Wendip Week 2023

6 Hurry Up, Please, It's Time

Part One: The Onset

Mabel hosted the big baby shower in the Shack in the last week of March. Medically, everything was going fine with Wendy. With her due date some six or seven weeks away, she now wore maternity clothes that, she said, made her look like she was wearing a tent.

At Dr. Greenberg's insistence, Wendy had arranged to begin her maternity leave from that week, though she said she still felt fine. However, she definitely wouldn't be climbing or chopping down any trees anytime soon.

Soos and Melody were getting the Shack ready for its season opening, which would come on April 4. Actually, because they had returned from Mexico a month before, the place was about as ready as it needed to be. To Wendy's delight, Mabel had invited all her old friends, and almost everyone had shown up—Robbie and Tambry, who now were music producers, Thompson and his wife, still running the town's theater, Nate and Lee, still unmarried, even three of Wendy's high-school teachers, all came.

Dipper good-naturedly grumbled that they were going to have to add on a couple of rooms to their house to hold all the gifts, but that was an exaggeration. They had a guest room and a spare room, and with Dan's help, they had turned the former into a nursery and the latter into a replacement, somewhat smaller, guest room. Dan had rumbled, "I'll plan out how to expand the place, maybe dry in the carport and divide it into two rooms for the grandbabies, and while I'm at it build on that garage I never got around to."

But that could come later. At the moment, Dipper kept an anomaly detector going around the clock. It fluctuated, as the devices will, sometimes swinging up to a ten (probably a pterosaur gliding over), dropping down to a 2, a point below the normal background readings. Nothing too alarming.

But April was coming on. And with it . . ..

Ford detected it first, up in the hills. He had established a network of detectors, sort of an early-warning system for paranormal stuff. On a Wednesday morning, he got up, ready to drive to his Institute for a day of educational endeavors, including his three-day-a-week Practical Investigations seminar. He took just twenty students a term, and there was always a waiting list at registration time.

That morning, though, he sat at the desktop computer for his usual pre-breakfast check of the instrument readouts. He was still there twenty minutes later when Lorena said from the doorway, "Don't get too wrapped up in your instruments, dear. It's nearly eight."

Ford looked around, blinking. "Please bring me an orange and a cup of coffee," he said.

"Oh, dear." But she went to the kitchen and a few moments later came in bearing a tray with a mug of hot coffee, a big navel orange, and a cinnamon roll.

Ford was on the phone. She set the tray down as he said, "The seminar today is the meeting on distinguishing between hallucinations and hauntings. You'll find my lesson plan on my desk, under the Megalodon tooth paperweight. Yes, thank you, Fiddleford. The students? Just tell them that I had something unexpected turn up, and I will see them on Friday. Thank you." He hung up and smiled as his wife set the tray on the table. "You're too good to me, Lorena."

"What's happening, and how can I help?" she asked.

"I'm not sure exactly what is happening," Ford said, taking a sip of the coffee. "I know where, however—up on Slaughter Hill, past Crash Point Omega and in the woods." He frowned, set the cup down, and began to peel the orange. "Something is forming there. Or—maybe that's not the right term. The readings are high, up in the fifties, but the profile is—well, it isn't an interdimensional disturbance, and it isn't a ghost. It's more like a . . . " he gestured with the peeled orange . . ."like a malevolent, ah, void. I'll have to go check it out."

"Should I alert the Agency?" Loren asked.

"If you would be so kind. Not on the red line, just phone Deputy Director Hazard and tell her to put a crew on standby. Six should do it. Everyone to be armed with quantum destabilizers."

"I'll get your kit together," Lorena said. She leaned over his chair to kiss the top of his head. "You eat your roll and orange now. I don't want you setting out hungry."

"Yes, of course." Ford looked closely at his computer screen again as Lorena went to get his ready bag, and he absent-mindedly dunked sections of orange in his coffee. When he had eaten it, he looked back at the tray and murmured, "I thought there was an orange. Oh, well, he ate the cinnamon roll, then got up, went to brush his teeth and make sure his quantum disruptor pistol and the rifle destabilizer were both fully charged.

He looked for but didn't find his black go bag, a compact messenger-style satchel. "Lorena?"

His eyes narrowed in worry when she didn't reply. He looked upstairs, downstairs, and called from the cellar door—

And then he heard the sound of an auto horn. Ford rushed to the kitchen door that led into the garage. Lorena sat in the passenger seat of the RHIN-O UTV, smiling at him.

He opened the driver's side door. His wife was wearing khaki slacks, a tan shell jacket over a chambray shirt, and had a broad-brimmed sun hat in her lap. "What are you doing?" Ford asked.

"Going with you," she said. "Your kit is in the back seat. Let's go, darling."

"It may be dangerous."

With an indulgent smile, she took something from beneath the hat in her lap. It was the most compact disruptor pistol that McGucket had created. "It may be dangerous," she agreed. "And you may need help."

Ford got behind the wheel, used the remote to open the garage door, and started the engine. "And that," he said, "is why I love you."

Both Dipper's and Wendy's cars were in the carport of their house, and Dipper opened the door fully dressed in cargo pants, red shirt, and Navy-blue vest. "I didn't know you were coming—" he said.

"Check your anomaly—" Ford began.

"It's ticking between twenty and twenty-two," Dipper said. "Come in. Wendy's in the dining room. Uh—" he stared at the stuff Ford and Lorena were hauling in. "Coffee?" he asked.

"That would be lovely," Lorena said. "May I leave these in the corner here?"

Two quantum-destabilizer rifles. "Sure," Dipper said. "Just anywhere."

Wendy started to stand up, but Ford waved her back into her chair. "Don't bother," he said. "I suppose Mason has told you—"

"Yeah. Hi, Lorena. If you want coffee, there's—"

"I got it," Dipper said. He got two Mystery Shack mugs from the cabinet and poured coffee into both. Ford took his with only one teaspoon of sugar, Lorena with two sugars and cream. By the time Dipper put both cups on the table, Ford had opened his laptop and had booted it up. The whole Valley had high-speed Wi-Fi, thanks to McGucket, and the laptop (another McGucket product) came online about as fast as a light bulb lights when a switch is thrown.

Ford tapped away, holding up both pinkies and typing with his other ten fingers. "Here we go," he said. "I'm calling up a relief map of the Valley and overlaying that with data from my instrument readouts. One second . . . there. Here are the hot spots."

Dipper sat beside Wendy, and Ford turned the computer so they could both see the screen. "SNB is white, Gravity Falls normal green, and then the paranormal levels go up from blue to yellow to red. We're here. And as you see . . .."

In the middle of a small blue circle a white dot flashed to show their position on Gopher Road. Toward town the green overlay was interrupted only once, quite near—another blue smear right over the Mystery Shack. But west of town, past the valley's center, an amorphous yellow smear held at its center an intense splotch of red.

"Where is that?" Wendy asked.

"It's a spot called Slaughter Hill," Ford said. "As I understand it, there' a Native American legend of a battle fought there in prehistoric times."

"Yeah, I know the place," Wendy said. "About fifteen miles from here, right?"

"Something like that. But watch this. Here is the track of this paranormal disturbance from the time it first developed to a few minutes ago."

He zoomed in, and then Dipper could see the round shape of CSO, or Crash Site Omega, a pulsating orange circle—normal for the spot above a buried interstellar alien vehicle. Past that, to the west and a bit north, the red spot elongated into a slash mark. "It's on the move," Dipper said.

"And here is the projected path," Ford said, switching the view and zooming back out again.

"Oh, great," Wendy said.

The red spot became a straight-line streak, and it now touched the spot where they were.

Their house.

"What do you think it is?" Dipper asked his great-uncle.

"Here we go," Ford said. "One moment." He used the keyboard and the touchpad to create an extreme close-up of the Slaughter Hill area. He turned the screen toward them again. "It looks ominous."

Now the red had become a spiral shape, and at its center—

A circle of absolute darkness.

"Looks like a hurricane on a weather map," Wendy said.

"Demons?" Dipper guessed. "Or aliens, or ghosts?"

"Whatever it is," Ford said, "it's hollow."

"I'd say it looks hungry," Lorena said. "How soon will it be here, dear?"

"By midday, unless it slows or speeds up."

"Well, if it's plannin' on just dropping in," Wendy said, "I say we get ready to greet it. Dipper, please bring me my axe.