The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 13, 2016)
5: Scene of the Events
"Whoa!" Wendy said as they came to the Skull Fracture. "Would you look at that!"
"That" was a mob of mostly middle-age to old guys, all in red fezzes, milling about in the late sunshine on the sidewalk in front of the pub. At the edge of the curb sat a folding A-frame sign, the kind that the Skull Fracture sometimes used to advertise happy hour or bargain burgers. Except now somebody had used a gigantic marker to make a sign:
CLOSED FOR PEST INSPECTION
TO SERVE YOU BETTER!
CALL AGAIN SOON!
Romping unicorns and cheerful waving winged bunnies decorated the edges of the sign, and Dipper could just about guess who the artist was. Yep, there she stood, in her pink sweater with big red kissy-lips on the front, next to Teek, and carrying—his paranormal investigation kit?
It sure looked like the scratched-up old black faux-leather laptop case that their dad had thrown away and that he had rescued to use in lieu of a briefcase. He rather liked having an investigation kit that looked like it had been through some experiences.
Mabel saw the Dodge Dart at the same instant Dipper saw her, and she waved, yelling, "Hey, Brobro! Hi, Wendy! This is me, Mabel, yelling at you from right here beside the sign! Free parking around back!"
Wendy made the turn, then parked in the usually cramped lot partly behind and partly off to the left of the pub. It was only about half full. "Crazy motorcycle, man," she said, pulling into a slot next to a pink one.
"Probably a girl's," Dipper said, looking at it. "It looks like the color Mabel would get if she were into motorbikes."
They climbed out of the Dodge Dart in time to meet Mabel, who came trotting around the corner. "There's a ghost!" she said excitedly. "Or maybe there is. Some kind of spook, anyway! It's haunting the lodge hall! And Grunkle Stan wants us to exorcize it!" For some reason, she had a coach's whistle hanging by a lanyard around her neck, and she put it to her lips and shrilled it so loud she made Dipper wince. Then she put her hands on her hips and ordered in a drill-instructor tone, "Hey, ghost! Drop and give me twenty, you revolting pile of flabby ectoplasm!"
"Uh—that kind of exercising is different," Dipper said, wiggling a pinky in the ear closest to Mabel and her whistle.
She gave him a flat-hand shoulder punch. "I know, bro of my heart! Come on, laugh it up! It's a Mabel joke! Yuck, yuck!"
"Where'd you get the whistle, dude?" Wendy asked. "It reminds me of Poolcheck's."
Mabel proudly displayed it. "That's 'cause it is Poolcheck's! I borrowed it from him!" She put her hand beside her mouth and whispered, "Grunkle Stan says he had to bully Poolcheck into coming tonight because he's scared of ghosts. Man! He looks even weirder in a lodge fez!"
"There you knuckleheads are," said Stan, coming around the corner with the massive bouncer, Tats, in tow. "Listen, we got ourselves a little problem up in the Holy Mackerel Lodge hall. My genius brother is off in Washington—oh, yeah, I told ya already. Anyway, normally I'd ask him, but since he ain't handy, Dip, would you go up and do your thing and see if it's really a ghost and if it is, banish it? Be great if it's nothing but plumbing or some deal, 'cause I got money on it."
Tats, his muscular arms crossed, rumbled, "Empirically speakin', I find the prospect of a genuine supernatural event to be of low probability. Then again, man, it ain't mice." He took out a keyring with about fifty keys hanging on it and unlocked the back door. They went in. "That's my room on the right," Tats said. "'Scuse the mess, y'all. Uh, and don't use these here bathrooms if you got an urge. The one upstairs is unisex but cleaner."
Of course that made them all glance through the open door into Tats's room, which wasn't really dirty, though the bed, which was made up, looked as if he'd rested on top of the covers. And there was an unwashed dish and a white coffee cup on the nightstand beside it, but that was about all. Wendy held Dipper's hand and sent him a thought: Looks better than your room usually does.
—Well, I get busy. Not always time to put the sheets and covers back in place.
Just teasin' you, Dip.
Tats said, "Watch your step. I gotta replace a bulb in the stairwell," and led them up to the second floor. Mabel opened every door in the hall on their way toward the front—"'Cause I'm a snoop," she said when Wendy asked her why—and at the end of the hall, they turned right and entered the sacred grounds of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel. Stan snapped on the lights, and they looked around from just inside the doorway.
"Oh, man," Mabel complained. "It looks like a schoolroom in a poverty district! I was expecting something more exotic."
"So what do you dudes do in your meetings?" Wendy asked.
"That," said Tats firmly, "is a forbidden secret."
"Yeah," Stan said, "but mainly we have a quick business meeting, take up dues twice a year, sometimes vote to give a charity a donation, and then we drink beer and play cards for the rest of the evening. Ya gonna report me for spilling forbidden secrets, Tats?"
"Naw," Tats said with a shrug. "It's nothin' that nobody can't guess."
"Yeah, 'bout what I thought," Wendy said. "How come Dad's not a member anymore? He used to be."
"He got mad this one time, last year," Stanley said. "He ordered a lager and said what he got wasn't fit for a logger. It's OK. He drops out from time to time, then when we get an opening, he reapplies and comes back."
"Figures," Wendy said. She knew her father's temper probably better than anybody, including her dad.
Dipper had counted chairs. "So there's thirty of you? Sacred number?"
"Huh?" Stan asked. "Oh, nope, that's the number of foldin' chairs we have. We got thirty-three on the roster, but there's always some that don't make any given meeting. And thirty-three's not special, either. If we'd just buy some more, we could have thirty-six or forty members or whatever."
"Why don't you?" Mabel asked. "Then me and Dip could be members!"
"Buyin' chairs comes up every September, durin' our membership drive meeting, but generally the guys vote for more beer instead," Stan said.
"Well, push for it," Mabel suggested.
Dipper had set his laptop bag on the desk. "We're kind of getting off the track," he said, rummaging in it. He pulled out a gunmetal-gray device that looked like the illegitimate child of a Colt .45 automatic, an oversize cell phone, and a tiny set of rabbit-ear antennae that telescoped out of the business end. "This baby should tell us if anything paranormal is going on." He brandished the compact and less powerful version of his Grunkle Ford's anomaly detector.
"What's that, Brobro?" Mabel asked, looking over his shoulder.
"It's a P-detector—" Dipper started.
"Bwah!" Mabel chortled, doubling over. Then, choking, she said, "You'd better start down the hall next to the stairs, Dipster! Next to the restroom!"
"P," said Dipper with such preternatural patience that it's a wonder the meter didn't light up and honk klaxon warnings, "meaning 'paranormality.' It's a limited version of Grunkle Ford's anomaly meter. OK, here we go." He switched it on. "Um, everybody else please go stand in the hall so I don't pick up interference."
Teek took Mabel's hand and led her, protesting, out the door, followed by Stan, Tats, and last of all Wendy. Mabel guffawed again and said, "Members! Ha!"
"Dude," Wendy said, leaning on the door jamb, "I'm gonna stand guard right here to keep this door from slamming and like trapping you or some junk like that. You be careful!"
"I'm not challenging anything now," Dipper said calmly. "Just sweeping for any disturbance in the reality fields. That shouldn't disturb anything that might be hanging out on the astral plane."
That meant he would have to make a dozen separate sweeps, with Dipper standing near the center of the room, between two rows of folding chairs, and slowly turning a three-sixty while studying the readout screen during each rotation. Then he adjusted the wave/particle detector array and tried again on a different frequency.
On the sixth try, he called out, "Negative for everything up to now, but I just got a flutter in the ApPoRev range. Fairly weak trace, but detectable. I'm pretty certain there's something here, but I'm not sure what. Let me finish out the other wavelengths, though."
"What's an applerev?" Mabel called.
"Short for 'apparitions, poltergeists, and revenants,'" Dipper said. "Covers about ninety per cent of haunting phenomena."
Mabel slapped her forehead and groaned. "Man, you even make ghosts sound nerdy!"
"Shh. Huh." Dipper paused with the antennae pointing toward the back of the room and fiddled with the controls. "Strange. There's a cold spot a couple feet in front of me. Ambient temperature is ninety, but right there in the one spot it's . . . forty? Weird! Not a very big area, though. But that's a huge temp gradient."
"Maybe your thingamajig grades on the curve," Mabel suggested.
Dipper rolled his eyes and finished the scans. "OK, you can come back in. I got positive readings in the sixth, eighth, and eleventh ranges. Well, there's definitely something here. My p-detector—"
"Bwah!" Mabel laughed. "Pee!"
Gritting his teeth, Dipper said, "My paranormality detector isn't as powerful as Grunkle Ford's instruments. His can trace fine gradations of unreality that mine can only suggest are there. But I'd say yes, you've got something unnatural going on here."
"You can say that again," Mabel told him, nudging him with her elbow. "All these old guys in their flat-topped red hats!"
"Can it, pumpkin," Stan said mildly. "That's th' sacred fez you're talking about."
Wendy nudged her. "Dude, straight up, have you been in the Smile Dip?"
"I'll be good," Mabel promised, hunching over and looking guilty.
"OK, you guys hang out in here and now let me go out in the hall and see if I can localize a nexus," Dipper said. "Sis, that means to see if there's a paranormal hot spot, where a ghost might actually manifest."
The vibes in the sixth wavelength seemed somewhat stronger about two-thirds of the way down the hall, near the spot where the storage room opened into the hallway—it had two doors, one into the lodge hall, the other, presumably for loading in stock, into the hall. He tested the inside of the room, really just a small walk-in closet for chair and various junk storage. Nope—the flutter still was more pronounced in the Lodge Hall and in the hallway. And even at that, "Nothing real strong," Dipper reported. "OK, let's go downstairs and I'll check there, just in case the real locus is in the restaurant or something."
They clomped down the narrow stairs, and Stan opened the front door. "Hey guys," he called, "looks like this is gonna take some time. Whyn't you all go over to the Mystery Shack? You can have the meeting in the parlor there. Tyler, tell Soos I said it's OK."
"Or we could go to my house," Bud Gleeful said. "It's right close, yes it is, just a short walk. We'll pick up some snacks and then we can meet in my basement and afterwards have a few brews and watch the game on the flat screen."
They held a quick vote and with only one dissenting voice—Horace Ornrey's—they agreed to that change of venue.
"Thanks, guys," Stan said. "If we can get this taken care of, me and Tats'll be along soon. But you guys go ahead with the business meeting without us."
"Hey, I could just leave y'all the key," Tats suggested. "I trust you. The cook and night bartender have done gone home anyways."
"Sure, go ahead," Stan said, pocketing the one key that Tats took off the ring. "I'll lock up and get this back to you."
"Right now, lock the door behind me," Tats said as he headed out. "Always somebody who don't read the signs." He clicked on the CLOSED neon sign, left, and Stan locked the door.
Teek, a little nervously, said, "Uh, am I wrong, or did your uncle just possibly lock us inside with a ghost?"
Mabel punched his shoulder affectionately. "Oh, come on, bae," she said. "Get real! This is the Mystery Twins you're talking about. What's the worst that could happen?"