Robbing the Memory Bank
(June 2015)
10: On the Run
A nice thing about Sunday mornings was that the Shack didn't open for business until 1:30 PM, since the Ramirezes always went to Mass. Dipper slept in until eight-thirty, unheard-of in the Grunkle Stan days, and then got up and in a pleasantly leisurely way began to get ready for his morning run with Wendy.
Mabel popped in just after he pulled his running shorts on, fortunately, and she threw herself onto her old bed, which made a sproingy sound. "That was such a good movie!" she said. "You and Wendy have got to go see it!"
"Maybe tomorrow," Dipper said, pulling his tee shirt over his head.
Mabel giggled. "You're getting as hairy as Grunkle Stan!"
"Yech! Hey, Mabel, do you have any lip balm?"
"Just a sec!" She sprang off the bed, out the door, and clattered down the stairs. By the time he had his running shoes tied, she was back, holding an assortment of little round tins with brightly-colored tops. "OK, Broseph, this red one's cherry, this pink one's strawberry, this one's passion fruit, and this one is mint. Take your pick."
He reached for the green tin of mint-flavored balm, dipped his pinky into the waxy contents, and smoothed it on.
"How'd you get chapped lips, anyhow?" Mabel asked.
"It involves alligators," he said.
She gave him a pop-eyed look of puzzlement. "Big-lipped alligators?"
Dipper smacked his greasy-feeling lips. The mint taste was pretty strong. "What? No, just your ordinary flying kind. So was Teek right about the movie?"
"Oh," Mabel said, flipping around so her head dangled off the edge of the bed and her hair brushed the floor, "it was so good! This girl, about our age, her family moves? Despite the fact that she's so good at ice hockey! And all the little people who live in her head go nuts and things, and the bridges all fall! The imaginary friend dies falling out of a little red wagon! Then she decides to run away from San Francisco, but Sadness steps in on the bus, and OMG, I laughed, I cried, Teek had to hold me, it was so freakin' good! Take Wendy to see it!"
"With that plot summary, how can I resist?" Dipper asked. He reached for the doorknob. "Want to come and run with us this morning?"
Mabel flipped around until she was right-side up in the bed again. "Nope! Gonna spend some quality time with Waddles and Widdles. I've been neglecting them lately."
"Happy pigging, then," Dipper said, heading downstairs and then out to the lawn.
Wendy showed up as he started his stretches. "Pretty nice night last night, wasn't it?" she asked, grinning. She was in her red running shorts, red shoes, and red headband. And, of course, her white top.
Dipper, doing lunges, said, "Yep." Before Wendy could begin her own stretches, Dipper straightened up, strode toward her, took her shoulders in his hands, and kissed her.
Her green eyes opened wide. "Mm-what, dude? Hey! Mint! You—wait, man, are your lips chapped, too?"
"Too many alligators," he said, grinning. "Mabel has some lip balm if you need it."
"Well—I put some plain petroleum jelly on this morning, but that mint's awfully tempting! I'll run and ask her for some."
Dipper was doing a set of side-stretches when he heard Mabel's triumphant shout from inside the Shack: "You too? That's some high-powered kissage! Way to go!"
A minute later, Wendy came out, laughing. "Man, your sister has, like, no inhibitions about being a teen girl, does she?"
"Nope," Dipper said. "Hey, want to do the nature trail again this morning? We've been doing the easy run through town the last few days, but today I'm feeling good!"
"You're on," Wendy said, and she hurried into her stretching routine.
Dipper, a sprinter, had to ease back into cross-country distance running. After three weeks of it, though, he'd settled into the old groove, and now he could match Wendy's long-legged strides pace for pace for four miles without gasping and panting. It always pleased him when, about a third of the way into the run, he got his second wind and like magic, everything, breathing, running, talking, suddenly seemed easier. It felt more like a change in the world than in himself: gravity loosened its hold a bit, the earth became springy, the air refreshed and filled his lungs in a way it hadn't before.
He had a sense of déjà vu, though it hadn't been a week since they last ventured on this trail. The pleasures of the run all came back to him, each time like the others but also unique. Same-y, as Mabel said, but also different-y. It was a morning of bright, broken clouds, cool, the ground damp but not muddy underfoot, the June-green trees scenting the air with balsam and pine sap. Birds twittered, woodpeckers rapped, and squirrels chattered as they passed. Their gently rolling trail took them across flower-sprinkled meadows, along the edge of a gurgling creek, and then up a wide, mounded hill knee-deep in sweet-smelling grass. When they crested it, they gazed down into a bowl-like valley where Moon Trap Pond, small and perfectly round, mirror-reflected the sky.
They ran around the pond, then uphill to the Lonesome Man, an anomaly—not a supernatural one, but an archaeological or maybe geological oddity, a standing stone like those you'd find in Brittany and in the British Isles, the ones contemporaneous with the construction of Stonehenge.
Native American legends—supposedly, you could never be sure when any given Gravity Falls legend might actually have been started by Stanley Pines—said the stone was a transformed Chinook warrior or prince whose bride—it was a forced marriage—had fled from him on their wedding night. Both had prayed to the moon for help, and the moon favored her, and to let her escape a match she didn't want, changed him into the six-foot tall, forward-leaning stone.
Unlike the Talking Rock, this one bore no pictographs. It was too far from the Shack to be on the Nature Trail, and so Grunkle Stan hadn't enhanced it.
Still, Dipper kept thinking he ought to come out and examine the Lonesome Man more carefully, perhaps with Grunkle Ford's help.
"So," Wendy said as they started back, "you gonna give me the rest of the lake monster book to read?"
"Got the last three chapters revised," he said. "Let me print them out. You can take them home this evening. Thanks for critiquing."
"I'm not finding much," Wendy said. "'Cept once you slipped up and called Willow Wendy."
"Hard not to," Dipper said. "How's the crush bit?"
Wendy chuckled. "Lots better! Alexis doesn't spend most of his time moping 'cause Willow's too old and cool for him."
"He's still got a crush on her, though," Dipper said.
"Yeah. Give you a few thoughts on that. Not for this book, maybe the next one, 'cause it's like an arc. You gonna deal with Gideon? I noticed you mentioned a kid psychic named Gabriel."
"Don't know if I'm gonna go into the whole Gabriel-loves-Alexa thing so much," Dipper said. "Might embarrass Mabel."
"She's gotta know she's the model for Alexa."
"Oh, she does. But, you know, it was an uncomfortable thing for her. I'm gonna do a haunted wax museum one next, I think. Maybe make Gabriel's crush a little part of that one."
"What're you gonna do when you run through everything that happened that first summer?" Wendy asked.
"Stop writing and retire on my royalties!" Dipper said.
They walked from the bonfire glade back to the Shack, where they had a late breakfast, and Mabel came in for a second breakfast. She again gushed about the movie she and Teek had seen, and Dipper and Wendy said they'd take in a matinee the next day. "Me and Teek will go see it again with you!" Mabel said. "Double date! Wooo!"
It was almost time for Soos and his family to return from Mass when Dipper got a phone call. "Grunkle Ford," he said, recognizing the ring tone. "Hello?"
"Dipper," Ford said, "first of all, I'm all right."
"Huh? What happened?"
Catching Dipper's urgency, Mabel asked, "What?"
Wendy shushed her and looked at Dipper with concern.
Ford was talking: "It's too complicated to explain over the phone. I'm going to drive to the Mystery Shack. I'd bring Stanley, but he and Sheila are off on a weekend trip. Anyway, can you and perhaps Wendy and Mabel make time to hear me out?"
"Yeah, sure," Dipper said. "We've got nearly two hours before the Shack opens."
"I'll be there in ten minutes," Ford promised, and then he hung up.
"Dipper?" Mabel asked.
He shook his head and told them Ford was on his way. "I guess," he finished, "we'll find out what's up when he gets here."
"And when I received the call from London yesterday evening," Ford finished, "I realized that the man I thought was Dr. Helving was an impostor." He looked grim. "I am all but certain the real Dr. Helving died, an apparent suicide. Threw himself off a highway bridge. But I have reason to believe he was under some sort of mind control."
"What, like hypnotized?" Wendy asked.
They were down on the second basement level, clustered around the small conference table. The harsh fluorescent light made them all look pale. Slowly, Ford said, "Not exactly, Wendy. Something like hypnosis, I think, but magically induced. More like the man behind it all had a way of making the real Helving his puppet."
Mabel shot a worried glance at Dipper, who had a strong aversion to puppets. He just shook his head.
"Wait, you lost me, dude," Wendy said. "You got a call from London that came from—who?"
"From Dr. Helving's secretary and assistant, a gentleman named Brierly. Helving had let him know that he would be coming to visit me, and my number and contact information were in Helving's files. Helving was supposed to have called Brierly to let him know his schedule once he'd talked to me, but the call never came. I told Brierly that I had picked Helving up at the airport and that, in fact, the man was probably asleep after all his jet travel, first from London to Chicago for a conference, and then from Chicago to Oregon."
"But that man wasn't Helving?" Dipper asked.
"Assuredly not, Mason. I dropped a chance remark that I'd expected Helving to be older, and Brierly, surprised, asked me how old I thought he was. I guessed fifty. Brierly sent—is the word texted? It is? Odd when it's an image and not actual text, but—anyway, he texted me a photograph, and the old man in the picture was not the man I had driven back from the airport!"
"I think I see where this is going," Mabel said. "Mabel no like!"
"I made a few more calls," Ford said. "To my horror, I learned about the death of a man who had leaped off a highway bridge in Portland. The clincher was that the man apparently had dropped a pair of spectacles with a specific combination of elements in its construction. Brierly had told me that Helving had spent almost the entire past year in Brussels, and the spectacles, I discovered, were available only in Belgium. A Detective Rao in Portland is working on my tip and will attempt to make a DNA identification, but—well, the man's death is my fault, I fear."
"You didn't know," Dipper said.
"Thank you. I should have been more careful after learning that much, but I acted imprudently then," Ford admitted. I'd been up all night, I was racked by guilt at possibly having summoned Dr. Helving to a place where he would meet his death, and by then it was early morning. I knocked on the impostor's door and confronted him. He gave me a gaze of such hatred—I've rarely seen anything like it, even in the War Dimensions. Anyway, I hadn't come armed, and he attempted to ensorcell me."
"The who with the which now?" Mabel asked.
Ford waved his hand. "To—to bewitch me, to place me under a spell. I felt it dragging at my mind, but it couldn't take hold. He did slow me, prevented me from calling for help, long enough for him to flee. He left behind all his luggage—actually, Dr. Helving's luggage. I'm not sure how he escaped, but he got out of the mansion, and by the time I could move freely again, he was gone."
"Wow," Dipper said. "You were lucky."
"I don't think it was luck," Ford said. "I believe it was an effect of the metal plate in my skull. It was strong enough to resist Bill Cipher—and it's certainly strong enough to resist the power of an earthly sorcerer."
"Do you think he got away?" Mabel asked. "Do you need a grappling hook?"
"Thanks for the kind thought, but grappling hooks can't help us now."
"Us?" Wendy asked, reaching to take Dipper's hand.
"Us," Ford said. "I'm afraid we're all in for trouble. I'll tell you about my theory, but first—well, look at this." He reached into his coat and produced a folded piece of paper. "The impostor forgot to pick this up as he ran. He accidentally left it behind."
He unfolded the document and laid it on the table.
"Oh, no," Dipper groaned. "Oh, no, no no!" He felt like someone on a peaceful seashore who had just noticed an enormous, unavoidable dark wave rushing in, ready to crush him. The shore was the present. The wave—the wave was the worst memory the terrified figure on the shore had from the past.
Because the sheet held only one thing—a drawing in black ink, drawn with a broad-nibbed pen. A circle with the rim divided into ten sections. Each section was marked with a rune—and, in nearly calligraphic letters inked in black, a name.
Pines Stl
Pines Stf
Pines Mb
Pines Ms?
Corduroy
Gleeful
Northwest !
McGucket !
Ramirez (?)
Valentino/O'Grady?
"Cipher's Zodiac," Wendy said.
And in a small voice, Mabel said, "Oh, my God. Teek!"
"I think," Ford said heavily, "that we face an adversary who possesses uncanny powers. And I'm afraid we may all be involved in a fight for our very lives."
The End
(But that wave is going to break soon. . . . )