Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 15, 2017)
8: Where It All Went Down
As soon as work ended, Mabel, Teek, Dipper, and Wendy gathered in the attic and Dipper explained his theory about what was going on. Despite his trying to ease Mabel into realizing the possible situation, her reaction was bad. "You're saying it's all my fault!"
"No," Wendy said. "Mabel, listen—it's like a ghost of those things, Dipper thinks. It's not your fault at all. And anyway, you didn't even know where you were, or what was going on."
Teek, with his arm around Mabel, didn't say anything. However, Mabel did: "But—you think—the ghost of herself that Wendy saw, the dopplegänger or whatever, was—that was the ghost of the Wendy double? The horrible one that you told me about?"
"I don't know for sure," Dipper said. "I just think that it might be. And that must have something that Bill Cipher put in the bubble, not you—"
"It was me," Mabel wailed. "I didn't know if I'd ever see you guys in Mabel Land, but if I did—I th-thought if there was a W-Wendy who would l-love you—you'd stay with me—"
Dipper tried to comfort her: "Hey, hey, Sis, it's all right, really. Remember, you're the one who got us all out of Mabel Land."
"Yeah, you popped Bill's bubble," Wendy said.
Mabel nodded but wouldn't look up. "Dipper said she was made out of bugs," she mumbled.
Teek blinked. "Out of what?" He had not heard the whole story of Mabel Land.
"I guess she had to be made out of something," Wendy told Mabel. "Come on. You didn't, like, deliberately make a Wendy out of bugs yourself, did you?"
Biting her bottom lip, Mabel shook her head. "I just kind of thought If Dipper comes here, let him have a Wendy who loves him," she said miserably. "'Cause when I woke up there and found out that what I wished for came true, I was just so lonely. That's why I—oh, my God. Dippy Fresh!"
Dipper held up the hat that Teek had retrieved from Mabel's car. He turned it backward and it fit better. "Yeah," he said, snatching the cap off again. "Him."
"But he must still be like twelve years old," Wendy said. "That's why you and Teek thought Dipper was slouching down when you saw him in your car. Dippy"—she stopped herself and then continued, "I mean the other guy wasn't as tall, 'cause he's still a kid."
"And I don't know for sure," Dipper said, "but the two guys who came and knocked on the gift shop door—I just barely saw them, but those might be the same two you first called up when we went into Stan's mind, chasing Bill Cipher."
"But they're characters in a movie," Mabel said. "They weren't real people to begin with!"
"Neither is the substitute you made up to replace me," Dipper said through clenched teeth. "OK, I looked it up on the Internet Movie Data Site. Here you go: Dream Boys High, 1985. A high-school jock and his musician buddy team up to straighten out school bullies and in the process become every girl's dream boy. Starring Burley Clarkston and Mattson Dexter as Xyler Crestwood and Craz Monckley."
"I never learned about the actors. I just knew the movie from one of Mom's old videotapes," Mabel said.
"It's also available on DVD," Dipper said. "Or it used to be. Anyway, I looked up the actors. Clarkston's a TV director now, and Monckley has an oldies music show on satellite radio." He showed Mabel a couple of pictures.
"Ew!" she said. "They're so old!"
"It's been more than thirty years, Mabes," Wendy said. "Actually, they're not so bad-looking now." Clarkston, a little heavier than when he played surfing jock Xyler, had lost a lot of his hair, but he was still recognizable as the teen, as they used to say, heart-throb. Dexter hadn't gained as much weight, but he, too, looked different—hair much shorter and gray, combed back from his forehead, and he wore glasses.
"The point is," Dipper said, "these are the real people. Xyler and Craz are just kind of reflections of them. You didn't recreate the actors when you were in Mabel Land—you recreated the roles they played in that one movie."
"OK," Wendy said. "So they apparently asked to meet up with us in a few minutes out near the split bluffs. We don't know what they want, but we do know they're dangerous."
"No," Mabel said. "They couldn't be, because I made them up to be all nice and—"
"Listen," Dipper said. "This is important. We have to warn you. Grunkle Ford has dealt with this before, when he was traveling in the Multiverse. This is serious. If I touch that guy—" he made an effort to say the name—"Dippy Fresh, we'll both be annihilated."
"No," Mabel said again. "He was just a—a—"
"An improved version of me," Dipper said, not managing to hold back a tone of bitterness.
"Brobro," Mabel said. "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings when—I'm really sorry."
Teek gave Dipper an imploring look that said Don't make her feel worse.
Dipper took a long breath. "It's OK, I forgive you. But—Mabel—I mean, how would you like it if it was the other way around? What if I was in the bubble and created Serious Mabel, who—who wore glasses and—and was interested in conspiracy theories and paranormal mysteries—and I thought she'd be—never mind."
Now tears were spilling from Mabel's eyes. "What if you thought she was better than me," she almost whispered. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I just missed you so much. I'm so sorry."
"It's all right Mabel," Wendy said gently. "Nothing's gonna change between you and Dipper. Only you have to understand—these things don't belong in the real world. We have to—to deal with them."
"Kill them, you mean," Mabel said. "Oh, I can't! Killing Dippy Fresh would be like shooting one of my pets. I can't do that. Don't ask me to do that."
"We didn't mean to shoot them," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford's ready to try that if he has to—but he's hoping that won't be necessary. We all hope that. But we do have to talk to them, if they show up, and find out what they want. Remember, though, we can't let them touch us."
"If the fake Wendy touches you, you'll both die?" Mabel asked Dipper.
He shook his head. "Not me, probably. Grunkle Ford doesn't think it works like that. But if she touches Wendy, or if—the other guy touches me—yeah, we'd pretty much both be wiped out."
"So I can touch them?" Mabel asked.
"Probably not," Wendy said. "See, you created them, so they're all kind of a part of you. Dr. P doesn't know what might happen, but he says it's too dangerous to risk."
"Maybe we can—I don't know, help them somehow," Dipper said. "We have to try, anyway."
Mabel nodded. "OK. I'll try. Just—I won't take one of Grunkle Ford's guns, OK? I couldn't shoot them. I'm sorry. I just couldn't."
They pulled off the road out of the Valley directly under the metal framework that had replaced the old ruined trestle. Grunkle Ford got out first with his anomaly detector and scanned. Then he called the other four out.
Teek was the only one among them who had not been present for Weirdmageddon, and Wendy, Dipper, and Mabel were the only ones who had been in Mabel Land.
Teek carried a quantum destabilizer pistol. Wendy had the special axe that she had inherited from her ancestor Archibald Corduroy. Dipper, after serious thought, carried—a copy of Journal 3.
Ford had a double holster with two quantum destabilizer pistols, plus a sleeker version of the original quantum rifle slung around his shoulders. "Nothing to report," he said as they gathered on the side of the road. "Just the normal background weirdness signal for Gravity Falls. Yet this is the spot they tried to point out."
"Hello?" Mabel called. "Dippy Fresh? Are you there? It's Mabel!"
Nothing but the bright, flute-like song of meadowlarks answered her. "There's something wrong," Ford said.
"Maybe we somehow got the wrong place?" said Teek.
"This was unquestionably the spot something indicated on the sketch," Ford said. "Is it a time limitation? Can they appear only at the witching hour? Some disjunction between temporal dimensions?"'
Mabel said, "No, that doesn't make sense. In Mabel Land, it was always daytime! These aren't, you know, ghosty ghosts. If Dipper's right, they're my, um, my creations. Or something."
"We're not in the right place," Dipper said suddenly.
"Dude," Wendy said, "You saw it yourself. The sketch and the map of the Valley lined up exactly. We're where they wanted us to be."
Dipper tilted his head back. "No. We're under where they wanted us to be."
"Oh!" Mabel said. "The bubble was up where the old railroad trestle was!"
Ford, who at the time of Mabel Land's creation had been golden, but not in a good way, had never seen the prison bubble. "Up there?" he asked, gazing straight overhead. "How can we possibly get up there?"
"There's a way," Wendy said. "The old mining road. It's in rotten shape, but we can probably make it in the Jeep, if Soos will loan it to us."
Of course Soos would—he got enough of the story from them when they made the request to volunteer to go with them. "We went in for Mabel once," he said. "We can totally do it again!"
"There's no bubble this time, Soos," Mabel said gently. "But thank you."
"Aw, Hambone, I really want to help," the big guy said.
Dipper said, "Soos, you're helping plenty by letting us use the Jeep. Come on, man. You're married and a dad now. You have responsibilities the rest of us don't. You wait here. We'll call if we need you."
"Seriously?" Soos asked.
Mabel put her hand on Soos's shoulder. "We promise, Mr. Mystery," she said with a grin. "Count on it!"
"Thanks," Soos whispered. "Wait a minute, I'll get you guys a baseball bat. Because you never can tell, dawgs."
They took the bat, and Wendy took the wheel—Ford admitted he was not comfortable driving a Jeep, and Dipper said she was the best driver they had. Soon they wound up a disused road that Dipper had been on twice—once on a bus driven by Soos and chased by a gigantic Li'l Gideon robot, and once in a hot-wired former police car driven at top speed by an underage Wendy with no license and a total lack of driver's training.
It took a while because the road climbed the bluffs in a series of hairpin turns and switchbacks. At one point, Wendy took a left turn down a washed-out old track that stopped at the adit to an old mine. "We can cut through here and come out where the trestle was," she said. "Track spur used to come out here. We'll have to go on foot, but it isn't far."
"Spooky," Teek said.
"Beats having to jump a gorge in the Jeep," Dipper assured him. "I've got my flashlight."
"I have mine," Ford said.
"Let's go," Mabel whispered.
Though the mine had not been used in more than a century—the miners' inadvertent freeing of at least one long-preserved pterosaur had been the proximate cause of closure and abandonment—the short tunnel wasn't in terrible shape. Solid stone arched overhead, and although the old tracks had been removed long ago, the footing was uneven, muddy in spots where rain runoff had flowed in, but walkable. They encountered only a few rockfalls, and these were all minor enough to clamber over. Better yet, the tunnel stretched for only about a football field's length and was short enough for them to see daylight way at the far end.
The only alarming feature was a colony of eyebats clinging to the ceiling. They showed up when Ford shone his flashlight up. "They're multiplying again," he observed. The creatures hung like bunches of bizarre grapes, creeping away as the beam of light disturbed them.
"Never saw those before we moved to Gravity Falls," Teek said.
"I found a related species in New Mexico," Ford told him. "Much smaller than these, though. Only six-inch wingspans."
They emerged from the tunnel and found themselves in a stand of pines. The sun shone from the western sky, but they still had at least a couple of hours of daylight left. Dipper said, "I remember this. The old trestle would be right below us. This is where I jumped from that time the Gideon bot had captured Mabel."
"I've got my grappling hook with me," Mabel assured him.
"Grab me if we fall," Dipper said with a smile.
They emerged and looked down.
At a quick glance, the old trestle seemed to remain there—but it was only the metal frame for the big red WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS sign the town had put up after demolishing the crumbling, dangerous old trestle.
No bubble.
"When we came up here during Weirdmageddon, the prison bubble hung right there," Dipper said. "It filled the whole gap."
"Just the sign now," Wendy said. "Where are they?"
Ford had stopped off to the left and studied his anomaly detector. In a tight, level voice, he said, "Something's happening."