The Big Con
Chapter 12: All Together Now
From the Journals of Dipper Pines:
. . . I actually can't describe it. The first part is the worst, when you have no sense of yourself at all and everything is gray and empty. You can't feel, hear, smell, taste, or touch anything. There is nothing but your awareness. I think it feels like death . . . .
Slowly, gradually, almost painfully, sensation returned to Dipper: Wendy clutched his right arm tightly, and he could feel the pressure. Mabel pressed his left hand. The monotone gray almost imperceptibly broke up into darker and lighter patches, shapeless and roiling, like being tumbled in a gigantic clothes dryer with wads of poofy lint. Then somehow—it seemed more like telepathy than speech, and not Gideon Gleeful's fake telepathy either, but the real thing—somehow they communicated.
Wendy: Dipper? You OK, man?
Dipper: I'm good. Mabel?
Mabel: I'm so scared! Don't let go! Don't leave me!
Dipper: I'll never let go, Sis. And I won't leave you!
Wendy: We got your back, Mabes. Hang on and tough it out, girl.
Other presences now swirled and flowed around them, only dimly perceived at first: shimmering, pulsating near-human shapes, pale blue, barely lighter than the fog around them. Were they moving, gliding all in the same direction? If so, Dipper thought, so were he and the other two kids. Did the specters have a goal? Were they just drifting, or were they purposefully heading—somewhere?
Mabel: Look at that, guys! They're—they're splitting up and re-making themselves. Like jigsaw puzzles!
Dipper saw now that they were doing exactly that, and he realized something: the weird, disjointed ghost they had first seen might actually be—a composite?—a blend? It might have been made up of pieces of many different ghosts, somehow assembled to make one more-or-less complete apparition whose parts didn't hang together right.
Because now from a cloud of . . . of human pieces, the shapes were attracting things, a hand here, a head there, a leg over yonder. And they were becoming complete human forms, sorting out the jumble. And yes, he could see now that they were heading toward a faint distant swirling whirlpool of blue light . . . their way out of the Between.
But not ours! Dipper became aware that he and the girls were taking a different direction, passing the parade, sailing for some other destination as yet unseen.
Then he actually heard Wendy's voice. "Dude! We got a guide! Check it out!"
Without even knowing how he did it, Dipper spun in mid-flight, dragging Mabel with him. Yes, now they were behind a floating human-shape, featureless in the mists, but whole and unified, and it was beckoning them, urging them on, waving.
"I can sorta see now," Mabel said. "Wowie wow! My hand is back to normal!"
"Our bodies changed again. That means we're going back home," Dipper said, hoping, almost praying, that it was true.
And yes, he glimpsed another revolving blue oval floating ahead, and their guide seemed to stop and hang in mid-air. The kids swept past the shimmery ghost, accelerating, and as they did, in all their minds they heard a kind of eerie faint voice: Fair winds and a following sea.
"We're goin' fast now! Get ready, dudes!"
Following Wendy's advice, Dipper tried to stay loose and prepared to roll with the landing, but they shot through too quickly—they all tumbled out—
They flew out of the portal with a crash and a clatter in the hallway of Admiral Skipper's house. The small table still stood there with the three unburning candles and the incantation resting on it. The Admiral stood in the same spot as he had when their trip began. The only difference was that the hall light was on again.
They hit the carpet hard. Wendy took it best, tucking and rolling. Dipper and Mabel just flopped loosely and somersaulted without meaning to, knocking over the table with a bang and a scatter of candles. Dipper lost his hold on Mabel's hand, got on hands and knees to scramble over to her, and asked, "Are you OK?"
"Uh—yeah, I think so," Mabel said, sitting up and rubbing her forehead. "Ouchie. Hey, look, something's wrong with the Admiral!"
Behind them, the shimmering blue light still hung suspended in air, flaring, flickering, as if it were about to wink out of existence. Standing before it, both arms outspread, Admiral Skipper twitched and jerked like a badly-operated marionette. Then something transparently blue burst out of his body and seemed to be sucked into the vortex—and the blue oval imploded, soundlessly, with a final cold flare of white light.
"It's—it's over," the Admiral gasped, leaning against the wall. "Thank God, it's finally over!"
Dogget was suddenly there at the old man's elbow. "You need to sit down, sir. This way." Offering the Admiral the support of his arm, Dogget jerked his head at the kids, who were just getting to their feet. They followed, not to the more distant sitting room, but into the dining room. Dogget pulled out a chair for the Admiral and helped him sit down. He nodded at the other three, and they sat, too.
"Cool," Wendy said as she leaned back and squirmed. "Now my axe is back to normal. I can't even feel it hangin' there until I reach for it."
Mabel patted her shooting-star sweater, grinning. "Hammerspace!" She reached inside the sweater and like magic produced her favorite tool. "Grappling hook!"
Dogget had brought the General a tall glass of water. The old man was breathing hard, and he took a long, grateful drink. "That took a lot out of me," he wheezed. But he mustered a faint smile and added, "Literally."
"Admiral," Dipper said, "I think I know what happened. I saw a ghost come out of you. Something like that once happened to me, too, I mean a spirit possessed my body, except it was a kind of interdimensional demon. It wasn't your own spirit that went through the vortex, was it? It was kind of . . . kind of a double."
"Yes," the Admiral said. "You've been to—to the other Earth, I guess? The other dimension?"
"Yeah, Admiral dude," Wendy said. "And let me tell you, man, it is messed up."
Skipper nodded wearily. "So I gather. Do you want the full truth? I couldn't tell you earlier. Not as long as he shared my body. There are . . . rules, I suppose you'd say, that ghosts can't break." He took a deep breath. "I'm not young any more. I'll make this short as I can."
He told them that the problem began in 1982. Actually, almost nothing of his former story had been true, at least not in this dimension, where there had been no experiment with the Mistral at all, although he had served aboard the small vessel as a Commander and then in a later tour of duty as a Captain. But in 1982, when he was still a Captain himself, Skipper had experienced, well, the first symptoms of some bizarre disorder. After briefly passing out—fortunately, he said, in his quarters and not on the bridge of his vessel—he started to experience bizarre symptoms. He had thoughts that he didn't believe were his own. He recalled vivid memories of things he knew had never happened. He fought them, covered them up, hung in for a few years until he had just gained his promotion to Rear Admiral, and then . . . one day he lost control completely.
"I became mentally incompetent," he said. "Hopelessly confused, losing all my concentration, unable to function. During my more lucid moments I really thought I'd lost my mind. Had myself committed for treatment. Didn't work, because it turned out I wasn't really crazy. But then gradually I, well, I suppose you'd say I came to terms with my visitor. We worked out internally a way for me to understand him and vice-versa. I learned he was terrified and until he adjusted, his fears and his bafflement at where he was made normal life impossible for me. Even after he calmed down, I found that just behaving normally was most difficult."
The Captain Skipper from the other Earth had somehow burst through the dimensional barrier to merge with his near-twin in the Gravity Falls world. "I could communicate with him in my mind, remember," the Admiral said. "I had his memories, or most of them. But he couldn't make sense of time any longer. Five years after my mental troubles began, I learned to pass for sane and was released from the mental hospital. But of course my naval career was finished, and I had to retire years before I'd planned to do so. As for my . . . passenger, let's call the Captain that for now, well, since he wasn't really concerned with Earthly time any longer, to him the accident had always happened 'five years ago.' Never changed, no matter how many years passed for me."
"So—who were we talking to when you called us in about the ghost?" Dipper asked. "You or him?"
"A mixture of the two of us. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. That's why I've become a recluse, more or less. People who are around me any length of time think I'm schizophrenic."
"Now they won't," Mabel said. In a soft, sad voice, she added, "The other one, the Captain—he's dead, isn't he?"
"Yes, he is," the Admiral said. "He died trying to help his men. Not such a bad way to go. I like to think that if I were in a similar situation, I'd risk it all, too. We weren't exactly alike, mind you, but he was—he was as good a man as I hope I'd be in a life-or-death situation."
"And the first ghost we saw, the one who opened the portal?" Dipper asked.
"Not one ghost. Parts of all his dead shipmates. They couldn't communicate with this world—I suppose they had no close kin, no counterparts in this world, as the Captain and I did. They knew where the Captain had gone, though, and they repeatedly tried to contact him. They learned that only by working together as a team could they muster the power to break through the barrier between worlds and guide you to the other Earth to do what had to be done to free them."
"We met a scientist named McGusset," Dipper said. "I'm sure he has a counterpart here, because we know the man, but their lives weren't really anything alike."
"I believe from what the Captain learned of this universe that the two worlds are only partially parallel. I think the ties between personalities have to be extraordinarily close for an actual exchange to work—unless you have a guide, as the three of you did. But you didn't seem to exchange with or possess anyone on the other Earth. You were yourselves, weren't you?"
"Well, kind of," Dipper said. "Actually, there's a cartoon show over there that's based on our lives, I think. And a fan of that show told me that the creator of it is a guy who has a twin sister and a grandfather who was a lot like our Grun—I mean grand-uncle Stan. But we didn't go into those twins' bodies. We just wound up with versions that looked like ourselves, but different, too, 'cause the humans over there are built weird."
"It was way freaky," Wendy said. "We even had more fingers an' everything. Hey!" she reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a crumple of cash. "Look at these. Over there these things can actually buy things!"
"They don't even look like real money now," Mabel said.
"Never did, Mabes. And I guess they're not usable, here on this side. Prob'ly shoulda left 'em with Bradford. Man, these bills are strange-lookin', right? I got one hundred-dollar bill left. Check it out!"
"Oh!" Mabel said. "Their Benjamin Franklin really was a guy! How weird is that? I wonder if their guy version was as much of a do-good as our woman version in the real world."
"Sir, do you know what happened to McGusset?" Dipper asked. "He turned off the generator that kept all the ghosts trapped in what he called the Between. He said it would be dangerous to be inside the generator field when he did that—but he stayed just the same to send us back. Maybe he even died, but he didn't seem to be in the Between with us. And I don't think he wound up among the ghosts because we saw them going through a portal, I guess to the Great Beyond or somewhere, and nobody his shape was with them. But did he make it or—or not?"
"There are some things we'll never know," the Admiral said. "We'll talk about this more if you want, later on, maybe tomorrow. But I'm worn out. I have to sleep."
"Is this like the same night, still?" Wendy asked.
"Only a few minutes went by from the time you left to the time you returned," Dogget said. "Five at the most."
Wendy leaned back in her chair. "Whoa! We spent days over there! Now my mind is, like, totally blown." She mimed a head explosion. "Boosh!"
"Before I do get to bed," the Admiral said, "there's the matter of a reward. Let me pay you for ending my long trouble. Dogget, bring me the checkbook."
Dipper said, "Uh—Wendy, could you and Mabel go wait in the car? I need to work this out with the Admiral."
"Okay," Mabel said. "But remember Grunkle Stan's motto: No Refunds!"
"Hey, dude, anything you agree on is fine with me," Wendy said. "Even if it's nothing!"
When the girls had left, Dipper leaned on the table. "Sir, I don't want your money. I think taking it would, oh, I don't know . . . make what we did seem cheap? Even dishonor the sailors we tried to help? Does that make any sense at all?"
"It does to me," the Admiral said softly, with a sad smile. "It does to me, my boy."
"But if you really want to reward us," Dipper said, "There is something you could do . . . ."