Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 14, 2017)
2: Visitors from Where?
It's a horror movie cliché. Trixandra shrieks, Chadley rushes to her side. "Trixandra? What has just happened to make you scream like that for no reason?"'
"Oh, Chadley! I just saw something terrible right there in the doorway of that abandoned house where the murders happened a hundred years ago this very night!"
"I will go over and look. Hmm. Well, there's nothing here now. I'm sure you just imagined it. Let's go inside."
"OK."
You know the bit. It's usually the girl, and the insufferably overconfident guy pooh-poohs her alarm with an assurance that her cute little imagination is working overtime and she gives in and from there on, it's all raspberry jam spattering the walls.
In real life, that didn't happen. Dipper immediately whirled to face whatever danger Wendy had seen, instinctively throwing out an arm to protect her. He saw grassy hills and the forest beyond. Nothing else. He heard jays calling and woodpeckers pecking and the skittering of insects in the grass. Wendy gasped. "Where did it—?"
"What was it?" he asked.
Wendy's hand closed on his shoulder—not the clench of fear, just the reassurance that she had his back. "Dude, it's gone! But for a second, standing right over there I saw—me!"
"You were just imagining things," Dipper did not say. Instead, he said, "Where? Show me."
The spot was just about fifty feet away, in ankle-high grass—no place for anyone to hide for at least a thirty-yard radius. But no one was there. Because it was on the shady side of a hill, dew still gleamed on the grass, but there was no dark trail showing anyone had walked there.
"It was right here," Wendy said. "I took my eyes off it when you spun around, and when I looked back, it was gone."
"Let's see if we can find it," Dipper did not say. Instead, he said, "Come on. Let's get back to the Shack and talk to Grunkle Ford."
Yeah, because if Chadley and Trixandra had asked someone for help instead of, you know, going through that door into that old falling-down house, there wouldn't have been a movie.
Wendy and Dipper missed their picnic, but they made good time back to the car, and in about two hours and ten minutes, they parked in Stanford and Lorena Pines's driveway. Lorena answered the doorbell, took one look at them, and said, "He's up in the Shack doing some work for the Institute's fall term."
"Thanks," Dipper said.
He and Wendy drove up the hill to the Shack. No one was home. The Ramirezes were probably off at a park somewhere, letting the kids play and unwinding from the stress of putting on Woodstick. Teek and Mabel were off touring a TV studio set.
They found Stanford on the upper level, typing away at a keyboard. He looked around, said, "Let me just finish this memo. Twenty-one seconds." And twenty-one seconds later, he took them to the small research library he maintained on that lab level and said, "Sit on the love seat and tell me what happened."
Wendy sat holding Dipper's hand. "We went out to Ghost Falls for a picnic," she began. "We took a dip in the hot spring, and then afterward as we started up toward our camping site, I saw, I guess, a ghost? Or a vision or something. And in a second, it vanished. But I know it was there."
"Can you describe it?" Ford asked.'
"Look at me," she said. "It looked just like me—boots, jeans, a green-plaid flannel shirt, my ushanka. Just standing there holding her arms out toward us. But then Dipper turned to look, and she vanished."
"You poor little thing, you're nervous about the wedding, and you imagined it," Ford did not say. Instead, very seriously, he asked, "Did the apparition appear transparent? Solid? Were the colors normal?"
Wendy bit her lip and thought for a second. "Solid. Looked real. Kinda like looking into a mirror, you know. I'm pretty sure it cast a shadow, and I could see the boots were wet from the tall grass."
"What do you think?" Dipper asked. "Doppelgänger?"
"Possibly, Mason," Ford said. "Wendy, did you have any sensation of being in two places at once? Were you where the figure was, looking back toward you and Mason?"
"Nothing like that," she said. "It was like seeing another person, but the person looked like my double."
"It didn't leave footprints or marks in the grass," Dipper said. "We went over and checked."
"What's a doppelgänger?" Wendy asked. "I know the word, but it's like 'double,' right? I mean, some people might think that Dr. P. and Stan were doppelgängers."
"That's one sense of the term, yes," Ford said. "It's a German word that literally means 'double-walker.' In mystical theory, it's a spiritual duplicate of a person—identical in every respect—and it can appear miles from where the actual person is and anyone seeing it would just assume it was the person whose duplicate the apparition is. It appears real, it can hold conversations and manipulate solid objects and so on, but it's essentially a paranormal force, not an individual."
"What do they do?" asked Wendy.
Dipper said, "A lot of times it's just sort of random behavior, like a poltergeist. Like a trick the doppelgänger plays just to mess with the victim or to confuse people. But sometimes it comes to warn the person it imitates of danger or illness or something like that."
Wendy looked him in the eye. "Dude, I'm holding your hand. It's a death omen."
"Only sometimes," Dipper said.
"Mason's correct," Ford told her. "There's also a psychological or organic condition that causes some people to hallucinate meeting their double. A researcher, what is his name, let me think . . . Peter Brugger, encountered a case in which a man had a terrifying experience of being awakened by his own double. The bizarre thing was that the subject's consciousness alternated between the two—the man woke in bed to find his double shaking him, and then suddenly he was standing by the bed shaking his double. Other researchers, Heydrich and Blanke for example, have located a specific portion of the brain that generates illusions of duality like this."
"So I have something wrong with my brain?" Wendy asked.
"I doubt that," Ford said with a smile. "Knowing you, and knowing Gravity Falls, I'd choose to believe that you saw something real."
"Was it threatening?" Dipper asked.
Wendy frowned a little as she shook her head. "No, not scary at all. A little sad, maybe? I don't know exactly. Oh, one thing—I'm not sure, but I think this was like me a couple of years ago, not now. She looked a little bit younger in some way. I don't know, I can't put my finger on it, just an impression."
"All right," Ford said, "the faculty meeting schedule for the term can wait. Let's get to work and see what we can find out about doppelgängers in Gravity Falls."
Teek and Mabel had taken turns driving Helen Wheels, and they'd had more coffee than usual. They'd been up late on the last night of Woodstick and had to keep themselves alert on the drive over to Salem.
They had lunch at an Italian restaurant with the boys of Sev'ral Timez and Tad Strange, and then they went to Camelopard Studios, on the outskirts of town. From a distance it looked like three enormous concrete-block warehouses with metal roofs—for good reason, because they were in fact repurposed warehouses.
Now the walls had colorful abstract designs painted on them, the expansive space in front of the buildings had become a huge parking lot, and across from the structures squatted a one-story pale brick office building that looked new. Tad got them through the manned gate, they parked where he indicated—in front of the offices—and when they got out of Mabel's car, he said, "We'll need to get visitors' badges for you. Follow me."
On the way, he looked into about four offices just to say hello. Mabel got the feeling he was well-liked—the guys and girls at the desks all had a cheery, "Hi, Tad!" or "How was the music show?" for him. The main office was spacious, and Tracy, the chief assistant, quickly prepared two clip-on name badges for Mabel and Teek. "These will give you access to everything but Studio C," she said. "They're shooting interiors for a movie there today."
"We're just touring Studio A," Tad told her. To the kids, he added, "All the major interior sets of Brothers at Law are in there. Tracy, are they doing construction?"
She checked a schedule. "They're finishing the jail cells," she said. "So you might want to stay away from those. I think it's mainly just touch-up stuff, though, so nothing too noisy."
They walked across the parking lot. Each former warehouse had a giant-sized garage door, probably fifteen feet all and close to twenty wide, but also just plain old human-sized doors. "The boys are going to meet us in their office set," Tad said as they entered the cavernous space. "Watch where you step. Work lights are on, but it's still dark in the backstage areas, and there's lots of cables on the floor."
As they walked down a wide, dim corridor, Tad explained that it had cork lined walls mostly for sound buffering. "Have to have it quiet on the set," he explained. "And despite the size, the building's soundproofed. Turn right here."
'They walked into what, on three sides anyway, looked like an office—and there were Deep Chris, Leggy P., Greggy C., Creggy G., and Chubby Z. grinning at them. The guys were dressed in business suits. "What do you think of our crib, girl?" asked Deep Chris. "Yo, these are the law offices of the Brothers at Law, crusading attorneys!"
To tell the truth, it was underwhelming. It did look like an office—a receptionist's desk, two interior doors, a big window through which you could see a cityscape—although that was actually just a mural-sized photo and looked very fake. The desk was real and, from a distance, impressive, but sort of battered and scratched when you got close to it. A potted plant turned out to be plastic.
"Does it look better on the screen?" Mabel asked.
With a chuckle, Chubby Z. called, "Hey, Dwight? Camera A, please, and throw it on the monitor for us."
From somewhere in the dark a voice said, "You got it. Lights."
Bright lights flooded the set, and then Chubby Z. said, "Look at the monitor behind you, Mabel."
"Oh, boy!" she said catching sight of a wide view of her, Teek, and the guys. "It looks so real! Even the buildings outside the window!"
"Looks are most deceptive, though," Greggy C. said, opening a door. Beyond it lay a tangle of cables and wire supports. "There's no backdrop here yet. But when there is, this will be like the corridor leading to the offices. That's really the next set over, but to look like I'm going there, I'll open this door and then they shut off the camera, and we pick up in the next set with me coming in through my office door. It's hard to get your head around."
They looked at the office set—"This one will be all four of our offices, they just re-dress with different desks and decorations," Creggy G. explained—and then at the conference room, the courtroom—not yet ready because it had the judge's dais and the rails, but no attorneys' tables or spectator seating—and then Tad took them to a viewing room and they watched test footage of some locations.
"These two streets were run-down and all," Deep Chris explained. "So the company did some refurbishing of the store fronts in exchange for getting to film there on Sundays and nights. That's supposed to be the building that our offices are in. It's really an old department store that's been closed for thirty years."
They also had some beach scenes with a surfer riding a big wave. And then a shot of Deep Chris balancing on a surfboard that was on some kind of lift that gently moved it as he spread his arms, crouched, and pretended to ride the wave. Behind him was a blank green screen.
Then the shot replayed, but this time moving footage of the ocean replaced the green screen. "It's not real looking," said Deep Chris, "but when it's all edited with quick cuts and a little CGI water is added, you'd think I was really surfing!"
"That's the magic of movies," Teek said.
"Most excellent observation!" Chubby Z. said, laughing.
They had a good time, and after four hours they'd seen it all and had made selfies with Sev'ral Timez posing in the office and in one of the unfinished jail cells—Teek and Mabel behind bars, the guys pretending to have just unlocked the door and to be offering them their freedom.
By then it was late afternoon, and Teek and Mabel returned their name tags and said their goodbyes. Tad told them to get in touch any time they wanted to visit and apologized that the writers and director of the show weren't yet on the site. But that was OK.
"I enjoyed that," Teek said as they left the office and headed to where they'd parked Helen Wheels. "One day I want to work in a studio like this."
"Maybe you can work in this one!" Mabel said. "That would be handy! You could—what the heck? Why's Dipper here?"
"Huh?" They were fifty feet away from Helen Wheels, parked near the center of a long row of slots. The windshield reflected the afternoon sky, but through the glare, Teek saw Dipper slumped at the wheel, as if waiting for them. "Maybe something's wrong!"
They ran the last few steps—but by the time they arrived at the car, Dipper had disappeared.
"I know I saw him!" Mabel said as she unlocked the car. She opened the driver's side door and said, "He left his cap!"
Teek got into the passenger seat and lifted the trucker's cap with its pine-tree emblem from the floor. "Where did he go?"
He wasn't in the back seat. The car's interior felt hot, as if no one had opened the door since they parked.
"I don't like this," Mabel said. "Mysteries aren't supposed to follow us out of the Falls!" She started the car. "We're good for gas," she said. "OK, we're driving straight back. Buckle up. I'm not even going to stop for dinner."
Teek shot her a quick glance, her words making him realize how serious this all was.