Dummy

(July 2014)

5-Ill Met by Sunlight

As the gathering of Gnomes broke up, Jeff led the Gnome Queen, who happened to be a badger, out of the clearing. She wore a collar with semiprecious gems glittering on it, a small tiara somehow clipped to the short hair on her head, and a leash that Jeff held onto. As they passed near where Mabel crouched, she could hear Jeff speaking to the badger, not in Gnomish but in English: "We should discover what did this, your Majesty. Shmebulock and I think it must have been a car, but—aahh!"

Mabel had risen suddenly from her crouch. She held up her hands, palms out, urging Jeff to calm down. "Shh. I didn't mean to scare you. Uh, hi, your Majesty." She curtsied, and the badger looked on with approving indifference. "Jeff, what happened here?"

"Nothing," Jeff said, blinking. "Uh, back there we had a memorial for one of our Gnomes. We buried him in the Place of Memories. He died last night or early this morning."

"I couldn't help hearing what you were telling the Queen," Mabel said. She dropped her voice to a dramatic whisper: "Was it—murder?"

Jeff's eyes narrowed. "You don't have that wind machine, do you?"

"Not on me, no," Mabel said. "Look, we patched all that up. Remember Weirdmageddon? Gnomes and people side by side? Yay, go, Gravity Falls?"

"My nerves are on edge." Jeff looked down as the Queen curled up, yawned, and dozed. "Murder? No, we don't think it's Gnomicide. Possibly an accident. It, uh, it happened over on the roadway—" he pointed.

"Gopher Road?" Mabel asked. "I live on Gopher Road!"

"No," Jeff corrected gently. "You live in a room in the Mystery Shack."

"Well, yes, but the address is on Gopher Road," Mabel said. She did not talk to the Gnomes as often as Dipper did, and she was still getting used to their habit of taking everything literally. "Where on Gopher Road? Downhill, toward the Shack?"

"No, uphill. Where the road curves just before it goes over the human-stone bridge."

"You mean the concrete bridge? The one over Cold Creek?"

"We don't call the creek that. We call it Fullwater. Because it never goes dry, even in a hot summer."

"Whatever." Mabel frowned. "That's a couple of miles from the Shack. So tell me everything you know. I'll help you find out what happened to—what's his name? The dead Gnome?"

"It could be a her," Jeff pointed out.

"Oh, I'm sorry. What's her name, then?"

"No, it's a him. But it might have been a her. Nobody really knew him very well, except for a few of the young Gnomes. He was a former Feral, and his name was Skerro. Someone found him lying just off the road, where the woods begin. He was mashed."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Mabel said.

Jeff looked glum. "I feel really bad for his parents. They have an older son, too, Ainbalk. Those are old-Gnome names."

"They're beautiful. Skerro and Ainbalk. What do they mean?"

"'You tell me,' 'his name.'"

Mabel stared at him. "Whose name?"

"No, Skerro is you tell me. Ainbalk is his name." Jeff sighed. "Look, when the oldest boy was born, his mother said, 'I'd like his name to be something special.' So his father asked, 'What's wrong with his name?' Ainbalk, you know? And they thought that was special enough. Then when the younger son was born, the father asked, 'Now what are we going to call him?' And the mother said, 'You tell me.'" He paused. "It makes more sense if you know what Feral Gnomes are like."

"Uh, this isn't meant to be gross or anything, but could you take me and show me where the body was? It's not all—you know, blood and stuff, is it?"

"No. Funny thing is that our two chief sithaks—uh, those are peace-keepers, um, Gnome policemen—"

"Yeah, I met a couple when they did a butterfly bust once," Mabel said. "Near the unicorn circle."

"Ugh, unicorns," Jeff replied.

"I know, right? Anyway, you were saying your two top cops—I mean sithaks—what? Investigated?"

"Yes, old Blobh and deputy Graith. They couldn't smell anything un-Gnomish but squirrel. There was a squirrel with the body. The sithaks think the squirrel may already have been crushed and Skerro was collecting it. Fresh roadkill is food, you know. And while the boy was on the roadway, maybe a car came along and the human in it didn't see him, bending over to get the squirrel, and—accident."

"Show me," Mabel said.

"Let me put the Queen in Dave's keeping," Jeff said. "Come with me."

It wasn't that long a walk, cutting through the woods, and beneath the forest trees the air felt cool and fresh. Jeff pointed now and then to show Mabel around. Over there was a Gnome farm, not tilled and squared off like human fields, but a patch of ground where the crops grew as though Nature had planted them. In that clearing, at berry-harvest time, the Gnome women would make and bottle jams of all kinds, some ritualistic, others with magical properties.

"What do they do?" Mabel asked.

"Different ones do different things. Help Gnomes recover from illness, give them strength, things like that."

"Cool."

Eventually they emerged from the woods. "It was here," Jeff said.

Now I play Sherlock Holmes. Wish I'd read more of those stories.

"Doesn't look very violent," Mabel said.

"Well, we think the poor boy might have been struck right over there in the roadway and been thrown this far. His red cap was a few steps that way, toward the road. The rest of him was here in the weeds."

Mabel walked to the road. It was paved with asphalt, but alongside it ran two bar ditches. Closer to town the ditches were rock-lined, but out in the country they were nominally green ditches, seeded with grass. Except in hard rains sometimes the grass washed away and the county had to come in from time to time to repave a washout and replant the grass.

The ditch on this side had suffered from erosion. Most of it lay under fallen pine straw or irregular clumps of bunchgrass, but stretches were bare, packed brown soil littered with pebbles. Mabel hopped over the ditch and followed the road downhill for a few steps. "Look at this, Jeff."

Jeff joined her. "Not too close to the road. The big log trucks come downhill fast."

"But they'd be in the other lane."

"Not always. What are you pointing at?"

"That little dark patch on the road, see? I think it has fur stuck to it—"

Jeff sniffed. "Dead squirrel. That may be where Skerro had the accident."

Mabel turned around. "Are you sure? I mean, that would be a long way from here. For a car to toss an accident victim, I mean. Uphill, too."

"What else could have happened?"

Mabel's shoulders slumped. "I don't know. I need Dipper. He's the one who reads all these detective stories—wait, what?"

They were crossing the ditch when Mabel reached way down to stop the Gnome in his tracks. "What's wrong?" he asked, sounding panicky.

"Is that a footprint?" she asked, pointing at the silty bottom of the ditch.

"Not a Gnome's," Jeff said. "Too thin."

"Yeah, doesn't look like a person's, either." Mabel tilted her head. "Kind of like someone wearing a shoe with no heels on it, but real narrow. It looks like whoever it was just stood here, or jumped down here from the woods. Huh. If Skerro was, uh, harvesting the squirrel, this would be a good place for someone to watch him and then if he got hit by a car, maybe whoever would've taken him off the road because they felt sorry for—oh, I don't know!"

"It doesn't smell like a person," Jeff volunteered. "More like, uh. Like—I don't know what, but not like a human and definitely not like a Gnome."

Mabel took her phone out and snapped half a dozen photos of the depression, from all sides. She put her ball-point pen on the ground near it in two pictures for scale. And then her phone rang in her hand, startling her so much that she dropped it.

"Whoa, thanks," she said as Jeff retrieved it and handed it back. "Usually there's no bars up here—Dipper, hi."

"Ah, a far-talker," Jeff said. "Phone, I mean."

Mabel didn't respond to Jeff, but into the phone she said, "Just up the road from the Shack, about a mile or two, I guess. No, Jeff's with me. What? No! They have a Queen now! Uh—well—OK, I'll tell you. I lost something and I'm looking for it, but the Gnomes had a death in the family. Don't know him, his name was Skerro, and Jeff says he was just a youngster. Looks like he was hit by a car, but—hey, Dip, let me text you some photos of a footprint and see if you can make anything of them." She sighed. "OK, I'll come back then. I didn't mean to worry anybody." A pause. "Yeah, I'll tell you more when I get there. Photos are coming in a minute. Bye."

When she had put away her phone, she said to Jeff, "I'm not sure that what happened to the Gnome boy was an accident. Somebody might have done this on purpose. Dipper will help out. Listen, do me a favor, OK? Ask the Gnomes if they've seen something that looks like a person but isn't alive."

"A dead human?" Jeff asked.

"No, a never-alive lookalike kind of thing. A—a made thing. You know what a statue is? Remember that statue that Bill Cipher melted, in front of the City Hall?"

"Big hat," Jeff said. "Yes. Or like the wax figures that used to be in the Mystery Shack."

"You saw those?" Mabel asked.

"Uh, we didn't pay admission," Jeff said, looking embarrassed. "But once in a while we snuck in to see what the things were. One time, though, they were moving, and that scared us so we didn't come back."

"Must have been a night when the moon was waxing," Mabel said. "They were cursed, and that's when they came . . . to . . . hey, what phase is the moon in now?"

"About a week past full," Jeff said. "We can follow the creek here down to the bottom of the hill near where the bonfires are burned. It's an easier walk."

They turned and walked on silently, except for the sounds of birds and the breeze rustling the leaves. But once they had crossed the creek on a fallen log—Mabel, the daredevil, balanced easily enough—Jeff said, "There's the clearing, and the trail to the Mystery Shack is just past it. Is it all right if I don't go on with you from here? Uh, some of the Gnomes complain I spend too much time with humans."

"I'm good. Thanks, Jeff. Hey, come around tomorrow afternoon. I'll get some mushrooms for you guys."

Jeff bowed his thanks and, in his Gnomish way, sort of faded into the undergrowth. Mabel climbed the hillside. This was the clearing where they sometimes sat on logs, listening to Stan tell ghost stories around a campfire. From here it was just a short walk past the Bottomless Pit and to the Shack—

She stopped and turned around.

"Who's there?"

She held her breath. Nothing and no one.

Yet she was sure she'd heard footsteps.

Following her.