Car Haunt
(August 21, 2018)
6
Seeing the troll home was a bit of an adventure. Mabel wanted to see his house, but Stan said the chance of her slipping and tumbling thirty feet down into the shallow, rushing creek were too great. Finally, reluctantly, he broke out the safety rope, cinched her into an improvised harness, and they lowered her as Neeahpik easily made the trip, swinging down beneath the bridge deck as if it were his home, which made sense when you thought of it.
Mabel was granted the favor of using a weak penlight—the flashlight might blind him, the troll said—and she squeed at the sight of the little apartment he'd created under that end of the bridge. "You guys! There's like a bed, well, a circle of rocks with hay piled up on it, and a board with stuff on it! It's so cozy!"
"Spend the night," Dipper suggested. He was one of the pair holding the rope that supported her, Stan the other.
"Wouldn't be polite!" Mabel said. "Besides, people would talk. Trolls would talk! You all snuggy-wuggy, Neeahpik?"
She tugged twice on the rope, and they hauled her back up. "Is he snuggy-wuggy, Mabes?" Wendy asked her.
"He said 'meh,' and I took that as a yes!"
"OK," Stan said. "Pile in. I gotta drive half a mile to an old loggin' trail to turn around, and it ain't getttin' any earlier."
They made the turn, got back to the Shack, and while Stan simply dropped them off and continued just down the hill to his and Sheila's house, Dipper, Wendy, and Mabel lingered near Dipper's new Manitou.
"Nothing here now," Dipper said, sweeping the area with his anomaly detector. "Just random fluctuations in the reality field."
"Hey, Mr. Ghost!" Mabel yelled. "I'm talkin' to you, little man who wasn't there! Apologies if you're a lady! Where you at? This is the Mystery Crew callin' you!"
A noise of something running toward them startled them, but Dipper turned the flashlight to see it was only Tripper, loping across the lawn. "He must've heard Mabel from inside the Shack," he said.
"I think they must've heard her in Portland!" Wendy said. "It's not exactly protocol to scream for a ghost, is it?"
"No, normally people scream after they show up," Dipper agreed.
Tripper sniffed all around the car, stopped at one spot and circled it, nose to the ground, then sat defiantly and cocked his head at them. They had not mastered dog language*, but he tried to convey with body attitude the notion of "What's wrong with you dear ones? It's plain as the nose on my face!
At least Mabel was alert. "He smells something. And this is where the ghostie was standing."
Dipper got right down to it with his anomaly detector. "Background phantions are eleven per cent above normal," he said.
"Pantaloons?" Mabel asked.
"Phantions," Dipper and Wendy said in unison. Then Dipper said, "You tell her."
"OK, Mabes, Dr. P has learned, and Dip has confirmed, that when ghosts try to manifest, they pull as much substance as they can from the air around them. There's not usually enough to make 'em solid, so at worst they're just a blobby mist, at best, they have the transparent form of a human being. When there's more substantial stuff to work with they can get solid enough to hold things. Anyways, their invisible bodies or whatever are made up of subatomic particles that he calls phantions. Sometimes they can create artificial physical bodies with it and air, mist, and like that. When they vanish, some phantions remain on what they leave behind."
"Remember Ma and Pa in the Dawn2Dusk?" Dipper asked Mabel.
"I remember talking dogs the size of elephants. And the flying dolphin man with his four dolphin arms that could shoot rainbow destructo-beams. His name was Aoshima. He was nice."
"Ma and Pa Duskerton," Dipper insisted. "Ghosts? Pudgy, lovey-dovey pair? We went back later, even, and talked to them!"
"Oh, right," Mabel said. "Yeah, they could pick up solid stuff for short periods, but they couldn't hold stuff like brooms and mops for the long haul. Still, one time they picked me up! By my hair? Ouch! What's the deal with that?"
"Remember what was laying all over everything inside the store?" Wendy prompted.
"Uh, not you and Dipper back then—you and Robbie!"
"Ew, no!"
Dipper stepped in: "Dust. The place was thick with it. And there was enough in the air for the Duskertons to take on at least semi-physical form. Here, though, there's not much for phantions to work with—just air and pollen and water vapor, I guess? So whatever this thing is, it hasn't been able to take much form."
"Except once we think it grabbed the steering wheel and tried to drive us off the road," Wendy said. "Probably put all its power into manifesting just a hand or some deal, just enough to try and turn the wheel."
"Like the hands in the Handwitch's cave!" Mabel said. "This case is getting clearer and clearer!"
"No," Dipper said. "Those hands are real, not ghostly. They're flesh and blood."
"Yeah, and the Handwich just enchants them enough so they can run—well, finger-run—around and do her chores and stuff for her," Wendy added.
"How you know?" Mabel asked with a frown.
"I am a witch, after all," Wendy said, rolling her eyes.
"For real?" Mabel asked. "A-hah! Hey, sister-in-law, dear, about that bust enlargement spell thing—"
"I was kidding!" Wendy said. "Besides, if I knew one do you think I'd be stuck with these cupcakes?"
"You're talking about the cupcakes I love," Dipper objected.
Wendy grinned. The flashlight still pointed at the ground, and its reflected glow underlit her face, making her grin look mildly sinister, but also—to Dipper—undeniably sexy. "Mabel could always try the enlarger/shrinker ray," she said.
"Don't go there," Mabel said, sounding upset. "I'll tell you a big lopsided story some day. It doesn't work right for that. Besides, unless you want to keep up the zap about once every forty-nine hours, whatever's shrunk grows back and whatever's grown goes down like a leaky party balloon."
"How did you find—"
"That topic is off-limits," Mabel said, her tone closing the conversation. "Talking board, anybody?"
A OuiJa board? That carried risks. They thought that over as around them crickets began to announce that it was night, night, night, a distant coyote howled, and an owl probably cruising for a meal murmured, ooo! ooo! ooo! ooo!, sounding like a cross between a loading vehicle backing up and Arnold trying to get Mr. Kotter's attention.
"Saw-whet owl," Dipper and Wendy said in unison.
"Are they dangerous?" Mabel asked. "Are we gonna see any owl gore?"
"Nah, they're small," Wendy said.
"Native Americans thought they carried darkness, mystery, and bad luck with them," Dipper added. "They thought they were familiars of, um—"
"Witches!" Mabel said. "I knew it, I knew it!"
"Mabel," Wendy said, sounding exasperated, "Get it clear in your head, OK? I'm not a witch! Never been one, never wanted to be one, don't ever intend to be one. Just so you know."
"I'd be one if I could," Mabel muttered. "Sorry. But you have some kind of magic in you, Wendy. I bet if Brobro scanned you, it'd show something."
"Show that I didn't trust my own wife," Dipper said. "Mabel, you know and I know and everybody knows that whatever is special about Wendy has nothing to do with witchcraft! It's the kind of good, uh, mojo that good people have. Like you! Here!"
He pointed the detector at Mabel and keyed it on.
Whoa.
A red light blinked and an electronic siren howled.
"Is that me?" Mabel yelped, sounding scared.
"It's that!" Dipper said.
Halfway between him and his sister, a tall, vapory, skinny figure, possibly male, flickered for an instant before whirling around to face him. And its face was a skull, not clean like in an anatomy lab, but crusted with dried flesh and wormy dirt and the eye sockets crammed with scuttling bugs—
A startled Dipper killed the switch on the anomaly detector, and the apparition evaporated.
"I think we found it," Wendy said. "You guys OK?"
"Not really," Dipper said.
"Don't turn it back on," Mabel asked, chastened.
"Let's go call Ford," Dipper said. "Where's Tripper?"
They heard a yelp. It was Tripper, from the porch, one yip that, in Dog, said, "Here I am, you noseless humans! Here! Good boy, good girls! Come here before it gets you!"
Dog language. One yip. It's really quite simple—
But man, is it ever nuanced.
*Dog language is not complex. A combination of vocalizations—woofs, barks, whines, yips, growls, and so forth—with position of tail, ears, head, and chest generally does the trick for dogs. They can express important dog ideas:
1-Hello, do I know you? If you let me sniff yours, you can sniff mine!
2-Keep away. I'm protecting my turf and my people, and I will get seriously angry with your ears and loose flesh if you come any closer.
3-Run away!
4-YES I want the ball! Throw the ball! Throw the ball! Throw the ball!
5-Enough with the ball already.
6-HELL-o, lady! I notice that with the season and all you're shopping for a romantic partner. Fortunately for you, I have not been fixed!
7-My darling, that was wonderful. Don't worry. I shan't ever see you again.
8-A simple no would have sufficed. You didn't have to chomp my butt.
9-I didn't do it, somebody else did it, the cat did it, or if there's no cat, maybe a squirrel got in? See my big moist honest eyes? I didn't do—oh, OK, I did it.
10-Dammit, Jim, there's a ghost here! I'm not a doctor, I'm a dog!
The latter would have tipped off Dipper and Mabel if they'd been a little brighter.