Beware the Banshee
Chapter 2
"So . . . here you go," Dipper said, standing on the front porch of the Shack and reaching over to put the trapper hat on Wendy. He couldn't help smiling like a kid on Christmas morning. "Sweet. Now you look like my Lumberjack Girl again."
She popped his trucker hat onto him and tilted it at a rakish angle. "And now you're the old Dipper. 'Cept taller and broader in the shoulders."
"And with a firmer butt!" Mabel called from the side yard. "Am I right, friends?" Waddles and Widdles oinked agreement, or at least oinked.
"Mabel!" Dipper said.
She peeped around the corner, her grin, now brighter and without braces, shining. "Go on and smooch her, brobro!" she urged. "Grunkle Stan's got the engine running. She has to go!"
"I wouldn't mind a little smooch," Wendy said with her lovely, slightly lopsided smile, and so they gave each other a little peck on the lips, a token of—Dipper hoped—more to come.
"Hey," he said, walking her to the car, "you try to get some rest."
"You too, Dip. 'Cuz I'll be over tomorrow at seven-thirty for our workout and run!"
"Oh, man! But OK, it's a date," he said, opening the car door for her. "Until then, Assistant Manager Corduroy."
"Such a gentleman!" Stan said from behind the wheel. "Hey, Wendy, I tossed your overnight bag in the backseat. Don't let me drive off an' forget to let you get it out."
"I'll remind you," Wendy said. "OK, Stan, let's go see if my brothers burned the house down while I was gone."
Dipper closed the door and waved as Stan drove her away.
Soos, Melody, Abuelita, and the baby took off for Mass about eight-fifteen, and Mabel, who never seemed to run down, said she was going to get some exercise with her pigs, so Dipper went up to the attic.
He didn't go to his room, but sat on the window seat—the one from which he'd spied on Mabel and "Norman" the Gnome-man back early in the kids' first summer in Gravity Falls—and wondered again why the stained glass had been laid in that faintly creepy pattern that resembled a more colorful Bill Cipher.
He'd brought a few books from home, including a used paperback he'd tracked down online, published in 1988. It was pretty thick, the pages yellowed, the black-and-white photos inside grainy halftones, like old newspaper pictures. You sometimes had to read the captions to know what they showed.
The book was by Carleton Fitzthurbert: Where the Ghosts Live: The History, Legend, and Lore of the Westminster Mystery House.
Dipper had visited the haunted mansion in San Jose and had confronted a creature that Ford later identified as a lich—an Undead, like a zombie in that it was an animated corpse, but unlike one in that it had a cold, malevolent, dangerous intelligence and considerable magic powers. In the end, the lich had collapsed into a heap of bones and dust as the spirit within it passed on—or at least Dipper thought it had and hoped it had.
Because the adventure left him with a sense of failure. He'd guessed wrong, made wrong moves, put the girl Eloise in danger—though unknowingly—and only by a last-minute and desperate inspiration had he been able to tag the lich with the item that dragged its soul, and not his own, from its body and into the Beyond.
Worse than all that, the creature's insane, enduring evil had apparently lingered behind it and had infected the timbers and bricks of the house. The house itself had tried to kill him and Eloise. He felt sure of that.
And now Ford was down there in San Jose investigating. The old, crazy mansion was a tourist attraction, like the Mystery Shack ("but with class"). However, since the earthquake—really more the upheavals of a sinister sentient house—and the discovery of a previously concealed ballroom and the bones of the lich scattered inside it, the place had been closed for safety inspections and repairs. Somehow Ford had talked his way in.
And Dipper desperately hoped he would be lucky and smart enough to get out again whole, sane, and safe.
Just in case, he was studying what was known about the Westminster place. With the yellow-tinted light streaming through the stained glass, Dipper pulled his knees up, leaned against the wall to the left of the window, and read the old paperback, sometimes having to hold brittle, loose pages in place with his thumb as they threatened to separate from the spine. Carleton Fitzthurbert's writing style sometimes plodded along but more often broke into overheated purple prose:
Those caretakers and preservationists who labor within the doleful walls of the Westminster Mansion avouch, nay, even swear, that the preternatural visions of souls who should have passed long since have burst upon their optics even in broad daylight, though to be sure they emerge in thronging numbers especially after sunset, and most of all as the Witching Hour draws nigh. Many, but not all, of these specters bear ghastly wounds, the evidence of Eben Westminster's handiwork in designing rifles and ammunition that killed in its thousands both with dreadful ease and gruesome wounds.
One is a Plains Indian chieftain, half of whose head is a gore-shattered crater. . . .
"I could write a better book than this," Dipper muttered.
When the style cooled down a little and the author began to write about the history of the house, he began to feel drowsy. A whole chapter unfolded the story of the enormous farm that once had stood on the land where Eben's widow—except it probably was actually Eben himself, in ghostly disguise—had decided to build the house.
Fitzthurbert suggested that the ground itself might be responsible for the haunting:
According to the Spanish missionaries, the indigenous Costanoan peoples spoke in their hushed legends of the accursed place, whence none would willingly venture. Though no contemporaneous maps exist, indications are that the site these early natives of America dreaded and feared might well be the very land upon which the Westminster house came to be erected.
Certain it is that the rancho established there around the year 1775 by Don Alonzo de Vega y Molina never prospered, unlike all of its neighbors. The cattle died of a murrain, no matter how healthy the stock; the sheep would be found dead in the field, with strange mutilations wrought upon their corpses; and within ten years of the Vega family's settling the place, the whole of Don Alonzo's family, his wife and six children, two grown, had all died of a mysterious pestilence. Only old Don Alonzo survived, finally succumbing in 1803 a reclusive, embittered old man.
Dipper frowned. Grunkle Ford told him that some sites naturally attracted supernatural forces and mysteries. One was in Indiana, another near the Arctic Circle, and this place near San Jose—well, this might be another of the uncanny places of Earth.
Of course, at least in Dipper's opinion, the most mysterious of them all was right here in Gravity Falls. And the Mystery Shack stood right in the heart of it.
Fitzthurbert went into considerable dull detail about how the land first occupied by Don Alonzo had descended to others, being taken to pieces gradually as the government took it over (he had no heirs) and subdivided it, until finally hundreds of acres of it again became a dairy farm in the 1860s—one that similarly failed to prosper.
Dipper yawned, closed his eyes for a minute, and opened them three hours later. The book had fallen to the floor, a couple of pages spilling out. His neck had cramped, and he got up, limped from the window seat into the attic bedroom—the run was partly to blame, but also he had sat for too long in a bad posture—and carefully put the tattered old paperback book onto the table he used as a desk.
He heard the stir of people downstairs and came down to find Abuelita preparing a bountiful lunch: Elote, or roasted corn, with a scramble of steak and blistered tomatoes sprinkled over with goat cheese. Together with her home-made tortillas and cheese-sprinked fritos refritos, these were scrumptious, as he remembered very well.
"Hey, dawg!" Soos said cheerfully as he helped Melody set the table. "I came upstairs an' saw you were, like, snoozing or somethin', so I didn't want to wake you, but since you're awake, want some lunch?"
"Sounds great," Dipper said. "Mabel still outside?"
"Yeah, we saw her with her pigs when we got back from church. You want to go round her up? It'll be ready in a couple minutes."
"Sure thing."
Dipper went out into the backyard. Soos had built a house for Waddles and his daughter, a sturdy little near-replica of the Mystery Shack, shielded from the Shack by a grove of trees to give the pigs some privacy. Passing it, Dipper saw that he had also put a fence around the Bottomless Pit—one that would let tourists go close enough to toss things in if they wanted, but probably would keep Little Soos from tumbling over the edge once he grew big enough to toddle.
"Good work, Soos," Dipper murmured as he skirted the new fence. He remembered how when a human fell into the Pit he or she was doomed. Doomed to twenty-two minutes of utter boredom until somehow they fell back out again.
Of course, most people who fell in might do so by themselves. They wouldn't have to listen to stories made up by Grunkle Stan, Soos, and Mabel. Maybe they could take a short nap or something—falling through the air was really pretty comfortable, unless you hit something solid at the end of it.
"Hey, Mabel!" Dipper yelled, "where are you?"
He heard some oinks from the trail that led to the bonfire clearing, so he headed that way. He came around the bend and saw Mabel sitting on the log, talking to a guy—a boy about their age whom Dipper didn't know. He wore a tawny-red shirt and khaki jeans with white sneakers, and he was a redhead, too—not quite the shade of Wendy's hair, but coppery in the sunshine.
He rose with a smooth, catlike grace, said something to Mabel, and hurried down the trail, glancing back to wave at her. Dipper heard her say, "Do you really have to go?" If the boy replied, he didn't catch what he said.
"Hey, Mabel," Dipper said, "Abuelita's made one of her Mexican specialties. Come on in to lunch."
"You ruined everything," Mabel complained, getting to her feet and dusting off the seat of her skirt. "Just as I was getting to know Russ, you showed up and scared him away."
"Scared him away?" Dipper asked. "Hey, I just came to find you! The guy could've eaten with us if he wanted to! Who is he, anyway?"
Mabel looked pouty. "His name is Russ, and he's dreamy. He's got the prettiest chestnut-brown eyes. And I know his nose is a little sharp and his face is a little thin, but that just makes him intriguing! He was telling me his folks live up the hill."
"Up this hill?" Dipper turned and gazed at the heavy forest. If you went that way, you eventually came to the place where a few woodpecker-trap trees grew. But someone lived there? He asked, "Where? There's no houses between here and the bluffs. No roads, either."
"Well, there must be, 'cause he said they live back up there somewhere. He heard Waddles and Widdles oinking and came to see what they were doing, and he found me and we sat there on the log, and talked and talked—oh, Dipper, I think I'm in love!"
He stared at her. "Yoooouuu . . . must have sat there a really long time," Dipper said as they and the pigs started back down the trail.
In her swept-away-by-romance whisper, Mabel sighed, "What is time to someone who's in love?"
Here we go again. Trying not to sound harsh, Dipper said, "Mabel, you hardly know this guy! At least wait until you're sure he's not, like, a pile of Gnomes or something!"
She popped him on the arm, but not really hard. "You're just mean."
"I'm not trying to be! Come on, Sis! I'm only telling you to go easy. Don't repeat past mistakes."
Mabel sighed, rubbing her left elbow with her right hand. "I know, I know. But he was so fascinating, Dipper! He knows about all the animals of the woods—deer and raccoons and possums, sure, but also the unicorns! He didn't laugh or make fun of me when I mentioned them. And he's seen the Gremloblin before, too. And he even asked if I knew the Shack was built so close to an old cemetery, except he called it 'burying place.' Ha! I promised to tell him the story about our big karaoke party some time!"
Dipper felt good to see the old Mabel back again, and yet—"Well, go slow. I don't want you to get all heartbroken over this guy. And anyhow, remember this is only our first day. You still have lots of time left in the summer."
Mabel kicked a mushroom, which flew about ten feet. A Gnome ran out and fielded it, then scurried back into the underbrush. Gnomes loved mushrooms, but for some reason hated to pick them. If you want to make a lifelong friend of a Gnome, bring him or her a basket full of fresh mushrooms. Of course, after about twenty minutes of constant companionship from a typical Gnome, you'll probably wish you'd brought death-cap amanita 'shrooms or some other poisonous ones.
Mabel grumbled, "Yeah, I know, but—you got Wendy, Grunkle Stan even has Sheila—"
"Wait, what? Is that still going on?"
"Yeah, bro! You don't listen! Stan talked about her when he was driving us over from Portland. 'Course you were in the backseat with Wendy—" She broke off and then said, "I'm sorry, Dip. I don't mean to sound all bitter, and I'm glad that you two have each other. It's just that seeing how happy you are, I feel like I'm an outsider, all fifth-wheely and depressed."
"Mabel, Wendy and I aren't exactly engaged. We're still in that good-buddies-hanging-out zone, you know?"
Mabel shoved him playfully. "Good buddies and smooch pals! Plus, you slept with her!"
"I slept beside her!" Dipper said. "We just fell asleep on the floor watching TV, and nothing happened! Except you took pictures of our bare feet for some weird reason."
Mabel's mood changed like the weather in Seattle: "Oooh, they were so cute! Your toes and hers almost touching! One of those is my favorite photo ever. Mm, what's that smell?"
"Abuelita made a great lunch," Dipper said. "Told you."
They had come within sight of the Shack, and the two pigs had grunted their way into their house. Mabel started to walk faster. "Now I'm hungry!"
"Hey, Mabel," Dipper said as they got to the back porch, "How about introducing me to Russ next time? Tell him I don't bite."
"Oh, he's not scared of you," Mabel said. "Just shy, I think."
As she opened the door, Dipper, right behind her, thought, but wisely didn't say, Yeah, maybe he's shy. I'm sure he's not up to no good. Yeah, right.