The Big Con

Chapter 9: Talkback

That night Wendy and Mabel turned in early, but neither Brad nor Dipper was ready for sleep—Brad was too elated over their second-place finish and his trophy ("This'll show 'em back in Cordele!") and Dipper was worried because he had no idea what to do next.

The hotel had a lobby with many nooks and a strong Wi-Fi signal, though, so Brad spent some time posting photos of his trophy and one of the group online. Dipper thought that most of his friends were the ones he never saw but only chatted to on the computer.

Meanwhile Dipper took out his camera and played back the footage he'd tried to shoot of the ghost. As he'd feared, there was no distinct figure to be seen—a kind of flickering blue light was all. But the voice was there—the weird, distorted sounds that weren't like any words.

"What's that, dude?" Brad asked, looking up at the noise.

"Nothing. Just, uh, something that I got from somebody I know. It's supposed to be like a code, but I can't make sense out of it."

"It's backward masking," Brad said promptly.

"Huh?"

"It sounds like normal speech played backwards. They did that in the show, season 1, episode 19. Man, that was a good one! Remember? Bill Cipher made a bargain with Li'l Gideon to go into Stan's mind and steal the combination to his safe? Li'l Gideon's incantation's just the words 'backwards message' back-masked. And Bill Cipher later—"

"Wait, what? You mean if we played these sounds backwards—we might get something understandable?"

"Well, yeah. And the hissing sounds like wind, they're probably part of it too. You don't really notice them so much under the words. Sorta like an electrical discharge or something. Alex used that at the end of the show—"

"How could I play it backwards?"

Brad grinned. "Leave that to the Handyman of the Electronic Age. Let me borrow your camera. Huh, don't recognize the make, but it has a standard USB micro socket." He rummaged through his laptop case and came up with a short black cable. "Let me perform my magic."

Dipper watched as he plugged the cable into the laptop and camera. Then he switched the camera on and checked the laptop. "Yup, here it is as 'USB Storage Device.' Okay, let's see—only one video stored, has to be it. Take a second to copy . . . there. Close that, open this . . . open the file . . . I could isolate the soundtrack, but it's faster just to play the whole thing. Here we go."

Just as it had when Dipper first confronted the ghost, his skin pimpled up and he felt the hair on his neck bristling. The chorus of buzzing, faint voices now was saying words—distorted words, true, but barely intelligible, with a wrenching tone of agony: "Hhelllp usss . . . we arrr lossst bet-a-ween worls. Stoppp the es-per-uh-ment. 'Elp usss."

"Ooh, creepy," Brad said.

"Help us," Dipper said. "We are lost between worlds! Stop the experiment! Help us!"

"That's not from an episode, is it?"

Dipper said, "Uh, no. It's kind of . . . kind of a fan thing."

"Hang on. Hear the hissing? It's whispering, Dig. Let me isolate it—right. And I'll damp out the back-masked message. I think the whispers are backwards, too, but we'll see in a second. This'll be hard to make out, so listen close."

At first Dipper couldn't be sure that the new whispered message wasn't all in his head. But as they listened twice, then three times, he said in a shaky voice, "Brad, back me up on this. Pause after every word and let's see if we can agree on what we're hearing."

"You got it, dude." Brad grinned. "This is great, man! You guys really take your cosplay to the extreme. We gotta keep in touch after the con."

"Uh, sure. I'll—we'll try," Dipper said.

"Ready? First word."

He played it, and they both said it together: "McGusset."

Word by word. Twice they slightly disagreed and played those doubtful ones over and over until one or the other gave in to the other's interpretation. Dipper had a hotel scratch pad and painfully wrote out what the whispers seemed to say: "McGusset aboard Mistral stop him free us."

"Whoa!" Brad said. "Mistral, dude! That's the ship where the famous Mistral Mystery took place thirty years ago!"

"Thirty?" Dipper asked, shocked. "Not—not five?"

"No, dude, it was like back in 1983, I think. They were gonna like send a whole Navy ship through some sort of dimensional portal, right? So it could, like, go from Catalina Island to Hawaii in less than a second? But it never got to Hawaii—just blinked out of existence and then a few minutes later came back, but most of the crew was dead and all the rest insane! I saw a TV show about it. Oh, they say it was just a radar experiment, but if you ask me, that's a government cover-up. And you know what the coolest thing is?"

"What?"

"The Mistral is moored out in the bay, dude! You can see it from the Maritime Museum. Just go up, I think it's Harbor Drive, north from the convention center and look out to sea, and it's just moored out there. I think you can even tour it. Are you guys on some kind of quest game?"

"No," Dipper said. "No, it's just some more fans of the show, uh, messing with me."

"Bummer."

Dipper's impulse was to head up to the Maritime Museum right then—but it was past midnight, and if the patrol boat was moored out in the bay, they would have no way of getting there. At last, reluctantly, he went up to the room The girls were both sound asleep. Brad tried to talk Dipper into taking the bed, but Dipper said, "No, it's okay. I fit the loveseat, and you don't. It's comfortable for me, don't worry."

He finally got to sleep—a kind of troubled sleep, but still—some time past three.

The next morning while Brad was in the shower, Dipper conferred with Mabel and Wendy. Mabel had spent a little time online with Brad's computer, and she still was complaining about shipping. "Me and Gideon? Blaaarghh! Me and Pacifica? What kind of crazy people are these? Me and Waddles? That's just sick!"

"It's just imaginary, dude," Wendy said. "Hey, it shows you how popular you are in this world. And it's kinda creative, you have to admit. So if people want to dream about strange stuff like that, what harm are they doing—"

"You and Soos," Mabel said.

Wendy's face hardened. "I'll kill 'em all!" she said, sounding like she meant it.

"Aw, man," Mabel moaned. "Me and Dipper!"

Dipper said, "OK, OK—disgusting—but pay attention! We have to get away and out to that ship as soon as possible."

"I'll handle it," Wendy said. She reached over and closed the lid of the laptop. "Focus, Mabel."

"Okay," Mabel said. "But now I'm sorta scared about what all those people are gonna do with the pictures they took of us!"

Wendy told them her plan, and when Brad came out of the shower, she said, "Hey, man, the cops think they have my car. We're gonna go in to ID it and maybe get our stuff out if it's still in the trunk."

"I'll drive you."

"No sweat, dude, the cops are sendin' a cruiser. Tell you what, you go on over to the con—I know you have panels you want to see—and we'll try to get together later. We'll be movin' out of your room, so—thanks for everything, and have a great rest of the con, man!"

"I've already had that," Brad said. "God, I love you guys!"

"In a nice way, I hope you mean," Mabel grumped.

So they left the hotel and hiked over past the Convention Center and then turned north. "Wow," Dipper said, looking at a gigantic vessel. "That's an aircraft carrier!"

Past that, and further north, and they saw other vessels moored in berths: a couple of tall sailing ships, a submarine, and then—out a little way from shore—"That's the ship in the picture," Dipper said. "The Mistral."

"What's that mean?" Mabel asked. "It sounds like it was on trial for murder, but the trial jury broke down or something."

"Not 'mistrial,'" Dipper said. "'Mistral.' It's French. It's the name of a wind, like the Santa Ana wind in California."

"See, Mabel?" Wendy said teasingly. "Dipper's one smart guy. That's why I love your brother."

"I hope you two are very happy together," Mabel said. 'Mabaddles.' Huh!"

"C'mon," Dipper said, hoping his hot face hadn't turned beet red. "Brad told me you can get a tour of the Mistral."

They found the ticket booth. The woman at the cash register said the fee was twenty-five dollars each, nonrefundable, and that there were only two tours a day. The next was at ten, about an hour away. The tour was only of the upper deck—no one was allowed to go through the ship. They all said they understood, and they bought their tickets. Wendy was handling their cash. The lady said, "Now, don't lose those, even after you go out. The boat pilot will have to collect them again to make sure we get all the tourists safe back to shore."

They found a place to get a kind of breakfast—rolls and juice, and coffee for Wendy—and waited on a bench near the place where the tour folks would ferry them out to the Mistral. The ticket seller had given them a brochure, and Dipper studied it. "Hm. Mystery Vessel Mistral. Fact or Fantasy? There's the story here of the experiment that went wrong. But it says that the experimental device was really a high-powered radar unit that malfunctioned. Brad says a lot of conspiracy theorists are convinced that's a cover story."

"And the ghost dude told you McGusset is actually on this ship?" Wendy asked.

"That's what the recorded whispers sound like they're saying. But it's hard to tell for sure."

"OK," Mabel said, "we gotta figure out some way of getting down into the ship. I'll take my grappling hook—"

"Nah," Wendy said. "I think this calls more for trickery than brute force. And I think I may have come up with a way of coverin' it. Notice how the waitin' area is fillin' up?"

It was clear that a good many of the thirty or forty people waiting for the tour were from the convention. Some were even in costumes. Wendy zeroed in on two tall, skinny guys who were wearing T-shirts with the words GRAVITY FALLS on them in big block letters, like the ones on the souvenir postcards in the Mystery Shack gift shop. "Those two guys keep, like, checkin' us out. I'm gonna talk to those dudes. You guys wave back when I wave at you."

She ambled over and both of the guys checked out her appearance, then started to talk to her in a very animated way.

"I hate them already," Dipper muttered.

"Dippendy!" Mabel said with an annoying giggle.

"Ssh."

Wendy pointed and waved, both kids smiled—Dipper really forcing it—and returned the gesture. The two boys seemed to agree to something, then Wendy sauntered back to the bench. "I got it arranged so we can stay aboard."

"How?" Dipper asked.

"Once we get out on the ship, I'm gonna pass our three tickets and a hundred bucks to Creighton, there, the one with the scruffy little chin beard. He thinks we're doing somethin' called a larp. He's gonna wait until the pilot guy gets real busy takin' the tickets as everyone returns an' slip his, his buddy Waymon's, and our tickets to him all at once. That way the ticket count comes out OK, and we can hang back and try to find a way—what is it, below decks? Down to where we're not s'posed to be, anyway."

"Wendy," Dipper said, "you worked for Grunkle Stan too long."

"Nah," she said. "Just native talent, dude. Stan never did find out that I spent some time up on the roof when I was supposedly workin'. And I mean like every day!"

Dipper mimed zipping his lip.

She grinned and did the same thing.

And then all they had to do was the hardest part:

Waiting.