Zero Regrets
(October 9, 2017)
25: Hell is Empty
"Back!" Ford's voice whiplashed through the dismay that washed over Dipper. Past his grunkle, he glimpsed a nightmare hellscape—from the threshold on, the dorm room had become a vast underground chamber, spears of black rock jutting up not from lava, but from liquid fire. Skeletons and half-decayed corpses had been glued to the rock by their own dried juices.
In the roiling, turbid air, below clouds of black and burning red, great black birds wheeled, their wings striking yellow flame as they flapped, leaving jagged gleaming sinewaves in the troubled sky. "It ain't real!" Stan bellowed. "This thing is messin' with our minds! Concentrate!"
Dipper could feel the heat. Eloise grabbed him, whimpering. He strained.
For a brief instant, the dorm room clarified—there it was, a little messy, having been deserted in a hurry, bedding half-on, half-off the twin beds, window looking out into a clear morning. Then it all melted. Now tendrils of snaking black oily smoke began to leak out, trying to grab him. Eloise screamed.
"Close your eyes!" Ford yelled.
When Dipper did, it was as though he had stopped his ears, too. Sounds—Hazard gagging, Mabel's whimpers—came as though from inside a room with doors and windows locked and sealed.
"Wendy!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.
He heard her shriek, the sound Dopplering away as she fell into the pit—
Then a hand against his neck. Fight it, Dip! It's a hallucination!
—Is Mabel OK?
Pushed her down the hall. She's lying on the floor, curled up, but safe. Further away you get, the less hold this thing has.
Someone slammed the door with a sound like a gunshot, but hell lingered in the hallway, no visible manifestation, but a deep-seated terror billowing like invisible flames.
Dipper heard Stan again: "For cryin' out loud! Gimme the doohickey, I'll take it in!"
Then Ford: "Stanley, you don't understand this thing's power!"
"Hell with that. It's messin' with the Pines family. Come on, Poindexter. Whadda I do? OK, don't tell me, then. Wait here. I'll be back!"
"At least take this. You just have to make one circuit of the room, but what if that's a portal? You could be lost, or worse." Ford handed Stanley an anomaly detector.
"Maybe it's my turn. If it's a portal, see ya in thirty years."
"Stanley—please be careful."
"Gotcha. If I don't come back, tell Sheila I love her and the combination to the secret safe in my office is taped to the bottom of the register till in the Shack. And if I die, take care of her."
He opened the door again, and smoke smelling of burned flesh roiled out.
"No!" Dipper tried to catch hold of Stan's white hazmat suit but missed. Stan walked through the doorway—and his whole body burst into devouring flames. Clothes and flesh vanished in a blinding billow of yellow-white fire. Dipper heard himself screaming. The door closed.
An agony later, it opened again, and Stan walked back out, slammed the door, and handed the anomaly detector to his brother. "There. See what it shows."
"How did you—" Ford started.
Everyone was gasping for breath. "Take care of Eloise," Dipper told Wendy. He ran to Mabel and knelt by her. She was lying on her knees and chest, her out-flung hands against the floor, and she moaned, "No, no no—"
"Mabel," he said, forcing her to roll over. "It's OK. It was an illusion."
She opened her eyes, tears running down her temples. "I saw you dead!"
"I'm not," he said. "Nobody is. Grunkle Stan, you should've seen him. He walked right into hell and out again—" he heard himself laughing, and he couldn't stop. "He—he—carried the detector inside—and—and came out and slammed the door!"
"We're OK?"
Wendy and Eloise had joined them. "Yeah, Mabes, OK. God, no wonder those poor girls went nuts, that thing inside their heads. Eloise?"
"I thought Dipper was falling into that pit," she whispered to Mabel. "I grabbed his wrist, and his whole arm came off, and maggots crawled on my hand—"
Dipper helped Mabel up. "We're all here," he said.
Ford absent-mindedly murmured, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
"What's that, Chief?" Hazard asked.
"Hm? Oh, a line from The Tempest. Shakespeare. Hazard, look at these readouts." He handed her the detector.
"Nothing out of the normal range," she said.
"Stanley, you were right. It was all in our heads. How did you know?"
Stan had pulled off the hazmat suit. He shrugged. "Meh. I been a con artist too long for somethin' to con me easily. Second I saw that hell-pit, I thought, nah, gotta be a trick. And then I kinda saw the dorm room, what's the word, superimposed on the pit. That was real, the fire and brimstone was imaginary. And you know me, Sixer—I got no imagination!"
"That's not true," Wendy said. "You can dream up some crazy stuff!"
"Yeah, but that's different," Stan said. "That kind of imagination is just keepin' one jump ahead of the guy who thinks he's cheatin' you. Ignore what you think you see. Concentrate on what you know's really there. By the way, get outa those stupid white coveralls. You'll feel better."
They all did, except for Ford, who seemed to be trying to put words together. But at last he said, "Stanley, thank you."
"There's a change," Stan said. "What are you gonna ask me to do?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"Eh, I know you too well, that's all. So what's the favor?"
"I think we could cut through the illusion if—would you dare to go back in with a camera and just transmit images of the room?"
"Gimme," Stan said. Ford handed him a very tiny electronic device on a band. "What do I do?"
"Wear this on your head. It's a G0-Cam. Just go in and look around, and we'll see the video on this tablet."
"Sheesh, I still gotta look like a nerd. OK, fix it on me the way it's s'posed to go."
Ford adjusted it until the little lens peered out from the center of Stan's forehead, like a third eye. He switched it on, then showed Stan his tablet, which had an image of the tablet that Stan was staring at, which had a smaller image of itself, which in turn . . ..
"Hah," Stan said. "Droste effect."
Ford nearly dropped the tablet. "How on Earth did you—"
"Poindexter, while you were away, I learned a lot of stuff to fix that thing we broke. Don't remember where I read that, but I know what infinitely recursive images are. Ya remember Bandelli's barber shop from when we were kids?"
"Yes," Ford said.
"Uh—what's that mean?" Dipper asked. Wendy was still comforting both Eloise and Mabel. Hazard looked a little pale still, but leaned against a wall as if taking a load off her feet.
"Bandelli's was a barber shop around the corner from our parents' pawn shop in Glass Shard Beach," Ford explained. It had two walls of mirrors, big ones, one behind the barber chair, one in front of it."
"So when you were sittin' in the barber chair," Stan said, "you could look and see yourself sitting in the chair, and behind you there's another chair and another you, and behind that's another one and another one. Brainiac here always tried to count them."
"I always lost count somewhere around nineteen," Ford said, peeling off his fake hazmat suit. "Beyond that the images grew too distant and tiny to be sure of. It was strangely unnerving—ordinary reality receding and vanishing into a foggy gray infinity."
"Well, if I gotta do this cockamamie thing, let me do it," Stan said. "Get away from the door. If I yell, yank it open quick."
They backed off, he opened the door, and the hellscape re-appeared. Stan shrugged and said, "Meh, I seen worse," and stepped into it, closing the door behind him. "You getting' this, Ford?"
"Yes," Ford said. He held the tablet against the wall, letting them all crowd in to look. Stan was right—it was a dorm room, no light on, but plenty of daylight coming in from the one window.
"OK, let's see: This bunk looks like nobody slept in it recently. Covers all wadded, but it's just unmade. This one here, let's see, there's a bra, don't let Dipper see this, he's liable to get all sweaty and awkward, pair of jeans, one leg inside-out, I'm guessing this was what's her name, Tammi's bed, looks like she got dressed in a hurry for class or some deal."
The picture revolved as Stan turned. "Gah. The whatsit's making this place stink like a slaughterhouse built next door to an overflowing toilet. OK, two desks, opposite sides of the room, back to back. Books and I guess homework on both of them. Closets. Clothes on hangers, see? This one too-whoa!"
Dipper felt the hair on his neck prickling. When Stan pulled the clothes aside, he could see jagged strips ripped into the drywall—
"'Someone tried to claw their way out of the closet," he said. "Those are fingernail marks."
"I'm hearin' sounds from the ceiling in here," Stan said. "Scraping and scratching, right up above. You getting 'em?"
"Negative," Ford said.
"I hear them," Eloise said, her voice tense with fear.
"Stanley, listen to me: that spot may be the locus," Ford said. "Stanley, quick come to the door. I've got one last task for you to do."
"You got it."
The door opened—but this time the infernal landscape was gone. Just the room. "Here, Stanley," Ford said, handing him a round white plastic device with a button in the center. It was the shape of a tin of tuna, but only about a third the size. "Peel the backing off here, see? The bottom is adhesive. What I want you to do is to open that closet again, push this button once, peel off the backing, and stick this to the ceiling. It's a beacon we can read from the attic. It'll lead us where we need to go."
"Gotcha. Just be a second."
Again they watched the tablet as Stan walked to the closet and followed directions. Then he came out in a hurry, yanking the camera off his head. "You owe me one, Sixer."
Ford awkwardly hugged him. "You're a braver man than I am, Stanley," he said.
"Yeah, yeah, but we're married men, and Pinecest is weird. Come on, pat, pat, and that's over. What next?"
"Next," Ford said, "the young people go to safety and then we climb into the attic and find what we're looking for."
"No," Dipper said.
"Mason, think of your safety, and Mabel's, Wendy's, and Eloise's. We have no right to ask you to—"
"You got no right to stop us," Wendy said.
"Grunkle Ford?" Mabel's voice, still a little weak. "Dipper and Wendy are right. We're in this. If Eloise wants to go—"
"I have to see it through," Eloise said. "I brought this stuff to your attention."
Hazard said, "Chief, you may need everybody. This is a bad mother."
Ford bowed his head for a moment and then nodded. "Very well. Wendy, have your axe ready. Everyone else, make sure the destabilizers are set and activated. The green button above the trigger guard on the left is the safety. Don't depress it until we're in the attic. Which way to the ladder?"
"This way." Eloise and Mabel led them around the corner. Ford unlocked the door, and the odors of the janitor's closet, bleach and pine cleanser and moldy mops, oozed out.
"That's the ladder," Mabel said, pointing.
Wendy said, "Give me the key to the padlock. I been up there before."
"I'll be right behind you, covering you," Ford said.
Dipper realized that Stanley was still in the hall. He hurried back and found his grunkle leaning against the wall, breathing hard. He asked, "Are you all right?"
"Shh!" Stan nearly whispered: "Don't tell 'em you saw me like this. You want to know the truth? I walked into hell. I saw it all. Saw you and Mabel and Wendy and the others up to your shoulders in fire, down under me, dying. But I made myself see the real thing, too, like a double exposed picture. Made myself believe it was real, the rest wasn't. Truth is, the whole time, I was scared shitless, Dipper. Please don't tell 'em that."
Dipper couldn't even imagine taking a step into the inferno he'd viewed through the doorway. If his grunkle had seen that—and had forced himself to ignore it—it was an act beyond bravery. "Stan," Dipper said. "You did—" He swallowed hard. "That was—it—"
"Yeah, yeah, somebody had to do it," Stan said gruffly. "Come on. We don't want to miss the big finish."
