Chapter 11: A Game of Hide-and-Go-Die

Dipper tensed, but the figure before him—Felicia, whatever it was—spun and slammed into him, seizing his arms, lifting him, flying through the corridors with him too startled to yell or struggle—

They flashed through a solid wall, then upward, out into the sunlight, then in shadow again—

And it set him down. It no longer looked like a young woman, but a mummy—dry, crisp, corrugated, its eyes deep-sunken glittering pits, its face parchment stretched over bone. Dipper backed away and realized that above him a great bell hung silent, the rope from it frayed to nothing.

"The bell tower," he gasped.

"My home." The voice had become a horrible arid rasp, syllables drawn out and harsh as sandpaper.

"Wh-who are you?" Dipper asked. The figure wore shriveled garments, green with mold and stiff with age, but whether it was a man or woman—he couldn't even tell.

"I used to be Eben Westminster," the grating voice said. "Now—I am—I am—I am this!" The figure shifted weirdly, like a form glimpsed through a pane of glass with water flowing over it. The tour guide, Felicia, stood smiling at him. "You should have figured it out—smart boy," she said with a sneer, though the voice was sweet.

Again the features flowed like melting wax, and the body became shorter, dumpier, a wrinkly-faced old woman in heavy spectacles and a purple dress. "For a great many years," it said in a prim voice, "I was Minerva Westminster, until people began to wonder if I would live forever and I had to take other shapes."

Dizzyingly, the body and faced melted and reshaped themselves, more than once: a tall man with a pencil mustache, a little girl of ten or twelve, a fat man with a jolly red face—and then the wizened, shrunken mummy again.

"They said you were dead!" Dipper said.

"So I am, boy. So I am. But I learned powerful spells that let me cling to Earth and keep a shape—and change it as I wish." The creature shook its head. "You should have gone to the slaughter as I intended. I put the mark on you to force you to the place of sacrifice—but you dragged another along, and she will have to do. She will die just as fast as you would have."

"Eloise!" Dipper said. "No—you can't kill her! What did she ever do to you?"

"She entered my house," the creature said. "By the laws of dark magic, I must release a soul once every seven years. I must replace it—or my own soul will have to pass on and be judged for all my sins." The form bent, thrusting its rotted face close to Dipper's. "I can't allow that."

"Come on, man," Dipper said, trying to back away and finding the wall at his back. "Killing another victim—that's just making things worse for you! Why did you even pick on us?"

"I have no hatred for you," the mummy-man said, raising its doddering head. "I have no care for you. The living are as logs for my fire—the things that keep the warmth of movement and awareness within me! What does it matter if I burn a young one or an old? They serve the same purpose."

"Don't you even care?"

"For you? No. Not as long as I can stretch out my existence here. That is all. That is everything." The creature pointed a bony finger and cackled. "I will leave you. This tower no longer has an entrance. Perhaps you will somehow be able to climb down from here without breaking your neck, or you may fall and die. Or perhaps someone will find you as you scream for help. Or maybe you will starve here—it is of no consequence to me."

"Wait, wait!" Dipper said, desperation tightening his voice. "I—I promised Eloise that I wouldn't let her die! Let me at least go back to where she is so—so they can take me!"

"The Grand Ballroom!" the creature rustled. "What? Would you die in her place? Nothing is easier than to send you back—you have the mark on you!" It raised its skeletal hand, the fingers and thumb poised to snap, but it paused. "If you wish, I will send you there now. Do you? Well, do you?"

Dipper touched the gold star on his vest. His reward for being a smart guy. Well—he was a smart guy. "Do it," he said.

As the creature that had been Eben Westminster started to snap its fingers, Dipper ripped the star from his vest—and stuck it onto Eben's chest as he seized the creature's arm, a broomstick inside a coat jacket—

A silent, blinding flash filled the world—now, it was behind his eyes, inside his head—he felt as if a hurricane were blasting him through space, but he wouldn't let go, though a howl of outrage and anger screamed all around him—

And then they tumbled to the floor. The creature writhed and flailed, and the ghosts crowded around from the darkness.

"This is the man who trapped you!" Dipper yelled, scrambling to his hands and knees. "Eben Westminster!"

Someone shrieked—Eloise, fully awake and frantically crawling away over the dust-covered floor—

"No!" Eben screamed.

"Justice!" the ghosts moaned in a chorus. "Justice!"

"Not with my sins on my head!" Eben dropped to his knees. "Mercy! I can't go to judgment!"

The unrelenting ghosts crowded in. Dipper reached Eloise and said, "Don't look!"

"It—it's beautiful!" Eloise exclaimed.

"What? What is?"

She pointed into the dimness. Dipper saw only they faint blue-gray whirl of the ghosts, nothing else. "I don't—what are you seeing?"

"A doorway!" Eloise said. "A golden doorway, beautiful light—look there, it's right there!"

Dipper saw nothing but darkness.

And then one of the ghosts—the old woman who had died in the earthquake—rose from near the floor and dwindled as she did, vanishing utterly. "She went through," Eloise said.

Now others rose, shrinking and disappearing, and the light from the ghosts grew dimmer. Dipper took out his phone and turned on the flashlight app.

And wished he had not. The mummy of Eben huddled all knees and elbows on the floor, skeletal hands clutching its skull of a head, shaking so hard the bones rattled.

"They're all leaving," Eloise whispered. "They're going through the golden light."

"I can't see it," Dipper whispered. "But it's a portal to the Beyond. It's their way out. Somehow his being here in the room opened it."

The writhing, groaning mummy piped in a voice like a broken flute: "Don't leave me! Don't leave me to die!"

A calm, quiet reply: "You are dead already."

Only one ghost remained—the young, gaunt girl, Neosha. She stood above Eben, looking more solid than she yet had.

The creature of bone and shriveled skin raised its head, its jaws chattering as if about to fall from its skull. "No! Not as long as one of you remains, I am not fully dead, not fully!"

The girl extended her hand. "I will go with you."

The mummy lurched, trying to pull away, but seemed to lack the strength. "I can't go! I'll face judgment!"

Neosha's quiet voice said, "You already have. Come. Have courage. I will go with you."

"Wait!" Dipper yelled. "What about us? We'll be trapped here!"

The girl turned enormous eyes, eyes brimming with grief, on them. "I cannot feel for the living. Only for the dead." To Eben, she said, "I forgive you for what your work did to me and my family. Forgive yourself. I do not say forget; I do not say expect mercy; I do not say have no regret. Grieve for the wrongs you have done, but come. It is the only way." She looked up, and suddenly she looked different—almost alive, not starved and bloody, but young and pretty. "My parents call to me. I must go to them. Come now. It is your only chance."

The mummy put out a trembling hand. The ghost took it and rose—and something slipped from the collection of bone and dried flesh, and the body collapsed into a heap, fingers rattling on the wood floor like dice thrown by a demon—

And Eloise fell back. "They're gone."

"All of them," Dipper agreed.

She grabbed his hand again. "We're going to die in here, aren't we?"

"Not if we can help it."

He stood up and looked around the room. It had almost no furniture—the sofa they had landed on, a few chairs along one wall. Ah, but that wall had windows.

Useless windows—they looked onto laths, not outside. The room had been boarded over, sealed, forgotten, many years ago. But Dipper tried a window sash, and it creaked and squeaked and inched up, sticking in the old frame so he had to tug and hammer at it. He opened it as wide as it would go, and then he broke one of the chairs and used a leg to batter the woodwork covering the window from the outside.

The carpentry might have been expert, but the wood was old and dry and he cracked a four-inch wide lath, then kicked it completely out, and he saw dim light on the other side. With that lath gone, it was easier to break more and more—until finally he'd opened a hole big enough for the two of them to get out. He helped Eloise through first, then handed her his backpack and hauled himself through.

They stood in a hallway. A far-off window gave them faint light. Eloise slapped clouds of dust from Dipper's vest, and he brushed her back as best he could. "Come on," he said.

They headed for the window.

And it vanished. The hall suddenly took a left turn that had not been there a second before and led to a dead end.

"This isn't fair! Eben's gone!" Dipper said.

"It's not him. It's the house," Eloise told him.

"The house?"

"It wants to kill us," she said. "Don't you feel it? Whatever was in that skeleton is in the house now!"

"Come on!"

It was like a maze in a terrifying dream, one where nothing was as it seemed—doors opened to blank walls, staircases ended midway down, forcing them to drop ten feet to the floor. Windows vanished as they neared them. An open door slammed as if it were trying to bite them in half.

"Think of something," Eloise pleaded.

And then something came into Dipper's head, words from his great-uncle Ford's Journals, a charm against evil forces. He shouted it as loudly as he could: "Fructum a tenebris ad lucem!"

The house—thrashed. The floor bucked beneath them, tumbling them to their knees. The hallway writhed.

But a door popped open, and Dipper grabbed Eloise's hand and dragged her through—

And there was the reception hall—

Plaster rained from the ceiling.

He hurtled through the front door, pulling Eloise after him. Someone grabbed him and straightened him up. "It's an earthquake!"

The last spasm rolled beneath his feet dust billowed from the open front doors, and a crowd of people who had spilled out of the house asked if they were all right. "The old place stood up," someone said. It was another tour guide, dressed as Felicia had been. "But I think we'll cancel the next tour. Our engineers will have to make sure it's safe. Everyone accounted for?"

A young man with a clipboard said, "Yes, everybody got out."

"How about Felicia?" Eloise asked.

The tour guide looked at her. "Felicia? Who's that?"

"Never mind," Dipper said. "I'm sure she got out." He pulled Eloise along. "Listen, that—thing in there—that was Felicia!"

"What?"

"I don't know how it works," Dipper admitted. "But trust me on this. Are you OK?"

"Yes. Dirty, though. So are you."

The house made a strange groaning, growling noise. "Come on, it's mad at us! Let's get off its lawn."

They stood on the sidewalk near the entrance, still slapping dust from their clothes while Dipper tried to explain. Eloise couldn't understand, but she said she trusted him. "What did you say that made it let us go?"

Dipper repeated the Latin words. "Over light, darkness has no power," he translated. "It's part of a ritual for purifying cursed places. My great-uncle taught it to me."

"Say it again."

He repeated it until she had memorized it. "I may have a use for that," she said. She looked down the sidewalk. A hurrying couple had to pause at a stoplight, but they waved. "Here come Mom and Dad," Eloise said. She asked, "What's your phone number?" He told, her, and she dialed it. "Answer when it rings."

Dipper did, and they had each other's numbers. All around, sirens wailed in the distance and car horns blared. "I'm going to try to free the ghost at home," she said over the noise. "I may call you."

"You—you're not afraid?"

"I think the ghosts underestimated me," she said with a lopsided smile. "Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Yeah, I'm a mess, but there was an earthquake!"

They both hugged her, and she told them that Dipper had led her out before the house could collapse. They thanked him, the two kids said goodbye, and then Dipper saw his own mom and dad cruising down the street in their car. They paused for him to jump in, and both of them asked about the quake.

"It was rough for a few seconds," Dipper said. "But I don't think it did any bad damage." He paused. "Maybe some windows crashed and some old boards were broken and plaster fell."

"It was centered south of here," his dad said. "Good news is that for Piedmont it was only a 4.9. It was a 5 here."

"We called Mabel," his mother said. "She said everything's OK, and the house wasn't damaged."

A car behind them honked, and Dad drove forward. Dipper turned in the seat to look at the Wesminster Mystery House. Despite the sun, it looked as though it were under a cloud.

To Dipper, it no longer looked like a place of mysteries to be solved.

It brooded there beyond the palm trees, and now, like Eloise, he felt what radiated from it:

Evil.

Evil.

From the Journals of Dipper Pines: Tuesday, April 1, 2014: This morning at breakfast Mabel told me that Mom and Dad had given her permission to drop out of school and move to Gravity Falls so she could live permanently with Waddles and Widdles and become a professional pig whisperer.

Fortunately, I've lived through enough April Fools' Days with Mabel to know right off that she was putting me on, and I told her so. I didn't even try to fool her. Not in the mood.

Good track practice after school today, but man, I am missing Wendy so bad right now. Marking the days off on the calendar! As of tomorrow, 67 days until June 7, when I may see her—if we're in the state track finals and if she can come down for them. And on June 8, either she'll drive us or Mabel and I will take that long bus ride to Gravity Falls. Mom and Dad have made their plans for vacation and this morning they officially said yes, we can go back to the Falls!

So now I'm aching to see Wendy. I'll call her around nine tonight, I guess. It's seven-thirty now. We just had dinner, and Mabel's sitting on the floor in the corner of my room doing math homework, listening to Men-R'nt-Boys on her headphones—I can tell by the way she bops—and occasionally asking me to check her answers. I told her to get my calculator out of my backpack.

"Hey, what're these?" she asked as she rummaged, holding up a sheet of eleven stickers. Big gold stars.

"Picked them up—"

"Huh? Wait a sec!" She took off the headphones. What was that?"

"I said I got them at the Westminster Mystery House," I told her, trying to cut the explanation short. "If you want them, you can have them. They may be cursed, though."

Her eyes grew round with interest. "For real?"

"Yeah." I shrugged. "Probably not now, but maybe they were. I didn't do so hot in investigating some ghosts there. It worked out OK, I guess, but—I did and said some really dumb things and nearly caused a girl our age to die."

"I'll paste these in my scrapbook," she said. "When you want to talk about it, I'll add a descriptive label."

"OK."

She let a couple of minutes go by as she worked out an algebra problem, without the aid of "Now You Got Me Cryin', What, You Want Me Dyin'?" on the headphones. "Dipper?"

All I'm doing at the moment is lying on the bed with a pen and my second Journal. I glanced up. "Yeah, what?"

Casually, Mabel has just asked me, "Was this girl pretty?"

(Later): I set the Journal aside for the moment. "Her name was Eloise, and I'd call her cute. We held hands." I had to clap my own hands over my ears. "Don't squee! It was because the place was scary, not because we got mushy. My gosh, I only met her that one time! There's nothing between us, and I'll probably never hear from her again. She and her folks live in Minnesota, so there's no way we're, like, hooking up."

Mabel had been sitting cross-legged on the floor. She leaned back into the angle of the corner and gave me a stern stare, pretending to be the Alpha Twin again. "Good thing for you. Wendy would kill both of you."

I sat up, dangling my legs over the edge of the bed. Somehow I hadn't noticed, but I've grown enough so I can now put my feet on the floor when I do that. I said, "Funny, but I don't think Wendy'd do that. She'd understand it was a bad situation. Eloise and I got out of it the best way we could, but it was a close call."

My voice, I guess, showed Mabel that I still troubled about the whole thing. "Place was scary, huh? What's it like?"

I tried to grin, but it felt like I was making an angry face. Didn't mean to. "The Westminster Mystery House? Imagine the Mystery Shack about a hundred and fifty times the size it really is, and with class."

"Can't do it, Broman," she said, shaking her head and pursing her lips. "The size is no problem, but a Mystery Shack with class? Beyond the scope of the human imagination. Maybe we can go back there together some time."

I hopped off the bed and sank onto the floor and grabbed Mabel and hugged her. "No! Never. But I do wish you'd been there with me," I said into her shoulder, trying to hide that I was tearing up. "You could've kept me from making so many dumb mistakes."

"Hey," she said gently, patting my back. "It's OK, Dipman. Nobody died, right?"

I shook my head. "But—I don't know. I walked away from that house feeling that it knew I'd been there and it hated me. Go back? No, Sis, not me. Not ever if I can help it. You know, I think that when a place has been haunted—really haunted, and the haunting is a bad one—though the ghosts might leave, the house has absorbed their emotions. This was a real bad one."

She stroked the back of my head. "Talk to Ford about that. Hey. Call me tonight if you have nightmares."

"Always," I said, breaking the hug and swiping my hand across my eyes. "And next time I take on a haunting, we have to do it together or it's no deal. Mystery Twins?"

We did the silly little fist bump. "Sure," she said softly. "Mystery Twins."

I love my sister's smile when she's feeling kind, especially now that her braces are off. I can't blame Trey Moulter for having a thing for Mabel. Oh, I could cheerfully kick his butt over it, but I can't blame him.

I took Mabel's hand and squeezed it. "Thanks. I can't do anything without my sidekick."

"I'm flattered, Brobo," she said, beginning to work out another math problem with the help of the calculator. She left the headphones off. I could faintly hear the boy band wailing out their second-biggest hit, "Girl, You Done Made Me Stupid." Mabel heard it too and turned off the player app on her phone. "But let's be honest with each other. I think I've deserved that much. Will you always be on the level with me, Dip?"

"Always."

"Then I'll treat you the same way." Without even looking at me, she said in her most serious voice, "YOU are clearly the sidekick."

So, it being the tag end of April Fools' Day, I let her have that one. Because sometimes you need to be kind to your sister.