Wanderers from the Weird Side
(August 15, 2017)
9: View from a Cliff
When the adrenaline was flowing, when fear spiked and her attention centered on saving herself or her brother, or both, Mabel lost her fear of heights. When she was more anxious than afraid or angry, she found it again.
"Oh, my gosh!" she said, gazing wide-eyed out over the nearly five hundred-foot drop to the Valley floor. "Teek, hang onto me!"
"I got you," Teek, who was already holding her hand, said.
The sight was awe-inspiring. The ground far below looked blue-hazed by distance. Already the afternoon shadows reached out long and darkening, claiming Gravity Falls for the coming night. A farm truck below already had its headlights on as it crept along the ribbon of highway like a beetle with shiny eyes.
Up here the cooler air gusted in breezes that ruffled their hair and tugged at their clothes. The sun had sunk lower, and off to the west the cliffs darkened steadily as they lost the light. Dipper shivered a little—he wasn't afraid of heights, but he dreaded that his sister and his fiancée might stand in danger. That made the gusts feel even cooler, raising goosebumps on his arms.
Stanford stood a little out in front of the rest of the group, left foot advanced a little, gazing downward at the instrument he held at waist level. He switched on his anomaly detector and methodically turned the dial that shifted its detection range from ghosts and haunts to time distortions and other weirdness. The device made a very faint electronic hum, like a bee trapped beneath a thick glass jar. Finally he paused, intently studying the readout.
"What is it showing?" Dipper, his tone urgent, asked Stanford.
"Definite but irregular anomalies in the N/R range," Ford said. "I can't see anything visually, but the detector indicates a vortex of paranormal energies quite close to us. There near the very edge of the drop. Everyone watch carefully but remember—stay back!"
Wendy held her axe at the ready. "I don't see anything at all!"
"The signals are weak. They may be facing difficulties in manifesting. Wait, wait—there's a slight increase in E/M pulses. It may be trying to create a physical manifestation now."
Dipper squinted. A vague shape moved, or was it his imagination? No, he saw something like the ghost of a shoulder-high whirlwind that wavered and danced at the edge of the cliff. It had very little color, more like a faint and transparent gray than anything else, and except for not fading or moving in the breeze, it might have been a thin puff of smoke drifting in air.
"Dipper!" The voice came faint, but it was recognizable as Wendy's. In the slanting late-afternoon light, within the paranormal disturbance an indistinct blur of green and red shimmered but did not solidify. Only imagination could shape the hazy colors into a girl's form. "Dipper! You're all grown up. We can finally be together, man!"'
"Over my dead body!" the real Wendy yelled in a murderous voice. The unformed figure actually flinched, flickering, and then it fell silent.
"Stay back," Ford urged. "Remember, Wendy—the slightest touch means mutual annihilation."
Off to the left, Mabel had sunk down to earth and, hunkered low, she gripped the long grass with both hands, like a girl riding a wild horse bareback and hanging onto its mane. Teek knelt beside her, his arm around her. "Hang on," he said. "You can do this."
"I shouldn't have looked down," she gasped. "I think I'm gonna barf like a Gnome!"
"Ride it out," Dipper advised his sister. "The shape is fading away."
"Losing energy," his grunkle said, glancing at the anomaly detector's readout. "It takes considerable power to break through the paranormal barrier, even in Gravity Falls. I don't think they can take physical form, or if they can, they can't hold it for long. There, the readings are down to background level with just random ticks."
"Mabel! Call you-know-who," Dipper said.
"Voldemort?" she asked, sounding surprised. "Snape's way hunkier!"
"No!" Dipper said. "I mean, you know. My double. The one you made."
"Oh, him." Taking a deep breath, Mabel yelled, "Hey, Dippy Fresh! If you can hear me, please come talk to us! This is Mabel!"
"The energy's picking up again. There's another attempt to coalesce," Stanford said, staring at the anomaly detector screen. "A little further away. Right there, ten yards ahead."
That put it perilously close to the dizzying drop, maybe out in thin air. Dipper had brought the trucker's hat that Teek had found, which seemed real enough. He tossed it spinning, and it landed not far from the edge. "Come get your pine-tree cap!" he yelled.
The blur this time was blue and red. "Flip-a-dip, Mabel!" The voice had a wavering quality, the tone a little off, sounding like a faint vibrating echo came half an instant after the words. "Seriously uncool. Help us, Sis!"
"Big spike in energy! Something just happened," Ford said.
"Yeah, man," Wendy told him. "The hat disappeared!"
The vanishing hat seemed momentarily to spark the energies. Just for a heartbeat, there flickered Dippy Fresh, a slight figure and quite short, the cap worn backwards, purple shades with green frames hiding his eyes, wearing a red tee shirt and a navy vest (though adorned with yellow lightning bolts), long gray jeans instead of shorts, high-top white sneakers—and carrying a yellow skateboard cradled under his arm.
"Now there's a rapid drop-off in psychic forces. I'm losing him," Ford said.
"Help us, please!" the specter said, his voice fainter and more distorted than before. "Mabel! We're dying!"
And then he vanished, the gray whirlwind dissipating instantaneously. Ford waited for a couple of minutes before saying, "Completely faded now. No signal."
"I hate him," Dipper said.
Wendy put her hand on his shoulder. "Dude, no," she said quietly and in a gentle voice. "Did you see him? He's only a kid, man."
Ouch! "He's—never mind. Not now," Dipper said, his jaw tense. "What do we do, Grunkle Ford?"
"Let's wait fifteen minutes," Ford said. "I'll keep monitoring. They may make another attempt to come through."
"Why are they dying?" Mabel asked. She still crouched in the grass, her eyes closed. "Don't let go of me, Teek!"
"I won't," he said.
"I don't know the answer to your question," Ford said. "They're not alive in the usual sense. They're not ghosts, they're more like—like psychic imprints. Temporary three-dimensional shapes formed from psychic energies. There must be some physical component, too, but that's not coming across the barrier. We're only getting a kind of reflection."'
"Do they know what they are?" Dipper asked.
"Difficult to say," Ford murmured. "Perhaps. They seem to have at least a consciousness of their peril."
"Yeah, and that fake me still has a yen for my guy," Wendy said. "We ought to get some things straight!"
Fifteen minutes passed, and then two more. Ford then gave in. "We'd better get back down while we still have good light. Let's go."
This time the eyebats in the mine tunnel chittered and scrabbled, claws on stone, overhead. Perhaps they sensed the coming sunset. Stanford led the four others to the Jeep, helped Mabel in—she was still shaky on her legs—and Wendy got behind the steering wheel. "Everybody buckle up and hold on. It's worse going down than driving up!"
Dipper, sitting beside her in the front seat, remained silent and brooding until they were halfway down.
The fact that he so clearly recalled a moment from his first summer in the Falls surprised him and appalled him a little. It was a sharp and hurtful moment, though—and it had happened not long after Dipper, then twelve, had realized he was falling hard for Wendy, who was then fifteen. Wendy, who was the chief mischief-finder for her group of friends, took them to explore the Dusk2Dawn convenience store on the edge of town.
The place had been long closed and stood abandoned and condemned—though come to that, in 2017 it still stood, and the two ghosts that still hung around inside it seemed to have the power to stave off the bulldozers indefinitely. Five years earlier, the gang had found the place locked up tight. And Robbie couldn't force the doors. Dipper volunteered to get them in, and Robbie had sneered at him—"I can't get in, but I'm sure Junior here is gonna break it down like Hercules!"
Then it happened. Wendy, who thought he and Mabel were thirteen, mainly because Dipper had lied to her, defended him in the most painful way possible: "Come on, leave him alone. He's just a little kid."
Just a little kid. At the moment that had crushed him.
Now that he was nearly eighteen, he found the wound still there under the surface, still painful. Just a little kid. And what made it worse, seeing Dippy Fresh, his mirror image, had given him the exact same impression. That's exactly how I looked to Wendy back then. No wonder she tried to let me off the hook later that summer.
Now the age difference didn't matter. But though the fake Wendy hadn't even appeared clearly, he wondered—Would she look like a kid to me now?
After a good ten minutes of silent fretting, Dipper took a long breath and then said to Wendy, "What you said about Dippy Fresh back there, you know. You're right. He's just a kid. But the fake Wendy—she kind of is, too. Four fingers on each hand. She's just fifteen years old. They haven't aged."
"They wouldn't," Ford said from the shotgun position. "Being psychic constructs, they're less like us and more like intangible bundles of awareness and volition that can, under certain conditions, take physical form They really aren't subject to the normal flow of time. That makes Mabel's question apposite: Why are they dying, if time has no hold on them?"
"Where did the energy come from when they first got, uh, made?" Teek asked from the back seat.
"Excellent question," Ford said.
"Proud of you, Teek," Mabel said, sounding less nauseated now that they were on the way down and the curves in the road had flattened out a little. "You impressed my nerdy Grunkle!"
"The energy came from Bill Cipher, " Dipper said flatly. "It was Weirdmageddon, Teek. I know you don't have any conception of how that was, but it was wild, crazy. All the rules of nature got canceled out. The sky ripped open. Trembley Falls turned into blood and flowed up into the sky. Time stopped. Things just spontaneously transformed into other things, and that even happened to people. I remember the bell in the courthouse tower came to life. Soos says Abuelita turned into a reclining chair—but she was still alive and still herself inside. Crazy stuff."
"Yeah, me and Dip temporarily became a couple of birds," Wendy said. "That was awful."
"Uncontrolled, alien, extra-dimensional energies were flooding in through the rift from Outside," Ford said, his tone indicating the capital letter. "Kinds of forces unknown in our dimension, replacing and distorting the ordinary laws of physics. Cipher called on them to perform his apparent magic. That's how he created his fortress, the Fearamid."
"That was like an Egyptian pyramid deal," Mabel told her boyfriend. "Huge and with all these tunnels and chambers running through it. It was just like the Great Pyramid, practically, except it flew!"
Wendy guided the Jeep around a final sharp curve and for a moment they passed behind a thin, small waterfall as the road hugged a cut into the face of the cliff. "Yeah, but that wasn't just magicked from nothing. It was made out of rocks and stuff," she said. "It didn't just come from thin air."
'And it all went back to normal after Grunkle Stan punched Bill out in the Mindscape," Dipper added. "We were inside the Fearamid Teek! Like Mabel says it was made of stones, but it hovered a hundred feet in the air. When Bill got wiped out, it descended, the rocks shedding off it as it crashed down. It finally set us on the ground, and the big rocks just sank into the earth all around us."
Ford added, "Our normal physics returned, and everything pretty much went back to the way it was before Weirdmageddon. Perhaps these things we just saw lingered because Bill Cipher gave them, I don't know—a tiny spark of consciousness, self-awareness? They may have been lying dormant for the past five years. I don't know why they're trying to re-emerge now."
"Bill Cipher," Mabel said in a soft voice, "is going away."
To be continued