Yesterday's Tomorrows
(Sunday, August 7, 2016)
Chapter 2: A Tight Squeeze
A sweating Dipper pushed some ferns aside and followed Wendy through tough undergrowth. "You sure you know where this place is?" he asked. They had been hiking for more than an hour, and even in the woods, in the shade, the air hung heavy and humid.
"Not exactly," she said, glancing back over her shoulder. "The cliffs are just ahead, though, kind of an outcrop. We may have to scout along them, but it should be pretty obvious. Ought to look like the entrance to an Old West mine, like in Yours, Mine, and Monsters."
That forced a chuckle from Dipper. Wendy had named an ancient, nearly incomprehensible cowboy-and-monsters movie, one from the nearly no-bud?get bunch that Gravity Falls TV rotated every Friday and Saturday night. "You mean fiberglass rocks and cardboard support beams? Is there by any chance a bunch of monsters that look like people with oatmeal spray-glued to their faces inside?"
"Who knows?" Wendy asked cheerfully. "Told you, I've never been in there myself. I just know where it is because Dad warned me never to go into it."
"Oh, well—that's a big recommendation," Dipper said. "Pfft." A fern frond had lashed back into his open mouth. He spat a few green oval leaves and wiped his lips.
"Ground's rising," Wendy said. "Should be real close now. Oops, the rocks underfoot are kinda loose. Watch me and put your feet where I step."
Dipper watched her, but his gaze didn't sink as low as her feet. Or even her knees. But what he did see made up for the drive and the long hot push through the woods.
The rise became steep, and when Wendy stopped, she stood a couple of feet higher than he did, and he blundered right into her, face-planting in her left hip. "Watch it, dude!" she said. "This is not the place." Then, much less sternly, she added, "Now, if the cave is nice 'n cool . . . ."
Dipper stepped up next to her. They stood on a slope of sand and pebbles fallen from the cliff or washed down by the weather over thousands of years. Ahead, not six feet away, reared a stony bluff. Unlike most of the rocks in Gravity Falls, the stone that made it up were all sedimentary—mostly blue sandstone, Dipper thought. The sedimentary layers showed up clearly, slanting horizontal streaks, alternating darker and lighter. "Huh," he said.
Wendy gave him a look. "What huh? Looks more likely this way. Follow me, Dip."
"I said 'huh,'" Dipper grunted, "because nearly all the rock in the Valley is basalt or volcanic of some kind. This must've been like a lake bed millions of years ago. Or maybe an arm of the ocean."
"Found it," Wendy crowed from about twenty feet ahead of him. He stumbled along the loose spill of rock and soil—the stuff known as scree—at the foot of the bluff until he reached her. A bad tangle of underbrush had completely covered the boarded-up entrance to the cave—she had used her small axe to chop away enough to allow them to stand close to the bluff.
"Doesn't look very big," Dipper said. The cavern entrance evidently was a breach in the stone that started as a slanting crack between two sedimentary layers and then broadened out—a bit, anyway—to wind up as a slanted triangular gap maybe two feet wide at its widest and only about four feet tall toward the narrow top-right end. It looked as if, possibly, an underground stream had worn its way through here, though no trace of it remained outside of the cave.
Rough-hewn planks—Dipper wondered if they were Manly Dan's handiwork—had been nailed up by huge iron stakes, maybe railroad spikes, driven in through what looked like drilled holes. Wendy tugged on the top board. "Good thick redwood, very durable. Still attached pretty firmly, and not rotten at all," she said. She wedged the blade end of her axe behind the board and levered.
The wood creaked, a patter of rock grains peppered the Vancouveria, the low-growing "inside-out flowers" that had sprung up on the scree. "Grab hold and pull, Dip," Wendy said. "Watch your fingers, though."
She had tugged the wood loose enough for him to grasp the top and strain back. He felt it give, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, until suddenly the spike turned loose and the whole thing creaked back and he lost his grip on it. It fell diagonally, still partly blocking the opening.
"No sweat," Wendy said, swiveling the whole board to the right, like an arm gate opening. She bent down and picked up the fallen spike and laid it carefully on the ground, in a clear spot. "We'll replace this later. Rest of the boards should be easy. Grab the next one, and when I say go, pull. One, two, three—go!"
That one came loose with three good hard yanks—loose on both sides. They set it and its spikes off to the left of the cave, then took care of four more boards. "You sure this is it?" Dipper asked.
It didn't look like much—a very narrow opening that ran up about three feet, then slanted right for about two more. Only the bottom was wide enough to creep through, if you were careful and went on hands and knees.
"Pretty sure," Wendy said, bending to peer into the darkness. "Matches Dad's description, and it's in the right place. Got your trusty flashlight?"
"Of course," Dipper said, taking it out. "Only I don't know how long the batteries will last. I recharged them not long ago and haven't used it much, but—well, let's not go too far or spend too much time in there, OK?"
"Aw, I was hoping to move in and play house with you," Wendy said, grinning. "Don't get your worrier fired up, Dip! We're just goin' in to take a look around and maybe shoot a few pictures, that's all."
"OK," Dipper said. "Let me go first, all right?"
"Sure," Wendy said. "But I don't think there's any bears inside. Far as anybody knows, the cave doesn't have any other outlet, and a bear couldn't have broke off the planks and then nailed them back up from inside. But I'll have my axe out, just in case. After you!"
Grunting, Dipper hunkered down and dropped to hands and knees. The first ten feet were terrible and claustrophobic, and twice he had to bend his elbows and worm through a low place, but then he came out in a tubular sort of tunnel—an arched ceiling about eight feet tall—it would have been taller, except for the stalactites hanging from it—and curved walls on either side. He guessed it might be eight feet wide at that point, and it ran back a good way.
Wendy came creeping out, stood, dusted her hands, and said, "Man! Your Grunkle Ford must've been real determined if this was a place he visited."
"Well, he's stubborn," Dipper conceded. He shone the flashlight on the walls. "No pictographs here. Not even any graffiti—no, wait. There's something."
They looked closely at what he had found, a little above eye level. It was only three inches long, and not carved into the stone, but put on with a black permanent marker—at least, it looked like that.
It was a simple arrow, straight line and then angled line, pointing into the darkness.
"That's Ford," Dipper said firmly.
"What, you recognize his arrow-writing?" asked Wendy.
"No, but he always has a pocket full of pens and markers," Dipper said. "He's the only guy I know who wears one of those pocket protector things."
"Well, let's check it out. Follow the black marker road!"
"Didn't know you were a Wizard of Oz fan," murmured Dipper with a smile.
"Oh, yeah, big time when I was a little kid. Hey, you know after Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow leave the cottage in the woods, if you look close, you can see a Munchkin hanging himself?"
"Not a Munchkin," Dipper said. "It's a bird opening its wings. An African crowned crane."
"You sure?"
"Positive," Dipper said. "Get the Blu-ray and look at the scene in step-motion. What happened was the company borrowed some weird-looking birds from the zoo to make the woods seem, you know, strange and different. Just when the Scarecrow and Dorothy come up to the cottage, on the left you can see that crane or another one pecking around on the far side of the Yellow Brick Road. And there's a toucan, too."
"Shatter my girlish illusions," Wendy said. "You'd think people would recognize cranes and toucans."
"Well, this was, what, the 1930s? No TV, and I guess people didn't get to zoos all that much. Did you know that in the original Dracula, Count Dracula's castle is overrun with armadillos?"
"Get out of town!"
"Really. The director figured that nobody outside of the Southwest would know what they were and figure they were, I don't know, vampire rats or some deal? There's another arrow."
Discussing the marvels of old movies, they went back maybe sixty feet before Wendy pointed ahead. "I think this is it. If it goes anywhere."
"This" was a crevice that ran all the way up to the cave ceiling, a cleft in the rock that made them turn sideways to squeeze through. Dipper went first again, holding onto the flashlight, not that it did him much good in the passage. At times he thought they might have to drop down and creep through on hands and knees again, but they were just able to suck in their guts and press through the hard parts.
And then after fifty or sixty sideways paces, they came out again. This time the cavern was larger and more nearly circular, a space thirty feet across or thereabouts. Dipper's light gleamed on pale yellow sand—the whole chamber was floored with it—and he held out an arm to stop Wendy from coming straight in. "Wait. Look there. See them?"
Wendy peered over his shoulder. "Footprints?"
"Yeah, and about Grunkle Ford's size, too. Oh, and look here on the flat stone!"
A slab about two feet in diameter lay just inside the chamber, and instead of an inches-thick layer of sand, it wore only a dusting. And in the dust was the perfect outline of a handprint, as if someone had crawled through the crevice and had pushed himself up with one arm as he emerged—someone with six fingers on his left hand.
"That's him," Wendy said. "No doubt about it."
"And . . . pictographs!" Dipper said, shining his light on the wall. To the left, just inside the cavern, from ground level to a spot eight or nine feet up, someone long ago had incised figures in the relatively soft blue sandstone.
Dipper saw humans, or at least stick figures with lollipop heads crowned with curved spiked headdresses. They looked as though they had been caught in the act of dancing. Above them ranged bison, deer, and bears and still higher flew birds.
"Owl," Wendy said, pointing. "Hawk. Eagle, I guess? Geese."
"I think this was a record of hunters and their game," Dipper said, using his phone to snap some pictures. They went into the cavern, right at the edge of the sand—Dipper didn't want to disturb any of the marks left by Grunkle Ford, for some reason—but at one point he stooped and picked something up from the floor, shaking sand off it.
"What did you find?" Wendy asked.
Dipper held it up. It was a sheet of paper torn from a pocket notebook, dry but not brittle. "Ford's writing, all right," Dipper said.
The letters were in block printing instead of Stanford's normal, clear cursive. The paper read,
WRWDO QR RI JOBSKV WKUHH WKLUWB WKUHH. HBH RI SURYLGHQFH WBSH JOBSK UHPLQLVFHQW RI RQH LQ PRGRF IUDJPHQW ZLWK LQFDQWDWLRQ. CRGLDF FLUFOH DURXQG LW PHDQV ZKDW? PXVW VNHWFK
"And it doesn't mean anything," Wendy said. "Seriously, what is this? A code?"
"A cipher," Dipper said. "This is an easy one, the three-back Caesar cipher. Ford only used that when he first started to encrypt some of his Journal entries. I guess he tore out this sheet and re-did it. Maybe he recounted the glyphs or something and wanted to correct his notes—you can see he didn't finish the thought, and there's plenty of room."
"Can you read this?" Wendy asked.
"Here you go," Dipper said, taking her wrist in his left hand. He telepathically shot her the knowledge.
"Yeah, now I see!" Wendy said immediately. "It is pretty easy when you know the secret, I guess. Huh. Total of 333 glyphs. Who's Modoc?"
"That was the name of a Native American wizard," Dipper said. The air in the cavern suddenly seemed to be too thin. "Uh, he built a primitive Portal for Bill back in, I guess, pioneer days. But he hadn't finished it before he realized that Bill was a menace and destroyed it in time to keep Bill from coming through. And then because Modoc was afraid Bill might take over his mind and make him repair it, he, um, Modoc, uh, burned himself alive."
"Oh, man!" Wendy said. "That's messed-up!"
"Yeah, Grunkle Ford's never talked much about Modoc, but in some old library he found an evangelist's unpublished diary from the 1800s. This guy was trying to convert the Chinook people, and he either interviewed Modoc just before he committed suicide, or else someone who'd known Modoc's story. The missionary guy had, uh, written down the stuff about Modoc and also an incantation. A version of the incantation is also somewhere on the wall in here. And reciting that out loud was how Ford first—whoa, speak of the devil."
The light had hit the first of what would turn out to be three representations of Bill Cipher in the cave. It had been gouged into in the sandstone and then some red pigment had been worked into the cut, presumably meant to make it stand out.
This pictograph was simple, without the trimmings—no top hat, bow tie, or cane. Just an equilateral—well, roughly equilateral—triangle with a round eye and a distorted pupil. It was high up on the wall.
And it seemed to be staring down, enigmatically, at them.
Dipper felt goosebumps rising on his neck and arms.