Haven Days
(July 2020)
14-Light at the End
It might have been a warm summer night in 2012 when the twins were twelve. It might have been a similar night decades after a catastrophic pandemic that depopulated the world. For the moment all Dipper could see was darkness below and stars above, and the darkness revealed nothing and the stars did not care.
"Dipper?" Mabel's shaky voice.
"Here I am," he said. "Wendy? Grunkle Stan?"
"Dude, I forgot!" came Soos's voice. He turned on a flashlight. "There, that's better. Didn't work, huh?"
Stan was adjusting his glasses and scowling. "What the hey just happened?"
"Soos," Wendy said, "how long were we gone?"
"Like, you mean out cold?" Soos asked. "'Cause you all just sort of dozed there for maybe, I don't know, a minute?"
"A lot happened in a minute," Mabel said. "Wow. Did it let us go? Or—wait, Grunkle Ford! Billy! What happened to them?" she took out her phone and frantically punched in a number. "Come on, come on—Grunkle Ford! Hi, Mabel here! Are you and Billy and McGucket all right? Did you—OK, I'll let you talk, it's just such a relief to hear your—sure, I can be quiet and you can tell me—shutting up now."
She switched to speaker, and Ford's voice sounded, right in the middle of a sentence—"the purpose of that, but yes, we're all here physically and we all seem to be—"
"Me, too!" said a high-pitched voice. "Pine Tree! Shooting Star! Question Mark! Fish Fez! Are you OK?"
"It ain't a fish," grumbled Stan. "It's the symbol of the Order of the Lodge of the Holy Mackerel! And a new one of these costs over fifty bucks, so give it some respect! So this is Bill. Is Billy all right?"
Billy's voice, which Dipper now noticed for the first time had begun to break and sound more like Bill's: "Uh, yeah, I'm OK. I thought we'd see a light and have to go into it, but I didn't see one."
"We're all fine, too, little dude Billy!" Soos said. "I don't know what happened, but I heard you might, like, get sick from the virus? Are you sick or well or what?"
Ford again: "We're all testing negative, and the molecular scan is not showing any amount of COVERT-19 virus in any of us. Fiddleford says that we should be clear to return to the town—"
"In jest five more days, by crackity!" Fiddleford said. Then they heard the excited sounds of Fiddleford slapping his sides, chest, and thighs.
"He's hamboning," Ford said.
"I still don't know what that means," Dipper told him.
"I've become reasonably fluent in hillbilly body language. If I'm not far wrong, he's excited because he thinks he's devised a potential breakthrough in treating the disease."
"You ain't far off the path!" Fiddleford said. Whenever he got excited, the old man tended to lapse into his native Tennessee-hill dialect. "I kinda got a notion, but I can't visiblify it. Picture it in my head, I mean. Needs some more work! And some banjo music!"
"Lissen, Poindexter," Stan said. "I want to know one thing: Did we get through that trial or whatever it was OK? That eyeball lady and the lizard, are they done with us? What was it all about? It makes no sense!"
For a few moments Ford didn't speak, and Dipper was aware of ordinary night sounds: the soft brushing of pine boughs in a breeze, the shrill, small chirps of crickets, even the nearly inaudible twittering overhead of bats. He took a deep breath of pine-scented air. Then Wendy touched his arm and reached down for his hand.
—Dipper, what was that? Some kind of test?
I . . . think so. Maybe.
—Dude, did we pass or fail?
I think we need some time to find that out.
"Well," Stan said, "it's past midnight, anyways. Let's go home and get some shut-eye. Soos, put the flashlight on the trail. No, I meant just the beam. We don't want to trip on any roots."
Mabel whispered, "I feel all solemn. I don't know why."
From somewhere up in the trees a deep Who-who? Whooo? sounded.
"Great horned owl," Wendy said.
"Aw," Mabel complained. "I'm too old to get my invitation to wizarding school."
Before long they saw a yellow triangular light—the window of the Mystery Shack attic. And then a rectangle of light as Melody opened the Museum porch door, and then, eagerly and happily yapping, Tripper and DC came running across the lawn to meet them. The Stanleymobile stood in the parking lot. Stan said, "I'm goin' home to Sheila, and tomorrow we're gonna sleep in, so nobody telephone or anything until nine o'clock at the earliest, got me?"
"Got you!" Mabel said. And because it was dark, she added, "Wink!" Then she said, "Uh, Soos, is it OK if I sleep in the attic tonight with Dip and Wen? I don't want to be alone."
"Fine with me, Hambone," Soos said genially. "If it's OK with them."
"You'll need a sleeping bag," Dipper told her.
"And the dog beds."
"It's like a sleepover," Wendy said as they climbed up the steps and, escorted by the two happy doggies, they went in through the Museum entrance.
July was getting old, getting ready to move out and make way for August, when the quarantine was up and Fiddleford, Ford, and Billy returned home. Ford asked everyone to set aside time the next evening—a Sunday—for a family meeting.
Billy escaped punishment, due to Ford's explanation that he had a vital piece of information and had risked his life to deliver it. He'd also had Billy's bike picked up, painstakingly sterilized—no taking chances—and returned to him.
So on that Sunday evening Lorena and Sheila prepared a special meal: asparagus soup, grilled trout and grilled chicken, local vegetables, and a luscious German chocolate cake as dessert.
Everyone who had been at the strange trial was there, and Teek had come because Mabel invited him. He had become suddenly shy once his and Mabel's wedding date had been set, and the first thing he said was that Mabel and he wouldn't be going to Atlanta for a year because GCAF—the Georgia College of Arts and Film—was going fully online for the next year of classes. "Then," he said, "if the pandemic is over, I'm supposed to become a PA—that's production assistant—on a film project that's planned to be shot in Portland."
They congratulated him, they ate, they studiously did not mention their strange experience with the Oracle and the Axolotl. Then after dinner, Ford suggested they go into the family room, which had a big angled sofa, three armchairs, and a piano which he couldn't play—well, he could, but it hurt his pinkies because he had never devised a practical twelve-finger approach—but Lorena could.
"We need to catch up on events," Ford said. "A lot has happened this year, and I'm afraid we haven't seen the worst yet."
"Yeah," Stan said. He gave Ford a glance. "Not only this crappy virus, lots of other stuff's gone on too. For one thing, Vera Lynn passed away last month. Must've been on the national news, but I missed it until I just saw a story about her online. She was a hundred and three. A good age."
Ford looked somber.
Mabel asked—not brashly—"Who was she?"
Ford gave her a melancholy smile. "She was a world-famous singer in the last century. English. Her song—her songs, I mean—gave hope to the British armed forces and their families in the depths of World War II."
"She sang Ma's most favorite song," Stan said.
"Yes," Ford agreed.
A heavy silence fell. Dipper, holding Wendy's hand, thought to her, She must have meant a lot to Stan and Ford when they were younger.
"Well, well," Ford said. "I think first of all we need to assess what each of us thinks about the—not trial, but session we had together. Who wants to start?"
Mabel, after a pause, said, "I think what we were supposed to learn was that when something like this pandemic comes along, we can't fight and squabble and all. I mean, it's like the Zodiac, isn't it? No offense, Billy. I mean when there's some big threat, we can't afford for everybody to go their own way. It's not like there's a right side or a wrong side anymore. There's just . . . our side."
Dipper added, "And we can't let ourselves be held back by, I don't know, doubts and guilty feelings and all that."
"Kid's right," Stan said. "It's like we have to do the job that's in front of us. Do it the best way we know how."
"Reckon that's right," Fiddleford put in. "Later on a ways, I got something I want to tell y'all. It jest might be a big help. But it's gonna take hard work an' maybe months afore I find out if I struck gold or just dug an empty hole for myself. But I have to admit, I went into that thing as scared as a field mouse at a feral cat convention. I expect that's one o' my demons I gotta fight—fear. I done plenty of things when I was nutty as a pecan orchard in August, an' they hurt people or hurt their feelin's, but I was outa my head then. Problem since then is that lotsa times I've been too full of fear to try things that I oughta have tried. I'm tryin' to get over that now. And I'm gonna need yore help if my idear's gonna pan out."
"What are we trying to do?" Billy asked.
Stan shrugged. "I got a warning from the future to zip up the Falls best I could. Keep people here safe from the disease. Like the time when I opened the Shack to all the survivors of Weirdmageddon I could find."
"Or like when we got the Zodiac back together when Brujo was trying to kill us all," Dipper added. "That's when Teek joined us."
"We were all united then," Mabel said, holding Teek's hand. "And we got through it."
Lorena, sitting quietly beside Ford, said, "Perhaps the goal now that the Rift danger is over is to tackle the pandemic."
"Yeah," Fiddleford said. "Iffen I could jest get a good handle on the chemical and genetic makeup of that-there virus—but I ain't got th' equipment I need—"
"Hey, Specs, you need the big picture?" Everyone looked at Billy, who suddenly sounded different. And somehow his one good eye looked different, too—yellow. "Here ya go. I don't know how long I can hold this. Gotcha!"
He held out his hand, and floating in the air was a knobbly, bizarre sphere, dotted with pits and spiked with projections. "That's the virus, no rift included. Take a picture, it'll last longer!"
Mabel leaped up, snapping away with her camera. The image revolved and she got photos of every side.
"Size?" Fiddleford ask, peering at the floating picture.
"Point one twenty-seventh of a micron. A teeny weeny meanie," Bill's voice, coming from Billy, said. "I'm gonna fade in the shade. Shooting Star, you got the photos?"
"Got 'em, Triangle Man."
"OK, I'm taking a knee!" The conjured image disappeared, Billy staggered a little and then mumbled, "What was I doing?"
"I think," Ford said, "you just showed us a way to deal with the virus."
"Take months to work it out," warned Fiddleford. "But that's a big step. We're a-gonna have to hang together, maybe as long as November, and then—maybe. Not even s real solid maybe, jest only a maybe maybe, but it's better'n what we had!"
Billy started back to his chair but instead sat on the piano bench. "I'm so tired all at once."
Grunkle Stan asked, "Hey, Billy, ya had piano lessons?"
"Uh-huh, two years," the boy said "But Dr. Pines gets upset if I—"
"No," Ford said kindly. "Not any longer. Not after what we've been through. Not after all we've lost."
"Play it, Bill," Stan said. "If Poindexter can stand it, I can."
Slowly, Billy turned, raised the keyboard cover, and poised his fingers. "Is it OK?"
"Play it," Ford said softly.
And in a slow, sad, yet hopeful tempo Billy began to play "We'll Meet Again."
Stan put his arm around Ford's shoulder. "This is for Ma," he said softly.
"And for Miss Vera," Ford said with a wistful smile.
For a few minutes they listened to the music and thought, and yearned, and hoped they would all meet again on some sunny day.