Car Haunt
(August 21-23, 2018)
7
"Residue," Ford agreed. "Peculiar. It's like that of a revenge ghost, but not as strong or intense. I'm forced to agree with you, Mason. Somehow a specter of some sort has apparently decided to haunt your new automobile, at least on a now-and-then basis."
"Why isn't it always here?" Wendy asked.
"I can't say," Ford replied, putting away his equipment. "Not without further evidence. I think it's vital for us to get a full history of this vehicle—I mean from assembly through painting and preparation to the dealership. Someone somewhere along the line knows something. Our job is to find them."
"We're not going to do it tonight," Dipper said. "And tomorrow we both have to work in the Shack."
"I think the matter is urgent," Ford said with a frown. "If Lorena could substitute for you? Would that help?"
"We'll have to cover both our jobs," Wendy said firmly. "I'm not letting Dipper go into this alone. Those car guys may be slippery. I don't think they'd fool him, but if push and shove gang up on us, Dip and me together can be more persuasive than either one of us alone. First thing, though, I'm gonna check every nut and bolt again, and I'm not gonna miss anything. I'll do that tomorrow."
"May I see your axe?" Ford asked unexpectedly.
She drew it.
"Hold it quite near the spot where the apparition manifested. Dipper, be so kind as to run into the house and turn off the parking-lot lights. Oh, and the roof floodlights as well, please."
Dipper hurried away. Wendy said quietly, "Dr. P, you can say anything to Dip that you can say to me. We don't keep secrets from each other."
"I appreciate that," Ford said. "However, I really want to see if your axe is sensitive enough to—there go the lights. Let's close our eyes and wait about half a minute for them to adjust to darkness."
Dipper came back before the thirty seconds had passed. "What's next?" he asked.
"We're meditating, dude," Wendy said. "Close your eyes and join us."
"Uh—OK," Dipper said, doing as she asked. "What's supposed to—"
"Shh," Wendy said. "Be calm, man. Be one with everything."
A few seconds later, Ford said, "Now. Try it."
"It really is dark," Wendy said. She lowered the axe head and swept it slowly around as if it were a metal detector. "There it goes."
"Remarkable," Ford said. The metal shone with a foggy electric-blue glow.
"You should've seen it when the ghost was here," Dipper said. "Little lightning bolts and everything."
"Let's explore the vehicle more," Ford said. He held only a specialized anomaly detector—a ghost-finder, about the size and shape of a sleek modernistic hair dryer. He checked the cargo space, the back seat, and the front. He had Wendy pop the hood and checked the engine. He inspected all four tires.
"Nothing much," he reported at last. "I was hoping we could identify an anchor spot, something that the ghost could latch onto when it wanted to appear.
"Check out the steering wheel," Dipper said.
"I already did."
Dipper got into the driver's seat. "Try it again," he said. He started the engine but did not put the Manitou in gear.
Ford swept the anomaly detector over the wheel again and then said, "Hum!" He did not hum, but he did say the word.
"What is it?" Wendy asked. She stood right beside him.
"There is a flicker coming and going now," Ford said. "Wendy, can you time this?"
"No watch," she said. "Dip?"
"Got it," Dipper said, setting his phone timer app. "Tell me when to start."
"All right, get ready . . . wait . . . wait . . . now!"
The seconds began to flick by.
"And stop! Mason, what was the interval?"
"About eleven seconds," Dipper said.
"Let's try it again, for about a minute this time. Get ready and I'll tell you when to start."
"Ready."
Ford let Dipper time whatever it was for 71.7 seconds. "What was I timing?" he asked.
"A slow sine-wave curve of ebbing and building paranormal energy," Ford said. I began at the strongest point and counted ten cycles in all. Over a little more than seven seconds, the force goes from a high of about .12 to a low of .02, and then it builds again. It's a paranormal pulsation."
"And it's centered on the steering wheel," Dipper said. "Maybe it just builds up until it, I don't know, discharges, like an electric spark building up from static force?
"Get out, Dip," Wendy said. When he did, she took his place. "Might as well account for variables, Dr. P. See what you get with me at the wheel instead of Dipper."
"Good idea," Ford agreed. "Dipper, get ready to time this."
The effort bore no fruit, as Ford might have said. Or as Fiddleford might put it, the results were "less useful than a ten-dollar Confederate bill in a dang outhouse."
"It's Dipper, isn't it?" Wendy asked.
Heavily, Ford said, "Let's go to the lab." He turned on a flashlight, one of Fiddleford's blind 'em all specials, and led them to the basement of the Shack.
Because of the nature of his work—both as the president of an institution that taught all aspects of paranormal and crypto science and also as the head of the Guys in Black, an ultra-secret Government sort of bureau (but you didn't hear that from me) charged with investigating all the spookiest and sometimes deadliest events, beings, and forces in the world—Ford had set up a special section of the second floor (below the first floor—it went in reverse order to above-ground structures) of his lab as a paranormal decontamination suite.
For another half an hour, Dipper had to be scanned, imaged, micro-probed, and examined. He had to stand naked in the sort of old-fashioned phone booth that Clark Kent got nostalgic about while multicolored waves of light crept over his body. Ford had asked Wendy to give him some privacy, but she said "Nope." She'd been scanned like this before (though clothed) and she found watching her husband pretty interesting.
"Kinda psychedelic, dude," she told Dipper after he stepped out and she handed him his shorts. "Not here," she said much more quietly with a downward glance. "Not now. Turn around and get dressed. I'll distract Dr. P."
When she asked about the results, the older Pines said, "I'm relieved to say that Mason himself is not contaminated. His levels are higher than the average, but not by all that much, and it's quite understandable, given the number and quality of experiences he's been through. It's more about the car than about Mason, I'm certain. But for some reason, perhaps just the residual strangeness that Dipper's picked up in Gravity Falls, the force seems to resonate with him, gaining force until it's strong enough to manifest—but then, like a static discharge, it's over nearly as soon as it begins."
Dipper was pulling on his shirt. "So what's your advice, Grunkle Ford?"
"Listen to your wife," Ford told him.
"I paid him to say that," Wendy confided with a grin.
"Seriously, you two put your heads together, eliminate all possible mechanical explanations, and trace the whole history of that automobile, even the parts of its existence no one wants to talk about. That's our best chance, at least in my judgment."
"OK," Dipper said.
"It's midnight," Wendy announced. "Or close to it. For now let's get to bed. We'll work out how to time off for the car stuff with Soos tomorrow morning."
"It will be fine with him," Ford said.
Well, of course it would. But Wendy and Dipper still would have to ask. They wouldn't have been Wendy and Dipper if they failed to do that.
Ford's devices had not fully solved anything, but at least they proved a problem existed. Wendy drove the Manitou over to Steve's garage for one more intensive review and discovered no mechanical problems. The garage owner shook his head. "Beats me," he confessed. "Anybody else, I'd say they were imagining things, but if you say it's a ghost, I have to go along with that."
Funny thing, the ghostly hand never seized the steering wheel once when Wendy was alone in the car. When Dipper tried the next morning to start it up, the accelerator jammed, and if he hadn't used the emergency brake while killing the engine, he might have wound up parked in the gift shop. The vehicle had jumped one of the railroad ties that curbed the parking lot—Soos had paved it with asphalt, but had never got around to making proper curbs—and they had to drag it out before Wendy cautiously backed the car and moved it to a safer parking spot.
"What happened, Dip?" she asked.
"Like the time when something grabbed the wheel," he said. "Only this time an invisible foot stamped on the gas. It pushed my foot away when I tried to jam on the brakes, so I hit the kill switch and used the emergency brake instead. At least I know that works the way it should."
Mabel had come out, still dressed in pajamas and her sleep shirt. "You nearly took out the steps, Brobro!"
"Not me—the ghost."
Tripper hid behind Mabel on the porch and refused even to approach the car.
"When Neeahpik comes in for his workday tomorrow," Wendy said, "I'll see if I can persuade him to take a look. Somehow he can see ghosty things when we can't."
Thinking maybe Gnomes had the same powers, Dipper asked Jeff to give the car a once-over that morning at nine when he and his troupe of dancing Gnomes—they had sort of taken the place of the fake Wolf Boy now that Gideon had grown out of his enthusiasm for being a freak—came in for their day, Jeff agreed.
However, he warned Dipper, "We can't sense ghosts, you know. Trolls can, but then I don't think we're related. Back in the olden days, we used to be business partners. In the Middle Ages, Gnomes quarried stone and built about a tenth of all the stone bridges in the Scandinavian countries. The trolls lived under them and protected them. Don't believe all the billy-goat garbage. That was propaganda put out by human stonemasons who wanted to muscle into our construction business."
"What broke up your, uh, friendship with humans?" Wendy asked.
"Who knows? Records don't go back that far, but I think it must have been priests and monks. They didn't like us—not Gnomes, not trolls. They, uh, demonized us. Is that the right word, Dipper?"
"Yeah," Dipper said. "Have you been taking classes?"
Jeff looked embarrassed. "Uh. Yeah. I went to a Human school when I was just a Gnomelet, you know. Since I got elected Prime Minister, I thought I needed a better education. I'm getting ready to get married and maybe have a family, and, you know, a guy wants the kids to be proud of their old Gnome."
"Who's the lucky girl?" Mabel asked.
"Nobody who slings a leaf blower around!" Jeff said. "Uh, this is personal, so until it's official, let's drop it, OK? This is the haunted car, huh?"
"We're not sure," Dipper said. "It seems like the ghost only shows up when I'm in the car or close to it."
Jeff climbed through the Manitou, crawled under it, even inspected the engine. "Well, my thumbs aren't pricking and I don't sense anything wicked coming this way."
"Where are you going to school?" Mabel asked.
"Um, night school, twice a week. Stanford lets me audit whatever classes I want. The students use me as an example of a non-human sentient life form, so it's a favor for a favor."
"You read Something Wicked This Way Comes, huh?" Mabel asked. "You know, one time me and Dipper visited Waukegan, Illinois. That's where the author, Ray Bradbury, was born!"
Jeff blinked. "Uh, the pricking thumbs and stuff comes from Shakespeare. Macbeth. I read it for the Paranormal Themes in Creative Literature class."
"Huh. I guess it's true, Shakespeare stole all his best stuff," Mabel said. "Anyhow, good for you! You're going to make some lucky squirrel a great husband."
Jeff looked at Dipper, who shrugged, and evidently decided to drop the subject. "Anyway, guys, sorry, but this is not in my wheel room."
"House," Mabel corrected.
"Wheelhouse," Jeff said. "Wheelhouse. I'll remember that. Have you tried a conjuration?"
"I'm sort of iffy about that," Dipper admitted. "I've had some experiences with conjured-up ghosts. They haven't been great."
"Yeah, hard to control 'em," Jeff agreed. "Well, I gotta get my dancers to go through one rehearsal on stage. Got two replacements this morning. See you at work!"
"You're thinking exorcism, aren't you?" Wendy asked, crossing her arms.
"Wondering about it. But you know the problem."
"I don't," Mabel complained. "I don't have that mental telepathetic thing you guys have! What's the problem, Broseph? Dumb it down for me!"
"I don't have to," Dipper said. "Conjuring a ghost is dangerous because you never can tell what kind of ghost might show up. If it's what Ford used to call a Category 1, then it just hangs around and annoys you. But if it's one of the inimical ones—a Pain Lord or a Fallen Spirit or—heck, the categories go up to twenty now. If it's real powerful, it might manifest but the exorcism doesn't banish it. Instead, it turns on you."
"Yeah, like that time we called up a ghost and got pulled into that weird comic-book convention dimension. I guess that's a problem," Mabel agreed. "But we gotta do something. Tripper won't even come into the parking lot now."
"We start tomorrow," Wendy said. "We're gonna track down the whole history of this car. At some point, somewhere along its existence, somebody must've died. If we know who it was—"
"And how they died," Dipper added.
"—then we might get a clue on how to banish the ghost."
"If we can't," Dipper said, "I don't have any choice. I'll have to get rid of my car."
"Yeah, sell it to some unsuspecting yutz!" Mabel said, brightening.
"Not gonna do that," Dipper said. "Bad karma. I'll junk it and have it cubed."
"And lose all that money?" Mabel asked.
"It's the only honest thing to do," Dipper told her.
"Oh, man," she moaned. "Sometimes being good is such a bitch!"
"Mabes!" Wendy exclaimed, but whether it was the surprise or the general tension, she had to laugh.
To be continued