Dummy

(June 2014)

10-Heck Breaks Loose

Everything happened at once. Dipper tried to drag Mabel down and out of range. Mabel shoved Dipper away and not only didn't duck but spread her arms and yelled, "No!" Grunkle Ford weaved the quantum destabilizer back and forth, trying to get a clear shot. Fiddleford came stumbling up behind Ford, his headlamp brilliantly silhouetting the scientist. The dummy bellowed—for a raspy, staticky value of "bellow"—and came lurching through the brush.

Fiddleford pushed the barrel of the destabilizer down toward the earth. "Don't shoot it!" he yelled.

"Crash, no!" Mabel shouted as the dummy limped past her and Dipper in a shambling run.

And the dummy—threw itself to its knees and waited, a perfect target not ten feet from Stanford.

"Fiddleford, it's giving up! It wants me to shoot!"

"Listen to me! You can't jest take a life! That's not jest a dummy no more, understand? It's Crash!"

"Ay-it t'zar," the dummy said.

"It can talk?" asked Ford.

"It can talk!" said Mabel. She came up and stood next to the dummy, patting it on its head. "There, there," she said. "There, there."

"Me'zeda emeidhu woinazh," the dummy said.

"What language is it talking?" Fiddleford asked.

"No idea," Ford said. "Don't get close—we don't know what it might do!"

But Fiddleford had reached up to switch off his headlamp. Step by step he drew nearer, letting Ford's light illuminate him. "Hey," he said. "Yore name's Crash, ain't it?"

"Krash." Still kneeling, the dummy raised both arms as if imploring. "Zu el-zar nir' it sorthu neama?

"It's askin' something," Fiddleford said, staring at the dummy and the girl who was now hugging it. "But I got no more idear of what language that is than a possum what got sucked into a F-16's air scoop."

"Mabel taught it a couple of words in English," Dipper volunteered. "Uh, but not enough to make sense."

Ford now held the quantum destabilizer in one arm, down at low rest. "In the Nightmare Realm, the inhabitants were a jumble of different beings from thousands of dimensions. They worked out a kind of pidgin-language. I learned some of it from B—uh, I mean You-Know-Who."

"Voldemort?" Mabel asked.

"Triangle guy," Dipper corrected.

"Yuck, him?"

"Let me try it," Ford said. "There's just a chance." He cleared his throat and deliberately, slowly, asked, "Ilsobhuls a'e y'ah j'suy a uhg?"

The glowing red eyes flickered rapidly, alternating. "It's a-processing," Fiddleford said. "Crash is thinking about it, maybe remembering."

The dummy stretched out both arms toward him and rasped, "Vuy'ob?"

Ford drew in a sharp breath. Then, in an unsteady voice, he told Fiddleford, "It—uh, he—possibly she—no, go with it—it's asking if you're its father."

Fiddleford winced. "Oh, Lordy. But I reckon a man's gotta own up. Tell Crash that I made his shell, but not his mind, all right?"

Still speaking slowly, like a man in his fifties trying to remember two years of high-school French, Ford said, "Y'ah ah y'o g'bouyeb ev a'eab vahagmo zesa'." To Fiddleford, he explained, "I told him you created its physical body."

Bowing its head, the dummy said softly, "Somf no."

"Is it a-cussing me?" Fiddleford asked. "I can't rightly blame it."

"It isn't," Ford said. "In the patois of the Nightmare Realm, 'no' means roughly 'me.'" He coughed. "It's uh, it's saying 'Help me.'"

Mabel broke the silence of the pre-dawn darkness. "We gotta," she said. "Grunkle Ford, we just gotta."

Crash resisted—not yelling, it couldn't exactly yell—but physically pulling away as they led it down into the lab. On the steps, Ford tried to reassure it: "Jo noul le sub'l ye a'ei, v'bolsh do ubo. Oh, dear, I'm afraid I rather butchered that. In the Nightmare Realm I had no use for the word 'friends.'"

Something of Ford's meaning seemed to come through because Crash tottered down the stair. It seemed relieved when they did not return it to the dark room with the locker, but instead moved down one level into a laboratory. Ford invited it to sit, but it did not. Perhaps it could not. It simply stood immobile, the red eyes only dully glowing under the ceiling lights.

For about half an hour Ford carried out a stop-and-go and often-corrected dialogue with Crash. Then he said to the others, "It's much as we hypothesized. Crash was originally a plasmoid creature from one of the CA dimensions. They have a tenuous sort of body. I gather that Cipher either recruited him or deliberately tricked him. Either way, Crash was thrust into the Nightmare Realm. He says Cipher's plans horrified him. When you and the crash-test dummy intruded into the Nightmare Realm, Cipher ordered his minions to seize you. Instead, Crash managed to flow through the dummy's joints, and when I pulled you back, it came along within the dummy. For all those years it hung in the locker, Crash believed itself dead."

"That's awful!" Mabel said. She nudged her brother. "Wake up, this is so sad!"

"I wasn't asleep," Dipper protested, yawning. "Just sitting here with my chin on my chest and my eyes closed. And I drooled on my shirt because I like it that way." He blinked. "What did I miss?"

Crash said plaintively, "A gulley oghahy sobo. No zug ye laksynubo boumn. Eb ye na' ej'l sanolhael."

"What's he say?" Fiddleford asked.

Softly, Ford replied, "He can't continue to exist here. He's pleading with us to send him back to the Nightmare Realm or to his own lost dimension. Um, I hypothesize that, as a plasmoid, Crash needs to be surrounded by sustaining energy. There was plenty of that in the Nightmare Realm, a surging background of chaotic forces, but no equivalent on Earth. Probably he was inert in the darkness because the dummy's sensors had nothing to activate them. Once exposed to light and sensation, the sensor array powered up, and Crash is existing now on the electrical force provided by the batteries."

"Ford," said Fiddleford, "Y'all know we can't noways send him back where he come from, or to the Nightmare Realm, either."

"We have no working Portal," Ford agreed. "And if what I understood from Cipher is true—always a doubtful proposition—the Nightmare Realm ceased to exist when the Rift was re-sealed, hurling all of Bill's henchmaniacs back to their own dimensions. Now that pathway is permanently closed, so Crash can't return to the Realm or his own dimension. But—how can I tell him that?"

"It's a he now?" Mabel asked.

Ford smiled. "Well—I suppose I'm thinking of Crash as a person now. Let's call Crash 'he' to make him sound more like, um, one of us. As far as mind goes. Am I making sense? It's very late."

Dipper asked, "What if he does just stay here? Mabel can make a pet out of him."

"That's no kinda life for a thinkin' being," Fiddleford said. He smiled. "No matter how sweet an' nice Mabel is. An' Crash is a stranger in a strange land. He'll never be happy here. Every heart craves its own home, as my daddy used t' say."

"And when the batteries run down," Ford said, "the entity that's now Crash's, um, well, soul I suppose is the nearest term, won't be able to continue. It will cease to exist."

Fiddleford sighed. "Anyways, he ain't got long to suffer. The batteries are powerful, but I never meant 'em to provide for locomotion, jest fer th' low-demand sensor array. They'll run out pretty soon, and that's all she wrote. We could extend his life, I reckon, by hangin' him back in th' locker—"

"No!" Mabel said. "Please, no. Crash hates that! You saw on the steps he was afraid. Anything but that."

Ford put his big hand on her shoulder. "Mabel, please understand. If he doesn't go dormant, Crash will simply fade out over—how many hours, Fiddleford?"

"Not many," Fiddleford said. "I guesstimate two days at most."

Dipper asked, "Can't we change out the batteries?"

"No can do," Fiddleford said. "Truth is, the batteries is unique. I made 'em myself, and they can't jest be poked in like changin' out a flashlight battery. They're part o' Crash's shell, an' makin' a new shell would take months. That's a lot longer'n he's got left, Mabel. I'm sorry."

"He's dying?" Mabel asked. She buried her face in her hands. "No. Not again! It's so unfair!"

"We could switch him off," Dipper said. "End it fast. That might be kinder."

Mabel, weeping, just shook her head. "There must be another way," she sobbed.

"I'm truly sorry," Ford said. "If I could think of a method to send him home again, I promise I would try to help him."

Dipper gave Mabel a sibling hug. She did not return the pats.

For a few moments, Ford and Fiddleford just hung their heads in silence. Crash stood as stoic as a statue. Mabel sobbed.

But Dipper was thinking. He finally spoke his thoughts: "I think I remember something in Journal Three, Grunkle Ford." He bit his lip and added an unspoken sentence in his mind: I just don't know if it would work.

To be continued