9-In a Fog

"I'm not comfortable with this, Mabel," Elise said.

"You've got to get out of your shell," Mabel said patiently. "Come on. It's not that long a walk."

"I've never walked this far in my life," Elise complained. "We have a chauffeur. Had a chauffeur."

Despite the warm afternoon, despite the blue sky and the songs of birds, Elise trudged along with her shoulders hunched. Mabel had dressed her in ripped jeans, a baggy pale blue top, sneakers, and a blue trucker's cap with a question mark on the front, borrowed from Dipper's closet. He had worn it for the one season he'd played baseball for his high school. As a finishing touch, Elise was wearing an enormous pair of wrap-around sunglasses, Grunkle Stan's. They were designed to fit over his normal glasses, and they hid half of her face.

"Walking gets you in shape," Mabel said cheerfully.

"I ride my ponies for that," Elise muttered gloomily.

"Look around," Mabel said. "See if the town is different from the way you remember it."

"I already know it's different." They were passing Circle Park, and Elise glanced up at the water tower. "Some kid climbed that and spray-painted a cloud with a lightning bolt coming out of it," she said.

"Was his name Bobby?"

"Who knows? I don't associate with many kids in town. I go to the private school in—"

"Oh, lah di dah! No wonder you're such a mopey Molly! Our Pacifica's got her own posse and everything. You don't have any close friends?"

"Well—school friends, you know. Bambi and Trilli and Kati."

"All ending in I, I'll bet!"

"Yes. Why?"

"No reason. Let's go to the mall and try on clothes!"

"Clothes that come off the rack?" Elise asked with a shocked look over the top of the dark glasses.

"Doh, yeah! How else? How do you buy clothes?"

"We have everything tailored," she said.

"Come on. It'll be fun! Hey—we'll start with shoe stores! Or are yours specially made by leprechauns?"

"No, we buy them in—"

"Then come on!" Mabel urged. "Live a little!"

"Well . . .."

Mabel was about as easy to resist as an incoming tide to a sand flea. They walked the roughly mile and a half to the mall—Gravity Mall, singular, in this reality—and Elise kept whimpering a little. "I've never been so tired!"

"Come on!" Mabel urged her cheerfully. "You ride ponies! You play polo! You can dance all night long!"

"Those are different. I enjoy those. I don't enjoy walking uphill and down!"

"Then relax, sister, 'cause we're here! Uh, you do play water polo, don't you?"

"Yes, I do. And regular polo, too."

"Huh. I've always wanted to ask somebody who knew—in water polo, how do you keep the ponies from drowning?"

"Dipper! Talk to me, man! You're scaring me!"

Dipper and Wendy had barely reached the family porch when he staggered and said, "I think I better lie—"

She caught him before he passed out, and despite the difference in their ages and weights, she lifted him onto the saggy old green sofa. "Too hot for you?" she asked, patting his cheek. She kissed him—hard—and drew back. His eyelids fluttered a little and pulsed, as if he were in REM-stage sleep, but he seemed to be unconscious.

"You stay right here!" she said unnecessarily, charging inside. "Stan! Hey, Stan! Are you home? Dipper needs you!"

Stan appeared on the stair landing just outside his room. "Huh? What's the kid done?"

"He fainted or something!" Wendy yelled. "Bring your medical biz and hurry!"

She rushed back to the porch. Dipper lay where she had put him, twitching a little and mumbling something too low for her to hear. "It's gonna be OK, she told him, taking his hand and patting it. "It'll be all right. Stan's coming."

Stan himself came out, without his medical bag or his witch-doctor match. "Too much sun?"

"I don't know! We found that thing and he wouldn't let me carry it, and maybe it was too much for him—" Wendy pointed at the brown case that Dipper had left just at the top of the porch steps. "Do something for him!"

"Wendy, you've been working the appointment and payments desk for a while now. If you haven't caught wise, I'm a fraud, not a doctor! But I got some basics." He took something between the thumb and index fingers of both hands and snapped it. "You do me a favor, go to the kitchen and bring back a big bowl of water with some ice in it. And a washcloth." He started to wave the little ampoule that he'd broken beneath Dipper's nose.

Wendy hurried, sloshing a little in her haste. When she got back, Stan said, "I don't think he's seriously sick. Temp is normal and he reacted to the ammonia, but he didn't come out of it. It's something weird. Something Gravity Falls. Gert the cloth real wet with the cold water and fold it and put it across his forehead. If he don't come around in five minutes, I'll call an ambulance."

"Dipper," Wendy said, "come back. Please come back!"

"Is somebody calling?" one of the older Dippers asked.

Instantly the others began to babble and murmur.

"You guys!" the other older Dipper said. "You're so immature sometimes!"

"Where are we?" one of them asked.

It was so eerie to see them all, a dozen, probably more, at one time. Except for him, every Dipper looked faded, worse than the copy-machine clones. And as for where they were—"Not home," Dipper said.

"Or anywhere!" the other older one said.

One of the younger ones blurted out, "Should it be King's Cross Station?"

Another one punched him on the arm, except the fist went right through. "That's fiction, dummy!"

"Hey, don't call me dummy, you big dummy!"

One of the twelve-year-olds whined, "I wanna go back and see how we do with Wendy!"

"Testing, one two three . . . can all of you hear me? Any of you?"

"Shh!" Instantly all the shushing drowned out the faint voice. "Who's that?" several of the younger ones asked.

"Sheesh!" one of the older Dipper said. "You guys! That's my, our, I guess, great-uncle Stanford!"

"Who?"

"Just shut up for two minutes and listen! We hear you, Great-Uncle Ford!"

"Don't be alarmed. I'm not going to harm you. I'll have to return you within mere minutes. It's vital I speak to the correct Dipper! Are there any eighteen-year-old-Dippers there?"

"Here," two voices said in perfect synch.

"Good! You two, stand shoulder to shoulder and separate yourselves from the younger ones!"

They were the tallest, so they made their way through the mist, waling on mist while breathing mist, until they were a little way apart. The younger ones were complaining: "Boo! No fair!"

"Listen to me carefully," the disembodied voice said. "Do you remember the designation of your dimension? You would have heard it from Probabilator."

"Who?" the younger ones asked.

"Shut up!" the other eighteen-year old said. "Come on, men! Uh, it's Dimension 46 quotation mark backslash."

Dipper said, "That's close, but I remember Dimension 46 apostrophe backslash."

"The second one. Back away until you're out of sight of the others. The others—get close together. I'll be sending you back soon, but I have some instructions. The one from 46'"\, you wait for a few seconds. You can't see me, but you're not abandoned or alone!"

Dipper backed away, still feeling creepy as the others faded back into the mist. He could still hear his great-uncle speaking to them: "This is vitally important. You will find yourself back in Dipper's body, resting. Do not wake up! None of you can wake up! Imagine it's a lucid dream and just keep dreaming. Do you understand?"

There was a ragged chorus of "Yes," and one "No.""

"The one who doesn't understand, how old are you?"

"Twelve!"

"All right. The others, keep him busy with math problems! In a few minutes the other Dipper will be with you with vital news! Concentrate on mathematics until he comes back. Your universe depends on it!"

After a moment of near silence—Dipper could hear a regular rushing sound, his pulse in his ears—the voice said, "You're in dimension dangerously close to ours, Mason. Are the other Dippers visible to you?"

Dipper grimaced. "Uh, they seem to be inside my mind. And when I look into a mirror, I just see myself."

"Good, good. Let me just make certain of one thing. Tell me, who was my false Muse?"

"Bill Cipher," Dipper said. "He tricked you."

"Good. Second, when you and I played Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons, what was the final beast to overcome?"

"The Impossibeast," Dipper said. "Unless you mean Probabilator, but he was our opponent."

"And I had a problem with that because—"

"The Impossibeast was banned from the game, except in the controversial nineties edition."

"Very well. There are subtle differences in other dimensions for those two variables. I suppose in the dimension you find yourself in—and I'm virtually certain it's 46"\-has analogues of the people you know?"

"Yes. There's Zeus and Grunkle Stan, except his name's spelled differently, S-t-a-n-e-l-e-y. And Zeus is basically Soos, and Wendy is Wendy, and Mabel is Mabel. But I'm six years older than she is!"

"Not uncommon . Time variants among dimensions are often a component of dimensional separation. However, this is vital, there are no duplicates, correct? Only one you, though with others in your mind. No physical duplicates?"

"No. Oh, wait! This dimension has a Pacifica, but another one showed up, calling herself Elise. She's like a twin of Pacifica, but she's not from this dimension—"

"Oh, my word! Remember this, Mason: You must not let Elise and Pacifica touch! When the dimensions are only one step apart, their physical touching would be like matter touching antimatter—both would be annihilated, and what's worse, that is likely to set off a chain reaction that might destroy both their and our dimensions."

"I'll remember, but Elise is staying at the Shack—"

"Time's growing short. This takes a lot of energy. I believe that the blending of dimensional elements must have been triggered by Portals in all of our dimensions resonating—"

"Stan has experimented with the Portal here, switching it on. It's not finished, but he's warmed it up."

"Oh, no. The dimensions must be unscrambled, and he only way to do that—I can't tell you exactly, not yet! Do you have all three of the Journals?"

"Just one and three."

"Listen. In a dimension as close as that one, you will find Journal Two stored in an unused room in the attic of the elementary school. It is in the east end, and it's sealed off. Once it was the housing for an exhaust fan. Remove the plywood hatch and then pry up the bottom plank in the recess. I will try to get a message to you with specifics, but at least Stan can complete the wiring. I'll have to let you go in a moment. You're in a sort of null-space lying between your own dimension and the Nightmare Realm."

"I see the others."

"Quickly, join them. Only three seconds left here."

Dipper jogged three steps. One of the younger Dippers complained, "I haven't had Trig yet!"

Ford's voice called, "Cluster together, close as you can get!"

"Hey!"

"I don't like me touching me!"

"We have really big heads!"

"What's happen—"

"—ing?"

"Dipper! Are you OK?"

"Wendy! I'm sorry—"

"Hey, Stan! Don't call the ambulance! He's awake again!"

Stan came out onto the porch. "I knew he'd be OK. The Pines guys have hard heads! So what happened to you, kid? Fall out of a tree?"

"No, it's complicated." He sat up. "Uh, where is Mabel?"

Stan said, "She and that Elise girl went to the Mall. Shoe stores, betcha anything. Girls and shoes, sheesh!"

"Don't be sexist, man," Wendy complained.

"We've got to find them," Dipper said. "As quick as we can!"

"Why?" Stan asked.

"Because if we don't, it's the end of the world!"

"Drive us, Stan!" Wendy said.

"I don't got my pants on!"

"Then let me borrow your keys!"

"Are you nuts? You're fifteen! You aint' even got a license!" Stan pointed toward the parking lot. "Take SZeus's truck! He usually leaves the keys in it!"

Wendy grabbed Dipper's hand. "Come on, man! You can explain on the way!"

They set off at a run for the truck, while Dipper heard in his head a clamor of questions. They were all from him, or different versions of him, and not a one of them, including him, had any answers.