Future Tense

(July 2018)

14-Escalation

"Ah-haha!" Mabel chortled. "Good one, Grunkle Ford! A body! Ha-ha! Uh, of course, you're kidding . . . uh, aren't you?" She looked around as if seeking support.

Ford didn't meet her gaze. "I'm afraid I'm not. Ah—this is difficult to express in words."

"And ya don't know how to do interpretive dance," growled Grunkle Stan. "For Pete's sake, Ford, just spill it. We're all in this together, right?"

Ford sat for a moment biting his lower lip. Then he looked to Agent Hazard. "What do you say? I need your advice."

She leaned back in her chair, her hands on the table before her, right resting on left. "Sorry, Director. That's above my pay grade. The buck stops with you."

"That term comes from poker, ya know," Stan said conversationally.

Ford didn't respond, but drew a deep breath. "What I am about to tell you is seriously confidential. If you remain in the room to hear it, you can never tell anyone about it, ever. You'll have to swear."

"Damn it, we won't!" Mabel said.

Dipper said, "Not that kind of swear!" To the others he apologized, "Ever since she was in Avenue Q, Mabel's been using, a more, uh, mature vocabulary. I swear not to tell, Grunkle Ford."

So did Teek, Mabel (again, and in more proper form), and Wendy. Stan said in an unusually serious tone, "I swear on the lives of my family that whatever I hear will go with me to the grave."

"And Agent Hazard has already sworn a solemn oath," Ford said.

She began to speak, but he held up a hand. "No, I'll tell it. I won't reveal precisely how we discovered certain bits of information, though." He picked up a pen and absently tapped it on the table, like a metronome, for about ten seconds. Then he said, "I have a theory that Burnwald Punt isn't the original Burnwald Punt who was born in Gravity Falls. You've all seen the photos that gave me the initial suspicion. We've dug into the records, some here, some at the state capital, some even federal. The long story made short is that there is indirect evidence that the original Burnwald Punt died, most probably in that house, when he was a toddler, two years and some months old."

Wendy said, "But this is a small town. How would the family keep that secret?"

"They didn't completely," Ford said. "We found a few elderly people with memories of the Punts—faded memories, since they moved from the town sixty-eight years ago. Our informants are aged eighty to ninety now, and they have told us that the Punts were always standoffish. They did little socializing, mostly with the Northwests and with wealthy families outside the Valley. One older lady told us—" he referred to some notes—"'I was just a little girl, but my parents talked about how stuck-up they were.'"

Hazard said, "With your permission, Director?"

"Yes, but the rest of you remember, I bear all responsibility. Go ahead, Agent Hazard."

She nodded. Glancing around at the others, she said, "We believe that something happened to the original child between July 4, 1950—we uncovered a group photograph that appeared in the Gravity Falls newspaper a couple of days after that of an Independence Day gathering at the lake, and though it's too grainy and the figures are too small to make out any detail, the Punt family is visible a little off to the side and toward the back of the crowd. The boy, who would have been about two and a half, is sitting on his mother's lap. It looks like the same child as in the photo Dr. Pines showed you of the family taken a few months before."

Ford said, "So much is public record. What follows is not. In those days there was a local doctor in town, Dr. Higgens. He was a general practitioner and took care of all the illness, accidents, and childbirths in the town. Up until July first of 1950, he saw young Burnwald for bimonthly check-ups, as well as for three childhood diseases. He should have seen him again for his physical on September first but did not. The medical record indicates that the appointment was canceled and there is a notation that the parents had decided to take him to a pediatrician up in Mossy Run."

"They didn't," Hazard said. "Anyway, the medical records for both Dr. Glass and Dr. Whecomb—the only two pediatricians with practices there—don't record anything for a Punt family."

Dipper glanced at Wendy, who took his hand: —I got it, Dip. Doctor-patient confidentiality. It's way illegal for them to look at those.

I just never thought that Ford would have the Guys in Black do stuff like that.

"What makes that troubling," Ford said, "is that the woman I spoke off occasionally baby-sat for the Punts during that summer. She says Burnwald was a quiet little boy, and on the occasions when she took care of him, perhaps six weekend nights in that year, he was no trouble. She would feed him dinner, read him a story, and tuck him in about 7:30 PM. He always went to sleep.

"But Mr. and Mrs. Punt stopped calling on her some time in July, she thinks, or perhaps August. At the same time, they suddenly fired their servants—"

"La di dah!" Stan said. "Servants yet!"

Ford said, "Well, many wealthier families did have help back then, you know, either live-in servants or ones who came in for the day. They had three, a maid, a cook, and a man of all work. The ladies shared the attic bedroom, the man came in just for the day and lived in town. Anyway, the cook was our informant's aunt, and she says her aunt was terribly bitter about being fired one morning with absolutely no warning. The Punts didn't hire any other servants after that."

Hazard added, "And from what we could find, no one saw Burnwald after that, either, at least until early November. The Punts had decided to move by then. Another one of our witnesses, an elderly man who at that time was a teenager, was hired to help them pack up and load some things to be shipped to New York. He saw the child—or a child—one or two times, but curiously, Mrs. Punt kept the boy bundled up, even inside. She told the witness that he'd been ill for weeks. In fact, she claimed the main reason they were moving was to find better medical care for him."

"Wait," Dipper said. "What if that was true? Maybe he got sick in August and instead of taking him to his normal doctor's appointment the Punts took him to a specialist or something."

"There's more," Ford said. He passed around sheets of paper—all photocopies of the same newspaper column. "This is from the Gravity Falls Frontier Chronicle—a newspaper that folded in 1959—and the date of the issue is August 8, 1950, a Tuesday. The paper came out only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays back then. The relevant entry is circled."

Dipper took a copy and passed one to Wendy. "The obituaries?" he asked. He looked at the circled entry:

CHAMBRON, Hermes Nicolas, 2. Son of Abramelin and Cordelia Chambron, of a sudden illness, on Wednesday morning. Services private.

Wendy was quicker on the uptake than Dipper: "So you think the Punt boy died and the Chambron boy took his place? Is that it?"

"We can't prove it," Ford said. "However, the Chambrons were a poor family. Yet somehow that September they had enough money to buy a brand-new automobile. The husband and wife moved away only about a week before the Punts departed for New York. They simply abandoned their house, which the neighbors quickly burned to the ground."

"You mean they sold their baby?" Mabel asked in an outraged tone. "The Punt boy died and his parents just bought a replacement? That's terrible!"

Stanley frowned. "Chambron, Chambron," he said. "Did they live in that spot up on Deer Creek road? The one they call the Haunted Hollow?"

"You heard about that?" Ford asked, blinking.

"Well, yeah," Stan said. "Don't forget, Ford, I've lived in this burg longer than you have! I heard a couple stories about the Chambron family. None good."

"What about them?" Mabel asked.

Stan shrugged. "Well, for one thing, they were supposed to be devil worshipers."

Wendy said, "But to sell their own kid—" She didn't finish.

"There's nothing in that demon stuff anyway," Stan said.

"Well," Ford said slowly, "perhaps there isn't, perhaps there is. It's troubling that the Punt boy apparently died—apparently, mind, we don't have proof—about the first of August."

"How come?" Stan asked.

"Because that is Lammas," Ford said. "Or in Celtic terms, Lughnasa. A special day in the witches' calendar, the sorcerer's wheel of time. In legend, it's an occasion for evil magicians to join in a Sabbat, a dark festival. It's the harvest feast, the gathering of the crops, a time of . . . of well, sacrifice."

"Human?" Dipper asked.

Ford simply nodded.

How Burnwald Punt did it so quickly no one knew. Of course, he had money—maybe borrowed money, but he had plenty of it—and that could accomplish many things. However he managed it, on Saturday morning new TV spots showed up in Gravity Falls. Some of them had sketches of Gnomes, not looking as they did, bearded little men and round-faced little women, but twisted, evil-looking monsters. Very carefully, the scripts did not actually slander the Gnomes, but they implied plenty:

People of Gravity Falls, do you worry about your job security? Your privacy? Even the safety of your daughters and wives? Have you seen these creatures near your homes? Can you trust them? Burnwald Punt says they have no place in a human society. Elect him, and he'll take care of the Gnome problem once and for all. Burnwald Punt says, "Gravity Falls for the people—and only the people!" Elect Burnwald Punt Mayor, and make Gravity Falls safe for your family!

The spots ended with an artist's rendition: the split cliffs that were the gateway into the Valley, but closed by a curved concrete wall that reached all the way to the top of the surrounding cliffs. And the metal sign that had replaced the old rusting trestle—the one that read WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS—had been replaced by one bolted to the concrete wall: GRAVITY FALLS, HUMANS ONLY.

Other ads for Punt hinted that the Gnomes were behind everything annoying or alarming—mutated animals, illnesses and accidents, even bad weather.

Paranoia is an odd condition. It's not physical—but it is contagious.

People in the Falls were talking.

The Gnomes noticed that when they passed by, those people stared at them and stopped talking.

Jeff even spoke to Stan about it on Saturday: "What have we done to make people scared of us?"

"Nothin'," Stan said. "It's all Punt's doing. He's got no record to stand on, no program, so he's using you guys to stir up fear. Once he loses the election, he won't hang around. You'll see. People are fair if you give 'em time. Things will go back to normal."

Jeff muttered. "Normal. But this is Gravity Falls."