Dummy
(June 2014)
11-Where All that Was Lost Is Revealed…
Outside the Shack the stars began to fade before the slow tide of dawn-light in the east. Inside the Shack, Fiddleford, Grunkle Ford, Mabel, and Dipper clustered around the table up in the attic. Crash, who had trouble with stairs and wound up being supported on both sides by the kids, stood silent. His eyes seemed a little dimmer to Mabel.
Dipper read Ford's passage on the Bottomless Pit aloud to the others. "I want to get to the bottom of this mystery," it began. Ford went on to explain that some materials tossed into the Pit simply vanished forever. Others sporadically and unpredictably returned. He had begun to discern a faint pattern . . ..
"OK," Dipper said. "You say here that you didn't get up the courage to jump into the Pit yourself. Mabel and I did. Uh. Fell into the Pit, to put it better. Together with Stan and Soos."
"Remarkable." Ford stroked his chin. "I thought Stanley was merely spinning another yarn—lying, to put it better—when he told me that story. What was it like?"
"BOR-ing," Mabel said. "We fell through nothing for, what, twenty-two minutes?"
"I think closer to twenty-one," Dipper said. "It was hard to tell, because when it spat us back out again, only one minute had passed on my watch."
"I conjectured that beneath the surface the Pit develops into a Klein tube or a Möbius convolution," Ford said. "Wait, I begin to understand. The things that came back when I was experimenting all had one thing in common: a tin of beans, a stick of beef jerky, and an egg were three of them. You see?"
"A really sucky meal?" Mabel asked.
"Yes! A really—no! All of the items that returned were, or contained, something organic. Completely inert materials, a golf ball, a rock, a warrant for my brother's arrest—long story, someone came to the Shack once thinking I was Stanley—things that had no DNA, I suppose, vanished for good. Let me see the book. Curse my defective attention span! I meant to make more detailed notes, but I left no space after this entry and forgot about them later."
"You also never numbered the pages," Dipper pointed out.
"Yes, I—didn't I? Perhaps they're numbered in invisible ink. When I grew a touch paranoid, sometimes I wrote in invisible ink. One can read it only under ultra-violet illumination—"
"Grunkle Ford," Mabel moaned, "this isn't helping! What does this have to do with Crash?"
"Krash," faintly echoed the dummy, giving the first consonant a peculiar emphasis.
Ford blinked. "I . . . don't know!"
Dipper squirmed a little. "Uh, I don't know all the science yet, but, um—Gravity Falls has a lot of weird things in it. Things that are found nowhere else on Earth."
"Like them little men with long beards," Fiddleford said, shuddering.
"Um, the Gnomes actually live all over Western Europe, at least, and there are colonies of them in the Eastern United States," Dipper said. "They live underground in burrows almost everywhere else, but here they adapted to living in the trees. And I think when they first showed up here they were trying to tunnel to southern California, but took a wrong turn."
"Albuquerque, I bet," Fiddleford said. "Back when I rode th' trains a lot, that place foxed me ten times out of nine."
"Maybe," Dipper said. "Anyhow, they came out either in the Bottomless Pit or next to it. That was hundreds of years ago—"
"The Gnomes say it was thousands," Mabel said helpfully.
"They call anything over about twenty a thousand," Dipper said. "Anyway, we have mole men down deep in the ground under Gravity Falls, and they're unique. A Gnome told me that the mole men came here from another reality. They dug into their bottomless pit in their own dimension and popped out here. Do you think—"
"I do," Ford said. "I see what you mean. The Pit is a modified rift into other dimensions. Perhaps. Maybe thousands of other dimensions—"
"Or hundreds," Mabel said, again helpfully.
"—yes, have their versions of a Pit like this one, and somehow they connect. It's just possible that a being who ventured into our dimension from elsewhere could return by leaping into the pit. If it's alive, it'll come back out somewhere. If it's alien, perhaps it will connect with its own exit."
"That's a mighty long shot," Fiddleford said.
"It's the only one we have," Ford said. "Crash won't last another day. Let me explain it to him."
He had a long discussion. The crash dummy listened, asked questions, then took a long time to think before answering.
"Grunkle Ford," Mabel asked softly, "what did he say?"
Clearing his throat, Ford replied, "He wants to try it. Here, he says, he has no chance. In the Pit—there's a very small one. Small, but better than nothing."
"Can I hug him?" Mabel asked.
The pre-dawn haze had thickened into a mist. They all walked to the edge of the Pit, and Ford lifted Crash over the rail that Soos had built around it. "Careful," he said, and he repeated that to Crash in the pidgin language of the Nightmare Realm. He went on for a few minutes, then explained, "I told him that once he's falling, he will need to exit the crash dummy. No matter what, that will vanish utterly. But if Crash himself is once again his own entity—then the weirdness attraction of his universe may provide him a way back."
Fiddleford reached for the inert hand and shook it. "I hate that you got drug into that terribobble place with me," he said. "Good luck."
Ford translated.
Mabel said, "I'm glad I met you. It's hard to say goodbye. Remember us."
"May-bell," Crash said. "Duh-dipper. Garunkle Ford. Fiddleford."
"If we had a month, I could teach you English," Mabel said. "Only—we don't."
"Ready?" Ford asked.
Crash nodded.
"Good luck, man," Dipper said.
"Godspeed," Ford almost whispered. "Let's do it."
Crash didn't hesitate, but let himself fall forward. He stretched out his legs, and the last they saw of him, he plummeted down in a perfect arrow-straight dive, arms stretched overhead. The darkness swallowed him.
"Grunkle Ford," Mabel whispered. "I wanna wait."
"I'll stay with you," Dipper said.
"If he does not return in thirty minutes—" Ford began. He coughed. "Then he can't return here at all."
Mabel nodded. "I know."
The two men turned to leave, and Dipper walked with them as far as the Shack. As they reached it, Ford paused to speak to him: "Mason, a word. I don't think we'll see anything more of the crash-test dummy, nor of the entity we called Crash. Oh, by the way, in our talks I learned that in his own dimension his name was—is, I mean—Karoya. He tried to translate that into pidgin. I'm not sure what it means—just a guy, wanderer, or maybe even hero."
Dipper hesitated. "Do you think he'll really get to his own home?"
"Frankly, Dipper, no, I don't. I think he's—gone. But please, whatever you do, don't ever tell Mabel."
Dipper nodded and locked that secret away down deep.
He went briefly into the Shack and picked up a heavy quilt and a blanket before going back to the Pit. He and his sister sat together on the grass, holding hands and huddling under the blanket for warmth. "It's starting to get light," Dipper said.
Mabel sighed. "Ever since I found Crash, I hardly thought of Russ. Why does everyone have to go away, Dipper? Mermando, Xyler and Craz, Russ, now Crash. It hurts so bad when they do."
"I guess that's life," Dipper said.
"You won't leave me, will you?"
"Never. We're stuck like glue."
"I'm glad you're my brother."
"I'm glad you're my sister. Most of the time. Ouch!"
Darkness. The artificial body like a spear hurled from a great height. Yet no sense of rushing wind. No inexorable tug of gravity, the ancient law of all worlds, g equals G times M over R squared.
No light stimulus. No real sense of touch, no scents, no certain temperature. The body's batteries simply fed . . . thought.
And in its small way, the body sent the mind inhabiting it the smallest bits of information.
Time, for example.
It was hard to remember exactly what time was. In the world in which Karoya had been born, one of billions of planets in Dimension CA!/, no days or nights passed. It was a bizarre system, a planet with high gravity poised in a fantastical orbit that included three stars. No side of the planet ever knew full darkness.
Time there passed in a convoluted way, yet it passed. In the Nightmare Realm, time stood still, yet movement and duration occurred. True, there Karoya, Bill Cipher, all the Henchmaniacs were more abstractions than physically real. The Nightmare Realm was not, properly speaking, a dimension at all, but the foaming froth between an infinite number of actual dimensions. Not quite correct. Infinite minus one. And inevitably, the Nightmare Realm was eroding to nonexistence, leading Cipher to search frantically—
No, Bill Cipher was manic, not frantic. Say determinedly—
Not quite right, either. Fanatically. Bill Cipher searched fanatically for a dimension with worlds in which he could gain physical existence and complete domination.
First, though, eons ago, yesterday, Cipher had raided Karoya's home world, a planet lush in surplus energies, and Cipher had taken Karoya as a way of understanding how to access those energies, and when Karoya could not help him, in spite Cipher had forced Karoya to inhabit a multitude of unreal forms—
Until the body he inhabited flashed into reality, together with the old human's flailing arms and screaming face. Somehow Karoya felt pulled into the artificial body—and then something, gravity, a rope, something, jerked him into a whole different universe—
Then an explosion of impressions. Confusion. Paralysis. Then darkness. Then . . . nothing. Unconsciousness.
Until May-bell opened the door. Then baffling events, baffling things, a sort of madnss.
From what Ford had told him, Karoya knew that this dive into the Pit offered release.
Return to the Homeworld, or oblivion.
Either is acceptable. Neither is preferable.
I did not intend to end the life of the creature. I did not understand. Forgiveness? May-bell would forgive.
Sorrow for causing hurt.
Time is . . . passing.
Karoya waited until the dummy's internal clock told him that twenty minutes had elapsed. Once outside the suit, he might be able to hold on for another three or four minutes. At last he took a deep breath—figuratively—and stepped outside.
At first the loss of sensation terrified Karoya.
Then, far . . . below? A speck. A lone and lonely star in the vastness of absolutely nothing.
It grew.
Karoya saw it without eyes. What the being called Karoya perceived is impossible to communicate in Earthly terms, but it was as if . . .
As if the star swelled from a point to the tiniest disk, and expanded and grew larger, and as if against all reason Karoya was not falling into it but arising toward it.
The . . . the word "color" has no real application here, but as an analogy it might work—the color was not that of an Earth night, or a room in the Mystery Shack, or the daylight sky on Earth. It was the almost-forgotten hue of Karoya's home dimension.
Or maybe after all it was only illusion, wish, not reality. He hurtled toward either rebirth or extinction.
An instant before reaching it, Karoya thought intently, May-bell, I am home!
Then, without terror and without joy, without dread and without hope, Karoya went into the light—
"Brobro!" Mabel said, shaking Dipper awake. He had fallen asleep, and when he opened his eyes he could see Mabel in the early light of day. She was smiling, though tears ran down her cheeks.
"Wha? Dipper asked, blinking.
"I know," she said, squeezing his hand. "I know now."
"Know what?" Dipper mumbled, his tired brain trying to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of sleepy memories. A corner piece seemed to be missing. "What do you mean?"
"Crash," Mabel said. "He's all right. He's OK now."
"Um," Dipper said. "Why do you think that?"
"Because," Mabel said, solemnly for her, "I just . . . know."
The End