The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 14, 2016)
15: The Other
"There it is, Sixer!" Stan fired his weapon—as advertised, it sent out a long, spreading cone of red light.
The ghost had seeped up as vapor through the cracks in the floor boards, a nearly globular, wispy fume of swirling greenish gas. The ray struck it, and it jerked back out of sight—most of it.
The part that had been directly struck by the ray splatted the tables and floors in a pattern of purple goo.
"Watch your feet!" Ford yelled. "Use the atomizers around our ankles!"
Dipper felt incredibly cold, momentarily immobilized by fear, but Mabel and Teek pumped their spritz bottles, and a few tendrils of green gas coiling up near everyone's feet rapidly pulled back into the crawl space beneath the pub.
Then, all the way across the bar, at the entrance into the hall leading back to the stair and Tats's room, the vapor surged out again, but this time shrank and partly solidified into a ghastly, dwarfish thing—
The body was vaguely human, huge chest and narrow wasp waist and skinny hips and two bandy legs that had a weird ankle joint and long, clawed feet. It stood on the balls of the sole behind its toes. It had six arms, the middle pair ending in insect-like pincers, the two in the normal position ending in hands that were not really . . . human. More like a rat's grasping, bone-thin fingers.
The head was worst. It had a humanoid face, huge blank faceted insectoid staring eyes, a rat-like twitching nose, and a fanged slit of a mouth.
But the other face—that was worse.
It covered the creature's chest, like a photograph of a deranged lunatic printed on a rubber balloon and then blown up far too much. The bulging eyes were too far apart and wall-eyed, the nose spread so much it was mostly hairy nostrils, and the fanged mouth drooled.
Stan fired again, but the ray wasn't powerful enough to disperse the monstrosity. It bellowed in a strange, wailing voice.
Mabel squeaked and Wendy's trembling voice asked, "What's it doing to us?"
"Radiating emanations of fear! Don't give in!" Ford yelled back: "O Ímpie! Sanctus Lux et gloria Dominus cogit tibi! Silentium! Silentium! Silentium!"
The gibbering, loose-lipped mouth slashed across the thing's belly writhed but the sound it produced ceased, and Dipper felt some of the paralyzing fear let up.
"The door, Stanley!" Ford snapped.
Stan unlocked the front door and said, "Get out, kids, let me and Ford cover you!"
They scrambled. The monstrous ghost saw their retreat and rushed forward impossibly fast, moving more like an ice-skater than a runner.
Both Stan's and Ford's pistols hit it, one mid-chest, one head-high. It burst into putrid purple slime. The legs weirdly kept running for a moment but then dissolved into green vapor and streaked down through the floor as though being pulled by a strong vacuum.
"That was close!" Ford said as Stan locked and re-chained the door. "It was using its mental weapon of fear on us and also trying to utter a blasphemous spell. Somehow it's achieved the ability to gain physical form—though it's still weak."
"Weak!" Stan yelled. "Ya call that weak? It coulda had us if your Flash Gordon guns hadn't worked!"
"Quick, around back," Ford said. "The sun's bright, and I don't think it can venture out into direct sunlight, not yet—"
"Not yet?" Stan asked as they hustled. "Not yet?"
"It's not strong enough," Ford said. He grabbed up the chain as Stan locked the door, and then they both re-chained and padlocked it.
"Not strong enough. So what's it doin', working out at Ghoul Gym?"
"No, Stanley," Ford said. In a low voice he added, "It's . . . eating people."
"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said for the fourth time, like a toddler asking for attention. The two adults had been ignoring the younger members of the group. "Grunkle Ford!"
"Not now, Mason," Ford said. "We have to regroup and plan. I fear that my present countermeasures might be too weak to oppose it if it gains full—"
"You're not gonna let it lurk in this place and gather its strength, are you?" demanded Stan.
"We have no choice!" Ford said. "We need some way to meet it on our terms, not on its—and not in here, where it has a kind of dominion."
"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said.
"Not now!" Ford was clearly agitated. "Look, I'll put together some more potent weapons against this kind of thing. I believe it's a specimen of the hungry dead—that's a belief from—"
"We don't care, Poindexter! All we wanna do is get rid of it. What if we burn down the place?"
Ford blinked. "That would be extraordinarily ill-advised. We might be freeing it from all restraints—a haunting entity must maintain a connection to the locus where it first manifests, or else it will be drawn into the afterlife—"
"Yada, yada," Stan griped. "OK, can we go and do this research and get back here while it's still daylight? It can't go out in sunlight, right? Like a vampire?"
"Like a movie vampire," Dipper said, but the older twins still ignored him.
Ford said, "I believe not. I cannot guarantee that, but the indications are that strong light dispels its power."
"What if we get some floodlights?" Stan asked. "High-powered stuff! Really light up the inside of the place! Would that keep it at bay or whatever until you can do your voodoo?"
"That's an excellent suggestion," Ford said. "I might be able to prepare a light bomb—good idea, Stanley!"
"I'd thank you if you didn't sound so damn surprised it came from me! Let's go, then. Oh, wait a minute. You think it rode this pink bike, huh?"
"I surmise that it somehow controlled the motorcycle, yes, sort of inhabiting it almost as if it were possessing a body—"
"Yeah, well it ain't goin' bikin' tonight."
Stan bent over the motorcycle. He said, "Hey, Wendy, get the took kit outa the trunk of my car."
Wendy brought it over—not a big kit, but it packed essentials. "OK," Stan said, dragging out a ratchet set and a pair of tin snips. "I want you to take out the spark plug and cut the wire."
That took her all of fifteen seconds. Wendy handed the plug to Stan, who dropped it in his pocket. "Good work. Now take out the battery and cut those cables, too."
Dipper watched as Wendy expertly took off the motorcycle seat—the battery sat beneath it—and watched her disconnect and take out the small battery. She cut both positive and negative cables as far from the terminals as she could. "This is kinda fun," she said. "I haven't had a chance at vandalism for a couple years now!"
"What else can we do to make sure it won't run?" Stan asked.
Wendy pursed her lips as she thought. "Break the chain. Hey, I know!" She opened the gas cap, and they took turns dropping handfuls of sand into the tank. Ford got into the game—"Just a moment!" He came back with an unopened liter bottle of water. "Part of the emergency kit," he said, pouring it in.
"There. That bike ain't goin' nowhere, no matter what gets in the saddle," Stan said. "But I got the coup de grace." He took out his pocket knife and slashed both tires. "Now let's go!" He carried the motorcycle battery back and put it in the trunk of his car, along with the tool kit.
Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford! Listen, are we safe outside, at least until dark?"
"Yes," Ford said. "I'm virtually certain it cannot tolerate direct sunlight."
"Good," Dipper said. "Listen, I'm gonna stay behind. I'll walk back to the Shack in an hour or less, OK?"
"If Dipper's not leaving, I'm not leaving!" Mabel said.
"I'll stay with Mabel," Teek volunteered.
"Dudes, you know I'm sticking with my homies," Wendy added.
Ford began, "Not here! Not so close to the—"
"No, we'll be all the way across town," Dipper said. "We won't come near the Skull Fracture until we're all together again."
"Why?" Stan asked. "What you got up your sleeve?"
"I think I might know something that could help," Dipper said. "But I'm not sure. It won't take long to find out, though. Come on, we don't have all day!"
The brothers agreed, reluctantly. Ford went back to the Shack alone, and Stan piled everybody into his car and drove them to the place where Dipper wanted to go. "I don't get it," he said. "What's in here?"
"Maybe a weapon," Dipper said. "Look, you get back home. Why not have Lorena and Sheila stay over at the Shack tonight? I think it's got the best protection. We'll be home inside of an hour."
"OK," Stan said. "I just wish one time somebody's explain something so's I understood it! Look, I'm comin' back for you in thirty minutes, get me? By then I'll have Sheila moved up to safety. Half an hour!"
"Should be enough," Dipper said. "Come on!" he led the other teens up the marble steps and into the Gravity Falls Museum of History.
Admission was two dollars each on Sundays, and Dipper paid. "You Pines kids know the place pretty well," Mrs. Homarth, the lady at the door, said. She was attired in 1890s garb—a tulip-bell skirt, maroon, and a black jacket with shoulder pads and frills on the bodice. She had parted her permed gray hair in the middle and wore little maroon bows above her ears. "But if you want, here are maps and brochures—"
"Thanks but we'll do a self-guided tour," Dipper said hastily. "Come on!"
On an August afternoon with nothing special going on in town—Woodstick was coming up the next weekend—the place was uncrowded. Dipper went straight up to a room on the second floor, toward the back, where relics of some of Gravity Falls's most illustrious citizens resided.
There, for example, were Phineas Northwest's false teeth, an imposing set of choppers crafted from whalebone and 24-carat gold. Phineas had been a great-great uncle or something of Pacifica's. His older brother had been mayor of the town, and Phineas was a sea captain in the late 1800s, making long trading voyages to China and other ports.
Toward the end of his life, he'd gone a little crazy and he spent his last three years barricaded in a room on the top floor of Northwest Manor. He had all his meals brought to him, kept a small dog that he used as a poison tester before he ate or drink anything, and normally refused to speak, communicating only by written notes and charades. He refused to allow anyone to speak the words "sea" or "ocean" in his presence.
On New Year's Day of 1897 he didn't answer the door when breakfast was brought to his room. They had to break the lock to get in, and they found Captain Northwest in bed.
Drowned. In seawater.
His little dog was dead, too—of fright, they thought.
Anyway.
The closest thing to national fame that Gravity Falls could boast was that Phinsey Canton had been elected to the U.S. Congress in 1916 for one term. He lost favor with his colleagues by insisting that the United States' entry into World War I in 1917 should include an invasion and conquest of Canada.
A two-year term is short, but somehow at the end of his two years, when he lost his bid for re-election to a write-in candidate ("Anybody Else"), Phinsey returned to Roadkill County a rich man. He bought a farm and entertained lavishly there until he was bitten by a rabid elk in 1927. One wall sported sepia photos of Phinsey hosting various luminaries at his big house: early silent-movie stars, politicians more famous and a shade less crooked than he, even the Reverend Holy Roller Collyer, an extremely successful evangelist in the twenties.
One thing about the photos: Virtually all of them were taken on the flat lawn behind the Canton farmhouse, on the croquet court. Phinsey was a croquet nut.
And in the corner beneath the photos stood one of his original croquet sets. It had been there for maybe fifty years, long enough for the three-by-five card identifying it to have yellowed: "Croquet Set Owned by the Honorable Phinsey Devise Canton, 1884-1926. This is the set identifiable in the photograph of Reverend Collyer and Congressman Canton, #5 above. It is crafted from lignum vitae and is one of a number of sets imported from England by Congressman Canton."
Dipper took a mallet and one of the stakes. "This should be enough," he said. "At least I hope so."
"Are you stealing those?" Teek asked.
Mabel elbowed him. "Grunkle Stan would say 'borrowing with the return date being open-ended'."
"How do we smuggle these out?" Dipper asked.
"Here you go," Wendy said. She tucked the mallet behind the sheath for her axe—it was under her green-plaid shirt. The long handle was a problem, but she tucked the end of it inside her jeans waist. The stake, about two feet long, proved harder to conceal. Dipper finally stuck its sharp end in his left sock, Wendy tied the top of it to the outside of his thigh with a ribbon provided by Mabel, and Dipper limped around.
"Maybe we'll get away with it," he said. "How much time do we have now?"
"Eighteen minutes," Mabel said.
"OK, let's go. Be nonchalant."
As they left, the docent at the door said, "Leaving so soon?"
Mabel laughed. "Oh, we just wanted to show Teek one specific exhibit, all nonchalant-like, you know, Mrs. Homarth. It's not like we came in to shoplift or anything."
"What?" Mrs. Homarth asked in a sharp tone.
Teek quickly said, "Your hair looks really nice, Ma'am."
"Oh." She prodded it with her fingertips. "Thank you, young man! I was afraid it was too young for me, this style, I mean."
"No, it's you," Wendy said. "You go, girl!"
They left a pleased docent behind. Dipper negotiated the front steps like someone wearing a leg cast.
Away from the museum, he took the stake out, opening his belt and reaching down inside his jeans to pull it up from his sock. "Now I can walk," he said. "Come on. Mabel, call Grunkle Stan and tell him to meet us at West and Powell with the car. Here, Wendy, carry this."
He handed her the antique croquet stake and took his own phone, using speed-dial to call Ford. "Grunkle Ford!" he said. "Don't talk, listen: I knew where some lignum vitae was, and I've got a couple of pieces. Will that help? Great, Grunkle Stan's coming for us. We'll see you in the Shack in a few minutes."
Mabel had made her call. She said, "Stan'll be here soon. So what was this petty theft all about, Broseph?"
"Lignum vitae," he said. "The wood of life."