Lab Brat

I've been here before.

I didn't even know this was here!

Wendy wants to be my girlfriend!

Guys, shut up, shut up, let's think!

LET'S?

Dipper had to lean against the wall, clasping Journal 3 to his chest. Everything spun around, and he took deep breaths to steady himself. He told himself, himselves, whoever, If I can't even do this, how can I let Wendy go into the bunker?

He pushed the elevator button, and the doors immediately opened. Well, of course they would. That was the best way up from the lower levels.

It goes lower?

Dipper did his best to ignore the voices inside him. He pressed the bottom button and had a claustrophobic moment of gasping while the elevator, always fast, seemed to drop straight down. Then it stopped with a bounce, the doors opened again and he stepped out, fortunately glimpsing the switches across from the elevator before the doors closed again and shut off the elevator light. Dipper groped and found the switches, pushed all four up, and the overhead lights flickered on.

To his left the corridor led ahead, with two doors opening off to the right and then a straight stretch to a darkened room. He paused two-thirds of the way to the end, shocked momentarily by the fact that in a sort of enclosure just off the corridor, he was looking at the bottom-most section of the totem pole.

It looked like the Native American creature from mythology, the Thunderbird. Huh. He'd never thought about it being partially buried.

He looked back. The corridor was larger than he'd first thought.

This is like a tunnel! It's a long way from the Shack!

Beside the doorway into the darkened room, the last door to his left led into a control area, not much bigger than a very small walk-in closet. Some indicator lights glowed on a panel, but he couldn't find the room light switch. He had to take out his flashlight—not the size-altering one.

Size-altering? What's a size-altering flashlight?

Shut up! Look on the shelf—right there, the book at the end—

Shaking a little, Dipper pulled out a maroon-colored book. Bronze protectors on the edges. A bronze six-fingered handprint on the front.

With a great big numeral 1 on the front.

He opened it and read in a familiar handwriting,

Today I have officially moved into my new home here in Gravity Falls, Oregon. I should have begun this Journal earlier, really. I have been living in a boarding house on Lake Street for three months while a local builder, Boyish Dan Corduroy, constructed this snug, comfortable log cabin. He wondered why I specified such a deep basement. Little does he know that I fully intend to enlarge it!

With my quasi-government contacts from grad school, I have arranged for special equipment, the dimensional excavator (it removes soil and stone and projects it into an alternate reality, though it will not work on any living matter) and a clandestine construction team. Within a year I shall have an enormous secret laboratory for my experiments, collections, and research.

Already I have discovered that my expectations were quite correct. Gravity Falls is an excellent choice of locations in which to investigate the occult, the paranormal, and the just plain weird! I have glimpsed a forest giant, I suspect that one of the closets on the upper level of my house is haunted, and I have heard tales of "little men of the forest," a lake monster, and other very interesting subjects. I have visions of winning the Paranobel Prize in the not-too-distant future!

Meanwhile, because of feeling uncomfortable in front of the camera, I have decided to discontinue my video notes and instead record everything in a Journal, or perhaps set of Journals. They are more portable, not dependent on battery power, and more readily accessed!

"What?" Dipper asked aloud. Video notes? He had never seen any—

A drop of perspiration splatted onto the desktop. He rubbed his face. His hand came away dripping. Hot in here!

Then he blinked at his hand.

I have five fingers!

And suddenly he didn't quite know how to move them or pick up anything. While he sat trying to process that, he heard a high-pitched buzzing. It came from—

Oh, no.

He moved his gaze away from his palm and stared through the glass partition into the next, last, and largest room. No overhead lights were on there, but it was very dimly illuminated somehow.

In the depths of his mind, he recognized it. On the far wall hung a sizable inverted-triangle structure with a circular hole in the center. The whole thing glowed a pulsing, faint blue. And hummed.

He's activating it already!

The Portal.

Dipper's heart pounded so hard it felt as if it were trying to smash its way out of his ribcage. Was the Portal about to—

No, no, it wasn't cycling, just humming. Gravity was normal, no levitation, no anomalies. A test warm-up, maybe?

Leaning close to the glass window and being careful not to touch any controls, Dipper looked around the room. A few flickering lights, all except one orange and that one red. So . . . standby phase, maybe? He looked around the control chamber at ranks of monitors and dials, could make nothing of them, and then decided that Stan wouldn't miss Volume 1 if he borrowed it. Maybe. Possibly.

With both books under his arm, Dipper started back down the corridor. He opened the next door on the way and peeked inside. An overhead light came on automatically as the door opened. Motion detector, maybe.

He entered a mini-library. Ranks of floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up two-thirds of the floor space. Single ones stood against the opposite walls, and back-to-back double ones, for a total of six, were just far enough apart to allow a man to slip between and browse. Dipper couldn't resist, and he started with the one against the left wall.

Typical for Stanford. Or in this reality, Staneford. According to most of the spine, the books were arranged by authors in alphabetical order—Aabas, Aadensen, Aammon, and so on and so on. The volumes ranged from the size of a paperback to tall folios.

The titles were international, and some of the books were ancient, their spines crumbly and the inks or gold leaf had faded or flaked away until the titles remained readable only when they had been embossed. Των πνευμάτων και του βασιλείου των νεκρών. Russian? Greek or something? Hmm. Orbis invisibilis. That one he knew—Latin, "The Invisible World."

His great-uncle had some books that, Dipper suspected, were so ancient they must be valuable. He found an original copy of DAEMONOLOGY, IN FORME A DIALOGUE, 1603. It was possibly the only book about demons and witches ever written by a King of England. He found a translation of Malleus Malificarvm, "The Hammer of Witches," by Montgomery Summers.

I've read that one! In my reality, it's by Montague Summers. No, Montague Springle. No, Montclair Sumners!

Shut up, guys, and let me think! This is like arguing with my clones!

I have CLONES?

Though the books stood in ABC order—he found a whole shelf full of Anonymous—they varied wildly in subject from one volume to the next. Books on UFOs, one entitled Quantum, Superstrings, and the Multiverse, hundreds of others.

A natural bookworm, part of Dipper, or maybe parts, wanted to look through them. However, time was passing, and Dipper didn't want to hang around down here much longer. He turned to leave, opened the door and froze.

Grunkle Stan stood in the corridor, his fists on his hips, glaring. "Ya had to come down here, didn't ya?" he asked. "Didja know I'm a fortune teller? I see a bus ticket in your future, kid. Like tomorrow morning! I—"

Dipper held up Journal 3. "I came to show you this," he said. "I think you need it."

Stan grabbed the book from him. "Three," he said, his voice tense. "So where's number two?"

"I think, uh—I think someone in town has that one," Dipper said. "Grunkle Stan, you can't send me home, not yet! You need my help!"

"Come with me," Stan said. "This way."

Dipper expected to follow him upstairs, but instead he stopped on the top lab level and had Dipper sit on a tall stool at a lab table. Stan stood on the other side, thumbing through Volume 3. "I knew my brother hid this somewhere out in the woods, but I never knew where to look, and there's a lotta woods out there. How'd you find it?"

"By accident," Dipper said. "Look, did you turn on the Portal recently?"

Stan just glared at him for so long that Dipper started to fear that a rant was coming. When the old man spoke, though, his voice sounded on edge but under control: "I ain't got enough fuel to bring it all the way to full power, plus there's no user manual. I've found a search mode that looks through all the dimensions or whatever for a target, and then there's supposedly an extraction mode that pulls the target back home again. I ain't figured those two out, so I've just tested the basic circuit. Did that last weekend the first time and repeated it three times now. So what?"

"I think that's what screwed up my mind," Dipper said. "I think maybe the Grunkle Stans in maybe a dozen other dimensions did the same thing at the same time, I guess? And I think their doing that somehow pulled Elise through from her universe—she's the daughter of that world's Southeast family, only there's already one daughter here, and that family thought she was an impostor or something and kicked her out. I didn't exactly get pulled through myself, but in my head there's at least one me that's twelve years old and another one that' in his teens and maybe even more of them—it's hard to explain."

"It's nuts, is what it is," Stan said. "So the other, um, Dippers, they—"

"Two or three of them were twelve years old. They and their Mabels are twins, and in their worlds they don't know anything about the Portal yet. In at least one of them, the one that I came from, though—" he frowned, but it was like trying to grab hold of a forgotten dream—"I think I'm eighteen, like here, and in that one, um, back when I was twelve, you brought your brother home again."

Stan looked from his face to the two Journals and back again. "Really?" he asked, his voice rough. "I succeeded?"

Dipper nodded. "You did, but it was real hard. It was a mess. In the end, though, you and Ford, uh. Saved the world."

Stan blinked. "You're kidding me."

Dipper shook his head. "Look in my eyes, Grunkle Stan. Do you really think I'm a liar?"

Their gazes locked. Finally, with a deep sigh, Stan said, "I dunno."

"At least don't send me home. Let me help. I want to find a way back to my reality, too. If you don't want to let me help out, at least let me stay for the summer. Please."

"Ugh, that word again! Ya know what the P word means, Dipper? It means 'I'm too weak to take what I want!'"

Dipper gripped the edge of the table, hard. "I think it means 'Let me help. We're family.'"

Stan winced as if Dipper had punched him in the gut. He rubbed his chin and shook his head. "I dunno," he repeated. "At least I'll think about it over the weekend. Monday after work we'll talk."

"In the meantime, can I come back down here?"

"No!" Stan said. "It's way too dangerous! Heck, I don't even understand most of the junk that my brother stowed down here! You stay outa the basement, or you go home, got it?"

Dipper nodded. "Um—one thing. Grunkle, uh, Staneford mentioned in one of the Journals that he made a video recording?"

"Them? Yeah, about three or four of 'em."

"Could I see them?"

Stan went over to a desk shoved against a wall and pulled out a deep drawer, obviously designed to hold hanging files. Instead he took out three black plastic boxes. "These are them. Good luck, kid! Knock yourself out."

Dipper took them and felt his heart drop. "Betamax?" he asked. "Is that even a thing anymore?"

"If it was," Stan said, "I'd tell you where you could find a player."

To be continued