Yesterday's Tomorrows
(Sunday, August 7, 2016)
Chapter 3: Unmoving Pictures
"Chill, dude," Wendy said, rubbing Dipper's back. "It's just a rock carving."
"I know," Dipper said, taking a deep breath. "But—well, Bill Cipher." This version of him was as simple as possible, just the outline of triangle, eye, and pupil—but it seemed to stare down coldly at them. "Seeing this makes it feel, you know. Like he's here. Almost."
Wendy patted him comfortingly. "But he's not here. He's gone. Or he's turned into Billy Sheaffer or something. You said."
"You're right. I'm edgy. It's not really him that spooked me. Just—memories, I guess," Dipper said. "Let's explore."
They found it a little bit like being in a prehistoric art gallery. The pictures on the wall were crude, from one point of view—not very representational, reminiscent of their subjects and not fully done portraits of them. Still—somehow—the scratches and paint gave things a weirdly effective sense of life. A buffalo that consisted of only six lines galloped in a way that showed how the ancient animal must really have fled from hunters. A hawk, wings raised, seemed to hover in the moment before diving on its prey.
"Mabel would know about this kind of stuff," Dipper said. "She's studied art history and all."
"We'll show her the photos when we get back," Wendy said, and that reminded him he was supposed to be taking pictures.
The cave walls bore tons of glyphs, some very prosaic—people and animals, hunting scenes, a group of people that seemed to be dancing, a snake caught in the process of wriggling into a hole, crescent moons, sunbursts, that kind of thing—and others less ordinary, in fact shading into the uncanny. One section showed humans—apparently, anyway—armed with bows and spears attacking what might have been a Manotaur, arms raised in rage, horned head thrown back, three arrows already lodged in his ribs.
Another looked like a rough sketch of Gnomes emerging—perhaps—from a tunnel, the stylized representation made it hard to be sure—six round little figures with pointed heads or hats, all in a row. Some red pigment had been smeared into the triangle hats, even. "The natives knew about the paranormal creatures here," Dipper said.
"Yeah, but that's to be expected, right? Anybody who lives in the Valley latches onto that sooner or later," Wendy pointed out. "Look up there. There's another Cipher."
Dipper centered the flashlight on this glyph, a few feet over their heads. "It's more complete than the first one," he said. "That's kind of a hat on him, and he's got a sort of butterfly mark that's probably his tie."
"This one's later than the first one just inside the cave," Wendy said. "Colors are fresher. He's sorta-kinda yellow. Here, move the light."
She gently pressed the flashlight down to illuminate some fainter scratches beneath the hovering Bill Cipher. "What are they doing?" Dipper asked.
Half a dozen—six seemed to be a magic number here—humanoid stick figures stood under Bill, apparently looking up at him, their arms thrown un in, what? Fear? Worship? "I've seen something like this one before," Dipper said. "It was . . . it was in the Northwest Mansion! That time Pacifica wanted me to exorcize a ghost. There was a kind of tapestry or banner that had an image a lot like this."
"What are they doing, though?" Wendy asked. "Fighting him or welcoming him as their lord and master?"
Dipper couldn't say. The figures were only rough indications, sticks for bodies, legs, and arms, circles crowned with spiked arcs—feather headdresses?—and no features. It was different from the tapestry. That one had silhouetted figures, two of them—uh-oh. Now he remembered. They were bowing to Cipher, engulfed in what looked like red flames.
That one had made their relationship to the interdimensional demon obvious.
"This is bad." Dipper lowered the beam still more. Beneath the feet of the humans stretched a layer of what clearly were meant to be stylized human skulls, little more than circles with triangular upper jaws imposed on them. Their empty eye sockets, nasal cavities, and teeth made what they were plain. And there were . . . ten of them.
"What?" Wendy asked, piercing his silence. "The natives, I guess, prayed to Bill for help in some battle, maybe? And they killed their enemies and won?"
"Yeah, it could be that. Or it could just be a vision," Dipper said, more to convince himself than Wendy. "You know, Bill could always appear in people's dreams while he was in the Mindscape. Maybe in their dreams he was promising them something like that—if they'd obey him, he'd make them a great tribe. The winners in a big war or something."
"Nasty," Wendy said. "You know he'd never deliver. He'd trick them and enslave them."
"Right, that's true, but—you don't think about things like that when you're dreaming. Here, hold the flashlight for a minute while I take some photos."
Wendy did, stepping back to widen the beam. Dipper's phone flashed three times and he said, "Got them all, I think. I'm sure this cave is where Ford came. He sketched many of these in his Journals, but he didn't bring a camera, and back then there were no cell phones."
Wendy handed the flashlight back to him. She gave him a playful nudge. "Hey, wonder what Tambry would've done back then," she said.
She's trying to calm me down by making a joke. Dipper shrugged and played along, though he had a hard time putting a light tone in his voice. "Maybe hang out in the local malt shop and play records on the juke box and gossip with her bffs."
They moved on, still keeping to the periphery, near the walls. Though blurred by time and settling, the larger footprints—surely Stanford's—showed what when he had come, he had ranged all the way around the cavern, back and forth, studying all the walls. For a space the glyphs became representations of mystery figures, more Manotaurs, a few Gnomes, something that might have been a Gremloblin, a human with a wolf-like head, a possible unicorn. Wendy had been right—whoever left the cave paintings clearly had explored the weird side of Gravity Falls.
"No aliens," Dipper murmured. "But that's to be expected. Grunkle Ford thinks that the spaceship crashed between twenty-five and thirty million years ago. The aliens all died in the crash or soon after. Some of their creatures escaped and survived, though."
"Like what?" Wendy asked.
"The Sentivore. The Shapeshifter."
"Ugh, sorry I asked," Wendy said. "Is that another Bill way back there?"
The most complete representation of Bill had been chiseled and painted on the far wall of the cave, directly opposite the narrow opening. "Yeah, this is it," Dipper said. "This is where Ford found the Cipher zodiac. And where he recited out loud the spell that called Bill into his mind."
"Didn't you say Gideon did the same thing?"
"That time when he wanted to get the combination to Grunkle Stan's safe, yeah," Dipper said. "Mabel and Soos caught him but they passed out at the same time Gideon did. That's how they were able to hear what Bill said to him, Gideon and both of them were all unconscious."
"Man, I remember. That was the time when Gideon took over the Shack. Yep, that's Bill up there on the wall, all right. No mistaking this one."
It was the largest and most finished glyph of Bill Cipher in the cave. Here he was complete: Cipher in top hat, with skinny arms and legs, hovering inside a circle. An outer circle divided into segments framed the symbols of the zodiac: A question mark, a sort-of fish about to close its open mouth on a morsel, a six-fingered hand, a broken heart, a pentagram, a shooting star, a llama, something that might have been a pair of glasses drawn by someone who'd never seen spectacles, a pine tree, and—
"There you are," Dipper said, concentrating the beam on a rectangle.
"Dude, how would an ancient tribe even know what a plastic bag of ice looked like?" she asked. "Gotta be a hoax."
"No, I don't think so. It's not quite a bag of ice," Dipper said. "See the label, I guess?" A vertical line, a V rotated ninety degrees to the right, three dots in a row. "We're reading it as I-C-E, but I think it's the artist trying to picture something he saw only in a vision or a dream. It's not exactly the way we'd see it. Neither are the eyeglasses."
"Yeah, I see," Wendy said. "Llama looks a little off, too, like something the artist barely remembered seeing. Well, at least there aren't any worshipers around this one. Not quite as creepy."
Faded, smudged marks in a couple of rows above the circle looked as if they had been applied with some pigment and then later mostly erased. "I'll bet that was the incantation," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford had already read a version of it in the missionary's diary, and these must have been, I don't know, pictograms that represented the sounds in Modoc's language. Anyway, Grunkle Ford remembered the chant and said it."
"And Cipher showed up." Wendy grunted. "Bad move on Dr. P.'s part, huh?"
Dipper shrugged. "Well, yeah, Cipher did appear to him, but not right away, not here in the cave. I think it was some hours later. Grunkle Ford had left the cave, and in the woods somewhere nearby, he suddenly felt so tired he sat under a tree and fell asleep. Then Bill came to him in a dream. Told him he was a Muse and promised that he'd inspire Ford to create great things." Dipper's voice became resentful. "Instead he showed Ford how to construct a Portal, just so Bill could invade our reality. It was all a dirty trick."
"I'm surprised Dr. P. could be tricked. Your great-uncle's, like, the smartest guy I know," Wendy said. "Sorry, Dip!"
He chuckled ruefully. "I'm not bothered. I know you're right. He's had a big head start on me!"
"Yeah, so why did he fall for Bill's lies?"
For a few moments Dipper didn't answer as he studied the glyph on the wall. "I think . . . we've all got weak spots in our armor. Grunkle Ford's was his curiosity. And maybe his ambition—he kinda felt like he'd failed his and Stan's parents way back in high school, and, you know, he wanted to make up for it, to be a big success—and that left him open to Bill's flattery and all."
Wendy had become the official photographer. She'd made several flash snaps of the smudged letters—if that was what they were—and the zodiac. She paused. "Yeah, I suppose that if he offered me a chance to—never mind."
"To see your Mom alive again," Dipper said softly. "It would be hard to resist."
Wendy gulped and in a soft, choked voice, she asked, "How'd you know?"
"Because I know you," Dipper said simply. "And that's Bill who's doing the tricking, too. He had all the time in the world and a butt-load of patience. For decades, he spied on everybody's daily life, and he snooped in their dreams. That's how he knew about how to get to Grunkle Ford. And he'd know how bad you missed your mom, too. But—Bill's gone."
"I sure hope he is," Wendy said. "That version of him, anyway. The crazy one."
"The trick is going to be keeping Billy Sheaffer from going the same way," Dipper said. "I have to have a man-to-man talk with him soon. I'm not looking forward to it, and I hope I don't screw it up. Huh. That's weird."
"What's weird?" Wendy asked.
Dipper held the light almost against the rock face, aiming it up to throw everything into sharp relief. "The tie. Look at it."
"Raised up," Wendy said.
"Yeah, like everything else was chipped away, just leaving the bow tie sticking up an inch above the surface. Unless—" Dipper reached up.
"Don't touch it, man!" Wendy said. "It gives me a bad vibe."
"I just want to see whether the bow tie is glued on or something," Dipper told her.
He pushed lightly at the tie.
It slipped smoothly into the stone, stopped, clicked, and glided back out, like a pushbutton.
An eerie light shone from behind them.
"Uh-oh," Wendy and Dipper said together.