Robbing the Memory Bank
(June 2015)
4: Under the Museum
That evening they slipped into the back door of the History Museum as twilight shaded into night. Dipper placated the guard dog with more treats—they'd bought a bag of chicken jerky dog treats on the way in—and the contented Doberman padded along with them until they went into the eyeball room, which the dog didn't seem to like. They heard his claws clicking as he retreated down the hall.
Dipper pressed the disguised switch, the fireplace opened—Pacifica said, "Ew! Why does it have to be so creepy?"—and they went down to the sub-basement rooms and to the memory-storage vault.
Dipper explained how everything worked and showed Pacifica one of the memory erasers. "They'd put you in a chair out in the first room," he told her, "and dial into the gun whatever it was they thought you should forget. Then you'd get zapped right in the face, and that made you forget."
"Dip," Wendy said, "start with one of the others, show her how it works. How about Lazy Susan, the one we saw just before we busted up the Society? That memory wasn't so bad."
Dipper glanced at Pacifica. She had dressed down for the occasion—not as a ninja, but she was wearing dark jeans, a dark-purple top, and a purple scarf tied over her hair. "All right, but Pacifica? This is private, okay? We haven't tried to restore Lazy Susan's memories yet. We don't always do it. If somebody seems to be, you know, functioning normally with the memory loss, or if it seems kind of trivial, we leave well enough alone. If it's more serious, we get in touch and give the memories back if the people want them. But no matter what, we don't talk about what we see."
"As if I'd want to," Pacifica said. "Look, I'm not a big fan of Greasy's Diner? But Susan's always been nice to me. I wouldn't gossip about her. Or her memories."
"Then just watch, and you'll see how it happens," Wendy told her.
Dipper found the cylinder with "Susan Wentworth" and the year 2012 written on it, clicked it into the machine, and started it up. "It's old-fashioned," he said about the viewer. "It has to warm up for a few seconds before you get picture and sound."
The video began without introduction or explanation. Blind Ivan, his face mostly concealed by his red hood, intoned, "Who is the subject of our meeting?"
More red-robed figures led in Susan Wentworth, her head concealed in a pouch with no eye holes. "This woman," they said in dismal unison.
As they removed the blindfold hood and pushed Susan, still dressed in her pink waitress uniform and white apron, into what looked like an antique dentist's chair and strapped her arms down, Pacifica whispered, "Oh, my God! Who are they?"
"Society of the Blind Eye," Wendy told her. "People from town. 'Cept I never met the leader, Blind Ivan, and never heard of him. Watch."
In his deep, British-accented voice, Blind Ivan asked, "What is it you have seen?"
Susan, looking apprehensive, said, "Uh, well, I was leaving the diner, and I saw these little bearded doodads, and I was like, Whaaa?"
As the members of the Society pulled the drawstrings on their hoods, as though to shield their eyes, Ivan took a device from a trunk and comforted Susan: "There, there. You won't be like whaaa for much longer."
He pointed the memory eraser. Susan asked if it were a hair dryer, if the Society people were barbers, and then a brilliant, shimmering ray hit her full in the face—
The screen jittered and they saw her memory in desaturated color: She locked up the diner, headed for her home, and passed—four Gnomes. One, directing the others, Dipper recognized as Jeff; the other three, standing totem-poled, were intent on stealing a pie from the windowsill.
They faintly heard a scratchy soundtrack: Susan said, "Good night, tiny men stealing my pie—wait, what?"
Jeff was saying something that only partly came through: "Lift with your knees . . . resort to cannibalism . . . ma'am."
They saw Susan panic, run to a pay phone, and dial 6-1-1.
The memory ended, and a dazed Susan sat limp in the chair.
"Lazy Susan," Ivan said, "what do you remember of little bearded men?"
Robotically, Susan said, "My mind is clear . . .." and the picture and sound ended.
"Gnomes?" Pacifica asked. "She was freaked out by Gnomes? Why? You see them all the time!"
"Now you do," Dipper said. "Back then, they hid from humans. Remember, this was the summer of 2012."
Pacifica frowned. "So, Lazy Susan just forgot about seeing them?"
"Yep," Wendy said. "Totally forgot it. Just like the other people the Society helped."
"Well," Dipper added, "by their definition of helping. We know now that if it's used too often, the memory eraser has terrible side effects. I don't think you got any, because evidently, they had you in that chair just once, as far as we can tell. We've looked through all the tubes, and this one is the only one tagged with your name."
"They didn't get everybody in town," Wendy said. "Didn't seem to get me or any of my family, or Stan, or Dipper and Mabel. Others they got over and over again."
"Yeah, well, they never got us because we'd only been in town for a couple of months when all of this broke," Dipper said. "And anyway, I wasn't bothered by stuff I saw, just intrigued. And Mabel thought it was all lots of fun, so she wasn't scared. But we've found tubes for Soos, lots of them for—well, people you know. None for your dad or mom, though. Just you."
"Want to see it?" Wendy asked gently.
Pacifica bit her bottom lip and nodded. "But hold my hand," she whispered.
Dipper removed Susan's memory tube and replaced it with Pacifica's. Wendy held her left hand, Dipper took her right—and started the playback.
"Let me go!" Pacifica, maybe a year or two younger than she had been when Dipper first met her, struggled in the grip of one of the bigger Society members. The others forced her into the chair and strapped her arms. "Father! Make them stop!"
Dipper blinked. There was Preston Northwest, not in a robe but in his usual business suit. "There, there, daughter," he said coldly. "This won't hurt a bit."
Pacifica thrashed in the chair. "Let me go!"
"What is it that she has seen?" Ivan asked Preston.
"A little business deal." Preston whispered into Ivan's ear, and Ivan typed something into the eraser.
"Just relax, Miss Northwest," he said. "This will only take a moment."
The flash of the memory gun, and then, in washed-out color and sound, the memory—
Pacifica, opening a door. Preston Northwest standing inside in front of a chart on an easel, saying, "Very well. I will discover the people you are looking for and give you their names. In return, you will grant me exclusive rights to shares in your enterprise."
A high-pitched voice said, "It's a deal!"
A stick-figure hand shook Preston's, blue flames erupting around the handclasp.
Pacifica pushed the door all the way open and saw a floating triangle, yellow, the only splash of color in the monochrome room. It had one eye, which moved toward her. "Uh-oh! We have company!" the high-pitched voice sang out, sounding amused.
An angry Preston looked directly at the camera—into his daughter's eyes. "Pacifica!"
The memory ended.
"Bill Cipher," Dipper said. "Your dad made a deal with him."
Pacifica was shaking. "That thing messed up my dad! Messed up his face! We thought he was going to die before it came past again and Mom yelled at it, and it said, 'Sheesh, can't you take a joke?' and turned him back! Then it snapped its fingers and these monsters came and took my parents and almost got me! And Dad made a deal with that horrible thing?"
"What was the deal?" Wendy asked.
"I think I can guess," Dipper told him. "The thing on the easel was the Zodiac. Bill was probably trying to identify the people represented on it. They were the only threat that he knew about."
"I—remember now," Pacifica said slowly. "I think that was—it was in the summer of 2011. Before you and Mabel even came to town. I thought it was a ghost or something."
"Worse than a ghost, Paz," Wendy said.
"An interdimensional demon," Dipper told her. "A crazy one, at that."
"My rotten dad sold out the town," Pacifica said miserably. She blinked. "Let me see it again. Can you freeze the picture?"
"Sure."
Dipper re-ran it until Pacifica said, "Stop now!"
The image still twitched and flickered, and the picture was grainy, but you could see Preston's outstretched hand, Cipher's about to grasp it, and the whole chart in the background. "There's the llama," Pacifica groaned. "My dad didn't just sell out the town—he sold me out, too!"
"Hold on," Wendy said. "He didn't know that."
"Yeah, he couldn't, because you weren't the llama then," Dipper told her. "I don't think you became the llama until you put on the sweater that night before we counter-attacked Bill. And I wasn't the pine tree then, because I didn't have my cap, and Mabel wasn't the shooting star—she didn't even knit that sweater until like two months before we even heard our parents were sending us to Gravity Falls."
"But—the llama symbol is on the chart," Pacifica said. "Right there."
"So are ice, the pine tree, the shooting star," Dipper pointed out. "The six-fingered hand—Bill would have known that one already. Grunkle Ford. But I don't think he could clearly see our world—what we saw in the memory happened in the Mindscape. Your dad wasn't really awake—he was in a trance or something—but when somebody confronts Bill in the Mindscape, other people can see or hear what's going on if they're nearby and focus on the person who's in the trance."
"Mabel and Soos did that time when Gideon made a deal with Cipher," Wendy said. "She told me."
"Anyway," Dipper said, "you walked into the Mindscape and saw what was happening. Bill, looking from the Mindscape into the real world, couldn't see as clearly—at least I don't think he could. OK, he knew the six-fingered hand was Ford, and maybe that the question mark was Soos, but it's pretty clear that he didn't yet know that, oh, Wendy was the ice and Robbie was the broken heart and so on. That's why he made the deal with your dad, so he'd have an agent in our dimension who could help him identify the people represented on the Zodiac."
"And that's how he recognized us all," Wendy said. "How he got prepared for us trying to band together and stop him during Weirdmageddon."
"I ought to just run away from home!" Pacifica was weeping, though not sobbing. "My dad's such a shit!"
"Hey, hey, it's all over now," Wendy said, hugging her. "And it didn't hurt anything, girl. The Zodiac didn't work, anyhow."
"Yeah, because of Grunkle Stan," Dipper reminded Pacifica.
"You remember when we got, like, turned into banners?" Wendy asked Pacifica.
Pacifica nodded. "That was horrible. I couldn't move, couldn't blink, couldn't even breathe! But I knew what was happening!"
"Yeah, me too," Wendy said. "Look, my point is, if you can deal with that memory, this one's nothing. Anyhow, Mr. Northwest isn't the same as he was. He's changed. And you can change, too. Don't let the past hold onto you. Decide to do what's right for you."
"And do it," Dipper said. "No matter what."
Pacifica pulled away from Wendy and took the memory tube out of the machine. She held it for a moment, then threw it against the stone wall, as hard as she could. It shattered. "Know what?" Pacifica asked in a savage tone. "I'm not changing schools! I don't care what Dad says! If he puts up an argument, I'm going to tell him I know what he did to me—how he stole my memory! And how he made a deal to turn the town over to that demon freak! And if he pushes me to do things I don't want to do—I'll tell Mom! I'll tell everybody!"
"Be your own girl," Wendy said. "Stand up for yourself."
Pacifica looked at Dipper. He shrugged. "Nobody can tell you what's right," he said. "You have to feel it inside."
Pacifica wiped her eyes and then timidly asked, "Wendy, can I kiss your boyfriend?"
"This one time I'll say yes," Wendy replied with a grin. "Knock yourself out."
"Three of them are very strong right now," the researcher murmured. The room lay in darkness, except for the ghostly glow coming from a crystal ball. He held a pendulum over a chart, and the weight at the end vibrated. "The Ice. The Tree. And—it is not a sheep, as I once believed. I know now that I didn't make a mistake when I saw the image on the computer. It's a llama! They are together, and their life forces are very strong. They . . . reinforce each other."
He had been bent over the chart—a map of Gravity Falls, in fact, the four-color, not-to-scale tourist map he had picked up at a place called the Mystery Shack. Just a nondescript figure in an anonymous crowd of gawkers, he had passed through with no one's becoming the wiser. He had picked up the cartoony sketch map of the town and its sights and had brought it back to his lair.
The three Zodiac symbols seemed to have gathered in . . . a museum of history, according to the map.
He could kill them all, all three. He could do it now, send a deadly spell, though it would cost him blood.
But . . . he couldn't. Because if one, or two, or even three were killed, others would immediately spring up to take their places.
No.
"The key is not to kill, but to corrupt them," he murmured. "Perhaps not these three. Perhaps all of them, or only one or two. But to find and isolate at least three members—and I still don't know for certain the identities of three of them—the three weakest, most vulnerable—to turn them to evil and to my service—that is what I must do. That is what must happen."
The shadowy figure in the room with him said quietly, "I understand."