Dog Days

(Tuesday, August 3, 2016)

12: Bolt

Dipper had never been out in harder rain. That time when they had slogged through the mud toward the Gack of Doom, maybe as hard, but no harder. Blinding and cold, it slashed at his face and neck, a whip wielded by the unforgiving wind. Twice hail fell, too, in hard sudden drum solos, peppering him with stinging little blows. "If we're too late," he yelled at the top of his lungs, and a gust of wind took his breath away.

"Negative!" Ford shouted. "I counted the seconds until the thunder, and that first lightning bolt was five miles away! But hurry!"

The storm didn't want them to go. The wind was against them, trying to push them back to the Shack. Bent double against it, they sloshed down the Mystery Trail, finally turned into the woods—everybody always said to stay away from trees in a lightning storm!—and ignored the briars and slapping brush.

Nothing looked the way it should. The trees flailed and thrashed like living animals, maybe ones in their death throes. The rain and the tumbling windblown leaves obscured all landmarks. They got lost, found themselves back on the Mystery Trail, and then Wendy shouted, "I think I can find it!" She took the lantern and led the way.

"Most direct path!" Ford yelled. "Never mind finding an easy way!"

So they waded through thorny vines and stumbled over fallen tree trunks, Dipper following the gleam of the lantern in her hand, no longer even trying to orient himself. "Got it!" she called over her shoulder. "Bear left, everybody!"

They staggered out into the clearing. Ford reclaimed the lantern and set it on the fallen beam and said, "We lost a lot of time! The ritual takes an hour, and we may not have that long. Stanley! You dig! At least six inches deep, no more than a foot! I'll show you where the holes need to be!" He handed Stan a folding shovel, an entrenching tool, and pointed to the sodden earth. "Scrape the pine needles away and start here!"

"I'm in charge of unicorn hair!" Mabel yelled. "Dipper will help me lay it down!"

Ford handed her a sack. "Right, here you are. Weave it through the metal bars, and make sure it touches the ground. Tie it off every third bar—we can't let the wind blow it off. Wendy, you help me plant the moonstones. Stanley, first hole here, three feet away from the metal cage!"

The rain slackened and then fell harder again. They heard thunder, not too close at first, but by the third time, it had gained a lot of ground. The unicorn hair was uncanny stuff. The strands felt short, but when you pulled, they stretched into three-foot-long hanks. In the dark, they gleamed with a light that was near to the ultraviolet, and the felt warm and pulsating in his grip. He noticed that whenever Mabel held a tress of the mane hair, it glowed especially bright. "'S how you know I'm a virgin," she said in a voice only Dipper could hear. "So there!"

"Fine," he shot back.

But then she laughed. "It's glowing some for you, too, Dip, so I guess you're mostly pure of heart! Wonder if we can get Wendy to hold it—"

"I don't care," Dipper said. "Help me here!"

The twins wove the unicorn hair in and out of the metal bands—be great if the lightning hit right, now, we'd be fried!—until they had surrounded the statue. "Finished!" Mabel yelled.

"Step back. Well back!" Ford yelled, stooping to plant and cover another moonstone. "Wendy, how are you doing?"

She had just dropped a moonstone in the last hole, and she used her boot to scrape dirt in to cover it. "Don't wait on me! There! Done!"

"Back, everyone! Stand back!" Ford stepped all the way behind the lantern, ten feet away from the effigy, and with its light shining up from below to make him look extraordinarily creepy, he raised his arms and chanted something in no language the Dipper recognized.

For an instant, a half-globe of purple energy shimmered around the cage. "That's done it!" Ford shouted. "What time is—"

He didn't finish the question. A blinding bolt of lightning crackled down, making a direct hit on top of the dome of steel strips, so close that Dipper felt it suck the air out of his lungs, heard the wicked crackle, before the boom of the shockwave tumbled him back and made his ears ring, felt the hellish heat of a near-miss encounter with lightning wash over him.

He rolled to hands and knees and then grabbed a springy sapling and tried to stand. It took him three tries before he made it up and stood blinking and shaking his head. He could see nothing for some moments, except a red afterimage of a crooked, writhing bolt of lightning. "Everyone OK?" Ford's voice sounded distant, echoing and hollow, as if Dipper were hearing it from underwater, but he yelled, "Wendy?"

She put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. "Right here, Dip! Mabes? Stan? Where are you? You all right?"

They both where, but Stan was grumbling because the blast had knocked his fedora off his head, and he couldn't find it.

"No loss," his brother said. "You stole it from lost and found to begin with."

"It's the principle of the thing, Poindexter!" Stan yelled. "Blow a man's hat right off his head like that—hey, remind me to tell you the joke about the guy whose wife saw him talkin' to their doctor at a party—"

"Please, later," Ford said.

Wendy brought them back to the moment: "Did we stop it, dudes?"

"Possibly. I hope we have. The lightning did transfer energy," Ford said. "Obviously. Let's see if it was enough for the forces on the other side to force a rift open inside the cage."

They did not approach, but stood on the perimeter, ten feet away, staring. The rain still pelted down, though the drops seemed less fierce, and the wind had dropped off. Wendy found Dipper's hand and clenched it. Mabel went to stand between Ford and Stan.

No more thunder or lightning. The bolt must have been the storm's final parting shot. Wendy sent Dipper a thought: Six forty-two. I'd be pulling into the parking lot right about now, man.

A red crescent carved itself into the darkness inside the cage.

Dipper squinted No, not a crescent—a long ellipse, seen from the side.

Cipher's eye. Or the effigy's. The pupil, to be exact, was glowing a fierce orange-red.

"It looks like the same color as that big X in the sky," Mabel said.

Oh, yeah, Back during Weirdmageddon, the X that marked the spot where the Nightmare Realm leaked into the waking world. The rift through which all of Bill Cipher's associate had come as they invaded Earth. Dipper remembered.

Something flung itself out of that red glare, something that looked like a monstrosity Soos might stitch up: Not big, but it looked as if somebody had cut a seahorse in half at the waist and had stitched it to the body of a moray eel. And then somehow had brought the chimera to life. It swam through the air, furiously circling the cage of steel, then tried to writhe through the widest part of the gap—

Bzzzt! The weirdness containment dome flickered into reality and threw it back smoking against the Cipher effigy. It thrashed as if in agony, floated back up, drifting and only weakly moving on its own.

"It's hurt!" Stan said.

"Let me fix that for you," Ford told the creature. He aimed carefully and fired one short blast from his full-sized quantum destabilizer.

The squirming monstrosity exploded into orange sparks, which fell to the wet earth and hissed.

"Hah! One down," Stan said. "Good shot, Sixer! So how many you figure we got left to exterminate?"

"Ninety-seven," Ford said.

Stan laughed. "What a kidder! No, really?"

"Ninety-seven," Ford repeated patiently. "Cipher's magic number is three. His inner circle of henchmaniacs numbered 27—three times three times three. They and his sub-henchmaniacs totaled to 99. Remember, I was fighting them in the Nightmare Realm when your Portal dragged me back to reality. I just destroyed one of the minor ones, leaving 98. And we all remember the Banshee and how we dealt with Xanthar, one of the, um, major league players, and so that leaves ninety-seven henchmaniacs left to go."

"How come Bill makes it a hundred?" growled Stan. "You can't divide that evenly by three!"

"One hundred is the alchemical number of completion," Ford said. "It signifies a degree of perfection. Anyway, don't ask me. IRS mathematics are easier to follow than transdimensional math."

"Heads up! Here comes something else," Wendy warned.

It was a cross between a spider monkey and an octopus. A head with nine tentacles attached to the shoulders of a saved, purple spider monkey (minus a tail). It was hard to tell how big it was—at least eighteen inches, head to toe, Dipper thought. Anyway, it saw them and then fled back through the red cleft in the night before Ford could fire, appearing to shrink as it squirmed into the reddish-orange scar.

"What do we do now?" Stanley asked. "Wait for 'em to come out one at a time so's we can shoot 'em? I hate to yell you, Brainiac, but that only happens in kung-fu movies."

"I saw we wait for the moment. Wait and watch. The rain has ended, anyway."

"Says you," Stanley snarled. "I'm still getting' wet."

"It's just drizzle now," Wendy said. "Plus you're standin' where a big fir tree can drip on you."

"Nuts to this! I'm gonna go find my hat!" Stan announced. He took a pocket flashlight out and started to poke around in the brush.

A long way south, at the exact moment that the bolt of lightning struck the cage, Billy Sheaffer woke up, his one eye wide and round. Panic gripped him.

"Oh, no," he said in a high-pitched voice unlike his normal one. "No, no, no, no, no! The idiots are trying to break through! This is my last chance! They'll ruin everything!"

A moment later he was wondering what he'd just said. It had seemed there for a second that his mind had . . . expanded? That he had memories of eons that couldn't be real. That he was aware of having lost a fight that he had never had. Now all that was fading like a puff of

A half-remembered incantation was almost on the tip of his tongue: A-X-O-L-O-T-L! My time has come . . . . something. He clenched his hands but could not grasp the memory.

No, it was gone, and as far as he knew, the letters spelled out only a nonsense word.

Gasping, he lay back on the pillow and closed his eye. His head pounded.

Don't let it happen! Don't let them come in!

He didn't know if he was telling himself that, or begging someone else, or some power.

No, don't let it happen! I can't lose this. My last chance, no I can't!

IS THAT THE ONLY REASON?

Billy opened his eye again, but the room was empty, except for him lying in his bed, tangled in the sheet. "Who—who was that? Who said that?"

Nobody, evidently,

But Billy thought hard. Aloud, in a small, frightened voice, he said, "Not the only reason. Not . . . just me."

WHO ELSE?

Dipper. Mabel. R—I mean Wendy. Don't want them hurt. Don't want . . . them to die.

WHY NOT?

Just don't! I know them! I don't want them to die!

WHY NOT?

Aloud, Billy sobbed, "Because they're my friends!"

And that felt as if he'd ripped his own heart. "My friends!" he said again in a sob. "It hurts! It hurts so bad! My friends!"

THAT'S GOOD, said the disembodied voice. THAT'S BETTER. FRIENDS. YES, THAT'S BETTER.

In his mind, Billy suddenly saw a little dog.

"Go," he whispered. "Go help them. Please. Please go help my friends."