The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel

(August 14, 2016)

18: The Dark Passing of Wembley

The thing is, Wembley was not a bad Gnome. It's true, he was young, hot-headed, argumentative, rebellious, surly, and egocentric, but that, like taking squirrel baths, is normal for Gnomes.

Well, maybe that's a bad comparison—as far as anyone knows, only Jeff takes squirrel baths, but he's always tense because he's the Queen's prime minister and chief interpreter, and that is a heavy load for shoulders that measure eight and a quarter inches across. Maybe squirrel baths are necessary for his peace of mind.

Nobody has ever even attempted a census of Gnomes. Ford encountered Shmebulock's father, Shmebulock, Senior, and measured, weighed, and interviewed him, learning something about the Gnomes' habits and society. Shmebulock, Senior, who did not suffer from his son's disability of not being able to say anything more than his name, told what he knew, which was not a lot.

At that time (according to Ford's Journals, the extremely late 1970s), the Gnomes (according to Shmebulock, Senior) numbered 1,000. However, when Ford tested his subject's ability to count jellybeans (a great delicacy to the Gnomes), the little man counted up to twenty-two and then the next bean was "One thousand! Can I keep these?"

It isn't that Gnomes are inherently innumerate—as of 2016, Jeff and a few others could accurately count money at least up into the hundreds—but their society simply had small use for counting much above twenty. They simply never bothered to pick up the math skills. Therefore, estimates of how many Gnomes live in Gravity Falls Valley vary widely.

Gnomes, among other traits, are stubborn traditionalists, so to them there are always one thousand Gnomes and on the other hand, there are the Others, the Feral Gnomes, and they aren't counted because, to civilized Gnomes, ferals don't count.

Sometime way back in Gnome history—"Thousands of seasons," they say, which doesn't mean anything much, and Ford roughly estimates the crucial time as somewhere around 1650-1750—a sudden, unexpected, and unprovoked mass invasion of the deep-dwelling mole men drove the desperate and rapidly declining Gnome population from their eons-old system of tunnels and burrows up to the surface.

Mole men liked Gnomes quite a lot and ate any they could catch.

Driven from their ancient homeland into a surface world they only rarely had visited, the survivors made an epic, unrecorded stand against extinction. Had they been human, their experience would have loomed large in the history books. It was a hard-won victory against overwhelming odds.

At one time, there probably were no more than three to five hundred of them left alive. The forest floor was nearly as inhospitable as the mole-men-infested tunnels—foxes, bears, snakes, hawks, eagles—they all had a taste for Gnome flesh. Anything that could eat a rabbit would enthusiastically eat a Gnome.

To that point in their existence, Gnomes had never established anything like a social hierarchy or social order. They were an anarcho-Libertarian's dream group—completely unfettered by any rule of law, proud and free and dying off like rats in the deepest holds of the Titanic.

Three Gnome elders, in desperate cooperation, at last laid down the foundations for a surface civilization: all Gnomes would fall under the command of a Queen, the brightest of all the female Gnomes (they acknowledged without grudging that the females thought better than the males). Assisted by a group of advisors, she would make laws that the others pledged to obey.

Their first Queen was Telenna the Wise, and her first royal decree was "Let's get the heck up into the trees!"

And ever since that time, the civilized Gnomes of Gravity Falls have been arboreal. They flourished, making their home in hollow trees and the secret tangled thickets to be found in the denser evergreens. Their numbers recovered. They made a precarious living, though winters were terrible for them. And yet . . . .

Gnomes are contentious by nature. Their first impulse is always to disagree: "Nice blue sky today." "Not under the trees, it's not! It's green!"

As Gnome laws and traditions grew like the forest, always some Gnomes angrily dissented and who went feral, either setting off on their own as hermits or returning to the upper tunnels and burrows of their ancestors and gathering in lawless packs, as in the old days, risking the occasional mole man.

By the way, no one knows why the mole men suddenly erupted upwards when they did—they are truly deep delvers, and it's possible that something even worse than they were had driven them up to within fifty meters or so of the surface, where they found the Gnomes easy prey.

Anyhow, Ford had written in his Journal that "by my count, at least five hundred Gnomes live in the forest, though they are unsocial and uncooperative. I would hazard a guess that the outlaws [Ford's inaccurate term for feral Gnomes—in fact there was no Gnome law that anyGnome couldn't leave the colony for any reason or for none at all] exceed the number of the civilized, though since they are so secretive, and some are subterranean, there is no easy way of reckoning their population level."

We may see a gradual evolution of social organization in the Gnomes, the arboreal ones living in proximity to humans, observing them, existing just below their radar for centuries and adapting things from their larger neighbors. From about 1890 onward, for example, the Gnomes have had their own police force and legal system, though they tend to choose non-Gnomes for judges. An owl who is a judge can not only pass a sentence, but eat the condemned, a savings in jail construction.

So much for legends and history. Wembley was a young Gnome, not even fifty seasons old (oh, Gnomes recognize two seasons, Plenty and Starvation, so we might say Wembley was 23, 24, somewhere along in there). By Gnome standards, he was an adolescent, a teenager.

Gnomes are unruly enough as adults. Picture a rebellious Gnome teen, and you'll picture someone who is wildly indignant about everything.

So Wembley had quit the colony a couple of years earlier, outraged by nobody could remember what. The sad truth is that most feral Gnomes are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and, of course, short—and so are their lives. They scrabble for food, they rarely ever band together (and when they do, they ultimately fight), and on their own, Gnomes just don't think that well. The civilized ones recognize this and depend on obeying orders—they're kind of a barely-organized hive mind that is subject to mental illnesses of all varieties. In recent years, they have even stepped outside their species to select their Queen.

By the way, to insure loyalty, all the male Gnomes marry the Queen, not to produce offspring, but to love, honor, and especially obey her. Currently the males, in addition to their own individual wives and sweetGnomes, are married to an intelligent and accomplished female badger.

Back to Wembley; in short, the young Gnome had lived two years on his own, stealing food from others, always getting in fights with his fellow ferals when he ran into them, assuring himself that he was always right and the rest of the world was always wrong. He recently had decided to go fully subterranean, where he could be by himself as much as he pleased and where he could always find a meal (true, it usually consisted of earthworms and grubs, but protein is protein).

He didn't believe in the ancient stories about mole men. They were lies perpetrated by the overlords to cow the Gnome masses into servility! Except for Wembley, who thought he knew the truth—though if another Gnome had happened to agree with him, he would instantly have changed sides.

Had Wembley ever run into a kind human—Mabel, say—it all might have worked out differently. People can change. Gnomes can change. Sadly, for Wembley, there was to be only one major change left in his life.

The entity had enough consciousness to know that the humans had ways of hurting it. Not of killing it. The entity considered itself, as far as its awareness allowed, as immortal. It could not recollect having perished—it had never died so far—and therefore it never would.

True, it did fear things, light most of all. And now it knew that the humans had something that they could spray and make it impossible for its tendrils to manifest as even loosely solid, and sharp cutting red lights that would injure it.

It realized that it still hungered and that it badly needed more, more, more food. Yet it had left nothing living in its shell, in the building. Just a little more, it felt rather than thought, and its mind would awake and recover the purpose and the cunning that it instinctively knew it had once had but had lost.

Vaporous rather than liquid, it prowled the rooms and hallways of the Skull Fracture, seeking life, anything, a trapped fly in an airless upper room, a termite in the wood, anything at all, and it came up empty.

It settled into the crawl space beneath the building, flowing over the remains of the rats, seeking even the smallest spark of life—a bacterium would be something.

However, it had done away with the rats and their parasites and bacteria. It was like a dog trapped in a kennel, a starving dog that had eaten all the kibble and all the rats and had crunched and swallowed every bone.

Condensing down there, the entity discovered a few crevices. Pipes came in and went out, water and drainage. They offered nothing. One musty opening felt absolutely barren. The entity could have flowed into it, easily, but—

Well, it needed the darkness, but paradoxically, too much darkness revealed the distant Light. Not an earthly light, but a capital-L Light, the one it fled from. It could not allow itself to perceive that Light, the ultimate Light, the one that might pull it through to—

To whatever waited in eternity.

It had no connected, conscious memory of how it knew that. But when its core had been human, it had raged at those who did not believe in the Light. It had slaughtered more than its share of those unbelievers, sending their souls through the Light and into—a very unpleasant place, it felt. A place of torment unending.

And even when, as a man, it had persuaded someone to believe, it had been quick to kill, too—a benefit! The new convert would go directly to—to a better place? Something like that.

It all made perfect sense if one were completely insane.

Wembley the Gnome was starving. He had even emerged from a tunnel and fought a raccoon for a scrap of food up on the surface the night before and had been badly mauled. Now his arms burned from deep scratches, and he was pretty sure he'd lost about half of his left earlobe to the raccoon's teeth. Worst of all, he didn't come away with even a nibble of whatever strip of rotten food the raccoon had been washing in the lake—he thought it was a very ripe fish the animal had found on the shore of the lake, but maybe not.

Hurt and still hungry, Wembley had gone back underground and all day he had sought something to eat, finding not very much—a couple of dung-beetle grubs, and they taste just as good as they sound, three worms, not a meal he could go very far on.

Then he remembered the crawl space beneath the Skull Fracture. These days it was getting hard to find rat packs or nests of mice, because the so-called "civilized" Gnomes—hah!—were taking jobs as exterminators for the hated humans and did a thorough job of it, though they were shrewd enough to leave a breeding population to assure business next year.

But for some reason, they left the Skull Fracture off their list—probably the human oppressors did not pay them, that was another thing, the humans had corrupted the innocent Gnomes with their filthy money, diverting them from the barter system that had been good for, who knows, thousands of years, anyway!

Never mind that the Gnomes used no inhumane traps or dangerous toxic chemicals, but ate the rats they collected in addition to the human money they earned! Never mind that the "civilized" ones were getting fat and prosperous! There was such a thing as being true to one's Gnoman nature.

Even if that meant starving in the dark.

Wembley knew the old trails quite well. The one he took lay long untrod. Oh, maybe a gopher now and then blundered into it, but for the most part it was so old that it lay in bad repair, with scattered dirt falls and invasive root barriers. Wembley scrambled past these. In his memory, there were always dozens of rats, too fat to be good fighters, holed up at the far end of the tunnel.

He was almost there, within a dozen Gnome-sized paces, when something surged at him.

At first Wembley thought it was water, that this end of the tunnel was flooded—

No, something green and sludgy, not water—

He turned and tried to flee. The stuff was so viscous that it seized his ankles and drew him back, dragging him on his belly. He struggled. The weird fluid engulfed him. He held his breath until he gasped, and then it flowed inside him, into his lungs—

His last impression was that he was being burned alive from the inside out.

The entity pulled its meal back beneath the Skull Fracture. It absorbed blood and flesh and bone and—most important—the little flare of life-energy that had been the core of Wembley the Gnome.

The meal was not a large one, but satisfying.

Oh, yes.

Wembley had been intelligent enough.

His spark pushed the entity over the event horizon of sentience.

Now it knew.

Now it could plan.

Now it could win.