The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 13, 2016)
6: Not so Savvy
Everyone at once yelled at Mabel.
Mabel flinched as Teek shouted, "No!", Wendy growled, "Oh, girl, you didn't!" and Dipper snapped, "Mabel, what's wrong with you?" Stan, for a change, was the quietest, merely moaning, "Oy!"
Trying to force a smile, a blinking Mabel asked, "Uh—was it something I said?"
"Sweetie," Grunkle Stan rumbled, waving the others to silence, "you never say somethin' like you just said when there's a possible spookum hangin' around. Never! Even Soos would know better."
Teek looked miserable. "I didn't mean to yell at you, but Mabel, you're more genre-savvy than that. I'm sorry—"
"Yeah," Wendy said, sounding less angry. In a knowing tone, she added, "Smile Dip, am I right?"
"Maybe a little," Mabel muttered, looking down.
"You know that stuff makes you crazy, Sis," Dipper said, his voice not harsh but reproving—which in a way made Mabel feel a little bit worse than being yelled at.
She mumbled in a low voice, "Sorry, sorry, sorry! I didn't—not much—I mean, it's just that Teek and I were going on a date, and it's been a long day already, and I was tired and needed a little pick-me-up, so one packet is all. I'm so sorry, guys."
"Just don't let it happen again, Pumpkin," Stan said, patting her shoulder. "Come on, everybody, cut her some slack. Are we OK?"
"I guess so," Dipper said reluctantly. "Sorry, Mabel."
Wendy put her arm around Mabel and gave her a friendly little shake. "Come on, it's not that bad. Anybody can make a mistake. But now you're goin' into a sugar crash, right?"
"Yeah, I think I am," Mabel admitted, nodding unhappily. Her goofy mood had gone flat all at once, like a punctured balloon. "Hope I didn't mess things up too bad."
Teek kissed her cheek. "It's all right. Here." He reached to a ceramic container on the nearest table and handed her a sugar packet. "To tide you over and help bring you down."
"Thanks, bae," Mabel said, smiling through a tear or two.
"Just half the packet, though, all right?" said Dipper. "We need level heads here. We don't know what we're up—"
Mabel interrupted: "Relax, Broseph. Sugar is only like one-tenth as whoa! as Smile Dip is." But she didn't eat quite the whole packet. "OK," she said as the sucrose hit her system, giving her a little cushion for her crashing mood. "I'm sorry, everybody. Grunkle Stan, keep the key handy in case we need to hurry out, OK?"
"Yeah, sure, you got it," Stan said. "Come on, let's do this nutso scan or whatever and get the heck out of this place as soon as we can. We don't hafta fight this ghost tonight, but let's see if we can at least prove there's somethin' to fight tomorrow."
"All right," Dipper said, readying his anomaly detector. "Everybody get behind me, and I'll sweep the main room first."
They did, all of them crowding against the front window, where the sizzling neon sign read DESOLC in mirror-fashion red letters.
Dipper had switched on the device. Wendy stood directly behind him, hands on his shoulders. Stan was behind and to his left, Mabel and Teek behind and to his right. Mabel craned to look at what he was doing.
The display screen lit up—a blue background, and big blocky white letters as the readout: READY.
"Here we go," Dipper said. He twiddled a dial, pressed a button, and the large letters blinked out, replaced by smaller ones:
SCANNING SPP PLANE (1) WAIT... The three dots blinked off and then back on, one, two, three, and repeated.
"What's that mean?" Mabel asked. "Spup?"
Her brother muttered, "Spontaneous paranormal phenomena. Barely extra-mundane events, like predictive dreams, serendipitous coincidence, low-level stuff."
The readout changed to show a graph, a low, sinuous sine-wave in white above a green line and below a red one.
"OK," Dipper said. "Just background noise there, nothing really registering. Normal for the area. Plane one's clean. Next."
He went through the first five scans and then paused, taking a deep breath. "Here's the first one that charted upstairs. The ApPoRev plane, level six. Just a second, I need to make a couple of adjustments—ready to go."
Mabel stared. This time the display looked different, not a flat graph but an X-Y axis in a circle, the horizontal X line green, the vertical Y one yellow, background black. Almost instantly a series of five or six small red X's showed up in a loose scatter at the top left quadrant, not very far above the X axis, though. "What's that mean?" Mabel asked.
"It's picking up ghostly emanations. It's not real strong. Top left means an actual phantom of some kind, not just poltergeist or apparition events. Whatever it is, the indication represents something that has a mind."
"OK, and what's that mean?" Mabel asked.
"If it was a poltergeist or apparition, the display would be different, different colors, because they're not conscious. This looks like it is. But if there was a ghost really here in the room with us, the X's would be up toward the top of the screen and flashing. This is more like . . . I don't know, like some lingering traces of a ghost that was here not long ago. Or maybe a whole lot of them from a long time back. This is kinda like the trace I always get in the Mystery Shack front yard."
"Say what?" Stan asked, sounding shocked. "There's like ghosts walkin' on my lawn?"
"No, no," Dipper said hastily. "But—well, you remember the zombies?"
"Ya mean the ones that crashed the party and then we hadda sing to 'em?" Stan shuddered. "Yeah, I got kind of a faint recollection!"
"You know what? We ought to have another karaoke night," Mabel said. She could tell the sugar was taking hold.
Dipper went to scan seven and in a preoccupied way, he said, "Well, Grunkle Ford says the Mystery Shack trace happens because back in the big flood that came after the Northwest Mansion was first built in 1862, a bunch of drowned loggers were buried there in unmarked graves."
"Maybe that's why Tripper keeps digging holes," Mabel said. "Bones!"
"Don't eat any more sugar, OK?" Teek whispered to her.
"Wait, wait, wait," Stan said, rubbing his palm over his forehead. "Ya tellin' me this joint here was built on like, I dunno, an Indian graveyard?"
"No," Dipper said. "Uh—was it?"
"How should I know? Never heard that, though. Come to think of it, Ford told me one time that the Chinooks didn't ever bury their dead in the Valley, but took 'em out a few miles away."
"Yeah, probably didn't want 'em comin' back," Wendy said. "Dad says that there's at least one spot where if you bury somethin' dead, it'll come back to life, but it won't be normal."
"In this town, who can tell the difference between normal and nuts?" growled Stan. "How's it comin', Dip?"
"Almost done. Got a very faint blip in the eighth range—that detects active disembodied intelligences and invisible creatures, stuff like that. Nothing in nine and ten. Now eleven—that's the malevolence plane. If there's anything evil—holy cow!"
Mabel frowned. Now the readout was like a color bar. It started out black at the bottom then shaded to blue, green, yellow, orange, and red at the top. It pulsed right up to the lower edge of the red hue and hung there quivering. "What's that? Bad?"
"Yeah," Dipper said. "It means that whatever is leaving traces here is not our friend."
"Aw," Mabel said. "Maybe it needs a hug."
"Genre savvy, genre savvy," Teek repeated, like a protective spell.
Dipper took a deep breath. "OK, I need to go and scan the other rooms on this floor. No basement here, right? Didn't think so. You guys stay back and listen, and if I need help, I'll yell—you stay here, too, Wendy."
She had taken a step with him. "No way, man. I'm not lettin' you go back there when something evil may be waiting to pounce! Hey, just a minute."
They had reached the end of the bar. Wendy detoured and went to the wall, where a fire extinguisher hung in a little glass cabinet. A fire extinguisher, plus a fire axe. "They don't make these things anymore," she said, cheerfully elbowing the glass, shattering it into tinkling fragments. "Hey, Stan, you'll have to pay for this!"
"Sheesh!" Stan said. "Come on, I got the key! I coulda unlocked it!"
"More fun this way." Wendy grabbed the axe and hefted it. "Huh. Third-rate, but I guess it'll do in a pinch."
Mabel called, "Didn't you bring your own axe?"
"To go on a date with Dipper?" Wendy asked. "Nah, not needed. He's gotta fight me off, not vice-versa!"
"Atta boy!" Stan yelled.
"You guys!" Dipper complained, blushing. "OK, Wen, come with me then, but be real careful and stay behind me."
"You got it," Wendy said.
Teek, Mabel, and Stan came close to the hallway but stayed in the main bar room. Stan complained, "This is takin' forever!"
"All right," Dipper said. "To save time, I'm gonna concentrate on ranges six, eight, and eleven, since so far those have been the only spikes in the readings. Here we go."
The hallway was marginally more active in range six, but about the same as the second floor in eight and eleven. Dipper shook his head. "This must be an intermittently manifesting apparition," he said. "That means it only shows up sometimes. I don't know. Maybe it is strong background resonance from somebody who died a hundred years or so."
The small kitchen and storage rooms were about the same. Tats's room, ditto, though there the malevolence reading was down in the yellow range. "What causes that?" Wendy asked.
Guessing, Dipper said, "Well, Tats can be kinda violent if somebody gets unruly, but really he's kinda laid-back. I think maybe his personality may damp down the malevolence reading some." He stopped right outside the ladies' room. "Uh—"
"Oh, come on," Wendy said, opening the door and nudging him. "It's not much different from a men's room, 'cept they don't have those things hangin' on the wall—oh, my God. Yuck!"
To say that the restroom could use a scrubbing is like observing that the Phantom of the Opera really should have dusted the sewers of Paris at least every other year. The floor was nastily, suggestively, unpleasantly sticky. Two toilets crouched in adjoining stalls, and one could only surmise that sixty years earlier, both had started out white. Now they were, well, not-white. "Man," Wendy grumbled, "why don't they clean this place?"
Dipper was still getting over his culture shock at being in a women's room. With a woman. "Uh, I, I don't know."
"I mean, the Mystery Shack johns are way better than this!" Wendy said. "Even back when they were always clogged or broke and Stan had the portable john out back—"
"I'm hearin' this!" Stan called from the hallway.
Wendy yelled, "Well, it's true! Me and Soos—well, mainly Soos—did scrub the toilets now an' then! And now Soos has upgraded them so they're nice—"
"Yeah, yeah, Soos is a hard worker, point taken! Anything, Dip?"
"About the same on all three readings," Dipper said.
"Brace yourself, kid!" Stan yelled. "The guys' can's always worse than the women's!"
"How could it be?" Wendy asked. But then they went in, turned on the forty-watt bulb, and saw. "Oh, gross!" she groaned. "Look at the floor! Can't guys even aim? Gah, the ammonia's burnin' my eyes!"
Stan sounded defensive: "Wendy, sometimes it's hard to hit the target when you're emptyin' out a couple-three pints of beer!"
"The commode's not even in a stall! It's just sittin' here against the wall in the open. Oh, my God, look at the graffiti! That's obscene, man!"
Dipper was staring at the anomaly detector display. Tensely, he said, "Go! Let's get out of here now!"
They retreated into the hall. Mabel was pinching her nose. "Shut the door! That's air pollution!"
"What—what's that light?" Teek asked nervously. Dipper had switched off the one dim bulb as he and Wendy left the toilet, but an ominous green flicker came and went, came and went, inside the men's room.
"Something," Dipper said hoarsely, "that wants to get out."
Wendy tried to slam the door. It shut—almost—and stuck, ajar by about two inches. "Is it catchin' on something?" she asked, shoving against something that seemed spongy.
"Leave it alone," Dipper said. "Get back! Grunkle Stan, better go unlock the front—"
The men's room door banged open so hard it slammed into the wall.
Something awful surged from the toilet.