.'
Wendy accepted the pistol version of the destabilizer—more compact than the full-sized one, though the vise-shaped barrel was about a foot long, with a long straight pistol grip that housed a powerful supercapacitor battery made by Fiddleford McGucket himself.
She loosened her belt a little and jammed the weapon in. "If you insist. I'm still relyin' on my axe, though," she said. The axe rode in its scabbard on her back, looking odd because usually her long red hair concealed it.
Dipper, who was in jeans and his trainers, with—of course—his cargo vest and pine-tree hat, stuck his own destabilizer into his belt. "Well. Let's do this."
To their right the bluffs reared hundreds of feet up, sheer pale-gray stone. Ford had told Dipper that the cliffs around Gravity Falls Valley were basalt—ancient volcanic lava that had engulfed many thousands of square miles of land in layers up to a thousand feet deep, sometimes even more. The cataclysm—or the crash of an interstellar craft—that had created the Valley had eroded or pulverized a huge amount of it.
Had the event never occurred, Gravity Falls would sit atop a plateau. Since it did happen, the town and the surrounding countryside now occupied a niche in a mountainous expanse and, thanks to the rivers flowing into the Valley by means of waterfalls and then out again at the mouth of the Valley, level with the more arable land bordering the rocky terrain.
Which did not mean that the Valley always offered comfortable footing or easy going. "Man," Wendy said after just fifteen minutes, "Nobody's ever logged this place off!"
"Yeah, 'cause it's way too rocky," Stan replied.
Plenty of trees grew there, mostly pines—tall lodgepoles, scruffy knobcones, sugar pines with their enormous elongated red-brown cones. But they didn't look exactly healthy. Dipper commented on that.
"Yeah," Wendy said. "I think that's also a reason why nobody's harvested 'em. The lodgepoles especially should be, like, fifty feet tall. These top out at twenty-somethin'. And they're fat enough around to be taller than that. Lotsa brown needles on the white pines, too, like they got a blight or somethin'. But the main reason nobody's logged 'em is the rough ground. I mean, we gotta climb over boulders like every fifty feet!"
That was true, too—chunks of rock the size of cars littered the ground, sometimes in jumbles that made climbing them impractical, so the three had to skirt around them, getting tangled in devil's club and peafruit rose, both viciously thorny plants that grew in thickets. Before they'd hiked for an hour, they all had stripes of blood on arms and sometimes legs and cheeks from accidentally swiping against some trailing briars.
They had to climb up a slanting table of stone—actually a rockfall that sometime in history or before history even began had sheared off the cliffs towering above them and crashed to earth. It was maybe fifty feet long, and as they got to its highest point, Wendy said, "Dudes, there's Needle Falls just over there."
Dipper looked where she was pointing. From the very top of the cliffs, a rivulet of water poured over and then down, tucked into a vertical groove that, perhaps, it had worn away over a million years—or maybe it was simply a natural fault. The morning sun silvered the waterfall, and Dipper saw how it had earned its name—it really did look like a gleaming, gargantuan needle, stuck vertically into the earth, with the cliffs as its backdrop.
"Amazin'," Stan huffed, his tone sarcastic. "Now what're we s'posed to look for?"
"I'm on it." Dipper opened his backpack and began to scan.
"Did you get everything?" Dipper asked. "Over."
"Yes," Ford's voice crackled through the walkie-talkie speaker—cell phones had only one bar way out here, though Dipper had managed to transmit the data over a phone frequency. "I'm analyzing it now. Dipper, it appears that the main anomaly is from half a mile to a mile nearly directly north of you, and at the base of the cliffs. Did you copy that?"
"Mile to half a mile, base of cliffs," Dipper said. "Over."
"Now, you don't have to go there if it looks threatening, but—well, it would be helpful. Over."
"Gimme that." Stan grabbed the hand-held radio. "OK, Poindexter, listen good: We're goin' to have a look. If anything happens and all of us die, it's your fault. I mean it's all on you, Braniac. Over an' out!"
He switched off the walkie-talkie and, grinning, handed it back to Dipper. "Not that I think anything's gonna happen, but if it does—Ford's always layin' guilt on me. Let him stew in his own for a little while! Ya ready, knuckleheads?"
"Let's go," Wendy said. "Sooner we do it, sooner we can get outa here. This place is, like, cursed, dudes."
Dipper thought that had the ring of truth. From the edge of the fallen block of basalt, they looked out over an expanse of dead, dying, or weirdly corrupted trees, pines that corkscrewed unnaturally, oaks that spread leafless branches wide but had perhaps three tufts of distorted leaves at the crown, leaves ten times larger than they should be, and a sickly, dingy green.
No birds sang, no woodpeckers disturbed the silence. They had seen no squirrel, none of the commonly-seen Townsend's chipmunks—not the dainty Eastern version, but bulky animals often a foot long, nose to tail tip. Not a possum, not a mouse—not even an insect.
Deathlike silence reigned.
They had one path down from the summit of the block, a chipped-off corner where they could clamber down ten feet to the top of a hill. "This way," Wendy said.
A nearly-exhausted Dipper wondered if he'd have enough strength left for the return hike. Stan, for a wonder, didn't complain, but slogged on with determination. They reached a place where loose rubbly stone lay in a curving hill before them. "Gotta climb it," Wendy said.
"Oy," Stan muttered. "This is a real delight."
Up a good twelve feet over loose and sometimes shifting stones, and then they peeked over—
"Whoa!" Dipper exclaimed.
"What happened here?" Stan asked.
They were at the edge of a quarter-mile crater—a bowl-like depression, filled with broken, cracked, jumbled stone. Within it dead trees lay in radiating circles. One, a lodgepole pine—though it looked stunted and diseased, like all the trees in the area—lay within Stan's reach. He grabbed a branch to pull himself up, and it fell to pieces in his hand. "It's like papier mâché," he said. "Completely rotten! And it stinks like decayed fungus!"
"It hasn't been down all that long," Wendy said. "Couple-three years, maybe. Whatever blasted out this crater happened recently, dudes."
Needle Falls plunged down into a pool just beyond the far side of the crater. The splatter of water was the only sound. The earth itself seemed to be holding its breath.
"Oh, my gosh!" Dipper had one of Ford's meters on and pointing down into the cavity. "This is off the scale! Guys, there's something alive down there-but these readings aren't like any earthly life form!"
Stan shaded his eyes. "Don't see nothin'."
Wendy said, "Me neither, dude. You sure the machine's accurate?"
"Yes! It's something—maybe invisible! But—but it's not traveling in any direction. Seems to be stationary."
"Maybe it's dead," Stan said.
"No, I don't think so. Readings are too strong. Maybe—"
He broke off as Wendy grabbed his arm. "Shhh! Somethin's happening!"
Above the noise of the waterfall came scraping sounds, the clack of stone on stone. Staring down into the crater, Dipper felt the hair on the back of his neck prickling.
One of the smaller stones in the central pile teetered, slipped, and clattered down a few feet. The stones at the top, where it had been, heaved and made a grinding sound.
And from beneath them rumbled a guttural growl.
"It's digging its way out!" Dipper yelled.