Beware the Banshee

Chapter 9

When Abuelita spun her story of a constantly-crying Little Soos and spoke of how poor Melody was dizzy with sleep deprivation, and then added, "And Wendy, she is so good with the little one. Only she can calm the pobrecito and get him to sleep a little. So let her stay a few days for the sake of the baby and the mamacita, por favor."

Manly Dan pulled a wrinkled red bandana from his jeans pocket, blew his nose with a gushing whonnnk, and then wiped his eyes. "Dingdang it!" he yelled. "I done that in the wrong order agin!" But he reached down and patted Abuelita's head. "You're a good-hearted woman, I can tell. Yeah, Wendy can help out for a few days. Anything breaks my heart, it's a poor little helpless baby cryin'. Uh, have you tried duct tape over its—"

Hurriedly, Stan put in, "Manly Dan, you're a big man!" While that hardly touched the truth at all—Manly Dan was to put it more accurately a gigantic man physically and about a Gnome and a half in terms of fatherly warmth—it pleased the lumberjack.

Wendy hugged her father. "Thanks, man. You're the sweetest Dad in the world." She didn't add what she thought: Especially if you're ranked with the species that devour their own young. "I'll make it up to you if you guys can, like, cook for yourselves for two or three days."

"No, no, no!" Abuelita said. "I cook! I make things that you can put in refrigador and then make hot in oven. Here, Mr. Pines, you write down things to get and go to store for me. Then you take Wendy to home so she can calm little Jesús. You come back to get me at five this afternoon, and things will be all fixed."

"Aw," Dan rumbled, "I couldn't ask you—"

Stan pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. "OK, let's settle this like men," he said with a grin. "We cut for it. High side wins. You say Abuelita don't cook for you, I say she does. Here ya go, Dan, cut."

With gloved thumb and forefinger, Dan took about half the deck. "King of Spades," he said, showing the card.

"Oh, man! Tough to beat! I'm in real trouble now." Stan cut the rest of the deck, glanced at the bottom card, and said, "Oooh, hard luck, Dan. Ace of Spades."

"Geeze!" Dan said, pounding his fist on the arm of his chair, which fell off. "I always lose at cuttin' cards! I dunno how many beers I bought for the guys doin' that."

"You'll win one day," Stan said, putting the deck back together. He had never once showed his ace to anyone.

So Stan spent about an hour driving to the grocery, buying this, that, and the other, adding some plastic tableware and aluminum containers that could just be popped into a warm oven and as an afterthought, a big pack of paper plates and one of paper cups.

He got back to the Corduroy house to find Dan and his boys chowing down on huevos rancheros covered in melted cheese and Abuelita's improvised but always good salsa. "This is great!" Dan told Stanley, speaking through a messy beard and a half-full mouth. "Sorry, baby girl, but you could learn somethin' about cookin' from this lady!"

"I'll try to do that," Wendy promised with a smile and a suppressed shudder at her younger brothers' table manners.

Mrs. Ramirez unpacked the bags of groceries and said, "You get all I ask for, good man. This fine. You go to Shack now and come back for me at five. I be fine, and I make these gentlemens some nice foods."

"Let's go, man," Wendy said while her father still looked preoccupied with his fourth serving of eggs.

"Soos's grandma's quite a woman," Stan observed as they got into the El Diablo.

"Yeah, she's formidable," Wendy agreed.

"She's what?"

"Formidable," Wendy repeated. "You know, a force to be reckoned with."

Stan laughed as he turned the key in the ignition. "Dipper's gotcha readin' them literary books, huh?"

"Hey," Wendy said, "I'm tryin' to haul up my grades at school, OK? I got a B average now, but it needs to be higher if I'm tryin' to go to college." After a few moments, she admitted, "I got a vocabulary-building app to help me."

"Well, good for you," Stan said. "I admire that, Wendy, no BS for a change. You an' me need to have a serious talk about Dipper some day. He's a real great kid, but he's a little bit broken, you know? He needs some lookin' after. You ready for that formidable job?"

"I'll take it on," she said, "with alacrity."

"Great!" Stan said. "Who's he?"

The golf cart buzzed along the trail that Stan had first cut into the forest and then Soos had kept reasonably clear. On the extended Mystery Tour, sometimes the tram actually came this way, and now and then—not often—the tourists would catch a flash of red and learn from Mr. Mystery that they had just sighted a Gnome, "Like, one of the rarest of the rare, y'know?" as he would explain, wriggling his fingers mysteriously. Since he had to hold the microphone with his other hand, he had none left to steer with, and that little bit of theatrics often ended up with the tram hitting a tree. No casualties to date, though.

In fact, Soos was mistaken. Far from being the rarest of the rare, Gnomes were about as common as crabgrass and roaches, with roughly the same personalities. However, it was true that Gnomes usually tended to avoid humans. In the time since Weirdmageddon, a very few had become familiar sights in town. Jeff, in particular, the Queen's interpreter and prime minister, hung out sometimes in the Skull Fracture, a biker bar, where he occasionally won small sums arm-wrestling much bigger guys. Gnomes are stronger than you'd think.

Now as the golf cart hummed along, Dipper thought, This is like déjà vu. Two years back, almost to the day, he had sped through the forest on the same golf cart (well, practically. Soos had rebuilt it so many times that only the steering wheel and axles remained original equipment, but still it was the Shack cart, and that meant it was the same one). At that earlier time Dipper had been riding to rescue Mabel. Now he and Mabel were cruising for information. The track lay in pleasant green shade and smelled piny and was cool, but so far they had been disappointed.

"See any?" he asked her.

"Nary a Gnome," Mabel said. "Heh. 'Nary' is a funny word."

"Wonder where they all are? Try calling them."

Mabel bellowed, "Here, Gnomey, Gnomey, Gnomey! Hey, GNOMMMMMES!" Mabel's highest volume sent rabbits scattering from brush beside the track as snakes dived into holes in the ground and birds burst from cover and flew madly into the sky, but no one answered.

"OK," Dipper said. "I think that the place where we saw Jeff taking a, uh, squirrel bath is right about . . . there." He parked. They got out of the cart and walked into the small clearing to look around. "Jeff!" Dipper called. "It's Dipper, man! You there?"

When no answer came, he started to turn back toward the cart, but Mabel held his arm. "Hang on. I got a good feeling about this place."

Sure enough, they soon heard a rustling in the bushes, and an animal with a black face striped with black ambled toward them. It wore a tiny plastic crown on its head. When it came close, they realized it had the aroma of a carpet remnant left on the floor of an outhouse where guys had really bad aim. Walking beside it and holding a leash was Jeff, the royal interpreter and the Gnome who had the best command of English of all his kin.

"Dipper, my man! Whazzzup? Woogy mo-mo, bro!" he exclaimed, leading the author of this account to rescind the comment about English in the last paragraph.

"Jeff?" Mabel asked, blinking. "It's all good, bro. Uh—what's shakin', duuuuude?"

"Same-o, same-o," Jeff said. "No breaks, no shakes, y'know waddimean?"

"Jeff," Dipper said, "come on. Talk normal. We're not bikers."

"Too hip for the room?" Jeff asked. He sighed. "OK, fine. The Queen here says she's glad to see you both looking well, and Mabel you never looked more beautiful." Jeff wiggled his eyebrows as though he'd been watching a lot of old Marx Brothers movies on TV, which Gnomes did not have.

"Tell her I said thank you, and she's regal," Mabel told him.

"Of course she's legal!" Jeff said in a hot voice. "A Gnome queen can't be a Gnome bu Gnome law, but she can be any other species—"

"I said regal," Mabel told him. "It means 'real queeny.'"

"Oh. OK. Regal. Good word. Wait just a minute, I have to think of a word to forget before I can remember that one. Hmm. Is there much use for 'fubar'?"

"None at all," Dipper said firmly.

"OK, got this, hold on." Jeff closed his eyes, muttered to himself, and said, "OK, cleared the cache and regal's in my vocabulary now. Thanks!"

"And fubar isn't?" Mabel asked.

Jeff chuckled. "Funny-sounding term, Mabel! That's a cool word! Wait a minute, let me think of one to forget so I can remember it."

When he'd forgotten "malodorous" (Mabel said, "You got stinky, you don't need that one."), Jeff murmured the new words to himself several times.

"So every time you learn one new word, you have to forget another one?" Dipper asked.

"Well, yeah! I don't want my head to explode!"

"OK, OK, that's cool. Listen, Jeff, we just arrived back in Gravity Falls for the summer, but a banshee warned us—"

"Oh, my gosh! She was after you?"

"She was warning us," Mabel said. "Not trying to hurt us."

"Hah! A banshee's one of the Fair Folk, and they and us don't get along so good! Let me put on my skepticles," Jeff said.

"Hey! I invented those!" Mabel said, laughing. "But no, Jeff, it's true. The banshee wasn't trying to hurt us, but telling us of danger so we could be ready for it."

"So is there something new in the forest?" Dipper asked.

Jeff waved his tiny arms. "There's always something new! A seed sprouts a leaf, a frog's eggs hatch into tadpoles, an old bird dies, a new one hatches out."

"Is there anything new and weird in the forest?" Dipper asked, hoping if he narrowed down the question Jeff wouldn't wrangle over it.

"Well, you're here, that's one," Jeff said.

"Me weird?"

Jeff made a tutting sound with his tongue and shook his head. "Honestly, Dipper, if you and Wendy were Gnomes and you hadn't married her yet, everygnome would think you're several screws short of a toolbox."

"Preach it, brother!" Mabel said.

"Don't encourage him! And that's our business!" Dipper snapped.

"Oh?" Jeff asked. "How's your profit-and-loss projection?"

"Gahh! I should've known better. You guys are hopeless!" Dipper crossed his arms and turned his back on Jeff.

Mabel sat on a mound of leaves and said, "That's all right. I know you mean well. Come and stand beside me, Jeff. There, that's nice. Here, hold my hand. Now, you and I have a history, don't we?"

Jeff's face turned nearly as red as his hat. "Well, yeah. I almost married you."

"Yeah, I remember. But we parted good friends, didn't we?"

Squirming a little, Jeff admitted, "Yes, but you parted by walking into the house and I departed by being shot a mile and a half in a parabolic arc."

"Water under the bridge," Mabel said. "Now, I'll give you a kiss on the cheek—"

"Hot dog!" Jeff said, doing a little jig. Then he took off his hat, bowed slightly, and said, "Ready when you are, beautiful."

"Huh!" Dipper, who had turned around to watch, exclaimed. "You guys can take off your hats! And your heads aren't pointy but normal!"

Jeff gave him a stink-eye look. "Yeah? So?"

Dipper shrugged. "Nothing. I need to tell Grunkle Ford, that's all."

"Now, boys, boys," Mabel said. "Jeff, first tell me if there are any new or strange creatures in the forest anywhere. Then you'll get your kiss on the cheek."

"OK, let me think. New bear cubs this season, but that's not what you're thinking about. Hmm. Oh, yeah, there's something real strange over by Needle Falls, or so the birds keep saying. It must be like a gopher, because they say it tunneled out of the ground."

"What is it?" Mabel asked.

"You got me, toots. The birds don't like it. They remember Never Mind All That, and they think it feels a little like that did."

"Needle Falls," Dipper said. "I don't think I've ever heard of that place."

Jeff looked as if he were trying to think of directions, but if he was, he gave up. "Oh, well, it's way off in the foothills around the bluffs to the west, a good way past the lake and all. Very nasty country there, all rocky hills and tough briars and things. During Never Mind All That, something either crashed to earth there or exploded there, but nobody could find a trace afterwards. You can't see the waterfall very well until you're close, 'cause it's just one very thin streak of falling water, but when the sun's just right you might glimpse it sparkling as far as the Shack. The way the birds chatter, whatever appeared there is scary."

And that was all Jeff knew, really, though he spoke on about it for about fifteen minutes. Mabel kissed him on the cheek, and then gave him a gift—the wad of chewing gum she'd been working on—and he accepted it with an appealing show of pleasure and gratitude.

There was no phone reception that far in the forest, so Dipper had to wait until he had driven almost all the way back to the Shack to call Ford.

"I know of nothing particularly virulent that dwells in that area," Ford said. "Or at least, thirty years ago there was nothing. It may be different now. Stay away from the area. Do you understand me?"

"Sure," Dipper said.

"I'm not joking," Ford told him. "Listen, I'm working on a way to return to the Valley, and with any luck I may be able to make it this afternoon. If I can, we'll have a counsel of war about this approaching doom. When we all contribute to a plan, it can't help working."

"Yeah!" Mabel said. "'Cause we're flippin PINES! Oh no, wait, wait: 'Cause we're flippin' Pineses! That better?"

Dipper flattened his hand and made a comme ci-comme ca rocking motion. "How about just "Because we're the flipping Pines family?"

"You got it!" Mabel punched the air. "Yessss! A successful call-back to something I never actually saw or heard!"

On the phone, forlornly, Ford said, "Sometimes I wish I knew what was going on."