Dog Days

(Friday, July 29, 2016)

6: Not Quite Right

Friday was a little more hectic than the rest of the week had been, at least as far as tourists went, but nothing to compare to the July 4th rush. If everything went as usual, Soos expected another surge of business leading up to and just after Labor Day. But it was nice to have sufficient business to keep everyone on their toes but not so much they were out of their minds.

Tripper seemed to be mending nicely. His limp was almost gone, and he had visibly gained a little weight. He was definitely an odd dog. For one thing, he listened.

Mabel had sat in the floor holding his front paws and gazing into his face. The dog met her gaze—though Dipper had read it was best NOT to make direct eye contact with a dog because they took it as a threat.

And Mabel had said, "You have to eat all your breakfast and all your dinner so you'll grow up to be a good strong doggy. See? Here's your bowl. I'm gonna measure out the right amount of dog food for you—here you go. Now eat every last bite of that for me, OK?"

And Tripper had done it—not like a dog normally did, with quick snaps and hasty swallows, but with an unusual sort of doggy dignity, deliberately and not too slow, not too fast. After the bowl was empty, he nosed around and found three pellets that had fallen from the bowl or his mouth and had eaten them too. Then he trotted to the door and looked expectantly over his shoulder.

He now always came when you called his name, whether he was on the leash or not. Mabel told him "Run!" and he did laps around the house, obviously enjoying the exercise. But she held him to ten minutes, not wanting to re-injure his leg. He would have run with Dipper and Wendy if Mabel had let him, but she vetoed the idea. "When we're a little more certain he's not gonna strike off on his own," she said.

Teek, who liked dogs, was a little put off by Tripper at first because he was a small animal. Teek's definition of "dog" hovered in the Lab/Retriever range. However, once Mabel introduced him as "Teek's gonna be one of your friends," Tripper accepted him and was perfectly happy to chase a Frisbee with Teek. And Teek began to admit that the little dog had some good points, dog-wise.

Wendy stayed over for dinner on Friday, since her dad and brothers were going to be away, and afterward, Ford came up and they took Tripper down to his lab, where—of course—a suspicious Ford put him through his battery of tests. Most showed nothing but normal dog, though one—Ford rubbed his chin thoughtfully and stared at the display screen of one scanner. "This is a little unusual," he muttered. "His supernion readings are abnormally high."

"He's a super dog?" Wendy asked.

Ford shook his head. "No, no, 'supernion' is my name for a hypothetical subatomic particle that carries a weirdness charge. Those of us who live in the Valley have elevated readings of it, too—not as high as, say, a fairy or a Gnome, but about ten per cent higher than the human mean. Mine's about twelve per cent, and Mason's is only about eight. Wendy, you're at ten point five—"

"You've been testing us?" Dipper asked.

"I've scanned you both many times," Ford said with a smile. "Relax. It doesn't seem to have any negative effects, unless it's to make you slightly more aware of paranormal events and creatures. Although Stanley's reading is a bit higher even than mine—I believe that's partly heredity, though. And I have wondered if his abnormal luck at gambling might be the supernions somehow channeled to produce a desired result."

"What does he say?" Wendy asked.

Ford put on a sour expression and did an expert imitation of Stanford's voice: "Particle, shmarticle, Poindexter! Luck ain't nothin' but smarts and patience!"

In spite of himself, Dipper had to laugh. "That is so Stanley!" he said.

Tripper, now down from the table, went sniffing around the lab. He bristled at a container and growled a little. "Hm," Ford said. "I once confined a cycloptopus in that, years ago. Perhaps the dog is sensitive to paranormal residue. Surely not even the scent would linger this long."

Tripper evidently figured out that no arcane beast currently occupied the cage, because he circled it, then lost interest. "I had a dream with him in it," Dipper said. He glanced at Wendy. "And Bill Cipher, too. In his old shape, but . . . weak, I guess? It was strange."

"Tell me about it." Ford sat back with his big hands on his knees and listened intently. "How sure are you of the messages?" he asked. "I mean, those puzzling . . . pronouncements of Bill's?"

"Well, I wrote down a couple as soon as I woke up. I think the others are pretty much as I told you, but I can't be sure. It didn't make any real sense. It was like things were scrambled up."

"Hmm." Ford's gaze moved to the puppy, who was happily curled up at Dipper's feet. "I don't know. Cipher has a convoluted mind and a strange sense of . . . is humor the right word? I suppose so. When he and I were, uh, in regular communication, he frequently gave me written guides to various projects which I later discovered contained clever little codes. What did he say about the effigy?"

Dipper frowned, trying to remember exactly. "Well, it was a real strange dream. Bill had a bamboo fishing pole and was sitting, I think, on the bank of the beaver pond near Ghost Falls, fishing, but with no hook or line. He said he was fishing for axolotls. The Axolotl, I guess?"

"Possibly," Ford said. "The Axolotl is a . . . force, I suppose, that is in charge of maintaining order and discouraging chaos. Very powerful, extremely enigmatic, and all but impossible to get in touch with. But you said something about the effigy?"

"Bill said it was fishing, too. He told me to keep up my guard."

"Troubling," Ford said. "I think we've isolated it enough so it can't corrupt anyone or anything—but it has no sentience, no consciousness. Nothing of the real Cipher remains in it."

"You sure about that, Dr. P.?" asked Wendy.

"As certain as I can be. It's fishing, he said . . . let me think about that. I've checked on the effigy at least every few days, you know. The gold beetles are rebuilding the broken-off arm, but very slowly. And it's becoming, ah, frosted, coated, I mean, with a very thin layer of gold dust. I'm tempted to give it a blast with a quantum destabilizer."

"Why don't you?" Dipper asked.

"Because I'm not sure whether that would destroy it—or make it more dangerous. There are many things we don't understand about Cipher and his realm, Dipper. Studying them is high on my list of priorities once my Institute opens in the fall. However, my monitors show no conscious activity around the effigy, so—I'd say your dream was prophetic and prudent to the extent of advising you to keep your guard up. Otherwise, watchful waiting seems our best bet."

"And the other part of the dream," Dipper said. "The part about the mound over the UFO just . . . cracking like an egg. What does that mean?"

"Maybe that something is coming," Ford said. "I don't believe the UFO, as you call it—I prefer the spacecraft—is going to power up after all these eons and burst out of the hill. It isn't capable of that. Too many of its systems are shattered. But it's possible that something weird is about to, well, hatch. That would be within the norm for Gravity Falls."

Teek and Mabel planned to take Tripper over to the dog park (after strenuous work by Mayor Cutebiker and the town council in revoking a number of complex and outdated laws, dogs were finally allowed in the Earl Somerset Dog Park) for exercise. Dipper and Wendy went over to the Corduroy house for their movie night.

They found one they hadn't seen, a Good Enough production entitled "Plan Nine from the Planet People of Planet Planet." Like most of the Good Enough productions, it dated from the fifties and had been made on an apparent budget of whatever loose change the cast and crew had in their pockets that day. Chadley and Trixandra weren't in it—it had been made a couple of years before their heyday—but they recognized the actor who played Chadley as young "Butch the Paperboy," though at some points in the movie his name seemed to be Buster or Bubba.

The film "starred" an old-time horror actor—he had specialized in suave vampires back in the early 1930s—named Nosfer Atu. Dipper said, "Wait a minute!" as the opening credits rolled. He dug out his phone and checked an Internet movie site.

He entered a query and then said, "Huh! Atu passed away in November of 1953. This film was released—"

"Dude, it escaped."

"—it hit the theaters in June 1955. How in the heck did it get made with a dead star?"

"Maybe they propped him up," Wendy suggested, reaching for the popcorn.

But as they watched, it became clear. Nosfer Atu was featured in a couple of early scenes, as a scientist trying to contact beings from other planets. He had not a word of dialogue—just a voice-over from a bored-sounding announcer explaining that the formerly revered scientist had been ostracized by his colleagues for daring to suggest he could contact aliens by radio signal. The visuals had him leaning forward over a plain, scarred and beat-up wood table on which perched a conglomeration of flickering light bulbs and a speaker as he appeared to listen to something not actually on the soundtrack. He fiddled with knobs that did nothing.

And that was all. Dipper said, "What a rip-off! They had some footage of him being a mad scientist or something and just spliced it into the film so they could claim it had a big star!"

"I wouldn't exactly call him a big star," Wendy said.

A few minutes later, the film showed Atu, except it was an obvious double, hunched over the space radio, shot from behind. An unconvincing poof of smoke and a mismatched "boom" effect was, according to the narrator, "A mysterious explosion caused by deadly N-rays sent through the radio from space that left Professor Dabbler so terribly disfigured he never again dared show his face!"

Sure enough, the next scene showing the Professor had some guy dressed in clothes similar to his, but with his whole head completely mummy-bandaged so he never once had a line of dialogue. "Boo!" Wendy said. "Those N-rays caused him to grow a foot taller than he was!"

"And I think he gained fifty pounds, too," Dipper agreed.

It wasn't clear, but it seemed the space invaders now somehow controlled the injured professor. About twenty minutes in, the aliens, played by middle-aged men and women in footie pajamas, landed in the local cemetery, which must have featured cheap funerals since all the headstones were obviously made of cardboard, and began to resurrect zombies from the graves. Again, their purpose was never specified, but it all might have been a part of their plan to take over the world.

"I think we've seen this plot before," Dipper said.

"You think?" Wendy asked, rubbing his chest. "Hey, want to play a game?"

"What?" Dipper asked.

She toyed with a shirt button. "Um, every time somebody gets killed by a zombie, we each get to take an article of clothing off the other!"

"Very tempting!" Dipper said. "But that'd be too irresistible, and we'd be out of material too soon. How about we kiss instead?"

"I'll settle for that," she said. They adjourned from the sofa and lay back on the bearskin rug instead, cuddling, snacking on popcorn, laughing at the stupid movie, and exchanging frequent, salty kisses. When even that got dull, Dipper brought out a roll of peppermint Life-Savers. Then things became a little more interesting and the kisses more extended.

When Butch, the paperboy, accidentally discovered that the aliens were susceptible to poisoning if you squirted salt water on them from water pistols (the movie didn't explain why he had salt water in his plastic squirt gun), the movie hit the big climax. As cops armed with plastic water pistols attacked, the space invaders dropped their N-ray blasters, screamed, and fell to the floor, dissolving into mush, except you only saw them falling and then floppy, empty pajamas with a splatter of mush (it looked like lumpy oatmeal and probably was) where their heads should be.

By that time, Wendy and Dipper had almost lost interest in the movie. Even the shocking conclusion, in which Professor Dabbler sacrificed himself to blow up the spaceship and, when the bandages came off his dead body, was revealed to have only a skull for a head, they hardly paid attention.

Except Dipper did glance at the screen and point out, "Hey, his skull's made of plastic, his cranium's detachable, and somebody screwed a hook in the top of his head!"

That was a mistake because Wendy took advantage of his distraction to give him a slurpy kiss on his neck and wound up awarding him a spectacular hickey.

Oh, well. In this world you have to pay for your fun.

But after another long, proper, passionate kiss, Wendy gasped and broke away. "Dipper! I was catching your thoughts—"

"Sorry," he said, red-faced. "I'm getting all worked up, with your strip game in mind, you know, just thinking of doing this with, uh, all our clothes off—"

"No, not that! Sweet, but not that! You told Dr. P. wrong! I got a flash of your memory. Bill didn't say the statue of him was fishing! He didn't even say it was a fisher. The word is fissure!"

"Fiss—" Dipper said. He felt as if he had been hit by an electric shock, or maybe an N-ray. "Oh, gosh! I gotta call Ford!"

Wendy said, "Because—"

"Yeah," Dipper said, scrabbling for his phone. "A fissure is the same as a rift!"