Wendip Week 2023
5-Sometimes the Cipher Solves You
January blew into town, and with it freezing temperatures and flying snow. Into her second trimester, Wendy was able to do most of her work online, compiling data from the previous spring, summer, and autumn into charts and reports, analyzing botanical and zoological trends, and suggesting research topics for the near future.
Their side of the Cascades did not get the blizzards that hit again and again that year, but it did get snow about four days out of every week, and it mounted up into a ground layer more than two feet deep, with impressive wind-driven drifts of up to ten feet. Dan had designed their home well, despite never having studied architecture. The steep-pitched roof shed layers of snow before they accumulated to serious burdens, and the heavy roof beams shrugged it all off.
Days came when Dipper and Wendy might have been together on an isolated island, strangely quiet days with the snowfall muffling all sounds. Dipper, like Wendy, did his work for Ford online or by phone, and he got a running start on his next Granite Rapids book, tentatively called Going Underground, which would take the crew into a strange subterranean complex in the woods and introduce the Morpher, a creature that could change its nature and shape at will. He found it hard going, mostly because in it the young Tripper would be gently turned down by his older crush, Willow. A little close to home.
About once a week they'd hear the growl and the rumble of the snowplow out on Gopher Road, and then Dipper would break out the snow blower to clear the driveway, then use a snow shovel to dig out his dark gray Land Runner, which they had equipped with heavy snow tires, and they would drive carefully into town to shop for necessities. If the day remained clear, they could expect a visit from Mabel and the dogs. Tripper and C.D. would vanish, except for their curved tails, under the snow, bursting out in a white spray every ten feet or so. When they tired of romping, they would come in and warm up in front of the fire, gently steaming.
A few times Teek got stranded in the studio down near Bend—they didn't get as much snow there, but it wasn't unusual for the highway northward toward the Falls to be closed. He worked on preproduction for the upcoming movie and, when necessary, slept in a tiny bedroom in the studio complex, one of many intended for the use of studio personnel who had to stay over now and then.
Dipper and Wendy were glad to see Mabel, of course, but she sometimes fussed too much over Wendy—"Don't get up, I'll bring whatever you need! Here's a pillow for the small of your back! Here, I made you a cup of tea!" Still, it was nice to have company, and on other days they drove down to Stan's or Ford's house, or Mabel, Stan, Sheila, and they would congregate in the Shack to do the routine tasks to make sure the place was weathering the winter while being closed.
That involved checking that no water pipes had frozen or burst, inspecting for ceiling leaks or cracked windows, dusting, stuff like that. One big help was that a family of Gnomes had moved into a burrow beneath the Museum porch, not too big a burrow because if they went very deep, they'd hit the basement walls, but beneath the frost line. They were better than a kennel of guard dogs, since if any unknown humans got too close, the Gnomes would set up an eerie racket that made it seem as though a family of vengeful ghosts was haunting the place. In the past three or four years, that had happened just once—and now the Shack enjoyed a local reputation as a spooky place that only attracted more tourists.
Anyway, beginning the second week in January, a constant series of snowstorms came through, one after another, and the next week was the same. "We're snowbound, dude," Wendy told Dipper.
"I'm nervous about that," he admitted. "If there was an emergency—"
"We'd handle it," she said, kissing him. "But, yeah, I'd rest easier if we could be sure the route from here into town wasn't choked with snow. I guess I'll have to use my weather mojo."
Dipper knew that she hated to affect the weather very much—her aunt and the Handwich both warned that a weather-changer risked going too far and bringing on unintended disasters. "What are you going to try?"
"Been thinking about that, man. I won't try to affect the weather all over the Northwest. But if I concentrate, I can make sure that an area from here to, say, the center of town gets only about a third of the snowfall that everywhere else gets. I can spread what would normally fall here over a wide area and not make things worse for other people."
"If it won't strain you too much," Dipper said.
"Hey, if I thought it would hurt the babies, I wouldn't even begin. It's more of a mental challenge than a physical one. Let me look out at the yard and concentrate."
Dipper moved an armchair so she could gaze out a front window. By then the Green Machine, under a carport shelter, was visible, but Dipper's car could bee seen only from the windows to the roof—which itself wore a thick cap of snow. And more snow was falling, big wet flakes that clumped and piled up almost visibly.
Wendy took long, deep breaths and concentrated. Looking over her shoulder, Dipper could tell that the snowstorm was tapering—the clouds grew lighter, the flying flakes smaller, and the wind eased down.
"There," Wendy said after a while. "We should get just maybe three or four more inches. I think it'll be more like twenty inches everywhere else. But if I aimed just right, then the road down into town and town itself won't be buried. That means Mabel and Teek, Ford, and Stan will have a clear run in and out of town, too, just like us."
"How long will this last?"
"Dunno. At least a month, I think. And February's usually drier." She gave him a smile. "Anyhow, all this snow cover should really fill up the streams and lakes. If it wasn't such a trek, we could go check out Moon Trap Pond. Bet you anything it's unfrozen and clear of snow."
"No bet," Dipper said. The resident water sprite of the uncanny pond would take care of that.
No matter how cold the winter, no matter how intense the muddy run-off, Moon Trap Pond always looked exactly the same—a perfectly round pool at the base of a cluster of hills, reflecting the blue of the sky, even if the sky were overcast and dark gray.
It was Numina's home and her realm, and there in the dreaming water she made everything exactly the way she liked it. And Lord help the unwary human who fell into the pond. Not that they would die.
But from then on until forever, they would live a very different kind of life under the surface.
The storms finally tapered off as they turned the calendar to February. Wendy told Dipper, "Guess Mabel could nickname me now, 'cause when I walk, I waddle!"
Slowly the snow cover retreated, the streams swelled, and the weather turned warm. Warm-er, anyway, with highs in the low forties instead of the twenties. One evening as they both relaxed from a day at work (Dipper and Ford had tracked down an actual poltergeist whose gig was spilling everything in a poor woman's kitchen, from vanilla extract to ten-pound bags of flour).
To fight the rackety ghost, Ford had used an obscure method, making a male and female figurine from clay, mixing in a small amount of the spilled materials, and then precisely at sunrise invoking a psychopomp to lure the poltergeist to possess whichever of the two figurines was most appropriate.
The male statuette wobbled. Ford said to Dipper, "You may want to leave the room."
"I'll stay. You may need help."
Ford chanted in ancient Sumerian, the figurine juddered and vibrated, and then Ford wound up by saying, "Go and don't look behind you!"
Dipper started to ask, "Uh, me?" However, the male figurine glowed first red, then white, until the shimmer around it collapsed. Inside the fading ball of light, the figurine shrank to nothing. Dipper heard a small pop.
"Well," Ford said, "that seems to have worked."
They swept the kitchen, dining room, and other rooms with highly accurate anomaly detectors. No readout went above 1.3, a little high for Podunk, but below the usual Gravity Falls level of weirdness. The lady of the house thanked them and offered to pay what she could, but with a smile, Ford said, "No charge at all! For me, this is simply a field investigation, and my Institute pays my salary for such."
Dipper spent the rest of the day entering Ford's notes, observations, and directions into the computer, incorporating photos and a few short videos of the poltergeist mischief, then detailing the process of eliminating the noisy spirit. "One day," Ford told him in the afternoon, "this will be part of a chapter in my textbook on ghosts and spirits."
"It'll be a good one," Dipper said, taking his coat from the rack in Ford's office waiting room. "I'll check out and go see how Wendy's doing."
"My best to her," Ford murmured, reviewing the document and nodding with satisfaction.
Dipper drove home and came in to the aroma of a slow-cooking stew. Wendy had been busy. "Hey, Dipper!" she called from their bedroom. "Come here!"
Dipper found her in bed, her heels propped on a stack of pillows, her laptop on a hospital-type bedside table, a gift from Stan, who'd cheerfully explained, "When you're almost ready, you'll appreciate this!"
However, right now while she was still putting in three or four full workdays and her feet developed a tendency to swell, she already appreciated it. As Dipper came in, Wendy spoke to the laptop: "Here he is now. Hey, Dip, lay down and see who's paying us a video visit!"
Dipper stretched out beside his wife and saw on the screen a teenaged blond boy, gazing out at him with one mesmerizing eye and one that, if you closely inspected it, was prosthetic. "Hello, Dipper!"
Billy Sheaffer's voice, though distinctly human, had overtones of the triangle demon's high-pitched sound. "Billy!" Dipper said. "I just got home—"
"I know," Billy said. "I timed my call to talk to both of you. Are you worried?"
"Everything checks out fine," Dipper said. "It's all going normally."
"Yes, but you're worrying," Billy said. "I can tell. I pick up, well, call them vibes. It's a side effect of our having been so close, you know."
They had indeed been close, for about five years, Bill Cipher having saved Dipper's life by putting a few molecules of himself—and at that time he'd had few to spare—inside Dipper's heart. That was part of the Axolotl's plan for him. Cipher had been, what, retroactively reincarnated as a human?
His crimes had been vast and harmful across many dimensions. When Stan had put an end to Cipher's physical existence, an agonized triangle had invoked ancient powers in an effort to survive. As it happened, the Axolotl—not the Earthly amphibian, but a powerful guardian spirit of no one knew how many dimensions—decreed that becoming human and learning about such things as friendship, courage, and love from the inside was Cipher's only way forward.
Now he was clearly nearly almost but not quite one hundred per cent human. He even had acne on his chin and forehead. "Thanks for checking in, Billy," Dipper said.
Billy closed both eyes. His voice took on more of the treble timbre of the old Cipher: "Kid, the little ones are gonna slip into the world without much fuss or bother. But just because I'm out of the evil dimensional demon business doesn't mean you're out of the woods! Listen, I don't know how much of this is a danger and how much is just stranger, but around April first, don't be a fool. Get me?"
"Not really," Dipper said. "Some kind of threat?"
"I know lots of things, but not that," Billy said. "But my human senses are stingling. That's like a tingle with a sting in the end. Something weird's gonna hit the Falls at the end of March or beginning of April, so keep your chin up and your head down and make sure nothing bad sneaks through, OK? For me?"
Dipper glanced at Wendy. "We'll keep a lookout," he said. "I'll run an anomaly detector nonstop for those days."
"Ah, Fordsy's little spirit snooper! That should help. Wendy has an aunt, I think?"
"Sallie," Wendy said.
"Her. Ask her. She'll have something, don't know what. But keep your guard up."
Billy blinked and opened his eyes. Then he frowned, and in a more normal voice, he said, "I don't know what he, I mean, what I said. Does it make sense?"
"It's very helpful," Dipper said. "Thanks, man. We appreciate it."
"Well—say hi to Mabel for me," Billy told him. Once upon a time, Billy had a crush on Mabel, who like Dipper was some years older than Billy. Just as Dipper had once had a crush on a beautiful girl who'd told him, "I'm too old for you."
Thankfully, people grew out of that.
The rest of the conversation was mundane, catching up. Billy was trying to learn to dance because the high school was having a spring fling, and China had said she would go with him. He was nervous.
"You'll be fine, dude," Wendy reassured him. "Just do your best, do what everybody else is doing, and have fun."
"You got this," Dipper told him, smiling.
Billy nodded, his face serious. "I'll try. Well—I better go. You guys be careful up there, because—" he hesitated, then blurted, "because I love you guys!"
Wendy smiled gently. "Love you too, Billy. Call us after the dance and let us know how it went."
After they ended the call, Dipper said, "I don't like the sound of that. Something threatening around April first?"
"We'll be on guard, Dip," Wendy said. "I won't let anything happen to my babies—or to you."
"And I'll watch over you, too," Dipper said.
He meant it.
Though now Dipper thought he might really have something to worry about.