Beware the Banshee

Chapter 12

Daylight weakened it.

It did not dare stir abroad in the glare of the sun, for its rays acted against the creature's nature.

Underground was better, stifling, stony, bitter with tainted water and unfamiliar minerals from this reality, uncomfortable in almost every way, but dark, dark, dark and safe.

The sun still shone on the bluffs and when the light fell strong it was no good and the consciousness that tunneled upward toward the air knew it was no good and paused because it had no way of telling when it might shove aside two stones and burst into the hateful light.

Awareness had been oh, so very slow in returning, coming in a mere trickle over weeks and months and perhaps years, but the thing buried beneath the fallen rocks had no concept of time anyway, only of duration, and duration served only as a stone upon which to whet and sharpen its hatred.

They would pay, yes, they would pay, though not all of them by losing life, because certain ancient rules stood in place and longer ago than the Earth itself had existed the burrowing thing had pledged eternal obedience to the great leader and that oath could not be broken, ever, not so long as universes endured.

One of the enemy, however, could be taken and killed, one whose loss would cause pain and grief to the others and that would suffice, though it would not blunt the edge of loathing the mind beneath the stones harbored for the ones who had defeated it in unfair battle, who had humiliated it before the eye of the great leader, had buried it beneath rock.

The master, the leader, where had he gone? When the unnameable thing beneath the ground, burrowing up, waiting to feel the dark before bursting out, had a moment to think, when it did not concentrate on the difficult, continuing task of shifting stone, sometimes grinding it to powder over the course of weeks, the question plagued it, for always, always before now it could sense, could feel the master's implacable will, harder than the stone.

Now that will had evaporated, had vanished from the Mindscape, could not be found, could not encourage it to continue in its slow, slow upward course, inevitable as the circling of the stars, as purposeful as an arrow aimed at the beating heart of a despised enemy, but oh so slow, and yet it yearned to come into the dark and find the master.

Not to ask permission, for the hated creatures that had doled out so much pain and so much humiliation had forfeited the protection of even the mighty leader and one of them at least had to die, had to die, had to die in the way of the weak beings on this inferior world in this strange universe.

Upward and upward and pause for the light, upward and upward and pause for the light, all the time breathing inwardly on the orange-hot speck of anger and hatred, urging it to flame, all the time knowing that the time for taking sweet revenge already approached.

Which one, which one, was the question; not the two twins the master had claimed as his own prey, the two who had each opened a way in, and so he could not have either, but he could hurt them, for those two had ties of that strange force called love.

Two younger ones, male and female, delicious, two small deaths for one large one might be permitted, or perhaps the inventor and builder crazed by a flash of vision, old though he was.

Or if not any of them . . . someone dear to one or more of them, someone loved would do.

When the light of the sun faded and night reclaimed the world.

Soon, now, at last sooner and not later.

Then someone would pay.

Would suffer.

Would die.

"Geeze Louise!" Stan exclaimed, looking out the window. "It's Sheila!"

"Oh, I've been wanting to see her again!" Mabel said, bouncing on the sofa, where she, Dipper, and Wendy had been watching Zombie Mamba, a movie about an undead snake, convincingly acted by a rubber snake pulled by a visible string.

Stan stood in the doorway and called, "Sheila, baby! What's shakin'?"

On the couch Dipper heard the smack of a kiss and stuck a little finger in his ear to make sure it wasn't the product of his imagination or earwax buildup. He asked Wendy, "How . . . long has that been going on?"

"Since last year's baseball season, dude!" Wendy said with a laugh. "Stan an' Sheila are, like, an item! Everybody's expecting him to give her a ring most any time."

"I call bridesmaid!" Mabel announced, fist in the air.

Stan came back, with a blonde woman probably somewhere in her forties holding his arm. She was—well, not gorgeous, but very comfortable looking, plump rather than fat, with beautiful blue eyes—her best feature, everyone said—and wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, its swelling bosom printed with the colorful warning "Eyes this way!" and a red arrow pointing up toward her face, and over the T-shirt an open short-sleeved pale blue chambray shirt. Wendy waved and said, "Hiya, Sheil'! How's tricks?"

"Not so bad," Sheila said, laughing. "OK, this must be Dipper and Mabel. Stan's told me all about you guys. Wow, you're twins just like him an' Stanford! I'm Sheila Remley, but you probably don't remember seeing me."

"Yeah, I do!" Mabel said. "You work at that cloth remnant place where we came an' bought material for our baseball jerseys!"

"Ya know," Stan said, "Mabel made those jerseys."

Sheila blinked. "No kiddin'? You do great work, hon!"

"Thank you," Mabel said. She waved both arms in a rubbery motion. "What can I say? I'm just fabrically inclined! Womp-womp!"

"So what's up with the 'Temporarily Closed' signs, Stan?" Sheila asked. "I had to get out of my car, take the chain down at the end of the driveway, drive through, and then get out to hook it again! What's up with the Shack?"

"Uh, see, what it is, we gotta do some exterminatin' tomorrow, so we're just closin' for Thursday and also Friday this week, you know, fishin' opener and everything. Hah!" Stan clapped his hands together. "Well, it's great of you to come over, been a real blast, y'know, but the family's kinda in the middle of somethin'. Let's have a cup of coffee an' then I'll have to see you off."

And as if on cue, Ford walked into the room, cradling something that looked like a cross between a rifle and a gigantic industrial vise. "Stanley, I've charged up the quantum destabilizer. If it comes to a fight and I can't handle it you need to learn—oh, hello, Sheila."

"Hi yourself, Doc," the blonde said, grinning. "Say, is that based on a protonic generator? Fires a gluon beam, right? Broad-band or narrow?"

"Narrow," Ford said enthusiastically. "Beam diameter of 65 millimeters at the muzzle, multi-corrected quartz prism-and-lens compression so its focus is like a laser's—in fact, I call it a glaser beam—and the expansion is almost negligible. At one mile's distance in atmosphere, it's still only 70 millimeters."

"Much exit damage?" she asked.

"Oh, the beam takes out everything within about a 250-millimeter diameter from the strike point, more or less, determined of course by the density of the target. The gluons rapidly decay, so the effective range is about five hundred meters, though up to two kilometers away anything struck will undergo significant destabilization. At triple that, it's just a light show."

"And a partridge in a pear tree!" Stan snapped. "Look, Ford, Sheila ain't interested in your science fair project!"

"Oh, I am, too," Sheila said, laughing and linking her arm with Stan's again. "Come on, Stanley! I didn't almost get a doctorate at Cal Tech for nothing, sweetie!"

"Yes, I heard about that from Stan," Ford said, his expression sympathetic. "Too bad your compact particle accelerator broke free of the Earth's gravity before the doctoral committee could examine it."

"Yeah," she sighed. "I figure it's somewhere out past Pluto by now, and still accelerating. I knew I should have built in some particle brakes."

"Believe me," Ford said, "I know all too well the pain of creating an invention that fails to operate at the crucial moment."

"I never even been near Cal Tech!" Stan objected. "For cryin' out loud, Ford, let it go!"

Sheila studied the device that Ford held for a moment, and then, tilting her head, she asked, "So why do you need that kind of weapon, Ford? Inquiring minds want to know!"

"It's a long story," Stanford said with a sigh. "Dipper—perhaps you can fill the lady in."

Stanley threw up his hands. "Oy! Excuse me. I'm gettin' myself some coffee. Sheila?"

"Half a cup, black, please," she said.

"I know, I know. Anybody else?"

"Hot cocoa would be great, dude," Wendy told Stan.

"Yeah, that sounds good, thanks, Grunkle Stan," Dipper added.

"I'll come and help!" Mabel said, leaping up. "Mabel juice for me!"

"Mabel juice?" Sheila asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Believe me, you don't wanna know," Stan advised. "That's what should be somewheres out past Pluto!"

Widdles, who must have heard Mabel's yell, came ambling in, and Mabel swept her up and held her close. "Oooh, come to Mommy!" She kissed the pig's pink snout and set her down again. "Sheila, this is my latest pig, Widdles!"

"I love pigs!" Sheila cooed, coming over to lean down and skritch Widdles's floppy ears.

Mabel reached over and grabbed Stan's jacket lapel and pulled him down close to her. "Grunkle Stan," she said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, "quick, marry her!"

Grunkle Stan had been sleeping on the sofa, but at ten p.m. he and Sheila pulled it out and unfolded the hide-a-bed. "You sure you wanna do this?" Stan asked Sheila. "I'm told I snore."

"So do I, Stanley hon," she said sweetly. "Let's see who can sleep through the other one's chainsaw."

Melody was shorter than Sheila, but she lent Sheila a pair of her pink flannel pajamas that fitted the blonde pretty well. Stan was wearing his usual after-hours attire of boxers and T-shirt. "No funny business, OK?" Stan warned, stretching out. "This parlor don't have doors, ya know. Anybody, including a couple pigs, or even worse Soos, might come roamin' through at any time. And I warn ya, sometime between midnight an' four we're definitely gonna hear the banshee. Hope it don't scare ya."

"I'm a tough gal. My husband never scared me," Sheila said firmly. "And even besides him, right after I moved to Gravity Falls I had to face down a dybbuk and then the next day fight off a buncha sad-sack losers in crazy red robes! I can take care of myself, thanks. You shoulda told me you were in trouble, hon. I would've been here sooner."

Stan lay on his back with his hands behind his head. "Yeah, well, I didn't want to involve you, ya know. Cause I guess I kinda care about you. 'Course people in town make fun of me, ugly wrinkly old geezer runnin' around with a beautiful young girl like you." He paused and then shyly asked, "So whaddaya think about Mabel's suggestion? I don't suppose you'd really consider marryin' an old fart like me?"

"Mm . . . let me think about that one," Sheila said playfully, and before turning off the lamp, she kissed his big orange nose.

"Aw, Mabel, dude," Wendy said up in the attic, "you totally gotta give Waddles a bath, man! He smells kinda, you know, yuck!"

"Yeah," Mabel said, "I will. He usually gets one every other day, but what with the banshee and all, I guess I skipped a couple. It's OK, you don't have to worry. You get used to it pretty quick. And Waddles never gets in Dipper's bed, just in with me, and that's only when he's really scared. He'll stay right here beside me, down on the floor. Sorry about the stink."

"Don't sweat it," Wendy said. "I can stand Dad's after he comes home from a long night in the Skull Fracture, so this is, like, minor. Let's get what sleep we can." She turned out the lantern. "Dip gonna be OK down in the guest room?"

"Yeah, he'll be fine. He always stays there when I have a sleepover. Wendy? Do you think the banshee is right? Is one of us, you know, gonna really die this time?"

"Dunno, Mabes," Wendy said somberly. "But I swear this: it won't be you or Dip. Not if I can help it."

"Better not be you, either," Mabel said in a small voice. "'Cause if he lost you—I think Dipper wouldn't have the will to live, either."

Dipper came up the steps from Ford's basement compound, opened the concealed door, and turned to look down at his great-uncle standing under the conical-shaded hanging light down at the bottom. "Thanks, Grunkle Ford," he said. "But will any of these devices even work if the thing that's threatening us is a ghost, or a magic creature, or something like that?"

"We can only hope, Dipper. Now, remember, your pistol version of the destabilizer probably isn't strong enough for a kill shot—"

"I know," Dipper said, smiling. "I got it the first three times you told me. If I can target whatever it is, I shoot it in the leg or something to disable it, and that should buy us time. If it gets real close, I'll go for the head."

"Remember, you have only one shot. And it's true the head usually where the brain is," Ford agreed. "Though you can't count on it. In some of the dimensions I visited, the denizens had brains in unusual places. Sometimes their safety-deposit boxes. It's still probably safer to aim for some spot a hip or shoulder joint, that would disable whatever it is. Of course, it may not have hips or shoulders or arms or legs or even a brain."

"How can we find that out?"

Ford came up to the top of the stairs and put a hand on Dipper's shoulder. "Mason, I just don't know. That's what I hope to learn tomorrow when we make our hike out to Needle Falls. Assuming I'm not prevented from moving about in the valley by deer and bears, that is. I, or perhaps Stan, if I can't do it, will drive you and Wendy out the old logging road as far as it goes. Then it's about four or five miles of hard hiking through scrub forest and rock scree to the base of the Falls. Ever noticed Needle Falls?"

Dipper shook his head.

"Not surprising. It's a very thin waterfall, only a few inches wide, really, except after thunderstorms. When the light hits it right, it looks from a distance like a silver needle embedded in the cliffs. Most people have never paid it any attention. Anyway, that's our goal. We'll either all three go together—or if the animals still revolt against me, you and Wendy will go—to scan the whole area, especially making a recording with the PAA monitor. That will detect traces of virtually anything abnormal, from an earthly mutation to a ghost to a trans-dimensional intrusion. I'll do it if I can, but if not—my boy, I'm relying on you."

"I won't let you down," Dipper promised. He said his goodnight, and then almost turned to go upstairs to the attic out of sheer force of habit before remembering that Wendy had offered to stay with Mabel that night. So instead he walked to the guest room, lay down on the made-up bed without undressing, and pulled a light blanket over himself.

Then he had nothing to do but sleep.

And wait to hear the Banshee.