Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 14, 2017)
4: Noises in the Night
To avoid talking so loudly that they bothered Soos and Melody, they gathered at two tables in the snack bar for Mabel's, Teek's, and Ford's meal. Ford complimented Teek: "This is an astonishingly good hamburger!"—and apologized when he caught himself eating too fast. "I tend to get so lost in my research that I forget little things like eating."
However, no one had noticed him eating all that fast, especially not Mabel, who was already finished with her burger and was stealing fries from Teek's plate. "OK," Mabel said, burping a little, "what is this thing about double gangers?"
"Doppelgängers," Dipper corrected.
"Duplicates," Teek said. "It's a kind of ghost that looks like a person."
"What kind of a ghost doesn't?" asked Mabel, taking some more fries.
"No," Wendy said. "I saw someone, or something, that looked just like me, but it vanished. The same way you saw an apparition of Dipper, but he wasn't really there."
"Something sure as heck was there," Mabel said. "It left its hat!"
"But we've established that it wasn't me," Dipper told her. "At least, not the real me."
"OK, so a doppel-whatever is like a ghost twin of someone?" Mabel asked.
"That's a good approximation," Ford said. He reached for a napkin. "I'd suggest 'apparition' instead of 'ghost,' though. Obviously, If Wendy saw herself, it wasn't her ghost, because she's alive."
"All right, apparition, then," Mabel said. "But why are they bugging me and Wendy?"
"That's hard to say," Ford said. "At least we know they're probably not death omens—or Dipper would have seen his own double, not you."
"Wait, who said anything about death omens?" Mabel asked. "Look, I can't stand any more of that right now! I mean, Sev'ral Timez took a death spell for me, and that jerked me right back to the time when Russ tried to fight off Xanthar and got killed. If the boys had really been dead, I think I'd have died myself! So Wendy, Dipper, don't die! That's a direct order!"
When things settled down, Ford told them about death-omen superstitions. The British and Irish had a ton of them—the Black Shuck, which was a spectral dog that showed up to threaten someone whose end was near, was one. "Abraham Fleming wrote a famous account of a Black Shuck that appeared to a church congregation during a fierce thunderstorm," Ford said. "Its eyes and mouth flashed fire, and two of the parishioners died. The church steeple also collapsed through the roof."
"Bad dog," Teek murmured.
"More commonly," Ford said, "it's said that if one meets a Black Shuck, that person will die before the end of the year. Then there's the banshee."
"We know about her," Mabel said. "Remember, one was here that summer."
"It's similar in that it delivers a warning of impending death," Ford said. Now, Wendy's aunt mentioned the fetch. That word may not have a direct link to 'fetch,' meaning 'bring.' There's an old Irish Gaelic word, 'fáith,' which means a prophet who foretells someone's death. On the other hand, it may be an English term, shortened from 'fetch-life,' a paranormal being whose job is to take souls from Earth to the Afterlife."
"But that's just for the Irish, right?" Dipper asked.
"Well, no. In northern England during Medieval times, there was a superstition about people whose doom was near meeting or seeing themselves. The double was called a fetch there, too. The same concept—a ghostly double of a living person—was called a wraith in other parts of Great Britain."
"How do we just make it go away?" Mabel asked. "Because it can't have Wendy or Dipper. I've made serious wedding plans!"
"I don't think a fetch literally 'gets' anybody," Dipper said. "It's more a warning than something like a vampire that actually takes a life."
"In broad terms, that's correct," Ford said. "However, we're making too many assumptions. We may be dealing with something entirely different."
"Especially since they seem to look like us when we were younger," Wendy said. She and Dipper filled Ford in on the hints that what Wendy, Mabel, and Teek had seen were not Wendy and Dipper as they currently were, but as they appeared five years earlier.
"That does change things," Ford agreed. "Generally, a fetch is identical to the person being warned."
"Can it be time travel?" Mabel asked. "Like do you think Wendy and Dipper visited the future and we're seeing them as they spy on us, the rats?"
If that was true," Dipper objected, "then Wendy and I would certainly remember time-traveling. But we don't, so that's wrong."
"Mabel," Ford said, "did the vision of Dipper at the wheel of your automobile scare you? Did you find it ominous?"
"I found it irritating," Mabel said. "Dip's got his own car now!"
"I just thought it was odd," Teek volunteered. "Whatever it was, it didn't look scary. It didn't make any threatening moves or anything. And it didn't say anything. I didn't even see it move—just a figure low in the seat, behind the steering wheel. I sort of think it was looking at us, but with the glare and the reflections, I couldn't tell."
"I didn't really see his features, either," Mabel said. "But his silhouette's easy to recognize. His messy hair with those two little Pines family floofs in the back. And I think he was wearing his old vest and shirt. On the other hand, the car didn't smell like body odor when we got in it."
"From what you all say," Ford observed, "the creature, whatever it is, doesn't seem hostile. It can't be fully physical—that rules out the Shapeshifter, as well as its having appeared within a short time at widely separated places. These things just might be visitors from an alternate dimension, perhaps one lagging behind ours in time so they're younger. But we just don't know."
"What can we do to protect ourselves?" Dipper asked.
"The best thing I can think of is to stick to the house until we get a handle on all this," Ford said. "The unicorn-hair field will keep any negative energies out. Please let me know at once if any of you sees something strange."
"You could call in the Guys in Black," Wendy suggested.
Ford shook his head. "I am trying my best to keep them out of Gravity Falls," he said. "True, I'm the Director, but it's also true that many of the Agents are overly zealous. Unless it's an emergency—and so far, this doesn't seem to qualify—I prefer to keep them uninformed."
They all agreed they'd sleep on it, and they all needed sleep. Dipper, Wendy, Mabel, and Teek had all stayed up way late at Woodstick, and Ford had put in long hours dealing with Ergman Bratsman's threat. They broke up their meeting at ten. Ford and Teek went to their homes, and everyone turned in.
"Want me to stay with you?" Wendy asked Mabel.
"I've got Tripper," Mabel said. "He'll alert me if anything spooky happens. Are you gonna be OK? Maybe you should sleep in the attic with Dipper. Or with Dipper in the attic, your choice."
"Not until after our birthday," Dipper said firmly. "We've waited this long, so we can wait a couple weeks more." But to Wendy he said, "If you're worried, you can use Mabel's old bed."
"No sense in tempting the fates," Wendy said, smiling. "No, I'll sleep in my room. But have your phones handy, and if anybody needs help, yell, then call Dr. P."
At midnight, Dipper woke up—not because of a ghost, but because heavy rain drummed on the Shack roof. The promised showers had finally rolled in, and though he didn't see any flashes of lightning or hear rolls of thunder, the rush of rainwater was loud enough to wake him.
Grunting, he got up and went out to the landing. He sat on the window seat—Wendy's rooftop hideaway was directly over his head—and looked out. He couldn't see much—the parking lot was on the other side, and with the rain pouring down, he could only glimpse the pines thrashing in the wind.
He visited the bathroom and then went back to bed, feeling wakeful in that unpleasant way he always did when something disturbed his sleep. He needed a full night's rest but doubted he could fall asleep again any time soon.
Dipper rolled up in the sheet, cocooning himself—the attic always felt cooler when it was raining. The rain rushing off the roof and pattering on the ground started to sound as if a weather musician was creating rhythms: It's NICE to be inDOORS when the RAIN comes POURing down.
He fell into a light sleep, the kind in which he was dimly conscious that he was sleeping. At times he heard the rain music, and then at times he was asleep, and the dreams melted away.
At some point he woke up, convinced that he had heard a voice. He did not recognize it—it was a boy's voice, all confidence, but so muffled that Dipper couldn't make out the words. For a few minutes, he was sure he was awake, but the voice was silent.
Then he heard—the brrring of an old-fashioned telephone, very far-away or very faint. He pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the bed, head cocked. The only phone in the place that rang like that was the one on the check-out counter in the gift shop downstairs. But it was louder than this—he could hear it even in the bedroom, even with the door closed.
He got up and noticed the time: four in the morning. "Great," he groaned. "Who's calling now?" He pulled on his jeans and headed downstairs.
He stopped on the landing. The phone had stopped.
"Probably a wrong number," he muttered, returning to the bedroom.
Brrring.
Very soft, that sound—but it was somewhere in the room, he was sure of it. He picked up his cell phone, thinking that maybe Mabel had played some dumb trick, but no one was calling him. Anyway, the ring sounded while he was holding the phone, and it definitely came from somewhere on the other side of the room.
Brrring.
Dipper switched on the lights. The room looked the same as always—nothing particularly out of place, that ring coming again and again, so faint that he couldn't localize it. But maybe—from Mabel's empty bed?
Even standing right beside it, he could hear the sound, but couldn't even guess at where it was coming from. Ghost phone or something?
He said, "I'm here. What do you want?"
Brrring.
The rain continued to pelt the roof and windows. Maybe it's just rain falling onto something glass or metal outside. Maybe it just resembles an old-fashioned—
Brrring.
It sounded as if it might be coming from close to the floor. Dipper knelt beside the bed and thought the ring was a tiny bit louder.
He pulled things from under the bed—cardboard boxes with stuff that Mabel had owned the first summer they stayed there or had stored in the summers since. The sound didn't seem to be coming from any of it.
Then it stopped. He held his breath and counted to thirty. Nothing but the sound of the rain.
He breathed but counted on. Got to a hundred. No bells, just the rain and the wind.
"OK," he said. He haphazardly shoved the boxes back beneath Mabel's old bed, then got up, turned out the light, and went back to bed, hoping he could sleep.
His head had just touched the pillow when—
Brrring.
"Hello!" he said more loudly than he'd intended.
He heard a click.
And then a boy's voice, draggy, thin, robotic: "Hello . . . baby . . . this . . . is . . . Kevinnnn."
The sound thinned to nothing.
Kevin? Kevin?
The only Kevin he knew was Kevin Bailey, a year behind him at Piedmont High School. He'd made the Varsity track team the spring before, 300-meter hurdles. He'd never won an event, though he'd placed second once and came in third twice. But this definitely wasn't Bailey. The voice was vaguely familiar, but when had he heard it? And it was so machine-like . . ..
His memory dredged up something: Hello, baby. My beach house is big enough for two.
Same voice! Not as weak, not as draggy.
The sleepover that time! Grenda and Candy—Candy on the toy phone that came with that dumb pre-teen dating game—
Dipper jumped up, turned on the lights, and pulled out the boxes again. This time, down at the very bottom of the carton he found the battered cardboard box that contained Calling All Boys: Preteen Edition.
Candy: "Keven, for the last time, I am not interested!"
Grenda: "Candy! How could you say that to Kevin?"
There was the little blue-and-yellow plastic toy phone. He turned it over and popped the battery cover.
No batteries.
BRRRING!