Apparition
(October 25-31, 2014)
8 Interference
Davies turned the Duesenberg around in the school parking lot, and Dipper noticed the black, boxy Model T already parked where the older Mabel had told him to expect it. Braking, Davies stopped the car and got out to open the back door for the girls. "Mr. Flannigan told me to return promptly at ten o'clock to return you home," he said. "I'll expect you to be ready, Miss."
"I know," Angelique said carelessly. "The dance will be over then, anyhow. We'll be here, Davies. We'll wait out in front of the gym under the light. That's all."
"Yes, Miss."
Dipper had opened his own door and had come around the back of the car. "Thank you for driving us," he said.
Looking a bit surprised, Davies said, "Of course, young sir. Is the building even open? We're early."
"It's open," Angelique said. "The decoration committee will be there anyway. Come on."
She led them about fifty steps away and into the gymnasium, where crepe-paper orange and black streamers had been swagged overhead, leading up to three-dimensional hanging crepe-paper pumpkins a more ferocious orange than any real pumpkin could hope to achieve. All around the walls, cardboard cutouts of owls and bats flew escort for silhouettes of witches astride broomsticks. A woman teacher who had been chatting to a thick-set middle-aged man in a dark suit saw them and came over. "We're really not starting for another fifteen minutes," she said. "But you're welcome to sit here and wait." She pointed to a row of chairs along the wall.
"All right," Angelique said. "Oh, Mrs. Mallory, this is Mabel and Dipper Pines. They're from California and they're staying with us for a few days."
Mrs. Mallory, not elderly but perhaps prematurely gray, gave them a quick smile and nod, and they went to the chairs as she returned to the man teacher she had been talking to. "Come on, Mabel," Angelique said. "Bring the purse."
"Where are you going?" Dipper asked, a little apprehensively.
"To change," Angelique said. She led Mabel through an archway and turned left to the girls' room, and the two of them vanished inside.
Dipper sat and kept his gaze glued to the door—if Angelique came out through the archway and turned right, she'd be heading out of the gym, and he'd have to stop her, somehow. Plan E, maybe.
Minutes passed. He began to feel antsy, but then Chazz walked in, wearing a white shirt and black slacks, a gray sweater instead of a jacket, and a blue tie much too long for him. Dipper got up and met him. "Another five or six minutes," he said, answering the question in Chazz's eyes. "Angelique is changing. Uh, I was in your class today."
"I remember you and your sister," Chazz told him. He shook Dipper's hand. "Uh—is Angelique coming?"
"She's here already," Dipper said. "She and my sister are in the girls' room—no, look, here they come."
Chazz turned and Dipper heard him catch his breath. Angelique had changed from the white dress to the scarlet one, and she walked with a definite, feline sway, a smile on her newly-painted red lips. In her confidence and poise, though not in looks, she reminded Dipper strongly of Pacifica.
Angelique came close and twirled, showing off. "Hi, Chazz. Dipper, how do I look?"
"Fantastic," Dipper said.
Chazz just said, "Wowee."
Angelique giggled. "Oh, look, people are showing up," she said as a laughing crowd of teens spilled through the gym doors. Across the wide floor a bandstand had been set up, and a little group of musicians had been tuning their instruments—a clarinet, a trumpet, a couple of saxes, an upright bass, a simple drum set, and two guys with ukuleles. Off to one side, a pianist sat at a baby grand. One of the guys with the ukes said something, and the group began a tune that sounded familiar to Dipper, though he couldn't quite put a title to it.
"That's an old song," Angelique complained.
"What is it?" Mabel asked.
Sounding surprised, both Angelique and Chazz said "'Sweet Georgia Brown!'" Then they looked at each other and smiled.
"Hey," Dipper said, "Look, a few people are dancing. Angelique, Chazz, why don't you show Mabel and me the steps? We, uh, we didn't get to dance much in California. We'll watch you and pick it up."
"I'm not a very good dancer," Chazz said. Mabel gave him a hard look, and he coughed, "But if you want to try it, Angelique, I know you're good, so I'll try to keep up."
"Why not?" Angelique said. "Only I hope they know some more hep stuff!"
They went out onto the floor, burst into wild gyrations, and Mabel said, "She wants to be about five years older than she is, I think."
"That's some dance," Dipper murmured. Oh, he'd seen Mabel do the Macarena, the Dougie, Gangnam Style, and even the wormy dance, and this one wasn't perhaps as off-beat as those, but it involved a lot of side-by-side high-stepping, an assortment of side-kicking, and a frenzy of waving their hands in the air.
"It's the Charleston, I think," Mabel said over the music.
"Didn't they do any slow dancing back in the 1920s?" Dipper asked.
"Mm-oh," Mabel said with a shrug. "I guess we'll find out." She grabbed his hand. "C'mon, Brobro, let's fit a carpet!"
"I think that's 'cut a rug,'" Dipper said, but he followed her and tried to match the moves that Angelique, dancing with wild abandon a few steps away, was doing. It put him about a beat behind the music, but from the looks of the other dancers, that didn't matter much.
Mabel, as usual, was doing the dance the Mabel way—meaning jumping jacks, pendulum-arms, head bobs, and rhythmic kicking. To Dipper's mild surprise, some guys who had been leaning against the wall straightened up and started clapping along in time to Mabel's calisthenics. "Hotcha!" one of them yelled. They all grinned appreciatively.
The music wound down, and Dipper, winded, walked off the floor and over to an empty spot on the wall. A boy asked Mabel for the next dance, and she agreed. The pianist took the lead, and the boy led Mabel into a dance that Dipper recognized—a fox trot—because Mabel had watched "Hey, America, Dance!" on TV and one of the competitions had been all about that step. She wasn't too shabby at it, but Chazz and Angelique were better.
When that one ended, Mabel, Angelique, and Chazz came walking over, laughing, and stopped at a table nearby for paper cups of punch. Dipper joined them. "You guys are good," he said.
"Guys?" asked Angelique, sounding offended. "What about us?"
"Oh, Angie," Mabel said, "in California, 'guys' means everybody, boys and girls alike."
"That sounds goofy to me," she said, but she was smiling.
"What was the tune?" Dipper asked. "The fox trot?"
"Another old one," Angelique complained. 'Horses.' I wish they'd play some new music!"
As if a genie had heard, her wish was granted. The band struck up another number and one of the ukulele players began to sing "Bye, By, Blackbird."
"That's pretty new!" Chazz said. "Want to—"
"Yes!" Angelique said, and they took to the dance floor again.
"Here, Brobro," Mabel said, handing Dipper a Dixie cup of pink lemonade. "I think we pulled it off! Here's to the Mystery Twins!"
"Huh," Dipper said. "I didn't know they'd invented paper cups in the 1920s." He tapped the rim of his cup against hers. "Mystery Twins!"
Outside, Mabel II and the older Pacifica waited in the Model T. "It's time," Pacifica said, checking her wristwatch.
"You're right," Mabel said. "I see the Stutz down the street."
The car was passing through the yellow cone of streetlight illumination. It was a dark maroon 1925 Stutz coupe with a rumble seat, and it was cruising slowly. Both women slouched down in their seats as the Stutz approached. The coupe turned in at the parking lot and double-parked right in front of the Model T, blocking it in. The guy who climbed out from behind the steering wheel was a hulking boy, built like a football player—which he had been until his grades made him ineligible. Then he had dropped out of school. This was Butch.
His two buddies, Creighton "Crash" Collins and Mike Kowalczyk, clambered out after him. "She gonna be here?" one of them, probably Crash, asked.
"Yeah," Butch said.
The third boy sounded uneasy: "Butch, this could land us in hot water. I mean, she's somebody, she's the bank guy's kid—"
"And my uncle's the Deputy Chief of Police," Butch said. "What's the matter, Mikey? You turning yellow?"
"Aw, no, Butch," the third boy whined. "But you know you can't go in there. Old man Larraby always watches the doors, and he knows you ditched school last year."
"Which is why you're goin' in to get her, Mikey," Butch said. "You're still in school."
"Yeah, but—"
Butch cut him off: "The girl's curious. She ain't never been to a jazz party. I'm gonna show her what it's all about."
"Yeah," Mike persisted, "but she don't know how rough a joint Harry's is, and I'll bet she don't know she'll be the only regular girl there—"
Crash punched his shoulder. "Wise up," he said. "How's she gonna be any good to Butch without she gets a little encouragement from Harry's hookers?"
"Yellow," Butch said with a sneer.
"Naw, I'm not," Mike said. "It's just—we could land in big trouble."
"Nix on that. You just get her outside the building, and then you can go your merry way. You don't gotta go to the party with us." Butch pounded his right fist into his left palm a couple of times. "Do I gotta persuade you?"
"No, no, I'll go get her." Mike hesitated. "You mean it? Once she gets outside, it's jake for me to go?"
"Go, stay, what do I care?" Butch said. "I just want the girl."
"OK, OK, I'm going," Mike said. "Hey, before I do, gimme a fag, OK? Calm my nerves a little."
The three went to the deep shadows under a tree—the sun was down and the October night was coming on fast—and from their seat in the Model T, Mabel II and Pacifica saw the flare of a match.
"Three on a match," Pacifica said. "That means bad luck, right?"
"I dunno. Never smoked, never wanted to."
"OK, this time Chazz is here at the dance," Pacifica murmured nervously. "Maybe that'll scare Mike off. If she doesn't come out in seven and a half minutes, they won't make it to the railroad crossing when the train roars through, and there'll be no crash."
"We can't let her go with these boys even if she comes out late," Mabel insisted. "What Butch has planned for her maybe won't kill her outright, but it'll ruin her life."
"We don't know for sure. Maybe it'll work out. She needs her sister."
"If she can hang on until December, she'll get her. We've run the simulations. You know her sister's going to leave Vassar and come home."
Pacifica whispered, "But if Angelique gets to that party and Butch gets her drunk—"
"Yeah, then even December will be too late for her."
"We could block the drive. I think there's room."
Mabel sighed. "No direct interference from TPAES. You know what Blendin said. We can't personally interact with these guys to keep Angelique and Butch apart. Major paradoxes. We couldn't even get Mabel and Dipper back to their own time line if we did that."
"I know, I know—look, somebody threw down a cigarette."
Mabel peered through the darkness. "Mike. He's heading into the gym. The other two guys aren't looking this way. Let's go. You made the call for Plan B?"
"Yes. They should show up pretty soon. Quiet, now."
The women opened the doors of the Model T and then shut them silently as they stepped down. They had already picked an observation point across the street from the school, and they walked to the far side of the parking lot, keeping cars between them and Butch and Crash. Then they crossed the quiet street, empty except for little bunches of trick-or-treaters two blocks down, and came back along the other side, turning to walk across the lawn of a darkened house to a bench that had some cover from a hedge. They sat side by side.
"Two more minutes," Pacifica said. "You're sure the people who own this house—"
"They won't be back until nearly midnight. Nobody will spot us."
They waited.
"Only twenty seconds," Pacifica said. "I think we did it."
"No," Mabel II said in a dull voice. "I see her in the doorway. There she is. They got her."