real stories of true people, who kind of looked like monsters . . .
As the crane starts to move, Dipper, Pacifica, and Grunkle Stan all back away from the shelf to get a better look.
Slowly, the slack line of the hook retracts until the shelf begins to creak. Once it's tight, the bell chimes again, signaling the motion of the crane's arm. It glides overhead towards the aperture, and soon the hook goes taut with a steely bang. The shelf rattles and the back legs start to lift, grinding against the bolts in the floor. It tilts a few more degrees before the first pallets tip off. Dipper covers his ears as heavy metal objects smash into the concrete in deafening concert. Crates burst on impact, scattering debris and shaking the floor. The Thing grows agitated, whipping through the air with greater alacrity.
Shelves emptied, the crane reverses until the hook is directly overhead. The vertical motion is slower than the lateral; it takes several long seconds for the hook to retract enough to lift the empty shelving unit off the bolts. Freed from its moorings, the bell rings out and the shelf begins its journey towards the glowing tear. Once clear of the cluttered remnants of the pallets, it lowers again until it scrapes against the floor.
"If this doesn't work, I'm not gonna go over there and push," Grunkle Stan says.
With a sound not unlike nails on a chalkboard, the shelf is dragged across the concrete until it reaches the depression in the floor where the Thing twists and shudders. There's a momentary pause as the crane lowers a little more so the shelf rests at the proper height. Then the bell starts up and the shelf lurches forward.
When the shelf makes contact with the Thing it's not moving fast enough to really be called a 'hit.' It gently bumps into the pulsing creature and goes horizontal, beginning to drag across the top of the Thing. Great-Uncle Ford (or Mabel; Dipper isn't sure who's controlling the crane) halts progress before the shelf touches the aperture. At rest, it slides back down the Thing until the lowest shelf catches and goes beneath its barbed belly. The Thing is now caught between the first and second tier of shelves. Its spines rattle, pushing down and springing back up where they brush against the shelf.
The hook climbs upwards, taking the shelf and the Thing with it. It's only now, as it begins to elevate, that the Thing seems to realize its predicament. It lashes out from side to side, battering the shelf. It wraps itself around the orange beams and squeezes like some bizarre, eyeless boa constrictor.
Dipper holds his breath, half expecting the shelf to fold; aside from the sounds of stressed metal, there's no damage. He relaxes slightly. The Thing is strong, but not that strong. It can't bend the steel beams.
The Thing writhes in the makeshift snare as the crane inexorably moves towards the back of the room. The crane's motor makes sounds of distress and it crawls along the wall like it's going uphill. But despite its size, the Thing cannot completely halt the crane's advance. It thrashes violently, rocking the shelf and making the entire crane arm shudder against its rails. The warehouse thrums with the noise; it's like being an ant in a tin can.
"It's working!" Dipper says excitedly. The Thing is disappearing back into the aperture by inches.
He glances at Pacifica and finds she's already looking back at him, her eyes alight with triumph. He's just about to grin at her when he sees something he doesn't understand: The hair at the top of her head is floating upwards, streaming towards the aperture. He blinks, confused. What…?
Oh.
He wraps his right arm around her and uses his left arm to latch onto the steel column of the shelf. "Everybody hold on!" he shouts.
The Thing is no longer perfectly lodged in the tear (how does that work? The edges are uneven, but the portion that transfers is smaller than that?). Pacifica's hair is reacting to a current that's about to become a deluge. Wind is rushing towards the tear, bellowing. The Thing slides further into the rift, but the shelf isn't moving. The Thing wiggles, fighting the pull; its spines grate stubbornly across the floor.
Then, like some kind of macabre, disembodied bullet, Headsy comes spinning out of the darkness and smacks straight into the Thing. And just like a cork coming out of a bottle, the Thing flies back into the aperture and disappears.
The howling that ensues drowns out every other sound. The air in the warehouse rips past in a violent, unending surge. Dust spirals off the floor, the walls, and the shelves in a whirling funnel cloud, twisting into the tear like water down a drain. Bits of pipe, nuts and bolts, empty pallets, loose papers, slivers of wood; all of it whips forward in a deadly storm of debris. It's the wall of a hurricane localized to a single focal point and the entire building shakes with the fury.
Dipper holds onto the shelf and Pacifica with every ounce of strength he possesses, flattened against the side of a crate that he's fervently hoping is too heavy to be moved. It's impossible to breathe. He buries his face in Pacifica's hair and closes his eyes and just waits for it to end or for them to be sucked into the unknown.
Finally, the pressure begins to die down. The howl of the wind changes pitch, growing higher and higher until it's less of an all-encompassing roar and more of a distant rush. Dipper risks a peek over the top of his cover and sees that the aperture is shrinking. Soon it's just a pinhole, air hissing through it with the squeak of a deflating balloon. At last, it disappears completely with a sharp crack as air rushes into the gap where it once existed.
Silence falls over the warehouse.
Dipper spends a couple seconds trying to catch his breath. The warehouse is far from being impermeable, but the air is thin and will probably remain that way for little while. "Are you okay?" he says hoarsely, loosening his grip around Pacifica's torso.
She takes a shaky step back; her hair is a windblown mess and about twice its usual size, strands free-floating with static. She brushes the wisps away from her face, looks at them in disgust, looks at her filthy hands and dirty nails in disgust, and then looks at him—though, thankfully, not in disgust. "You're taking me to a spa."
Grunkle Stan is shaking his fists at the crane cabin. "Ford, you knucklehead! Are you trying to get us killed?!"
"That was unanticipated!" Ford shouts back as he leans out of the cab. "But it worked, didn't it?" With Mabel gleefully riding piggyback, he grapples his way down to the floor. "You've never been one to argue with results, Stanley."
"That was cray-cray! All the air was like WOOSH!" Mabel says as she hops off Ford's back. Then she makes a mournful face. "Poor Headsy…"
Ford pats her on the shoulder. "He's in a better place. Or a very different one, anyway."
"I'll remember him forever: Headsy Headington Pines. He died doing what he loved—crashing into things."
"I guess that Thing lived in a vacuum?" Dipper wonders.
"Not necessarily, but it definitely came from a significantly differing atmospheric pressure," Ford says.
"Shouldn't it have been crushed by ours?"
"If it were you or I, yes, we would have suffered some very unpleasant effects. But nature makes some things hardier than others. Whatever it was, it was tough enough to survive, if not adapt." Ford scribbles a few notes into his journal. "A truly fascinating anomaly. I only wish we could have studied it more closely."
Dipper looks over to where the aperture had been. The floor has been scoured, cleaned of the loose particles of dirt and grime, but it's still marked by scratches from the large red quills. "…I think that was as close as we'd want to be."
"You're right, of course. How frustrating that it was needlessly hostile! Ah, well. Some creatures defy easy observation. Most, actually." Ford closes his journal with a decisive snap. "Well done, everyone! Now we should leave the premises. Quickly."
That sounds like the best idea to Dipper. With Pacifica's hand in his, he hurries for the exit. Everyone piles into the truck and Grunkle Stan hits the gas hard. It feels more like a getaway than the end to the successful pursuit of an anomaly, but Dipper supposes that's what happens when major property damage is incurred. Unintentionally, sure, but he doubts whoever owns the place will care that their stuff is jacked up for the sake of science. Not that any of them are to blame for a giant Thing being there to begin with… It's just that removing it ended up being a messy endeavor. Still, if they hadn't intervened it could have been a lot worse. It's not saving the world again, but they just saved a small part of it, probably.
As the truck grumbles its way down the roads and streets of Piedmont, Ford turns on the screen for his Weirdness Emission Spectrometer again. He nods with satisfaction once the monitor is lit. "You can see the influence is already diminishing. In fact, I should take some readings for comparison, try to get a baseline for the fall off rate…" He grabs a pad of paper from somewhere in the pile of equipment and begins making notations.
Dipper is immediately interested but is also aware that Pacifica probably isn't eager to be forgotten again in the rush to study weirdness. It's sort of impossible to not be aware of her presence: Her hair is drifting all over the place, having reached a whole new level of dispersal thanks to their little brush with rapid decompression. Weirdmageddon aside, she's not used to this kind of taxing adventure the way the rest of them are. Which isn't to say he thinks she's weak or incapable; he knows better than that. But a monster hunt and a near-death experience rolled up into one probably isn't her cup of tea.
But when he turns to look at her, he finds her tired, yet victorious. Her mouth is plumped with the kind of self-satisfaction she used to take from lording it over the town. "We did it!" she declares.
He grins, equally ecstatic. "Yeah! Wasn't that amazing? And that Thing, that was crazy!"
"This is what you did all summer?" she asks.
"I mean, not all of it. But… sort of," he concedes.
She takes a second to mull that over. "What did you think when I showed up?"
He's confused. "Uh, I thought that you were all messed up because of Weirdmageddon, and I understood that because—"
"Not that time," she cuts him off. "When I asked you for help with the ghost."
"Oh, that." Dipper doesn't want to go into detail. His thoughts towards Pacifica hadn't been very kind in that moment. "I thought it was weird you would come to me, for starters…"
"It was my dad's idea," Pacifica tells him. "There was that picture of you in the paper. I think you were fighting a big bat or something."
He'd been rather proud of the picture, thinking at the time that it painted him in a flatteringly heroic light. Which had made him feel better about the whole thing because it actually hadn't been his finest hour. He'd been trying to photograph the bat, only to nearly become its prey in the process. He'd eventually been able to drive it off with a taser he'd taken from a terrified Durland and Blubs but had trudged home without evidence—or so he'd thought. The picture had been a welcome surprise, though his encounter had soon become irrelevant in the face of Great-Uncle Ford's return and Weirdmageddon.
Funny that was what had brought Pacifica to the Mystery Shack's door. "I always thought you wanted me to help because of the mini golf thing."
"What, that?" she scoffs lightly. "You didn't even do anything."
Ouch. That's a minor blow to his pride, but he can't really argue the point. He'd played second fiddle to Mabel for that little misadventure. "You two seemed like you had a handle on it," he says with as much nonchalance as he can muster.
"Yeah, well… maybe you suck at mini golf. But you are pretty great at this paranormal stuff," Pacifica says thoughtfully. Then she adds, "So I guess my dad had one good idea."
"Hey, you're right. If it hadn't been for the party…" He imagines an apocalyptic meeting at the Shack during which they were barely on speaking terms, and he hates everything that implies. "I guess it all worked out."
She seats herself on a bulky CPU. She starts to rest her hands on her knees and then jerks them back up when she remembers her pants are coated with several layers of accumulated filth. "Next time, how about we look for monsters somewhere that won't ruin our clothes."
He smiles at her, just happy she said, 'next time.' "Sounds like a plan."