The Haunting of the Holy Mackerel
(August 14, 2016)
23: Now or Never
Swinging by one leg, struggling not to be eaten, Dipper clung to the stake, barely lodged in the stinking thing's skin. He heard a confusion of yelling, smelled burning flesh as, inches below him, Stan's and Ford's rays cut into the entity's stolen body.
Then somebody's arm wrapped around his waist and Wendy yelled, "Gotcha, man!"
"Wen—Wendy—get back, get away—" he gasped.
She yelled, "Hold still!"
He heard a loud swack! as his right hand vibrated, and realized that Wendy was using the butt of her axe to drive the stake in. He flailed and touched her skin. —Again, Wendy! Harder! Don't mind if you hurt me!
Hang on, Dip! Uggh, it's got my leg too!
He felt Wendy twist and swing, and with their connection, he knew just how to hold the stake, and this time—SWACK!—it plunged through a stolen human skull and deep into the entity—
"Gotcha, Wendy! Hang on, girl!" Stan.
Dipper felt as if he were about to pass out, but he thought—One more time, Wendy! Hard!
He let go at just the right instant, and Wendy's axe drove the lignum vitae stake in to the hilt.
The monster shuddered and screamed, flailing, whipping Dipper away from Wendy. This is it, he thought. The creature was going to slam him to the ground and kill him—
—but it didn't.
Ford yelled: "Get Mason down! Use your axe!"
Dipper heard the chunk of Wendy's axe biting deep, once, twice, and then he fell—
"Gotcha!" It was Stan's night for gotchas. He caught Dipper and said, "Get this damn thing off his leg, Poindexter!"
Stan lay him on the ground and Ford loomed up in his vision. "Mason, can you hear me? Lie absolutely still!"
Then the zzzt! of Ford's ray gun, and whatever clamped his ankle fell away. "Wendy—Mabel—" Dipper said, rolling over to his stomach and pushing himself up.
"We're OK, Brobro!" Mabel said. "I just got knocked a little silly—sillier! Yuck, yuck!"
"What happened?" Dipper asked as Stan pulled him to his feet.
"Take a look, champ!" Stan said, turning on a flashlight.
The monstrous thing stood behind him—except—
"A tree stump?" Dipper asked. "Seriously?"
"The lignum vitae transformed its corrupted flesh to wood!" Ford said.
Wendy was busy with something—and then Dipper realized she was chopping at a knot of wood that had formed around her left ankle. "Be just a sec," she said. She chipped until it fell into two halves. "There, that's better. Did you get bit, Dip?"
He patted his chest and stomach. "Don't think so. You?"
"Nope. It was scared of my axe. Didn't expect me to have one that could cut ghosts!"
Dipper looked again. The five-foot tall tree stump looked old and rotten. The arm that had seized him had changed to a branch, which Wendy had lopped off. He guessed that a twisted root showing a fresh cut had grabbed hold of her ankle. The top of the trunk was broken at a forty-five-degree angle, and hollow. "We killed it?" he asked.
"Not yet," Ford said. "We have more work to do, and not much time."
"Ah, geeze," complained Stan. "Here we go again!"
Mabel and Teek went off a little way, and Dipper realized that a forlorn Jeff stood over near them in the brush. "Come on," he said to Wendy, while Ford was explaining to Stan. They walked over.
Mabel knelt beside Jeff and Dipper heard her say, "I'm so sorry."
The badger, dead, lay sprawled on her belly. Jeff was stroking her back. "She tried to help us," he murmured. "She was a real Queen."
Tripper came up and leaned against Jeff, whimpering. Mabel explained, "He's sorry, too."
Jeff stood and gave a high, ululating call. Half a dozen Gnomes appeared from the brush. One, Shmebulock, was crying, tears running into his beard. He stood before Jeff, his face wrenched with grief. Tremulously, he said, "Shme—Shmebu—" Then he clenched his hands and hoarsely rasped out the barely recognizable words, "Sorry, Jeff."
Jeff put his arm around the other Gnome's shoulders. "Don't try to speak, friend. I know about your curse and how trying to talk hurts you. I understand. We don't blame you. The Queen broke loose and came to—" he gulped—"to help us. She died protecting our people. Tomorrow we honor her—and Wembley."
One of the other Gnomes—Steve, Dipper thought—asked in some confusion, "Who? Wembley? But he was just a fer—"
"He was a Gnome!" Jeff said in a decisive voice. "He was one of ours! And we. Will. Honor. Him!"
The others nodded. "Shmebulock?" asked you-know-who.
Jeff cleared his throat. "Shmebulock, you and these others carry Her Majesty back to the funeral glade. We'll hold her services—and Wembley's—tomorrow. Then send thirty Gnomes to meet me at the Skull Fracture. Ask among the homeless ferals, the miners, because we'll need diggers! And tell the ferals, all of them, that if they want to return, we fully accept them and we'll share what we have with them, Gnome for Gnome. They're our brothers and sisters. Make that clear! We're family."
The six Gnomes lifted the Queen, tenderly, and took her body away. "Come on," Jeff said. "This isn't over."
When they got back to Ford and Stan, Stan was just putting away his phone. "No bars here," he said. "I'll call Dan as soon as we get in range. OK, so you're tellin' me we gotta root this stump up?"
"We do. And before you ask why, just listen," Ford said, pointing to the hollow opening.
Dipper heard it then, a high-pitched sound like a maddened hornet in a glass jar. "Is that—him?" he asked.
"All that's left is the raw soul of Esteban Pica," Ford said. "He's imprisoned in the wood—and since it's lignum vitae, he can't work his way out. He's trapped for now, but we have to end this—and it has to be before midnight. Teek, Dipper, you help us."
As it turned out, they did not have to uproot the stump, because it had no real roots. They pushed, and Mabel said, "Aw, he's no fun. He fell right over!"
The wood was dense and unbelievably heavy, and it took Dipper, Teek, Stan, Ford, and even Wendy to haul it back across Creepy Hollow, over the stream, and drag it down the hill. A solemn Jeff led the way with a flashlight, Mabel walking next to him, Tripper close beside Mabel.
They heaved the tree stump into the trunk of the Stanleymobile, though they couldn't close it and had to bungee-strap the lid down.
Dipper and Wendy rode back with Stan, Mabel, Teek, and Tripper in the back seat. Jeff rode with Ford, who had plans to tell the Gnome.
On the way, as soon as they were within phone range, Stan had Wendy call her dad and put him on speaker. Stan said, "Danny! How ya doin'?"
"Stan? I'm all right!" Manly Dan had no inside or phone voice.
"Listen, we all want you back in the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel. Tell ya what, you do one little job for us tonight, ASAP, we'll waive your dues for the next five years. An' I'll promise to buy you your own private stock of whatever brew you want—"
"I don't know if I wanna join up again!"
"Daddy," Wendy said, surprising Dipper. "For me."
With no hesitation, Dan continued, "OK, I'll do it for my baby girl."
"Listen, bring your carpenter's kit and stop an' stop and pick up Soos. We'll need him, too. I'll call him and he'll be ready. We got a rush job at the Skull Fracture."
"What—"
Stan overrode him: "Danny, do me a favor and don't ask me any questions, 'cause only my brainy brother could answer them, and he ain't here. But this is important to the whole town, includin' my family and yours."
"Half an hour!" roared Manly Dan.
By the time Dan's pickup jounced into the Skull Fracture lot, it was close to ten p.m. Soos got out, looking bewildered. "Hiya, Mr. Pines, I mean Stan. What's, like, up, dawg?"
"We," Stan said, "by which I mean you and Dan here, are gonna rip up the floor of this joint. Let's go, go, go!"
Ford gave Teek, Dipper, and, after a moment of hesitation, Mabel the ray guns. "Keep this stump covered," he warned them. "If you see any glimmer of light at all—shoot it! Wendy, you chop it with your axe!"
"With pleasure," she said.
The guys had wrestled the stump out of the trunk and had set it upright. The harsh glare of the parking-lot sodium-vapor light made it look sinister, like a sculpture of evil in twisted wood. The four teens and Tripper—who wanted nothing to do with the stump and kept behind Mabel, protectively close—stood on watch, the yellow light fixture fizzing overhead, surrounded by moths, as they guarded the stump. The frantic high-pitched buzzing—actually a human voice, if the human had been only a couple inches tall—still issued from the dark opening at the top. It spoke Spanish and Latin, but so rapidly and so high-pitched that Dipper couldn't even catch an entire phrase.
"Thanks for coming for me," Dipper murmured to Wendy.
"Hey, I had no choice! I know you got a present for me comin' up on the thirty-first, and I don't wanna miss out on it!" She nudged him. "Anyway, you promised to take me to Woodstick on Friday!"
A short way off, Mabel and Teek were whispering.
The sound of hammering and the squeal of crowbars prying up old nails poured out of the open back door of the Skull Fracture. At half-past eleven, Ford came to the door. "We found it. Teek, we need you and Soos. The ghost was Catholic."
A bunch of oddly dressed Gnomes came out of the door, tilted the tree trunk, and carried it inside. Gnomes are a lot stronger than most people would think.
Dipper and Wendy walked in behind the Gnomes, and Teek and Mabel and Tripper followed. Dipper didn't know exactly what he would see—
From the Journals of Dipper Pines: I was holding Wendy's hand. They had all the lights on in the bar. Most of the floor of the main room had been taken up and the warped boards with their rusty nails lay in a pile near the bar. The musty smell of dug-up earth rose strong. Below us, a dozen or more Gnomes were working—they had excavated a round hole, maybe six feet in diameter, that looked very deep, and the loose dirt they had shoveled out had been spread almost all the way to the floor joists.
"What are they doing?" Mabel asked.
"I think they're building some kind of crane," I told her. The Gnomes had put up a triangular framework over the hole—the three stout wood beams rose above the former level of the floor by a couple of feet—and Soos, standing up to his knees in the crawl space, was hooking up a block and tackle.
"OK, Gnome dawgs," he said. "I think this'll do it. Who's goin' down?"
Jeff, already dirty, stepped forward. "I ought to."
"No!" another young Gnome with black hair and beard, and dressed differently—not the red and blue that Jeff wore, but an orange that now was all dirty—"This is underground work. I'm a miner. I go down."
Jeff smiled in a tired way. "Son," he said, "let's both go down together."
"I'm not your son!" the other Gnome snapped.
"Well, really we're all family," Jeff said quietly. The orange Gnome, his clothes I mean, looked at some others similarly dressed. After a couple of seconds, they nodded.
"All right," he said grudgingly. "But this changes nothing."
"Climb on, dudes," Soos said. "You got your lights? OK, I'll let you down easy." The two gnomes grabbed hold of the rope, and Soos lowered them.
"How deep is that?" I asked.
"They found the body at fifteen feet and a bit," Ford said from the other side of the torn-up floor. "We're preparing for re-burial."
"Just take it out and burn it!" Wendy said.
"No dice," Stan said. "Brainiac says we can't pay back evil with evil. I dunno, sounds like a square deal to me!"
"Stop!" Jeff's voice echoed up through the hole. "All right, Shale, here we go. Pass it under. Here, tie off. Good knot! One more round . . . OK, Soos, haul away, then send the rope back to us."
"And watch out, it stinks!" warned the angry voice of the other Gnome, Shale, I guess.
Soos heaved on the block and tackle, and something dark came up. It was a lump, about the size of, I don't know, a football tackling dummy, if it had been tied in a fetal position. It did smell really bad, rotten enough to make Tripper gag.
The Gnomes hauled it away from the hole, and then Soos brought Jeff and Shale back up.
"Now," Ford said. "Soos, the ghost was once a man who professed the Catholic faith. What we need to do is first to bless the body and then re-bury it with the proper ritual. And then before we fill in the hole, we'll send the tree trunk down after it."
"Ya gotta be kiddin' me!" Stan said.
"I assure you, I'm not," Ford said. "We don't have much time."
Soos took off his hat. Teek jumped down into the crawl space. "Uh—I know we don't have blessed oil, but is there any consecrated water?" he asked.
Ford supplied him with a small vial. Teek looked at Soos. "I guess—maybe unction and the last rites? Can you speak the prayers? He can't respond, so I'll try to do it for him."
"This is, like, solemn, guys," Soos said. Wendy and I took off our hats. I could see now that the body had been wrapped up in animal skin or thick cloth and then covered with dark tar that seemed to have hardened like stone. Teek accepted a handkerchief from Grunkle Stan and spread it out on the lumpy shape. With one hand touching it, Teek bowed his head as Soos murmured questions. Teek gave quiet responses. Teek sprinkled a bit of the consecrated water on his fingertips and touched them to the lump and said something. And then Soos made the Sign of the Cross.
He looked up. "That's the hardest part, guys. But now I'm gonna let him back down into the earth and we'll say a Psalm for him. Everybody who knows the words, join in."
He let the body down, cut the rope and let it drop. And then he said, "The Lord ruleth me; I shall want nothing. . . ."
Mabel began to murmur, "The Lord is my shepherd . . . ." I recognized the 23rd Psalm and joined in, though Mom's Protestant version was a little different from Soos's.
To my surprise, Grunkle Stan spoke softly, too, in Hebrew. I learned enough from Dad to know that the words were "I want for nothing, for Adonai is my shepherd . . . ."
We didn't say it in unison at all, or even in the same words, but we all said it, except the Gnomes. But then after the first couple of lines, Jeff cleared his throat and said quietly, "Fellows, the Prayer of Deep Passing. Ready?" And the Gnomes began to drone, "Lo, the way before me is deep and dangers lie in the dark, but I will not fear, for Right guides my steps. . . ."
Weird. Even they have the same basic notions. Mabel was sobbing as she spoke. I really hope the evil old priest at last felt a little bit sorry for his deeds. He made my sister cry for him.
Soos said another prayer or two and then he sprinkled the consecrated water into the grave. I don't know what I expected, fire and brimstone, maybe, but it did not happen. Then the Gnomes tied the tree trunk so it dangled exactly over the pit. The maddening buzz still came from inside it. "Time?" Ford asked, hopping down and taking something from inside his coat.
"Two minutes to midnight," Stan said, checking his watch. "If you're gonna do it on this date, do it now!"
Ford took something silvery from inside his coat. He called what sounded like a command—but in Latin—into the trunk, and then took what he held—a grenade? It looked like one! He actually pulled a pin and dropped it into the hollow of the tree.
A moment later, as though the tree had become a giant flashlight, a blinding white light shot out of it in a beam. White smoke or steam billowed. Ford yelled in English, "Go into the light! Drop it, Soos!"
Soos chopped the supporting rope, and the tree trunk hurtled into the dark, jetting that brilliant beam upward.
"Fill it in!" Ford said.
Slate relayed the order, and the mining Gnomes refilled the shaft that in record time.
"Thank you, everyone," Ford said, sitting slumped on the edge of the torn-up floor. "That was a close call."
"Did we win?" Wendy asked.
"I think we have," Ford said. "I'll know for sure tomorrow, but right now—yes, I think we have."
The trapped greenish spark that was the soul of Esteban Pica raged. The prayers rained down on it like fire and brimstone and hurt. The spirit had not hurt like this in memory. And then the water splashed and it heard voices calling it, commanding it to do what it had resisted doing for hundreds of years. It struggled, infuriated.
And then—light filled its world, and a voice ordered it in Latin, "Go into the light!"
The spirit had no eyes to close. It could not look away from that intolerable glare. But there—a different, dimmer spot of light, a far-away circle of dull red. It fled into that—
And fell, full of despair into—
Judgment.
And what came afterward.
Then it was practically over. Well, almost. Not quite.
Because the passing of souls through this world, like the passing of ships through an ocean, leaves wakes behind. Loose ends. Grief and relief.
The living still had responsibilities to fulfill, and things to think about.