Very Last Gig
(August 10-13, 2017)
17: The Moon Will Come Too Soon
Noon, Saturday.
In thirty-six hours, Sev'ral Timez will die.
But a lot can happen in thirty-six hours. That's 2,160 minutes. It's 129,600 seconds. If seconds were quarters, you could buy a heck of a lot of gumballs with that many.
I don't know why you'd want that much. Gum up the works, maybe.
Anyway, the guys left the stage just before noon, having rehearsed their first set. Rehearsal had some snags in it, but you know what they say—bad rehearsal, good show. They'd gone back over and smoothed the rough places and now they were pretty much set. Lunch was very light—a salad and some fruit—because by long experience, some of it in Multibear's cage, they had learned that munching on burgers or pizza or raw salmon didn't make for a happy performance experience.
They had just finished when someone tapped on the door. Deep Chris opened it. "Mabel, our girl!" he said. "You're looking pretty fly!"
Their slang tended to be stuck somewhere in the eighties or nineties. Just one of those things that made them them. "Thanks, Deep Chris!" Mabel said with perhaps too wide a smile. She'd gone a bit goth, black mascara, black bra top, open long-sleeved black shirt over that, short black skirt—and bright red leggings. Hey, Mabel had to show her colors somewhere.
"Hi, um, Teek!" Deep Chris said.
Teek, who'd spiked his black hair and wore, rather uncomfortably, a black faux-leather jacket and really dark shades, said, "Hi, guys. We just came to tell you 'break a leg.'"
"What?" Creggy G. asked, sounding shocked. "Dude, that sounds straight painful!"
"It's just theater talk," Mabel assured them. "It goes by opposites. It just means, 'have a great show.'"
"Oh. Well, uh, don't thank you, then!" Greggy C. said. "That makes us very unhappy!"
"It's opposite day," Mabel said. "Look, guys, promise me that you won't sing opposite."
"No way, girl!" said Chubby Z. "We sing them the way we learned them, yo!"
Mabel sighed. "I am gonna miss you guys so much! I promise to watch every episode of your show. And if you come back to Woodstick—"
Leggy P. said, "We talked it over and, like decided! We'll come back every year for another farewell show!"
"That's great!" Mabel said, sounding a little more upbeat. "Promise me you'll always let me know when you're going to perform, and I swear I will be there every time for you!"
Teek nudged Mabel. "The music's about to start," he said. "Remember what you wanted to tell them."
Mabel bit her lip. "Yeah. OK, guys, uh, look—be really, really careful out there. Mr. Bratsman may be around, and he'd love to kidnap you. Be on the lookout, and if you see anybody suspicious, let Tad Strange or Grunkle Stan know right away."
The five looked at each other. "We'll do it for our girl!" said Deep Chris. "That is a stone promise!"
"Well—we're gonna go watch the show. See you later, guys!"
In harmony, they sang, "Later, girl!"
The visit had been short, but still—$182.25 in quarters had ticked by.
Monday was payday for all of Stan's Woodstick employees, and Stan was getting ready for it. Once he would have counted out stacks of cash and change, giving him a chance to grin and say, "Tell ya what, flip you double or nothing."
Nowadays, though, Sheila took care of direct-depositing the money in their various accounts, except for the few who had no bank account. They'd get certified checks. Except for the three who were deeply suspicious of the government, the banks, the churches, the police, the Internet, squirrels, Grunkle Stan, and each other. Those three would only take good old American cash. Except for the one among them who was so suspicious he would only accept payment in gold. Even though that meant a bag of gold dust so small he tended to misplaced it or spill it in his jeans pocket, where it would sift away.
He was sure that the CIA was picking his pocket. Or maybe the squirrels.
Anyway, though Stan could operate a computer now, after a fashion—his particular fashion included a lot of off-colorful language, plus occasional shouts of, "I don't care what I told you to do, do what I want you to do!"—for calculating the payout, less his contribution to Social Security for each employee, less a deduction for accident insurance, plus the occasional overtime or small bonus, he used a good old-fashioned hand-cranked adding machine.
God knows where he got it. Probably it was a friend of Goldie's. It made about the same noise.
Fortunately it took standard rolls of paper tape, and it printed with old-fashioned ink ribbons, which he could still find in one local computer and business machine store. All he had to do was make sure the numbers added up, tear off a length of ribbon for each employee, and write the employee's name at the top with a ballpoint.
He'd spent Saturday morning wondering if he was going crazy.
Stan knew full well that he had six kids who worked the parking lot, each one putting in seven hours a day at minimum wage; Cliff, the sound-booth chief, and his four people, earning somewhat more than minimum wage and putting in long hours with overtime for the three-day festival; fifteen Security employees; Jorge, who ran the lights, and his crew of six electricians and gaffers; and that was it.
Simple. Thirty-three employees.
Yet somehow when he did the calculations, he came out with thirty-four payouts.
"It can't be thirty-four," he muttered, tossing the curled tapes into the trash and starting from scratch. "Let me see. Go backwards. Jorge, twenty bucks an hour, forty-five hours . . . "
The keys clacked, the crank clattered, the tapes curled out. "Something's wrong somewhere," he muttered.
Stanford was coming to the festival. He was incognito.
Wendy talked him out of the bell-bottomed slacks—where did he even get them?—and the gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He'd changed into a lightweight pale-blue sweater and jeans, plus a jaunty straw hat and shades.
Wendy warned, "Long sleeves are gonna get hot, Dr. P."
"Short sleeves show my scars and tattoos," Stanford told her. "Have you both memorized the chants?"
"Got them," Dipper said. Wendy would have had a hard time—they were gibberish to her—but all she had to do was hold hands with her fiancée to have a mental cheat sheet.
Who knew that each demon had its own personal exorcism spell? But the three chants were different. Ambduscias, in Gnostic legend the infernal musician, might be banished with a spell beginning "In nomine Domini, non magistrum turpi ab impietate sua usque ad quas eieci te de profundis inferni."
For Flauros, whose specialty was spiteful vengeance, it began, "In nomine domini, et omnes angeli eius, obsecro te, quod blasphemus fui, et usurpeth verum pertinet solum ad hoc munus ab Altissimo: qui reversus abiit."
Mammon's was hardest of all. It involved lighting a special candle and then chanting, "Ploútos, fouskoménos kai apechthís chrysoplástis, sto ónoma tou Kyríou sas apsifoúme." It went on from there. Dipper had been a good student in French, and he had a little knowledge of Latin, but like Shakespeare, he had less Greek. Like none at all. But he had worked hard to memorize all three exorcisms, and then had the bright idea to record them on his phone.
"Got your amulets?" Ford had asked. "Good. Got your consecrated water? Fine. Now, remember, for this to work, we have to confront the entity and splash it with the water as we say the correct chant. If we're mistaken and pronounce the wrong chant, well, ah—"
"All hell breaks loose?" Wendy guessed.
"Not quite. The consecrated water will prevent any of them from injuring you, but the demon won't be banished—it may be able to fulfill its evil purpose if it's targeting the singers or musicians."
"I think a better plan would be to find Bratsman," Dipper said. "He's human. The crosses and holy water wouldn't hurt him, maybe, but we might be able to persuade him to cancel out his control of whatever he's called up."
"Yeah," agreed Wendy. "Give Stan his brass knuckles, and he can persuade like nobody's business!"
"So far we have only the thinnest of leads," Ford said. "I agree, if we can find him, he's the one we should try to bring down. Still, though he himself has no power—no magic or supernatural power, I mean—he may have summoned up a formidable ally. If we do find him, we'll have to be on high alert. He could call for help."
Ergman Bratsman ordered Wilmer to keep a close eye on Mabel and to tell him the moment she was alone—anywhere. Even in the can. Wilmer had said he understood.
"What's wrong with you?" Bratsman had snarled over breakfast. They'd eaten at a café adjoining the seedy motel, and the food was about as good as the beds were comfortable. Wilmer had drunk some coffee and then watched Bratsman shovel in ham, eggs, a potato casserole, six slices of buttered toast spread with jam, and then—seconds.
"Just not hungry, I guess," Wilmer said.
"Don't go soft. The girl is my leverage," Bratsman said. "If we get her, we can make the guys do anything we want."
"We gonna hurt her, though?" Wilmer asked.
Bratsman just stared at him.
Wilmer, looking down into his cup, murmured, "'Cause I don't like hurting girls. It's not right."
"What I say is right is right," Bratsman said in a deadly soft voice. "You won't have to hurt the girl. You just get us to her—"
"You and me."
"I said 'us.'"
"Yeah, but you meant you and me."
"And any other . . . help I might take on," Bratsman said. "That's not your concern."
Wilmer nodded but didn't speak.
"You want out?" Bratsman asked, his bulging eyes squinting, making him look piggy. "You want me to cut you . . . loose?"
Wilmer shook his head.
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Keep an eye on Mabel and when she's away from the others call you and do what you say," Wilmer muttered.
"Once we get her, you don't have to hang around. Go do something. Go to a bar and get drunk."
Wilmer shook his head. "Don't do that any longer."
"Then go see a movie or something! Give me an hour with the girl and the boys, and then you can come back and not worry about it. Just never ask me any details and you'll stay happy."
Wilmer wanted to ask Did you do something really evil, Boss? Did you use those books with the ugly drawings and the foreign languages and call on something really, really bad?
He didn't, because he couldn't.
Wilmer glanced sidelong at Bratsman and wished he knew the nature of his game.
Bratsman looked around, angrily. "When are they gonna take this check?"
Wilmer said, "I think you pay up at the counter, Boss. I've seen other people doing that."
"Why didn't they tell me?" With a snarl on his lips, Bratsman looked at the total, then pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and peeled off a couple of twenties. "Here, go pay. Keep the change. And wait for me up front. I wanna go back to the motel. I have to figure some kind of disguise. I don't like the way a couple of people looked at me yesterday."
"All right." It was only a hundred-foot-walk to the motel, but Bratsman had to be driven everywhere.
"You wait," Bratsman repeated. "I gotta hit the john, and it'll be a while."
"OK."
Bratsman levered himself up from his chair and went toward the restrooms. Wilmer took the money and the check to the register, where a guy with chubby cheeks and a mass of blond hair—a surprisingly brawny and neat-looking man for such a slovenly place—stood at the counter. "Everything all right, sir?" he asked.
Wilmer nodded and passed over the money and the check.
The clerk rang it up. "And your change is twelve dollars and—"
"That's the tip for the waitress," Wilmer said.
"Are you sure? That's a lot."
Wilmer nodded. "She looks tired. And she had to run back and forth a lot. Yeah, it's the tip."
"I'll see that she gets it." The guy smiled. "God bless you."
Wilmer felt—warm. Like a glow. He couldn't even thank the guy. He stumbled out into the foyer, tears blurring his eyes.
After a few minutes he looked back for Bratsman. Somebody else was at the register now, a woman. He didn't know where the guy had gone.
He had to get close to Mabel Pines.
But—he didn't have to call Bratsman.
He was his own man.
The glow pulsed within his chest, like a touch of grace.
Wilmer told himself that he could get free of Bratsman. That he was, indeed, his own man.
And that the man he was had no sympathy for the devil.