Dummy
(June 2014)
1-"I'm a Creep"
Coming back to Gravity Falls was, for Mabel Pines, at least, THE high point of the year. Oh, sure, Halloween was super fun, and Hanukkah and Christmas were super rewarding, and her and Dipper's birthday was super exciting, but returning to the Falls for a new summer away from home was just, um, super super. Or something.
That summer, well . . . not as super as she always hoped. There had been the terrifying business of the Banshee and then the attack by one of Bill Cipher's old henchmaniacs, and, worst of all the sudden, shocking death of Russ, a boy who, after all, was part, maybe mostly, fox. That had shattered her mood.
And now, days later, everyone was so considerate that Mabel sometimes just wanted to scream. Wendy had promised to take her and Dipper on a camping trip soon, but just for a day or three, Mabel most of all wanted to be alone. She hadn't been in love with Russ, exactly, but she had been fond of him, and she thought he had a thing for her. Heck, she knew he did. They had buried the young fox in a beautiful spot, she had managed to get through all that, but . . . still. Now her heart felt raw and her eyes were swollen from tears both shed and held back.
Yet, as Grunkle Stan had patiently told her, "Life's gonna hand you stuff that's great and stuff that frankly sucks, Pumpkin. What you gotta do is be grateful for the good and push through the bad. And sometimes there's a whole lot of the bad. Trust me on this, I know."
Soos. Soos had given her a great big box of chocolates. He had handed them to her while mumbling, "I know you like this kind, Hambone. Enjoy." The box, which she had opened, now sat on her dresser. Under the tissue inside the box top, not one of the thirty-three chocolates had been eaten. Normally it wouldn't have survived the day.
Everybody else was like Wendy and Soos and Stan, so concerned about her, so determined to cheer her up that they depressed her. It was hard to explain to them, no, thanks, I don't need company right now, I just want to feel my feelings and think my thoughts and get my feet on the ground again.
Worst of all, she knew they meant their words and gestures kindly. How could she yell at Dipper when he patted her shoulder and asked, "You OK this morning, Sis?" How could she get mad at Wendy when she would say, "Mabes, anytime you need somebody to talk to or a shoulder to cry on, I'm here, right?"
They meant well. She knew that. But she also knew that her particular kind of misery didn't love company. It needed to be alone for a while, that was all.
Somewhere deep down she knew, too, that good things were bound to happen. They always did in the summers she and Dipper spent in Gravity Falls. There was the new guy who was working in the Shack, for example, Ticknor Keevan O'Grady, an impossible name.
Soos called him T.K., and Mabel had seen him wince the one time she'd addressed him as "Hey, Ticknor!" She was experimenting. Initials didn't really appeal to her. "Tick" was a possibility, but icky, and O'Grady, a dark-haired, rather skinny, soft-spoken bespectacled boy a little bit older than she was, might not appreciate being nicknamed for a parasitic arachnid. Mabel knew that eventually she'd think of something better.
So, anyway, that morning she didn't have to work. That was one thing about Soos. Unlike Grunkle Stan, Soos gave out free days the way that Santa tossed candy canes into the Christmas parade crowd, handful here, handful there, grab as many as you can. That morning before they opened for business, Mabel decided to continue her ongoing efforts to explore the Shack. She loved roaming around and opening random doors, because, as even she admitted, she was a creep.
Aside from that, opening doors was how she gradually discovered the layout of the place.
Easy, you say? Oh ho, you don't know how difficult it really was. The Mystery Shack could not be plotted. No one, not trailblazers Lewis and Clark, not old Anaximander of Anatolia, not Gerardus Mercator himself, could draw an accurate chart of the floor plan of the Shack. The above-ground portion alone had a habit of revealing rooms where, logically, there was no room for another room. And were there two floors, two and a half, or three? Or more? The truth was, Mabel had found their first summer in the place, there was simply too much Shack to fit inside the Shack.
Sure, she and Grunkle Stan and Dipper and the others could get around in the house without trouble. When you thought about it, all you had to do to navigate the Shack was not think about it. If you tried to analyze the layout, nothing made much sense. Grunkle Ford's old bedroom, where an electron carpet had messed everyone up one year, had a window to the outside that you couldn't find if you were on the outside. She had tried. Grunkle Stan's office had to be on the second floor, but there was no second floor.
Mabel suspected that the place, though not all that imposing from outside, had an interior that might be vast enough to contain Hogwarts. And maybe there was a Room of Requirement or something. That would be so neat! Perhaps there she might truly find an epic summer romance. Worth a shot.
Anyway, wandering around and finding new stuff kept her mind off Russ.
Therefore, investigating the Shack was always a pleasant distraction. She never knew. Sometimes she might discover a whole new room, or a closet full of illegal fireworks, or a stash of wax figures that came to life and committed murder. This summer, though, she determined to explore . . . the basement.
Make that "basements." Grunkle Stanford had his labs down there. And there were three levels and sub-levels. New worlds to explore. Suck on that, Alexander the Great!
For Mabel, the main thing about the basements—at the moment—was that nobody went down there these days. Anything she found would be new to her.
That morning as soon as she could slip away, before Dipper and Wendy had started to tidy up the gift shop and before Soos had a chance to unlock the doors, Mabel had slipped in and had tapped the secret code on the vending-machine pad. Dipper had found the passcode, but Mabel had been the one who had brilliantly realized that the code would work on the vending machine, so . . . .
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap, and parlez-vous! as she was nearly sure the French said, the vending machine swiveled open. She stepped onto the stairway down, closed the vending machine behind her, and as the stair light came on automatically, she hurried down to the landing.
Ordinarily, there she would have pressed the elevator button, but on that morning she felt around the other two walls just in case Stanford had concealed a doorway somewh—click!
"Hah!" Mabel said, in her normal tone—the basement was pretty much soundproof—"I knew he'd have something here!"
But finding the door was one thing, opening it was a harder something else. Yes, a panel in the wall had given very slightly and had clicked, but no amount of pressing seemed to persuade it to open. Didn't seem to be an invisible doorknob or even a knothole that you might thrust a finger through and tug. Anyhow, it felt as though it should open inwardly, not swing out. Maybe it was voice activated, she thought. "Open, Sesame Street!"
Nope.
"Alohomora!"
The door spectacularly did nothing.
"Aloha oe!"
Nada.
"Police, open up!"
She didn't really expect anything to happen, and she was not disappointed, because nothing did.
Hmm. Mabel felt the smooth wall, running her palms and fingers across it—aha, there was a vertical seam, barely detectable by touch and all but invisible in the dim light. Just the thinnest of cracks. And on the other side, oho, there was another one. Definitely a possible doorway about two and a half feet wide. How tall? She followed the left-hand seam up until she stood on her tiptoes, and then found the horizontal line that had to be the top of the door. Yep, it met the verticals at right angles—huh.
By running her fingers across and just below the horizontal top line, Mabel found a six-by-two-inch section that tilted inward slightly and sort of clicked. Nothing happened, though. "Gotta be a latch or release or something. If I were Grunkle Ford," she asked herself, "what would I do?"
Well, extemporize some boring lecture on the physical and chemical aspects of concealed doorways, maybe. Mabel drummed her fingers on the wall. What am I doing wrong? That little clicky place has to be some kind of lock. It's tall for me, but Grunkle Ford would just have to reach a couple of inches above his head height. Makes sense for it to be there, just about in the center. What does he have that I don't—
Mabel grinned, found the small swiveling panel again, yes, there it was—and reached up both hands, pushing at it with six fingers simultaneously.
With a faint grating sound, most of the apparently solid wall slipped back a couple of inches and then slid sideways. From the opening a gust of stale, dust-scented air drifted out over her. "Yes!" Mabel pumped her fist up and down.
The room the door now revealed flickered into visibility as the overhead fluorescents came to life. Not that much of a room, really, about eight feet wide by maybe twelve long, with a seven-foot ceiling, and absolutely crammed with shelves of chemicals, racks of apparently inert electronics, and, at the very back, a row of floor-to ceiling high-school style gray metal lockers.
Mabel wandered the shelves of electronic devices. Dials and lenses for various signal lights, none of them illuminated. Levers and many once-shiny metal flip switches and knobs with calibrated guides surrounding them decorated the matte-black component boxes.
Mabel even found one of those machines that had two clear horizontal tubes and a control panel, the type of device that when activated sent red light beaming back and forth. She had seen these in dozens of movies, and that seemed to be their only function, aside from possibly producing a Wilhelm scream randomly. This one, though, was dead.
Mabel walked an aisle of shelved electronic devices and flipped a few switches—none of the equipment was plugged in, and she decided this room must be strictly a storage space. She looked at the chemicals standing on a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves and noticed that a few of the heavy, thick glass bottles had labels decorated with little skulls and crossbones. As Alice said in the book, they must contain the kind of stuff that if you drank very much of it would disagree with you sooner or later.
Like you might say, "I very much enjoy living," and inside you the stuff you had gulped replied, "Nope." The contrary old thing.
Anyway, Mabel was too canny to unstopper anything uncanny. She abandoned the chemistry department.
The lockers intrigued her a little. None of them had any obvious sign of a lock. She had to shove aside a small two-tiered table—it was on caster wheels, meaning it was really some kind of cart, maybe for an old-fashioned movie projector or something—to squeeze past and get to the first locker, which, though pretty narrow, stood about six feet tall.
The latch was like the kind on a school locker, the metal kind with a hole through it for the shackle of a combination lock. You had to grasp the latch and slide it upward to open, and this one was perhaps a bit corroded because she had to squeeze it firmly and use some muscle, but finally it creaked and squeaked and she tugged the door open on hinges that had not been used in maybe thirty years and that resented being used now.
Anyway, the door did groan open. No light inside the locker, of course, and the overheads did not do much to relieve the darkness it contained.
But it also contained something else.
Mabel discovered that as she stared into the dim locker, something inside was staring back at her.
"Well, hello, gorgeous!" she said.