catastrophe keeps us together
"Okay, so can you describe what it looks like, exactly?" Dipper says. He's got his stupid journal out with a pen at the ready, face all serious like he's some sort of scholar-slash-warrior, ready to do battle after he charts all his enemy's weaknesses.
It's actually not a bad look for him. And Pacifica has developed a respect for what he can do with a book and a little courage. He's a nerd, but maybe that's kind of a good thing?
Ugh. What has she become?
A better person, a voice in the back of her head savagely informs her. Mabel is standing right behind Dipper, ready to fully support him in whatever he plans to do, and Pacifica remembers every spiteful, cruddy thing she's said to the other girl and she wants to shrivel up and disappear. And she greatly resents being made to feel that way. Even though it's not Mabel's fault. It's her own fault. But she still hates it, and it makes her want to say something mean again.
It's become a very familiar cycle. Her thoughts run in circles; she looks in the mirror and wonders who is looking back. She avoids her mother and father as much as she possibly can because she feels like one scathing remark or one ring of the bell will bring her old self crashing back to the forefront, and she hates that person. Even though that person is still there, in bits and pieces and a poisoned tongue. She's afraid to test her new resolve. She's afraid to find out how weak she really is.
Changing is hard.
But she looks at Dipper and Mabel, who got on a plane and came four hundred miles from their home, sacrificing their weekend for no other reason than she asked them to, and she thinks that changing might just be worth it.
"I only saw it for a second," she tells Dipper. "It's, like, some kind of crab thing."
"What did it do?"
"I don't know… it scuttled?" she says, crossing her arms. "I threw my shoe at it and ran. That shoe was a Donna Ray. I want it back."
Dipper continues making notes in his journal while also making short noises of interest and she kind of wants to strangle him. It'd be a little harder now that he's taller than her, but still possible. What is he even doing? Making sure the part about the shoe gets written down?
"Do you know what this thing is?" she prompts him.
"I have no idea!" he says, except instead of sounding worried or uncertain or anything sane like that he sounds positively thrilled.
"What's the plan?" Mabel asks, looking equally unconcerned.
"Step one is to make contact," Dipper says, tucking his journal back in his jacket rather dramatically.
He's all business again, standing straight with one foot forward, about an inch away from striking a pose. Pacifica sort of wants to laugh, but he's pulling it off surprisingly well. It's either the confidence or the new inches in height. On one hand, it's nice to see that she isn't the only one who's changed a little. On the other, it's really throwing her off to see him in such a different light. Except, she isn't really, is she? He's acting pretty much like he had when he'd come to the party. Something else is different. She just doesn't know what.
Then he takes a step and the tip of his foot catches on the hardwood, making a squeak and tripping him up. He recovers quickly and laughs awkwardly at himself. It's so reminiscent of his walking into the pillar incident that it makes her laugh and makes her feel a little more balanced.
Right up until she thinks about what he just said. "Wait, you're going to talk to it?"
"A lot of magical creatures are actually sentient," he explains. "It might just be lost or stuck or something. Never hurts to ask."
She thinks it could very easily hurt to ask. "No, you didn't see this thing, it has big claws."
He frowns. "That doesn't mean it can't talk."
"Yeah, but if it gets mad it'll mean you can't," she says. This sounded cutting and witty in her head, but it comes out more concerned than anything.
Dipper straightens his cap, as if the flimsy thing is suitable armor. "I'll be careful. It's right down here?" He reaches out for the doorknob to the basement.
Pacifica braces herself. "That's it."
She was home alone when the encounter occurred. Her mother has been gone for at least two days and Pacifica doesn't know where to; if she'd been told, she hadn't been listening. She had been watching the rain bead on the sliding glass doors to the balcony that overlooks the beach, listless and unenthused by the prospect of yet another weekend alone.
At least at school there are other people to observe and drama to witness, even if she is increasingly on the fringes of the happenings there. The dissolution of her family, the loss of their ancestral grounds, and the spreading rumors regarding the source of the Northwests' sudden near-insolvency (none of which are even close to being true, but all of which are damaging) made her a pariah so quickly that she would be shocked if she hadn't seen it happen to others before. She's taken part in it happening to others before.
It makes her wonder who is enjoying her swift decline. The old her would have already known and would have been prepping some form of revenge. The new her watches rain gather on the glass and struggles to care about much of anything. Sometimes she thinks about the Shack, the torn sky, and the fighting that followed, and she's puzzled how moments so terrifying could have made her feel so alive.
She'd been pondering that when she heard a rumbling crash somewhere in the house below her. Assuming a shelf had fallen over, she had gone downstairs to make sure none of her old things were ruined. But instead of finding a mess of boxes, there had been a dark, crumbled hole on the far side of the room where the concrete wall met the floor. The sounds of water echoed faintly from it. Pacifica stood on the stairs and gazed at the sinkhole, thinking, I can't deal with this right now.
Then something brown and chitinous had clambered out of the hole, clicking and chirring. Pacifica had screamed bloody murder, thrown the closest thing at hand (her shoe), and ran back up the stairs as fast as her feet could take her.
At first, she'd feared the horrible thing would smash down the door and come for her. She ran out into the rain and stood on the front lawn, paralyzed by terror and indecision. Eventually, she'd gathered the courage to go back inside and retrieve her phone. She called the only person she could think of who might deal with something like a crab-monster. The cops wouldn't believe her (not that the Northwests could ever countenance police invading their residence—what would the neighbors think?) and she assumed animal control would not be up to the task. She spent the night in a nearby hotel, wondering if she was crazy for calling a boy she knew instead of the National Guard.
Maybe it's not entirely rational, but she thinks that Dipper and Mabel are the only people she can trust with something like this.
And now Dipper is going to get decapitated because of that.
Pacifica's hand shoots out and grips his shoulder just before he opens the door. "Seriously, be careful."
"Hey, this isn't my first rodeo," he tells her, his expression indicating he thinks that's a pretty cool thing to say. "Besides, Mabel's got my back."
"I'll rake its face off!" Mabel says, brandishing a rake she took from the landscaper's shed. She pauses. "Does it have a face…?"
"Here we go," Dipper says.
He turns the knob and slowly pushes the door open. Mabel moves to the other side and leans in to see. Pacifica stands behind Dipper as she peers down the stairs; his shoulder has become just the right height for her to rest her chin on, which is an odd thought to have and she doesn't know why that occurred to her.
The lights are still on, Pacifica having left them that way in her haste to flee. She half expects the monster to be camped on the steps waiting to strike, but the stairs are empty. The sound of water is louder through the opened door. The stairs run down the rightmost wall of the basement and then open out to the left. Whatever is down there remains out of sight.
"Hello?" Dipper calls out. "Is anyone there?"
There's no reply, nor any of the awful noises Pacifica previously heard.
"Maybe it doesn't speak English," Mabel suggests. "HOLA! MI NOMBRE ES MABEL!"
Dipper and Pacifica both wince as Mabel's voice is amplified in the narrow stairwell.
"Maybe it doesn't speak anything," Dipper muses. He makes a fist and raps three times against the drywall on the left side of the stairs. He waits, then raps three times again. Then again.
After the fourth time, Pacifica is getting impatient. "Maybe it went away," she says.
Dipper looks disappointed by the possibility. "Man, I hope not. Okay, I'm going to take a quick look."
Mabel readies her rake again, as if that's going to be useful against a big horrible armored thing. Pacifica is starting to wonder if she should have just called animal control after all. At least they probably have stun guns or something. And she'd care less if they got eaten.
Dipper probably intends to go down alone but both girls stick to him like glue as he carefully descends the steps. Halfway down the drywall ends and a railing begins, revealing the rest of the basement. Dipper reaches that point and freezes.
"What?" Pacifica whispers near his ear. When he doesn't answer she presses closer to him and slides around his back until she can see.
The far side of the basement is dark. There are a couple inches of water on the floor, shimmering with the wavering reflections of the light from the stairs. At the far wall next to the collapsed hole, something big is sitting in the blackness, folded up into itself like a turtle with its legs in its shell. It's roughly the size of a bear, she thinks, and what little can be seen is unnerving in what it suggests: two huge lobster claws, a bumpy, barnacle-speckled shell, and beady black eyes glittering behind the shield of its limbs.
"Dipper?" Mabel whispers, eyes wide.
"Some… sort of Kraken, maybe, or…" Dipper is clearly at a loss. His eyes are as wide as Mabel's, but his hands are already groping for his journal.
"This thing's pretty scary, huh," Mabel says in a slightly wavering tone.
One of the monster's claws snaps shut with a clack that makes all of them jump.
Slowly, Dipper begins retreating up the steps. Pacifica and Mabel move with him, and as soon as they are cloaked behind the wall section they break out into a run, stampeding into the evening light and slamming the door behind them.