Chapter 10: A Matter of Death and Life
"Come on, come on!" Dipper whacked the meter—not too hard—and grimaced. The indicator had detected some form of psychic trap, all right, but the signal flickered, dim and uncertain. And the direction finder led him straight to the Minister's Parlor, then the room that adjoined the reception area.
He paused in the doorway and held the anomaly detector so that anyone glancing at him would think he held only a camera or a tablet. No use provoking hard-to-answer questions.
Other tourists strolled by, on their way out, chatting about the experience. Three of them, a middle-aged couple and a young woman who looked to be in her twenties—their daughter, maybe—sauntered past. The guy wore a gaudy blue, green, and white Hawaiian shirt splashed with a hibiscus-blossom print. He had a thick voice that sounded as though it should belong to a man twice as fat as he was: "Aw, it's fun, but you know. It's all hokey. None of this ghost stuff is real."
His wife, blonde-going-gray, trim in a lightweight yellow sweater and black slacks, patted his arm. "I know, hon. The antiques are real interesting, but ghosts? I wasn't scared for a minute."
The young woman, who looked more like the older woman than like the older man—and who was dressed similarly, pink sweater and black slacks—said, "I read online that the place really wasn't designed crazy, it was just rebuilt that way after that 1903 earthquake."
"Huh—1906," Dipper muttered in a sour undertone, but none of them heard him. The display showed clear, steady, and green. Something seemed to be close by—but the finder didn't seem to be able to focus on it. Could the trap be concealed by a cloaking device? Stanford had never mentioned anything like that.
Dipper paced around the room but couldn't localize the reading. Then he paused, unwilling to go into the reception hall—he wore a green wristband, after all, and they might just kick him out. Retreating to the Minister's Parlor (so called because Mrs. Westminster used it only on occasions when the minister of her church called on her and where she served him one small cup of tea on each visit), he fiddled with the controls.
Nothing he did stabilized the finder. Beginning to sweat, Dipper racked his brain for some way to fix the detector. Maybe what he had to deal with wasn't a psychic trap at all, but something that confused the sensors. He went around the band, passing "ghosts," and tried "Enchanted Objects" instead.
And . . . got a strong reading. That pointed toward—no, behind him—no, behind him again—no—
At him.
"Oh, come on!" he whispered again, shaking the anomaly detector. "Is this thing busted?"
Well—it had signaled the presence of ghosts, and it had certainly been right about that. Dipper squirmed. He calculated that he had only an hour and fifteen minutes to go before the ghosts would somehow sacrifice Eloise.
Or him.
His breath seemed to catch in his throat. What if I'm not—me? What if the ghosts have cast some kind of illusion spell and I'm lying unconscious up in that room and one of them is walking around channeling my senses? Is that even possible?
He tried the pinch test, and it hurt. He at least wasn't dreaming. He turned the detector away from himself and looked at it, thinking hard.
"I can do this!" he told himself. He'd given himself private pep times before, especially on the track when he was in trouble, and they'd got him over a hump. Think, think, think! Could the trap be outside the house, maybe in the garden or the yard? The indicator pulled that way. He had to check it out.
So he went to the reception area. At the moment no one manned the table there. He took out the meter again—and had to turn away as more tourists trooped past. He switched back to "Psychic Traps" and looked at the display.
Nothing. Not a single flicker. Not here, not back in the house. He switched it off and paced. What am I missing, what am I missing? Something's been hidden very carefully. That means somebody doesn't want it found. That means if it's found—the trap can be opened and the trapped ghosts can be set free. Does someone, something KNOW I'm looking for the trap? Could one of the ghosts be sabotaging me? Does one of them WANT to kill me?
A door behind the desk opened and the tour guide, Felicia, emerged, a bundle of brochures in her hands. "Hi, smart guy," she said with a big smile. "Enjoy exploring the house?"
"It's great," Dipper said. "Uh—listen, if I go outside to the front lawn, can I get back in again? I mean before the green wristband time is up."
"Oh, sure." She tilted her head and gave him a quizzical smile. "What are you up to?"
"Well," Dipper said, wishing he had just half of Mabel's superpower of improvising fibs under pressure, "there's a room up on the second floor that I thought looked out over the front lawn, but when I checked out the view from the window, I didn't recognize anything. I just want to see if I can spot the window so I can tell exactly where the room is."
"Go right ahead," she said. "Don't be surprised if you fail to find the window, though. Nobody can keep a sense of direction in this place." She lowered her voice to a whisper: "Even compasses lose their bearings. And you do want to be careful when you go exploring. This house has secrets that you couldn't even imagine in the worst dreams you ever have."
Dipper forced a smile. "Oh, I'm being real careful. Thanks."
He stepped outside into the warm sunshine of a California March. The walk leading to the house from the street stretched across the lawn for fifty yards or so, and it ran into a series of circles, like figure 8's in a row, three of them. Twenty-four identical circles, maybe twenty feet in diameter, like beads on a string. The center of each circle held an elevated brick flowerbed, the bases three feet tall, the bricks time-blackened and visibly repaired. Earthquake damage, maybe?
Each flower bed held a showy display: anemones, irises, narcissus, and tulips, among the ones he recognized, in a range of colors from deep blues to bright yellows and reds that would have pleased Mabel.
Those were the only flower beds—the rest of the lawn was a wide stretch of Buffalo grass, greening for the warm season. More than a dozen tall Canary Island palm trees scattered across the lawn, offering the house a meager screen from the street and small islands of shade. The fronds rattled and clattered softly in the breeze.
On either side of the concrete walk, just before the steps up to the front porch, stood two greenish-white marble statues, looking ancient, as if they'd been imported from Greece or Rome. Turquoise veins cut through the stone like cracks in an eggshell, and though the figures obviously been cleaned regularly, in places the deep tarnish of time had stained the stone gray and brown.
The figures represented two caped women, hoods draped over their heads, who towered there on their pedestals, each one larger than life size. The statues were similar to each other but not identical: Both stood in sorrowful attitudes of mourning, with their hands pressed together as though in prayer. Their heads were bowed, and though overall the poses looked respectful and peaceful, the smooth-faced women seemed vaguely threatening, disturbing. Centuries of wind, rain, and sun had eroded their faces blind.
We know a secret, their unreadable faces seemed to say. We bet you're just . . . dying to find it out.
Frankly, they gave Dipper the jitters. Then, on a sudden brilliant hunch, he tested the statues.
Nothing.
So he retreated to stand at the base of the flower bed closest to the house and aiming at the house in general, he did a widespread scan for the trap. He got a signal.
But the faint display insisted the trap was some distance inside the house, not in the yard.
"Oh, man!" Dipper tilted the device to point upward. The signal faded—wherever the trap was, it was not on the second floor or any of the other two higher ones. He went back into the house. Felicia was no longer at the desk, but she had arranged the brochures in neat stacks. Dipper checked the whole room. No signal there, but a faint one somewhere further inside the house.
Hmm . . . the basement? Did it reach this far forward? If so, maybe, just maybe the trap could have been planted there, below the main way in and out of the house, a border-crossing stop for ghosts that allowed no one to leave.
But then—Mrs. Westminster couldn't go into the basement because of its steep set of stairs, and the house hadn't even been started until years after her husband Eben's death. He'd never heard of a ghost that followed its spouse from one coast of the country to the other—ghosts tended to be tethered to specific locations.
And then again—the ghosts in the hidden room came from all over the place, so maybe it wasn't that crazy. Why, though? Ford had written that almost always a ghost remained on earth because the person had unfinished business or a thirst for revenge. Or, like the Duskerton couple and the lumberjack ghost in Gravity Falls, they had a love for a special place that meant their spirits just couldn't bear to leave it.
How could Eben have loved a house not yet even built? So the trap builder would have to be his wife Minerva, right? But she couldn't have done it because she couldn't have reached the basement—if that was where it was—and she was supposed to be deathly afraid of ghosts, so much so that she had the house built like a—a labyrinth to confuse them and keep them away. Why would she attract and hold them?
It made no sense. But if not Mrs. Westminster, then who would have put a ghost trap there in the basement?
Still—worth a shot. He tried to remember how to get to the windowless room where the only door to the basement was.
It took him ten minutes of wrong turns, dark lonely rooms, creaky floors underfoot, and dead ends, but at last he found it, opened the basement door, and with the lonely churchyard smell of old wood and earth coming out on a cool breeze, he pointed the meter downward and tested.
Nothing. Not a peep. He turned the dial for targets. Not even a ghost down there. But the "Enchanted Object" setting still beeped, as if the machine thought he was enchanted. He took off his backpack, set it on the floor, and checked that.
The detector chattered like a pair of those novelty wind-up fake false teeth. "Strong reading, man," Dipper muttered.
He was wearing an enchanted backpack. Apparently. He turned the detector toward himself and got a signal. Annnnd I'm enchanted too. Something was screwy somewhere. Maybe he could ask Stanford to calibrate the device for him—if he lived to see Grunkle Ford again. There was no reason why the machine would think he was enchanted—
No. Wait a minute—Bill Cipher's molecules, still in his body! That would account for the false reading. Maybe. But no, he certainly didn't have Bill in his backpack. He reviewed the contents mentally, and came up with zilch. Unless someone had put a stealthy spell on his compass, his magnifying glass, his spyglass, his snacks (Mom had packed them), his spare underwear and socks—no, nothing could be magical. The machine had a flaw in it.
Dipper shouldered his backpack again and switched the detection back to traps. He turned in place, a slow circle, north, west, south, and then got the same faint signal again. That way. He took out his compass. East.
He clenched the compass hard. It was crazy. The house faced east! He'd just come from the front yard, which lay exactly in that direction.
Time was passing, and he had no way to slow it. He hurried back, the detector in his hands, no longer caring whether tourists spotted him and got nosy. He heard Felicia's voice and saw her in the last doorway before the reception hall, speaking to an elderly couple about the house.
The detector was showing the strongest signal yet. The tourists thanked her, tipped her, and went on, and Felicia turned to wave at them. Dipper took five steps forward.
Without turning around, with her back to him, Felicia said, "So you really are a smart young man. Now you've found me. What do you think will happen next, young man?"
She had not changed physically, but was still a slim, pretty twenty-something in a black dress.
But her voice—her voice rasped like fingernails on a blackboard, like the death-rattle of an angry old man, like the soundtrack of nightmares.