Haven Days

(July 2020)

13-Verdict

Ford sternly and absolutely forbade Dipper from leaving the safety of town to join him, Fiddleford, and Billy in the quarantine house. "This is our problem," he said. "It's not your trouble, Mason, nor Mabel's nor Wendy's. It's kind of you to offer, but what must be done is up to the three of us." After a pause, he added, "I promise you this: Fiddleford and I will do our best to keep Billy safe."

"I still think we should be there," Dipper mumbled as he turned off his phone.

"Dr. P is sure to have the guards on high alert," Wendy said. "I don't think we have much of a chance of slipping past them."

Mabel, who had rested her elbows on the table and had been leaning her chin on her hands, murmured, "Do we have to go there in person?"

Dipper looked at her sister, but she was wearing her poker face, which in her case was a goofy grin. "Sis, what do you have in mind?"

Now her expression became conspiratorial. "Well, remember that time the first summer we were here when Li'l Gideon shook hands with Bill Cipher to make the deal so Bill would steal the combination to Grunkle Stan's safe?"

"No," Wendy said. "I mean, I've heard you guys talk about it, but I wasn't along for that one."

"What about it?" Dipper asked. "We had to go into Stan's mind for that." He glanced at Wendy. "Uh, it was in the Mindscape, and it was weird. Like every door in the Shack had something strange inside because they all opened onto Stan's memories."

Mabel said, "Yeah, and there were hundreds of doors. Thousands, maybe. I remember one opened onto a broken swing set, all rusty and sagging, one of the swings down. Later we found out that was Grunkle Stan's memories of when he and Grunkle Ford were little. And I saw Grunkle Stan's head with bat wings for ears, flapping through the Shack and squawking 'No refunds." She pulled her hands inside her sweater sleeves and pumped the air. "Oh, and we had to fight Bill, and I had kittens for fists after I regained my cuteness. That was fun!"

"Sounds like it," Wendy said deadpan.

Dipper shook his head. "Anyhow, we can't do that because we can't get to Grunkle Ford to go inside his memories."

"No," agreed Mabel. "But we can get to you, and you can get to the Mindscape, so if we get Grunkle Stan to go into your mind with us while you're in the Mindscape, we can go to visit Ford that way! 'Cause they're twins!"

"That's . . . probably impossible," Dipper said.

"Why?" Mabel asked. "Answer me that, Broseph."

"Yeah," Wendy said. "I think Mabel has a point, I mean from what we kinda-sorta know, the Axolotl appears to Ford in the Mindscape, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Dipper said reluctantly. "The way Bill used to do before Weirdmageddon."

Mabel looked smug. "So we can get into the Mindscape here and travel to the place where Ford is there. Doy!"

When Dipper still looked doubtful, Wendy added, "There was that time when you were in the haunted high school in Minnesota, and Ford and McGucket helped me to come and fight beside you by, what was it, astral projection. How's this so different?"

"The Mindscape is a tricky place," Dipper warned. "It's like . . . the realm of dreams. And I'm not sure that you can just appear in somebody else's dreams unless you really know what you're doing. I mean, Bill Cipher could, but he's a dimensional demon. Or he was back then."

"Will it hurt to try?" Wendy asked.

"I suppose—if we're careful—but listen, if I'm asleep, and I pretty much have to be, or in a trance, anyhow, and I wake up, then we'll be yanked right out of the Mindscape. That's like waking up from a really bad nightmare—it leaves you punchy and disoriented. Mabel, why don't you stay and watch, just in case—"

"No way, Dippay!" Mabel had the stubborn expression that Dipper knew well. It was the kind of face she wore when she took Stan's advice: "Remember, kids, when one door opens, choose a nearby wall and bash it open by brute force!"

"And don't ask me to stay behind," Wendy warned. "Remember our vows. We two became one!"

"I'll call Grunkle Stan," Mabel volunteered. "We'll need him, and maybe he'll be our watchdog."

However—"Nah," Stan said on the phone. "Definitely not. But I'll and go along for the ride."

Since Stan lived so close, he was there in three minutes. Dipper told him what they were up to. "We really need a watcher," he finished. "Like a lifeguard."

"Dipper," Stan said, "you're gonna need me to be there with you. Once you get into that cockamamie Mindscape, ya gotta get into my brother's head. I know the way there, you don't. How about Wendy being the watcher-?"

"She can't!" Mabel said. "She and Brobro are one! Dipdy Pineduroy! Wendip Cordurines!" She brightened up. "Hey, Soos was with us in Grunkle Stan's mind. He knows the drill. And he'll stay with us and watch while we're off exploring the twilight zone or whatever!"

Dipper realized this was where he had to give in. He sighed. "OK, let's find Soos. If he says no, it's off."

Soos was agreeable, though he warned, "I thought we were, like, in the Dreamscape, dawgs. Are you sure you're going to the right address?"

"The Dreamscape," Dipper said, "is just what you call the Mindscape when you're asleep and having a lucid dream. It's like when you're in England, you're also in Great Britain and the United Kingdom all at the same time."

"Yeah," Stan said. "It's all in your head, get it?"

But Soos's mind was at the moment on a single track. "Hey, you know what, dudes? When this pandemic is over, it'd be so much fun to take the kids on a trip to all three of those places! But it sounds expensive. Maybe just one to start with."

They waited until Melody and the kids had turned in for the night. Then when 11:30 PM arrived, they gathered in Ford's lab—there they could be sure of probably privacy, anyway—and Dipper said, "All right, I'm going to use autosuggestion to put myself into the Mindscape. Wendy, here's my copy of Journal Three. You read the chant—"

"Boo," Mabel said. "I could do that. Me, Mabel!"

"It's Latin," Dipper said patiently. "Or sort of Latin—"

"You do it, Wendy," Mabel said generously.

"I'm easy with that," agreed Stan.

They gathered close, except Soos sat a short distance away. "Soos, keep watch," Dipper said. "If any of us looks like we're in trouble, wake them up."

"With a shake, dawg!" Soos said. "I'll be like a guard on sentry duty!"

"Good man," Dipper said.

Still nervous, Dipper had to take a few minutes to sink into the strange, distorted black-and-white version of Ford's laboratory. Because of that, he didn't see the flicker of the candles as Mabel lit them.

Nor did he feel the touch as Stan, Wendy, and Mabel placed their fingers on his head.

And he did not hear Wendy reading, slowly but clearly, the weird incantation: "Videntus omnium. Magister mentium. Magnesium ad hominem. Magnum opus. Habeas corpus! Inceptus Nolanus overratus! Magister mentium! Magister mentium! MAGISTER MENTIUM!"

To Mabel, the transition came as a brilliant but silent white flash of light, a swift fade to black, and then a not-quite-so-swift lightening into the misty realm of the Mindscape. "Hey," Stan said, "something's wrong. We're outside the place!"

They stood near the distorted, warped version of the Shack's gift-shop entrance. Everything looked, in a deconstructed way, as it had when Dipper and Mabel were twelve. "Yeah, same place we landed when we had to go find you, Grunkle Stan, that time inside your head," Mabel said.

Stan looked around. "Where's Dipper? He's s'posed to be here."

Wendy blinked. "Whoa! What's that thing on the porch?"

A weirdly buzzing voice from an absurdly skinny and spindly humanoid figure said, "I'm the Hide-Behind. Dipper can't find me even in his dreams!" And then it hid behind one of the porch supports, completely. They heard it snicker.

"Here I am!" said a voice like Dipper's. And there a second Dipper stood.

"No, here!" and a third one was over there, near the front of the house.

"Up here! Roof time!" On the peak of the roof.

"They're not real," Mabel said. "See the numbers on their caps? Those are Dipper's copy-machine clones."

"Yeah, that's why they're in black and white," agreed Wendy.

"They're what in the which now?" Stan asked. "You sure we got the right address?"

"We're in Dipper's Dreamscape," Wendy said. "And I think I know where we'll find him. Follow me."

She led them past the Bottomless Pit, much larger than in real life, and then down the Mystery Trail to the bonfire clearing.

Dipper sat on the log there, in full color.

But only twelve years old.

"Uh—" he said. "I know I was expecting you, but I can't—Wendy! Mabel! You're all grown up!"

"So are you," Wendy said. "We got married, remember?"

Dipper shivered, then blurred, and then became his adult self. "Oh, right. I—was dreaming, I guess. We're going to help Grunkle Ford. We'd better hurry. It's a long way."

"Everybody grab hands," Stan said. "I got this."

"You sure?" Dipper asked.

Stan grinned. "Kid, I had thirty years of dreamin' about how to find my brother. I got this knocked. Just trust me."

And this time no one disagreed with that. Stan held Mabel's hand and Dipper's. Dipper held Wendy's, and Wendy held Mabel's.

"Hang on tight," Stan said. "Here we go."

And . . . there they were.

"I think," Dipper said, "we left my Dreamscape. This looks like it might be—"

"Poindexter's, yeah," Stan said. "You can tell."

The new buildings, the quarantine quarters and, across the highway, the emergency clinic, had vanished. Instead, stacks and stacks of books rose everywhere, like the stone hoodoos in Bryce Canyon. And in the fog that surrounded them, bright neon-green figures appeared and streamed past, intricate equations and formulae.

"This way," Stan said, leading them on a winding path past the giant stacks of volumes. "Yeah, I see him. Them."

Ahead three—no, four—figures appeared from the mists, all of them showing color—Grunkle Ford, in his old adventuring outfit of black trousers and boots, mulberry turtleneck, and tattered tan long coat, Fiddleford McGucket, dapper in a three-piece suit, but barefoot with a bandage tied around his right big toe, and Billy Sheaffer, in yellow tee shirt and denim jeans but glowing with a yellow aura. And just behind Billy, the golden two-dimensional triangular form of Bill Cipher.

Who said, "We've got company, guys! Does my eye deceive me, or is that Red, Pine Tree, Shooting Star and—Stanley?"

"What?" Ford asked, spinning. "How did you even-? You shouldn't have come here! This has nothing to do with you!"

"Think again, Sixer," Stan said. "It's got everything to do with us. It's got everything to do with everybody! Now where are the guys who wanted to have a word with the Pines Boys?"

"Right here," said the cool, dispassionate voice of the Oracle, shimmering into view apparently hovering two feet above the ground.

"And here," said the Axolotl. Like the Cheshire Cat, at the moment only its head appeared, a few feet above the Oracle's head.

"Uh-huh," Stan said with an unimpressed grunt. "And you're here to judge my brother, are you?"

"Not us," said the Axolotl. "Judgment will be delivered, but we will only witness and hear."

Stan crossed his arms. "So if you're not doing the judging, who is?"

"All of you, of course," the Oracle said. "Who will be first to speak?"

"Wait, wait," Stan said. "This ain't right. What's the charge? How can my brother defend himself unless he knows what he's supposed to have done?"

"It isn't just your brother," the Oracle said gently. "Think."

Dipper said, "Are you accusing us of hurting others? Of something worse? Maybe of letting people die or something? Because all anybody here has done is to try to save lives!"

Billy said fearfully, "I snuck out of town because part of me knew where Dr. Pines and Dr. McGucket were and that they were having trouble. I know I wasn't supposed to, but something told me—"

And almost at once Bill Cipher said, "Yo, that was me. I hang in the Mindscape a lot, and I can still see what people are doing if I really need to. And it wasn't the kid's fault. He likes Stan and Ford, and he wanted to help them. I'm the guilty one here."

"Hold on yore horses there," McGucket said. "Lissen here, I don't rightly know what you are, demons or—"

"We are not demons," the Axolotl said. "The opposite, in fact. My task is to be a force for order. The Oracle's is to heal, advise, inspire, and hold people to their purpose."

"Angels, then, or whatchamacallit," Fiddleford persisted. "If there's guilt to give out, I reckon it's my fault for not finishing up my research into countermeasures agin' the dang pandemic. I come up with an emergency-type medicine, but if I'd worked harder I might've—"

Ford put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "No, this is a good man. He's worked as hard as anybody could ask to relieve suffering. I—I've made mistakes, I'll admit that, and if that makes me guilty—"

"No!" Mabel bellowed. "That's not so! Our Grunkle Ford is smart and he cares about everybody, and we—we love him! I've made a bunch more mistakes than he has, and I'm sometimes really selfish and I've tricked people and—I'm way worse than he is!"

"Mabes," Wendy said. To the others, she said, "Listen, Mabel's a straight-up saint at heart, down where it counts. I've done worse than she has. Heck, I've stolen stuff before, even a cop car once, and—"

"Wendy's the best wife a man could have," Dipper said. "The best person. She makes other people better than they can be on their own! She's my—well, my everything. You can't do anything to her. If you do, I swear I'll—"

"Hey, hey," Stan said. "Everybody, shut your yaps. Listen, of everybody here, I got a feeling I'm the only one to have spent time in a Colombian prison, and for something I really did, too! And I've cheated, lied, and if you're lookin' for a victim to string up, well, I'd be leaving my wife Sheila, but I've had a good life, hard but good, and she's a strong woman—"

"Stanley," his brother put in, "you gave up literally everything to save us all when Bill Cipher planned to bring on the end of the world. You're our hero."

Cipher said, "OK, I know Seven Eyes there still hates me. I can confess, if that's what you're looking for. So say I had a second chance and blew it, but tell me, if you erase me, does that mean Billy gets it, too? Are we that close together?"

Silence.

"Why won't you tell me?" Cipher asked. "If you want to take it out on me, go ahead, but if it means you're punishing Billy, too, you'll have to fight me."

The Oracle asked in her cold voice, "Do you think that you could defeat the two of us?"

"I'll try it!" Cipher insisted. "I'll fight you alone!"

"No, you won't," Dipper said. He turned to the two apparitions of the Oracle and Axolotl. "If you want to—to execute Bill, you'll have to fight me, too."

Wendy stepped to his side, and she held her supernatural axe—though she had not brought it with her. "And me," she said.

Mabel warned, "Me, too! And I gotta warn you, in here I can fight dirty—with kittens for fists!"

Ford glanced at Stan. "And my brother and I will be on Bill's side, too."

"Me, too," Fiddleford said. "We may go down, but by gummity, we'll go down fightin'."

For a moment, the Oracle and Axolotl brightened, as if gaining corporality.

"Don't hurt them," pleaded Billy. "I'm human, but Bill's a part of me, too. Please don't hurt them."

The Oracle said, "Each of you, examine your conscience. What does it tell you?"

Stan snorted. "I don't apologize for nothin'," he said. "And listen, when I was a kid and said a prayer every night, I useta ask to be forgiven for anything wrong I did that I didn't even know was wrong. I don't know what it's like for you whatever-you-are's, but here it's a hard world. Everything I ever did was always for my family. If that's a sin, then that's on me."

Ford put his arm over Stan's shoulder. "I admit, I've made mistakes. I invited Bill Cipher into our dimension. I became paranoid, self-absorbed, and I've been too selfish too often. I've hurt people by neglect and inattention. But in my defense, I've always pursued knowledge that, I hoped, would lead to good for people everywhere."

"Well," said Fiddleford, "there was a long spell where I was clean outa my mind, but it was my own fault. I mean, I invented stuff to get revenge for stuff that wasn't really deservin' of that. I reckon my memory erasifier hurt a passel of people, but I swear my intentions was good. An' sense Mabel and Dipper and Wendy knocked some sense back into me, I have tried to make up for my shortcomin's."

Mabel was weeping. "My Grunkles and Billy and Fiddleford are good people! Why can't you understand that?"

"We do," said the Axolotl. "We want you to understand it, too."

"Hold hands," Dipper said suddenly. "Like in the Zodiac! Everybody hold hands!"

Wendy's axe vanished as she took Dipper's and Mabel's hands. Dipper took Bill's, Bill took Billy's, Billy took Fiddleford's, and he took Ford's, Ford took Stanley's, and Stan, no hesitation this time, took Mabel's.

"Close your eyes," the Oracle said gently. "And see."

For a moment, just the shortest breath of time, Dipper saw it, and he knew they all did.

It was a vision of them all, of Gravity Falls, of the world, the universe, and for that one instant everything was ordered as it should be, everything was perfect, and all the answers were clear—

And then Dipper suddenly woke up and the vision was gone.