The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 14, 2016)
17: Tick Tock
From the Journals of Stanford Pines: I have assembled a few more weapons. I must admit, I underestimated the threat we face in that tavern. I am not sure that even our augmented arsenal will prove efficacious against it.
I have called Powers. He can have a team here within 24 hours, should we fail. I gave him the go signal.
I have just broken off recording this because I finally remembered what was beyond my recall earlier. Eureka! Though I am not sure what I just learned materially helps us. I believe I at least know the identity of the ghost we are dealing with . . . .
Dipper found the door to the research lab locked, very unusually, and he pounded on it. "Grunkle Ford! It's us!"
Ford, looking startled, unlocked and opened up. "What is it?"
"We got these!" Dipper exclaimed, holding up the mallet and stake.
Ford blinked. "Um, Mason, we haven't time to indulge in sports—"
"No, no!" Dipper said. "It's what they're made of!"
"Liniment Vitalis!" Mabel exclaimed.
"Lin—I don't understand," Ford said, blinking behind his spectacles.
"She means lignum vitae!" Dipper said. "These are from an antique croquet set in the History Museum. We—"
"Borrowed them!" Mabel rushed to finish. "Yep, we definitely did not sneak out with them hidden under our clothes, if that's what you're thinking!"
Ford took the mallet and hefted it, as though testing its weight. "Remarkable. Yes, this is a heavy enough implement to be made from lignum vitae. But there is a simple test—to the bathroom!"
They all rushed up to the ground floor and to the guest bathroom. Ford stoppered the tub and ran water. "True lignum vitae is one of the few woods that will not float," he told them.
Wendy, Mabel, Teek, and Dipper crowded, stretching their necks to look. When the tub was half full, Ford said, "Drop the stake in and let's see."
Dripper dropped it, and it sank like a stone.
"It's the real McCoy," Ford said, pushing the lever to drain the tub. "Good work, though premature—this wouldn't work at all against the apparition in its vaporous phase. It would have to have some solidity to be injured by staking it."
"Like a vampire?" Mabel asked. "Oh, man, if it comes to that, never tell Pacifica. Her boyfriend's a former vampire."
"I think they prefer 'differently animated,'" Teek said.
She turned and punched his shoulder. "What are we, cartoons?"
"Animated as in 'being alive,'" Teek said. "They prefer that to 'vampire' or 'undead.'"
She stared at him. "How do you even know that?"
"Well, Paz talks to me from time to time," Teek said.
Mabel's eyes narrowed. "Oh, 'Paz,' is it? She does, does she?"
"Mabes!" Wendy said. "Our problems first, jealousy second. Come on, man!"
"OK," Mabel said, her tone irritated. "But this isn't over."
"Come with me to the parlor," Ford said, drying the stake on a towel.
The Ramirezes seemed to be out. Stan waited for them, sitting on the sofa and watching a nature documentary on TV. He picked up the remote and switched it off. "What's up? And why were you kids in such a hurry to see my brother?"
"We brought him a weapon!" Mabel said. She held up the mallet.
Stan took it and whacked it into his palm. "Whattaya do, clonk the ghost over the head?"
"Something like that," Ford said, settling down next to him on the sofa. "Listen, all: I am confident that I have discovered our ghost's identity. Or former identity. The information may help. Then again, it may not."
Stan glanced at the window. "Well, spill it, Sixer, and no long lectures. Sun's gonna go down before very long!"
"Very well," Ford said, getting up and leaving the room. In a few moments he returned with a thick book—not a published one, but a long manuscript of print-out paper, held together between two heavy brown kraft binders, the type with the metal prongs that held documents through two punched holes. "This is a photocopy of a holograph diary recorded int he nineteenth century by a scholar and missionary, Father Anthony St. Vincent Dessoins—"
"Cut to the chase, Sixer!" Stan said.
"Yes, perhaps that's best. Well, to render a tedious story brief, the writer records legends and oral histories he learned among the Chinook peoples of Oregon in the 1860s. One of the stories, which he heard right here in the Valley, has to do with the earliest European visitor to the area that the Chinook had any memory of. Let me summarize."
And Ford told them what the half-legendary oral history claimed:
The Spanish first reached the Pacific Coast of North America in 1533, when Hernan Cortés reached what today is Baja California. In the 1540s, other Spanish explorers landed and established temporary colonies—and missionaries began to evangelize the indigenous people.
One of these priests, Esteban Pica y Román, seemed to be a fanatic. The Franciscans whom he accompanied tolerated his strange behavior for a few months, but in the end objected that he was "a madman" and ordered him to be bound in chains and placed aboard the ship that had brought them, to be returned to Spain. That was somewhere south of what today is San Francisco.
However, the captain's orders were to explore the shore northward, seeking a Northwest Passage. For several months he kept Pica chained and isolated from the ship's company. The ship followed the shoreline northward all that time.
It was somewhere far up the California coast when the prisoner escaped his chains and somehow gained the shore. The ship's log recorded "the prisoner Esteban Pica absconded with a sword and one pistol. Three of my soldiers pursued him for a short way, but the natives appearing hostile to their approach, they retreated without loss. We will spend no more time in this place. Without doubt the savages will kill the crazed man."
Ah, but like many Native Americans, the tribes in that region regarded deranged individuals as untouchable. Evidently Pica survived and went north on foot, perhaps passed on from one tribe to another, each wishing to get rid of him. Somehow, within five years he arrived in what was to become Gravity Falls Valley, then called by the Chinook "Polaklie Ipsut," "place of hidden dreams or visions." Or perhaps it meant "Valley of nightmares." Shades of meaning are difficult to translate.
According to tales collected by the diarist Dessoins, some two hundred years after the events, the strange white man the natives called "Pikkar the Insane" tried to convert each man he met to a religion that revolted the natives, involving the eating of human flesh and the drinking of blood. Perhaps that was the natives' misunderstanding of the doctrine of the Eucharist; or perhaps Pica was so out of his mind at that point that he took the eating of human flesh and the drinking of human blood as literal, not symbolic. Though he learned the natives' language, they found him hard to understand, for his preaching was mystical and his reasoning convoluted. When his sermons were rejected, Pikkar became violent, attempting to slay the nearest unbeliever.
Finally he attacked two children, badly biting both of them, and their outraged father killed him "with one deadly blow." Though the Chinooks had a tradition of burying their own dead outside of the Valley, they interred Pikkar where he fell dead, digging a pit too deep to climb from, wrapping his body in tough cords, and coating it with a three-inch layer of boiling pitch. They not only buried him, but piled a cairn of stones over the site "more than the height of a man."
Then (Ford said) things took a ghostly turn. Many years later, the ghost of Pikkar began to appear. It killed by engulfing and absorbing prey, at least once a Chinook woman and perhaps an old man who vanished, as well as animals. The wise men banded against it and with difficulty contained it and buried it again—for it had regained some kind of physical existence—but though they buried it very deeply indeed the second time, the inhabitants of the Valley avoided that spot, believing that "like a great mole" the ghost would gradually burrow its way back to the surface."
"So you think the ghost is a crazy priest?" Stan asked.
Closing the diary, Ford said, "I think it began that way. Now it probably doesn't know who or even what it is—it's absorbed the life forces of so many people and animals. Its mind is scrambled."
"Yeah, well, why did it show up in our lodge hall?" demanded Stan. "It ain't a member unless it pays dues!"
"I have a theory," Ford said. "The trouble earlier in the summer with the Rumbelow, the earthquakes that struck, may have disturbed or awakened it. If in its ghostly form it ascended from where it had been reburied—it just might have emerged in the Skull Fracture."
"Heck of a supposition," Stan said.
"It's the best we have and a working hypothesis," Ford told him.
"But how do we deal with it?" asked Dipper.
Ford sighed. "How indeed? I think there is a way to lay the ghost—"
"Woo!" Mabel said.
"He means to get rid of it," Teek told her.
Mabel shrugged. "I knew that."
"To get rid of the ghost," Ford continued. "If the ghost began as this deranged missionary, then as a believer, the spirit, at death, should have gone on to its eternal reward. In other words, it should have gone—" He raised his eyebrows in an encouraging way.
"To hell," Wendy said firmly.
Ford looked a little discomfited. "Well, that's an assumption. No, what I meant was it should have gone, in the time-honored phrase, 'into the light.' Those who have had near-death experiences have reported that they felt drawn toward a light that seems to be a portal, if you will, between life and the afterlife. However, if the missionary was conscious that he had acted in, well, not a Christian way, his soul might have avoided the portal—"
"That's why it can't stand light!" Dipper said. "It's afraid of passing on and coming out, uh, where Wendy says!"
"Aw, the poor thing's all scared!" Mabel said.
Tripper, who had been lying under the table, barked sharply.
"The dog's right," Stan said. "To hell with the ghost! Literally!"
"Grunkle Ford," Dipper said, "is there a way to contain it? To trap it?"
"That will be extraordinarily difficult," Ford admitted. "The ghost seems to have manifested as a hunger—one of the hungry dead—drawing its energy from the life forces of its victims. Right now it can create a semi-physical body, but that body partakes of all the lives the ghost has absorbed. And if pursuit becomes too much of a threat, it simply vaporizes and escapes that way. It may be able to kill even in its non-physical state."
"Look," Stan said, "you called in your guys in black, or whatever you call them—"
"What?" Dipper asked.
Ford nodded. "We have task forces for things like this. They've never come up against a hunger, though, so I'm not sure how well they can fight it. But the trouble is that if we let this thing fester, it will only get worse. Tonight it may be strong enough to venture out of its hiding place—though we've probably prevented it from using the motorcycle. If it kills again, it will be that much stronger tomorrow, that much smarter, that much harder to destroy. I believe we must attempt it tonight—lure it out and then do our best to contain or eliminate it."
"What are our chances?"
"I wouldn't even attempt to calculate the odds," Ford said heavily.
Stan sank back on the sofa with a groan. "Oy."