The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 14, 2016)
19: Alerts
Some people believe dogs have a sixth sense for danger. These folk are usually the simple, superstitious type.
The topmost intelligent people, those with bits of the alphabet after their names, say that is nonsense, that dogs merely respond to subtle cues to which humans are oblivious, because dogs have keener hearing and a much sharper sense of smell than we do. And, oh, yes, they can see a different spectrum of colors.
Somewhere in the middle are merely brilliant people like Stanford Pines (who indeed has an alphabetic train he may, if he chooses, append to his name: M.D., Ph.D., J.S.D., etc.) don't believe that dogs have a sixth sense. Nor do they scoff at the notion.
Because they know.
So Stanford would not have been at all surprised had he known that after he, Stanley, the twins, Teek, and Wendy, left to confront the monstrous haunt for the second time, hoping they were better prepared, the dog Tripper became strangely agitated and paced through the Mystery Shack, claws clicking across the floors as he looked for a way out.
Tripper's doggy sense didn't tingle, it jangled like ID and rabies tags on a collar. He banged his cone of shame as he frantically ran up and down stairs, checked every door, every window, and found no way out. His heart told him he needed to go.
About twenty minutes after the party left, Soos, Melody, Abuelita, and the kids got home from an afternoon out. At first they kept Tripper from darting past them. But then Soos said, "He looks like he needs to go, bad, 'cause he's doin', like, the bathroom dance or some deal. I'll put the leash on him and take him out for a walk."
"He likes to go down by the sign," Melody told him.
He chuckled. "Yeah, that sign was a good idea of mine. Maybe he, like, admires Mabel's artistic ability. She painted it."
Melody kissed his cheek. "I know, dear."
Soos dug out the leash and said, "Come here, Tripper! I'll take you out so you can, like, do your business. Come on, stop spinning around and be a good dog."
Tripper obediently stood still. Soos clicked the leash onto his collar, and they went out into a hot, clear late afternoon. Tripper, though he felt that he was about to be a BAD DOG, also felt that he had to do what a dog had to do.
They got to the grassy plot around sign, Tripper sniffed around the mountain laurel roots and then one of the signposts—a good place for a dog to leave his pee mail so that other dogs could check it later—and then, without warning, whipped around the post, snagged the leash, and with a desperate wriggle backed out, husking the collar, the cone, and all right off his head.
And he was away, running at top speed.
"Boy! Come back! Don't, like, run off! Tripper!" Soos yelled, his voice fading.
Sorry, Big Man. Mabel and Dipper need me. Sorry, sorry. I don't want to be a BAD DOG, but some things are bigger than a spank on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper!
And at full speed, he ran toward town.
When a Gnome came and told Jeff, "Granny Gypsum wants to see you," Jeff didn't hesitate, but turned the Queen, who was a badger, over to the custody of Shmebulock and hurried to the old witch's hollow tree.
Well—Granny Gypsum was not technically a witch, because Gnomes didn't have witches. They had hekse'vins. They tended to be old women, wise in the lore of herbs and minerals and were schooled in many secret unknown things. Nobody talked about such old women or such unknown things, but somehow everyone knew of the secret unknown things—that they existed, not what they were. Well, the hekse'vins did.
These Gnome women could cure an infection, deliver a Gnome baby, which was not child's play, foretell the future in a limited way ("If you get into my garden one more time, young'un, ye'll have a sore bottom soon!"), and so on. And they had magic, of a kind, and everyGnome believed they could see what the birds and the serpents and the fish saw. And they could read the souls of Gnomes.
And if one called you, you went, no questions, no hesitation.
Jeff approached the hollow tree where Granny lived. It was an impressive hollow tree. Probably an oak with age-blackened bark and a fine growth of moss on its north side, it had been misshapen by something or other about two hundred years ago, and its branches swirled and twisted and kinked until it resembled Medusa's head on a bad-snake day.
Gnarly though its limbs might be, the tree still lived—handfuls and clumps of green leaves showed that—but ages ago a whole big branch low to the ground had dropped off, and the tree had been visited by woodpeckers, who started attacking the scar, and then other animals had come along and dug and gnawed the wood until there was a hollow. Then they denned there, and now, enlarged and refurbished, it provided a cozy apartment for a single Gnome lady.
No one knew how old Granny Gypsum actually was, including herself. Ancient, certainly—at least two centuries and maybe double that or more. She remembered the early days when the Gnomes had first come to the surface, she said. She remembered when the civilized Gnomes had created their form of monarchy under an elected Queen. She even said she had attended the first Queen on the morning of her coronation and had arranged her hair for the ceremony.
But then she also admitted, "O' course, I'm a terrible liar."
It was certain that she never spoke English—more and more Gnomes were learning it, since they now worked close to humans—but only Gnomish, and Gnomish with the old Deep accent, at that—the kind of language her people had used when they lived their whole lives underground, some of them seeing the sun no more than three or four times in a whole lifetime.
Jeff approached, knelt at the open door—carpenter Gnomes had built a ramp and had fitted doors for Granny, not for pay, but just to secure her good will—and called, "Granny, here I am."
"Come in, young Jeff," came the old, cracked voice. Jeff walked into a little parlor that looked like, well, a little parlor—a throw rug in the sapphire-and-ruby pattern, two armchairs with doilies on the back, a low round table, two teacups and a teapot on it, a fat, lazy tom-squirrel stretched out on the rug, everything except the squirrel Gnome-sized.
Granny Gypsum sat in the wing chair, her toes just clear of the floor. She wasn't much to look at, but no one could take their eyes off her—hunched over, eyes completely blind and looking like two glass balls filled with milk, a hooked nose with which if she concentrated she could touch her chin, more wrinkles than a satellite photo of the Cal Madow mountain range, and three teeth.
"We have lost one of our own," Granny said without preamble. She sat in her shabby old chair like a Queen on her throne (not that the current Queen, being a badger, had any use for a throne), her claw-like hands gripping the arms.
"Who?" Jeff asked.
Seeming in her blindness to stare into some distant place, Granny said softly, "Little Wembley, son of Grizzle."
Jeff blinked with surprise at the name. Him? "The one who ran away four or five seasons ago?"
"Yes. He has been eaten."
"Eaten?" Jeff asked. "How do you know?"
She turned her opaque white eyes on him, her blindness looking right into his brain. "I saw it."
"Then it is true," Jeff said. "No rescue is possible?"
"None. He is gone."
Jeff drew in a deep breath. "He must be avenged."
Now that—that right there—that is the mark of a successful Gnome. Jeff did not ask for particulars, he did not ask for advice, he did not lament or groan or worry about who would have to tell the Grizzles the terrible news. He cut right to the chase.
"You," said Granny Gypsum with a grim, wrinkled smile, "are destined to be great in the memory of Gnomes."
Jeff poured her a cup of tea, without being asked. She reached out a hand and, blind as she was, delicately and unerringly took it and answered the questions for which Jeff had substituted the small act of kindness.
"The evil thing is one who returned from the edge of the endless," she said. "In form it was once a Big'un, in essence it was an ondskiol. No, no hope for it now, it is lost and overdue to be sent to the eternal ice. It must pass. It must pass. It has enemies: Two pair o'two, two more who love them, stand in peril. Do what ye may, son of the Gnomes. A trof'sthun may help Find him a flodk'nin to chase. Feed the creature Special Mixture Number 6-6. Blood must be spilled. Let it not be yours or your friends'. Kneel down."
Jeff took a knee and removed his red cap. He felt the bony touch of her hand. She muttered in the Old Tongue, the Deep Language: "Stone of the mountains be the strength of your bones. Whip of the yew sapling be the strength of your sinews. Cold as the glacier be the purpose of your mind. All the powers of the Gnomes that were and are and shall be, flow through your veins!"
Oddly, Jeff, who was not a particularly religious or even superstitious Gnome, did seem to feel a Power flowing from the gnarled old hand straight into his body. He gasped and concentrated to contain it. It was like being poured full of light and warmth.
Granny took her hand off his head. "Now go! And quickly! And the bottle with the mixture is already in your pocket."
Jeff didn't even feel to see if it was true. If Granny said it was true, it was. And it was.
He backed out and down the ramp, then turned and ran hard until he remembered that he had not asked where he should run. And then ahead of him, bounding along, he saw a flodk'nin heading straight for the town. He followed the speeding jackrabbit, for that was what flodk'nin meant. It was a word the first Gnomes to the New World had brought from their deep burrows, and technically it meant "hare," but then a jackrabbit like the one Jeff followed was, technically, a hare.
He wondered when the trof'sthun would appear, and then as he and the hare crossed the city limits, he saw it, a brown dog, big to him, and he recognized it. He whistled shrilly, and Tripper stopped his headlong run and looked toward him, his sharp ears straight up.
"Here, boy!" Jeff said, as he had heard Mabel and Dipper do. The dog trotted over, whining urgently. The hare had stopped to wash its face, like a cat, and ignored the dog. Spellbound, Jeff thought.
The Gnome patted Tripper's side. "Don't worry. We're going to go help them. You know what you are? You're a tof'sthun, that's what you are. You're a—" he mentally translated—"a faithful dog! Good boy! Good boy!"
He took out the little bottle that Granny Gypsum had somehow slipped into his pocket. It held less than an ounce of a clear, faintly yellow liquid, and the numbers 6-6, in runic, had been etched in the glass.
Jeff had a flicker of inspiration: If a Gnome could count to 66, then 6-6 would be a way of writing it in Gnomish runes. And all you then needed was a sign like the humans had for zero, and suddenly a Gnome might count all the way to infinity.
However, he'd deal with that later. With the bottle unstoppered, he approached the strangely docile hare.
"You have to drink this," he told it gently. "Granny says."
Back in her hollow tree, Granny Gypsum nodded. "The three have come together. I see now a shadow of a hope."
The tom-squirrel jumped up into her lap, and she stroked it. "You did a good job of seeing for old Granny," she said, tickling its chin. At the moment, the squirrel was looking up at her, and she could see her old face through its eyes. It was, in fact, a seeing-eye squirrel.
She'd had to raise its intelligence to train it, though.
The squirrel said—though it didn't do so in words—"Do you really believe in ghosts?"
"Oh, I have to, dearie," Granny said. "For all my life, half of all my callers have been ghosts."
"Are you going to be a ghost?"
"Not any time soon, dearie," Granny said. "Not anytime—whoops! There they go! Run, hare! Chase hare, dog! After them, Jeff! I hope they won't be late."
"They should arrive in time," the squirrel said.
"No, late as in 'the late Jeff,'" Granny said. "When you deal with such evil as they go to face, anything might happen. Blood must pay for blood."
The squirrel stretched. "Wake me if it does," it said.
Squirrels live lives of constant stark terror to the point where it takes something more horrible than a possibly unbeatable hostile ghost to disturb them.
But Granny sat in her chair stroking the dozing squirrel, in the darkness of her eyes and in the light of her mind, and softly sang an ancient Gnomian chant that would have been called a prayer, had the Gnomes not held their gods in some disdain. Their myths tended to show the deities in less than flattering detail.
Anyway, whether the chant was prayer or merely a formulation of her thoughts, she wished the warriors well.
She absently sipped her tea. It had cooled, so she heated it up by thinking about it.
Then she drank it, thinking, Jeff is a good lad. Shame if he dies.