Dog Days
(Friday, July 29, 2016)
7: Fissure
The sun was not long down, but darkness came slowly on as Ford, Wendy, and Dipper hiked out to the clearing in the woods. The heat remained, lessened, like the heat in a boiling pot when the lid is lifted. The early night felt oppressively humid, too warm for comfort. A few bats whirled and twittered above them. An owl out hunting gave a prolonged hoooo. Under the drooping trees the darkness lay thick, and they switched on their flashlights.
"There it is," Wendy said, coming to a halt.
Ahead of them, in its small clearing, the steel dome that Fiddleford had erected around the statue blocked most of it from their vision, but when Dipper shone his flashlight directly on it, a golden glitter showed where the effigy stood.
"Stay back," Ford cautioned. He switched on his anomaly detector and slowly circled the steel structure and the statue it protected. Dipper could see the display screen, pale blue, flicker as graphs and figures formed on it. When Ford finished the circuit, he grunted.
"Bad?" Wendy guessed.
Ford put the detector away and took out his own flashlight. "Well . . . not good. There's definitely a degree of dimensional leakage going on here. Not enough for anything to come through physically, but perhaps leading up to a gateway event."
"So . . . " Dipper said, "you mean maybe something from the other side is trying to change the statue enough so it'll open up a portal to—the Nightmare Realm?"
"Well, I assume so, since that's where the rift opened last time," Ford said. "And when Stanley defeated Bill, his minions—most of them, anyway—were sucked back into the Nightmare Realm and the rift closed. Bill's not there any longer, but his followers surely are, and they hate us. Or perhaps they only hate the place to which they've been condemned."
"What is it exactly?" Wendy asked.
"I can't really tell you, for the simple reason that I'm not a hundred per cent sure," Ford said. "This much we do know: The Nightmare Realm isn't really a dimension. You've had experience of some of those—"
"Oh, yeah," she said. "The heavy dimension where there's no Hammerspace, and everybody's got five fingers. I mean, all their lives! And where there was a TV cartoon show that kind of imitated our real lives—what's wrong, Dipper?"
Dipper had suddenly jerked, as though in quickened fear. "Um, I'll tell you later," he said. "But, yeah, Grunkle Ford, Wendy knows what different dimensions are."
"Well, the Nightmare Realm isn't a fully-formed dimension at all," Ford said. "It's a madhouse of a plane of existence, where all rules of logic and reason break down—completely chaotic."
"Like Dante's Inferno," Wendy suggested. She had read a translation of that poem in one of her community-college English classes.
Ford said, "Something very close to that, yes. A place of madness and random terrors. It's evidently all that is left of Bill Cipher's original dimension. Some unimaginable tragedy occurred there, which led to its collapse and reduction. Just before I returned home from there—involuntarily, pulled by the Portal my brother opened in the same way that Bill's henchmaniacs were pulled back through the rift—just before that happened, I was fighting Bill and stood a good chance of destroying him."
Dipper had never really understood why Ford had seemed so enraged by Stan's having, after all, brought him home. He began to get a glimmer, though.
Wendy asked, "So, like, the monsters and freaks went back through to there, that place or whatever? They're in the Nightmare Realm right now?"
"As far as anyone knows," Ford said. "Xanthar remained behind, as we know, until we banished him to his own dimension. And I'm persuaded the eyebats came from there, though that was perhaps hundreds of years ago, through just a partial rift. I do know they're incredibly common in the Nightmare Realm."
Wendy continued, "And . . . so Bill's monsters . . . they might be trying to . . . get back here?"
"It's a possibility," Ford said. "This dimension offered them raw material—another place to corrupt into chaos."
Dipper spun around, shining his flashlight into the woods behind them. "Shh! Hear that?"
Ford and Wendy both held their breath. Whispering, Ford began, "I can't hear—"
And then Tripper came bounding through the underbrush, trailing his leash.
"Mabel and Teek must've got back from the dog park," Dipper said, kneeling. "And I guess lost their hold on him. Here, Tripper!"
The dog came straight to him and leaned against him, shivering and faintly growling.
"He senses something," Ford said.
Dipper handed Wendy the flashlight as he stood. He gripped the leash firmly. "Here, let's try something. Come with me, boy."
Tripper let Dipper get to within about ten feet of the metal cage, and then he jerked and pulled frantically. Dipper backed off, and the dog calmed down, though he still panted as if he'd run for miles. "It definitely spooks him," Dipper said.
They heard Mabel and Teek, both yelling "Tripper!"
"I'll go explain," Dipper said, leading the dog away from the statue—to Tripper's evident relief.
"There you are!" Mabel yelled a couple of minutes later, as Dipper emerged on the trail. She scooped Tripper up and put her nose against his. "You were a bad doggy! Hey, Dip! This little rascal jerked away just as I was getting him out of the car—wait, what are you doing here?"
"The Cipher statue's acting up," Dipper said. He quickly told the two as much as he knew. That didn't take long.
Ford and Wendy emerged from the forest as he finished. "So what are we gonna do?" Mabel asked, setting Tripper down and reaching for the leash.
"It's nothing a grappling hook can solve," Ford said kindly. "The catch is that we can't yet do anything—no one quite understands the dynamics of the situation. I feel confident that we could destroy the effigy—but that might be just what the beings, or the force, that's trying to repair the statue want us to do. It may be the effigy is the only thing plugging the potential rift between our realm and Bill's old stomping grounds. Until I'm sure, I don't dare take the risk of eliminating it."
The pup was tugging Mabel toward the Shack. "I don't think he likes it here," she said.
"Let's all go back," Ford said. "I don't really want to involve the Agency, not at this point, but I can at least use some of our resources to do a little investigation. Come on, it's getting late."
Not all that late—past nine, and lingering deep twilight by the time they reached home—so as soon as they were back inside the Shack, Dipper took out his phone and dialed a number.
"Hello?" It was Billy Sheaffer's voice, sounding not at all sleepy.
"Hi," Dipper said. "Too late?"
He said, "Hi, Dipper! Huh? Oh, no, I was just playing Empirization on the computer. Have you ever played that?"
"No," Dipper said.
"It's kinda cool. You start out with a village with just three huts, and you try to build that into an empire over thirty centuries. You gotta form alliances with other villages and find places to colonize and stuff, and sometimes other, stronger places will attack you—"
"Sounds exciting," Dipper said. "You can tell me all about it later, OK? So, I haven't called in a while—we've been real busy. But I was wondering how things are going with you."
"Oh, you know, it's OK," Billy said. "I'm going to High Adventure day camp, where we do crafts and learn swimming and canoeing and stuff. I'm not any good at baseball, though, so I sit that out. It's a depth perception thing."
"Yeah, must be hard," Dipper said. Having only one eye did mean he'd be disadvantaged in that department. "So—having any bad dreams? You had some when you visited up here."
"Mm, I don't remember," Billy said. "I think maybe I do, just once in a while. But they go away when I wake up, you know. I haven't, uh, you know, had any accidents or anything. Don't tell Mabel that, though."
Dipper knew, but Mabel didn't, that Billy had wet the bed one night, to his great embarrassment, while gripped in a nightmare. "I won't say a word," Dipper promised. "But that kind of thing happens. I did it once when I was your age and had the flu. It's not as big a deal as it seems at first. So you haven't been dreaming of statues and stuff?"
"No." Long pause. "I think I dreamed once that Mabel got mad with me, I don't know why. But she was mad and she called me a funny name. I mean funny-strange. She called me 'Nacho.' That's pretty dumb."
"Sounds like a bad dream, all right," Dipper said.
"Dipper?"
"Yeah?"
The silence went on for so long that Dipper started to think he'd lost Billy. But then the boy asked, "Could I come up again? I don't mean now, or even this summer. My folks are going on a long trip with us next month, so there wouldn't, you know, be time. But maybe I could visit again sometime?"
"I think that would be great," Dipper said.
Then Billy perked up: "Oh, I got your book about the lake monster! It's real funny. Will you sign it for me when you get back home?"
"Sure," Dipper said. "Count on it."
"Um, how are Mabel's pigs?"
"They're fine," Dipper said. "Fat as ever. When we come home, she'll bring a new pet. A dog."
"I think," Billy said slowly, "I think . . . I'm afraid of dogs?" His inflection made it a question, one that Dipper had no way of answering.
Later that night Tripper again slept on the foot of Dipper's bed. For a long time he lay there, quiet but alert, disturbed and . . . thinking.
I am Tripper. The leader is Dipper. My best friend is Mabel. The boy's friend is Wendy. This place is the Shack. I have words now.
The words flitted through the dog's mind: good boy. Bad dog! Eat. Food. Come. Sit. Shake. High five! Lie down. Roll over. Jump!
He had no word yet for "danger."
And yet he sensed danger—sensed it very strongly in the woods near the structure that smelled cold of strong steel. Something not-inside it but inside it. Something that was not-there but there, or almost there.
It was like a boy pressing his ear against a hollow tree somewhere in the forest, hearing, feeling the furious buzzing of a beehive inside. Killer bees. Bees that would erupt in a cloud of pain at the least disturbance. So close. Held off by so little.
Something pressed from . . . somewhere. Something wanted in. And the boy and girl must be kept safe. The Pack must be kept safe.
It puzzled him. He had been in desperate fights before, but this was nothing he could bite, nothing he could warn off with an angry bark or with the baring of his teeth and the raging snarl.
It was nothing and yet something. It was nothing wanting to become something. It was nothing-something that hated this world and everything in it.
He did not have the words.
Silently, the dog tried to form words with his mouth and tongue, the way the people did: Dipper. Mabel.
But his vocal equipment was not meant to make words. He could come out only with very soft whines that only approximated words: ehuhhh. A-uhhl.
If only he could talk. Or do the thing that Wendy and Dipper did.
Speak mind to mind. He could edge into Dipper's dreams at night, come right up to the periphery and stare, like a dog reaching the limits of its yard and gazing longingly into the neighbor's forbidden territory. He thought that Dipper was aware of him on such occasions.
But he and Wendy—even from the outside, Tripper could catch flashes of their mental communications, especially the feelings of love. Most of all that.
If only . . .
Outside the Shack, something howled not very far off, maybe a dog or a coyote. Not a wolf, not the right timbre or pitch for a wolf.
Tripper's head came up, ears perked.
The howl repeated, and the dog understood its underlying message. Put into human terms, the animal was saying forlornly, "I'm so lonely."
Tripper relaxed again, snuggled against Dipper's lower legs.
I am lonely, too.
I always was but did not know it.
Then I found Mabel, and she made me not-lonely.
But then I came, somehow, to think. To know myself and the world around me.
And here I am in the cage of my awareness.
So close to them.
Yet . . . so lonely.