Mabel and Teek's Excellent Adventure
(July 4, 2014)
Chapter 3
The straggly, overgrown path the Sand Witch had pointed out veered off the oxcart path to the left, toward the spot where in real life the water tower would have stood, approximately. Mabel pushed into it and found the experience like walking into a roofless tunnel.
Young Douglas firs, six and eight feet tall, crowded in on either side, and the path became twisty, which meant they couldn't see ahead. It was a little bit like visiting a Christmas-tree farm run by a mildly deranged farmer. And though they couldn't see anything ahead, they could hear chattering squirrels, the twittering of chickadees, and the incessant drumming of distant woodpeckers. The air smelled piny.
"Smells and sounds like home, anyway," Teek said. "Uh—Mabel? Any idea where we might be?"
"Nope," Mabel replied with serene confidence. "We may be on a different planet. Heck, we may have traveled back in time! Or forward!"
"Or sideways," Teek muttered.
Mabel, in the lead, looked back over her shoulder at him. "Sideways? Come again?"
"Well—I don't think we've gone back in time, or if we have, at least not very far. The landforms are just the same as they've always been. I mean, I saw that there's no railroad bridge at High Bluff any longer, but the shape of the cliffs is the same as at home. So we're in the same geologic era, I think. Uh, I guess we might possibly have gone back to pre-Colombian times, but I don't think so."
"Wait a sec." Mabel's sweater—blue, with a white circle and a red skyrocket on the front—had snagged on a twining briar, and she paused to untangle it. "There. Why don't you think we're in pre-whatever times?"
Teek pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "Because that lady spoke English, and it sounded contemporary."
Mabel stopped and turned to face him, head tilted, eyebrow lifted, a quizzical smile on her face. "Huh. You remind me so much of somebody!"
"The babe?" Teek asked with a crooked return smile.
Mabel frowned in puzzlement. "You remind me of my—wait, what? What do you mean? What babe?"
Teek's grin widened. "The babe with the power!"
Mabel tilted her head the other way, her eyes narrowing. "What power?"
Looking very pleased with himself, Teek shot back, "The power of hoodoo!"
She punched his arm. "You're being silly! I like that! Do it more often. But not now, we've got a baby to save. Let's go." She turned and shoved into the overgrown path again, springy boughs brushing both arms—it had become that narrow.
They continued, through grass that now grew knee-high. In a disappointed sort of voice, Teek told her, "You're supposed to ask 'Hoodoo?' and then I say 'You do!'"
"Yeah," Mabel said, shrugging as she walked. "Bummer, huh? What you gonna do?"
"It's just that I—I . . . was getting at something," Teek said quietly. Now they were hardly on a path anymore, just pushing their way through—slap!—Mabel had let go of a fir branch and it smacked Teek in the face. He spluttered a little, spitting Douglas fir needles.
"Whatever," Mabel said. "You should speak up. Anyway, let's talk about it after we find Little Soos. Whoa!"
They had suddenly emerged from the overgrown trail into a clearing. In the center of the grassy space—and the grass looked neatly mowed and tended here—someone had spread a long, ornate table, big enough to accommodate a dinner party of at least a dozen people—lace-trimmed gold-and-white damask tablecloth, dainty blue-and-white teapots and cups, plates piled high with cakes and snacks.
Six or seven chairs stood around the table at irregular intervals, haphazardly, some of them not even facing the table. Mabel caught tantalizing whiffs of strawberry and vanilla and chocolate. And someone was audibly munching, but they could see nobody.
"Ghosts," Mabel said with a firm nod, crossing her arms and staring around the table. "Probably Category 3!" She sniffed. "Though I don't smell any body odor. Do you?"
Self-consciously, Teek raised his right arm and sniffed. "Um—not much. I, um, sometimes around girls I feel kind of sweaty and awk—"
She elbowed him. "Not you, dum-dum! Category 3 ghosts are almost always invisible, but they reek! I mean, it's all there in the Journal—wait, you haven't read that, sorry. Anyway, they're always hungry. Come on, let's see."
They circled the table at a short distance. The nom-nom-nom sounds continued, but no visible person was eating—and if it was an invisible ghost, it didn't seem to be making any inroads on the food. Everything stayed in place, the only movement the gentle swaying of the tablecloth on one end as a light breeze played with it.
"Anybody here?" Mabel called. Then she giggled. "Excuse me! I meant to ask 'Is anyONE here!"
"Not a soul!" came a high-pitched, sweet voice from thin air.
"So not a ghost," Teek said.
Mabel approached the table. At one place setting, the only one with a chair actually squared up to the table, a luscious-looking chocolate cake waited temptingly, knife and fork on either side. It was not a birthday-cake sized confection, but a small three-layer cake, just about right for one person, round and gleaming in the yellow morning light. The frosting had twisty piping around the edges and a fat brown rose in the center. "This thing," Mabel said to Teek, "is moving!"
They looked hard at it. The top of the cake bulged and sank—in exact rhythm to the "yum-yum" sounds. "I think it may be eating something," Teek said.
Leaning even closer, they kept a sharp watch on the confection.
The cake spun on its plate and opened the space between the two bottom layers. From the crevice came the high voice again: "Would you mind! It's very rude to stare!"
"The cake," Teek said with a sigh, "is talking."
"Excuse me," Mabel said to it, "is this your tea party?"
This time the voice was less sweet, more frosty: "Certainly! Who do you think laid the table?"
Teek pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. "You," he said in a dull voice, his eyes squeezed shut. "Because you're a layer cake."
The nom-nom sounds continued, but no answer came. Teek asked, "Am I right?" He opened his eyes. "Hey—where did it go?"
"Mm-oh," Mabel said, licking her fingers. "Come on, we're wasting time."
"You—you didn't!"
"'S been a while since breakfast," Mabel said. "Anyway, I didn't like its tone. Sounded kind of like a half-baked cynic to me. Get it?"
"Please."
"Relax, at least I saved you from some awful puns. Let's see—that's the way we came into the clearing . . . "
"This kind of confirms my guess, though," Teek said, taking a handkerchief from his jeans pocket and polishing his spectacles.
Mabel burped. "What guess is that?"
"Well, think about it. Back there we met a Sand Witch. I don't know what the Sand means, but that sounds like somebody from a fairy tale."
"Ugh!" Mabel said, finally discovering where the path opened up again on the far side of the clearing. "Fairies! Don't get me started on fairies!"
"And this is clearly a mad tea party," Teek continued. "I think we must be in a pocket dimension with physics based on fantasy concepts."
"You know, that's so close to being interesting," Mabel said. "So, what? We're gonna run into a bunch of rip-off characters from kids' books?"
"Mabel, I don't know! But maybe there's a kind of—" Teek floundered a little with the words—"of echo, or resonance, or something. Like maybe we might run into someone a whole lot like Snow White—"
"I'd prefer the Beast from the movie. And not the guy! He was tons hunkier as the Beast!"
"Never mind," Teek said. "I was just telling you what I think."
"And I think we're on a path through the woods! It's widening out again, and now we're going uphill, did you notice? We're bound to come out somewhere!"
Ten minutes of steady climbing, and they emerged on a rounded hilltop. "Whoa!" Teek said.
Mabel gasped. "Check it out!"
They stood on a low summit that, in their world, overlooked Gleeful's Used Car Lot. Beyond it should have stood the town of Gravity Falls, Instead, they saw—
"A castle!" Mabel exclaimed.
So it was, a turreted and crenellated collection of round towers of light-tan sandstone, with the conical roofs making it look almost like a collection of Fourth-of-July rockets pointing due up. It should have looked majestic, but somehow missed that and settled for brooding. And looming. It loomed and brooded with the best of its kind. Maybe Dracula's castle might have rivaled it, but this place was broody and loomy as anybody could want.
It stood atop the butte where in the actual Gravity Falls, Northwest Manor had been built. And here the whole town had either vanished or had been transformed into a bewildering maze of paths surrounding the castle mount, a baffling warren of stone-walled, bifurcating, intersecting passageways, cut by four concentric, irregular circles of taller walls. For some reason the sky, blue (or actually a kind of pale green in the yellow light, but Mabel thought of it as blue) and clear before, now lowered down ominously, copper-colored smudgy clouds shot through with dark-gray streaks.
"Oh, yeah," Teek said, standing beside Mabel. "I've seen this movie. Kidnapped baby, population of goblins, David Bowie as the Goblin King!"
"I remember that!" Mabel said. "Such tight pants!"
". . . and he did tricks with crystal balls, too," Teek said.
Mabel nudged him and whispered, "You think there's a connection between his balls and ours?"
"I," said Teek with what dignity he could muster, "am not even going to answer that."
"It doesn't look exactly friendly, does it? So, you suppose Little Soos is in there?"
"I don't have any way of knowing that," Teek muttered. He sighed. "I suppose we have to go check it out, though."
"Sure!" Mabel said, slapping him on the back in encouragement. "What's the worst that could happen?"
He bent over to pick up his glasses. "Um, well, we could both die. And, by the way—ouch!"
Not far from the foot of the hill they found a paved, or at least well-tamped, road that led to the fifteen-foot surrounding wall and the gateway into the maze. As they approached it, Mabel did an air-punch and said, "Hah! Yes! I knew it!" She pointed to a big square stone embedded in the wall close to the gate. It had been deeply engraved with the inscription
THIS LABYRINTH
CONSTRVCTED BY THE FIRM
OF LOOM & BROOD, LTD
ENJOY YOVR UISIT
The arched gateway beckoned. Unfortunately, at the same time it also held up its stern other hand as a warning to keep away: the gate, made of some heavy, dark, and immensely solid-looking wood, had been closed, barred, and padlocked in five different places. A piece of yellow paper with untidy hand-printing on it had been tacked to it with a push-pin, the head of the pin a miniature grinning skull.
Mabel and Teek approached, and she plucked the card off the gate, tearing it free of the pin. "Huh," she said.
"What does it say?" Teek asked.
She handed it to him. He read what she had already read:
The Mangements is NOTT Responsybul 4
Lost babbies
Evil curseses
Magical Screatures
Reins of todes
Lost babbies
Randum fire balls
Gobblin attacks
Or
Wot is a bout 2 happen 2 U!
Pleeze go a way if you
know wot is good for you
r else dropp ded. Thank
you for yur copper ation.
PS No! Smokeing!
"Better put this back," Teek said, leaning forward and pulling out the push-pin that had held it.
He made a surprised yelping sound and dropped straight down into the earth through a cleverly concealed trap door.
Which closed immediately and ceased to exist as a trap door, though it continued its life as a very solid paving stone apparently fully satisfied with its position and career prospects, at least as far as Mabel could judge from its smug expression.
She had seen her share of fantasy movies. She knew here she was supposed to yell Teek's name, fall on the ground, scrabble with her fingers uselessly but frantically at the obdurate, silent stone, perhaps even burst into tears of rage, frustration, and fear.
However—"Gonna flip the script," she muttered, her face set not in fright but in an expression of extreme annoyance. And as Dipper could tell you, that was not something the average fantasy villain (or brother) would care to face.
"OK, Soosie, Teek, hang on. Mabel's coming for you!"
She whipped out that which she was never without, yelled, "Grappling hook!", fired it up to the top of the encircling wall, and then zipped straight up.
Mabel was ready to rumble.