the underdark — ii
Dipper's sense of the passage of time withers quickly, and much of his sanity goes with it.
The maze is endless. He stumbles through corridor after corridor, plunging ever deeper, making his futile chalk marks along the walls, wanting to weep with frustration when he comes across them again and again. He's whittling down his possibilities one branch at a time, but he feels like the maze is carving away parts of him even faster. His palms and knees are raw, and sting constantly. His phone tells him the sun is just beginning to dawn again, somewhere far above. Down here, it's always midnight. He is a photon circling a black hole, drawn inexorably to the maze's darkest heart.
Sometimes Emilia is with him, and sometimes she is not.
She flits by like a firefly, flickering, spectral. She screams, she sobs, she calls for her father. She huddles just up ahead, back to the wall, glowing as a faint beacon that vanishes when he gets closer. Sometimes, she stays, wandering the same circles; sometimes he swears she's looking right at him.
"I want to go home," she cries.
"So do I," Dipper says hoarsely, resting his head against the stone as the chill of the maze settles into his chest.
He can tell by the absolute blackness that presses against his eyelids that she's gone again.
He tries to hold on to some semblance of scientific inquiry. Emilia is definitely a recording, even if the means and motivation of her preservation and broadcast are not apparent. On more than one occasion he's realized that he's going the wrong way by watching her play out a familiar part of her terrible last days. It's impossible to get any reaction from her, so she's not a program. She's a phantom home video looping endlessly in the caverns of madness and memory.
Dipper dreads seeing her equally as much as he dreads never seeing her again. Even the facsimile of another human presence brings faint comfort, but he is ever apprehensive that he may witness where the recordings finish.
He's at yet another intersection. Typically, he chooses the downward path where possible, but his compass is now telling him that he's roughly level with the center of the maze. He's trying hard not to think about how long it's taken him to come this far. The vertically aligned maze is so much harder to traverse than the first one. He doesn't know what to make of the halls that veer left and right, what would have been up and down on the horizontal plane. Save for the ramp to the buried center, there had been no real verticality at all in the first maze. This one extends in every possible direction, a snarled dungeon in the dirt, and there seems to be no end to it.
Another trick wall leaves him stranded in a dead end. The only way out is another narrow crevice that his flashlight can't see through. Hating what comes next, he takes off his hat, places it in his backpack, and draws a chalk arrow on the wall to indicate the fissure. He'll have to hold his backpack in one hand to fit.
For the next half hour, his entire world is a slit of light that feels a foot wide and infinitely long, his sole companions the sound of his own ragged breathing and the scrape of cloth on stone, his canteen beating a metallic staccato as he drags his pack after him. He presses himself into the narrow gullet, swallowed by the rock one agonizing inch at a time. He can't turn his head to see how far he's already gone. The imagined promise of an exit ahead is the only thought he allows himself as he squeezes through the cold, constricted throat, panting and riding the ragged edge of panic.
When the crevice at last releases him, he sinks to his knees and concentrates on breathing for a few minutes. He's too afraid to examine the room around him yet, unable to face the possibility of a return trip if this, too, leads to nowhere.
When he gathers himself, what he sees gives him the first hope he's felt in hours. This corridor is fully upside down, and Dipper kneels on the hard stone that should have been open sky. But he can see that it's slightly larger than the others he's traversed, and just up ahead his flashlight reveals a corner past which is a space wide and open enough that he can't make out the details at the far end. There was only one place in the first maze that looked like this. He gets to his feet and hurries forward.
He is relieved to see that he's right—it's the clearing with the tree and the ramp. The glittering gravel is all over the uneven floor, some of it scattered into the side corridors. It must have fallen when the room generated upside down. The vast, leafless tree spreads its smooth limbs towards the floor, descending as an unearthly stalactite. That strange, eel-limbed tree will be Dipper's salvation, allowing him to reach the entrance to the maze's heart.
He crunches across the gravel and begins to ascend. The stone of the tree is dry but feels soapy, which makes him doubt his grip. As he climbs, he can hear Emilia somewhere beneath him, wandering aimlessly around the gravel room. She's too small to reach the first branch, and with a pang, he realizes he won't see her again. He looks down and watches as she moves off into the pitch black, shrinking from his perspective until she is surrounded by the gloom, her feet illuminating the small patch of gravel beneath her. Then it's like she's not walking, but floating, disappearing on her drifting island into the endless, inky ocean, forever sailing away from view.
"Goodbye, Emilia," Dipper says into the darkness, and then continues to climb.
Carefully picking his way to the top, he just manages to get his arm up and over the lip of the entrance. He swings his backpack up and then follows it, grunting with the exertion. If he hadn't been as active as he has been this summer, he might not have made it. He lies on his back for a while on top of the entrance, catching his breath as he aches from the cold seeping through his thin jacket, muscles trembling with fatigue. He'll have to sleep, eventually, if he can't get through the core quickly.
He sits up, his flashlight revealing no surprises. He's on what should have been the ceiling of the sphinx's room. It narrows down to the entrance to the hexagonal pillars, so he doesn't have to worry about not being able to reach the door. He pans his flashlight around the dim hall but doesn't see the sphinx anywhere. Perhaps she's not functioning? He wonders if she's separate from the maze, as a sentient being. Maybe she left when the maze broke.
The incline to the entryway is steep. Dipper scrabbles up it, resenting the weight of his backpack but unwilling to part with any of the load. He can do this. He's so close now.
Suddenly, he freezes, positive he heard someone talking. He slows his breathing, stretching his senses out into the unyielding blackness.
"…each measure will break, in time," something sighs.
The voice is close. Dipper spins in place, flashlight whirling across the walls. There's nothing there. Nothing glows green.
"…the fullness of months breathes rhyme… and rhythm of anchors creates new tides."
It's coming from the floor. On his hands and knees, he looks with horrified fascination into a deep crack in the stone, no more than an inch wide. The voice slithers up from below, quiet but clear.
"…a climb of the actual. A tumble of mind."
"Hello?" Dipper says. "Is someone down there?"
"Each garden bursts blooms—not some. Suns over agora… the dry beds will run."
"I… I don't understand," Dipper stammers.
"Words stack strange castles… walls lean; outlast, undone."
That accent… The sphinx. She's somewhere beneath the floor (the ceiling), buried and unseen. Can she tell he's there? Is she even speaking to him?
"If I can get to the heart, you'll be okay," Dipper says.
"All will, all have, all are—no, no, not some. This, too, is law in writ. This, too, is immutable…"
Shaken, Dipper gets back on his feet and moves away from the voice. If that is the sphinx, the only thing he can do is get to the heart and reset the maze. The hexagonal puzzle room is just ahead.
He crests the rise, stepping over the corner where one ceiling meets the next. He can't hear anything, and he's not sure if that's a good or bad sign. If the pillars aren't working, it might mean the path to the heart is clear. It might also mean he'll be confronted with a wall of immovable columns.
The strange green of the hexagonal stones is hard to make out in the darkness. It's not until he gets closer that Dipper can see their arrangement. The room is a forest of pillars, the stones jutting out from all four sides in an overlapping tangle that makes no geometric sense, creates no halls or rooms like before. On the plus side, they aren't moving, so he won't get crushed. If he's looking straight into the room, then the heart will be downwards relative to his position, the raised dais reversed. This may mean that the heart has fallen from its intended place and lies somewhere at what is now the bottom of the room. Whatever the case, Dipper needs to find a way down.
He carefully enters the tangle of pillars, thankful it isn't possible for any to be at an angle. It's like entering the darkest jungle gym, squeezing himself through every possible space, encountering random spots without obstruction juxtaposed with inaccessible routes and endless dead ends. Still, he's making progress, and the static nature of the room means he can backtrack and try new approaches when he needs to. It's just a question of persistence.
Or so he thinks. He steps over a pillar and finds himself in a blank box with nowhere to proceed. He turns to go back, and that's when the floor slides open.
"Ahhhh, no!" he yelps, carried halfway to the wall before the motion of the retracting floor tips him into the trap as if a rug is being pulled out beneath his feet.
The hole is crisscrossed with pillars and he catches the first one with his arms. The smooth stone squeaks against his skin as he swings and nearly falls. His feet flail over empty space until he finds another column not too far beneath and rests his weight on it, taking the strain off his weakening arms. He shines his light down the pit; he can't tell how deep it is because so many pillars intersect with it that it's essentially a series of steps, except the steps are in random positions. He wouldn't have fallen too far before he caught on something, but it would have hurt a lot.
He can't climb back up; the way he came in has been blocked, a trick that's lost its ability to shock by this point. Looks like this part of the maze isn't completely nonfunctional. It isn't hard to climb down, moving from pillar to pillar in the jumble. The room, as he remembers it, is extremely long and wide, but far less tall. There is less distance between floor and ceiling, so he can't have too much further to go.
He sits at the edge of a platform and pushes himself off to drop onto the next one, and when it retracts just before his feet hit it, he almost isn't surprised. He has just enough time and presence of mind to brace himself and roll when he hits, the breath leaving his lungs with a woosh as he rolls across the floor below.
He pushes himself up on his elbows, coughing. He's raised a cloud of dust on impact; he traces a finger through the layer on the floor, noting its thickness. These pillars haven't moved in a long time.
"Dipper? Dipper, is that you?" someone says.
He scrambles to his feet, overjoyed. "Great-Uncle Ford!" His flashlight catches on the dust, making it hard to see anything. "Where are you?"
"Over here," Ford says. "Move to your left."
Fanning the dust away from his face, Dipper goes to the left and encounters a wall of pillars with space between every other one. Immediately, he is reminded of the pillars that had kept him and Pacifica apart during the Fibonacci sequence puzzle. Even though it's not in the same place, he wonders if it's the same room.
Ford is on the other side of the bars. He's sitting against the wall, and he doesn't look good. His face is shiny with sweat and his clothes are damp with it. He's got one hand on his right thigh, holding his leg steady. Something is wrong.
"Are you okay?" Dipper asks.
"I twisted my leg when I fell in," Ford says, confirming Dipper's suspicions. "I thought I was so close to the heart… I should have been more careful." He sighs and grimaces with pain. "The trap caught me off guard. I suspect the same thing happened to my unfortunate friend here."
Dipper blinks. He doesn't see anyone else. "What?"
"Jacob Dawson, I believe. The first time he appeared it gave me quite a fright, but it seems to be some manner of recording. I saw him looking for his daughter, prior to falling in here."
Dipper goes cold. "There's… There's a body—"
"It's alright, Dipper. It's just bones now," Ford assures him. "I'm afraid he couldn't escape any more than I can."
Dipper is numb with fatigue. He slides down the pillars and leans against them. "I saw the other one, Emilia."
"I remember." Ford shakes his head. "Those poor people. This is no place for amateurs."
"I wonder how they ended up in here…"
"Jacob had a tape recorder he spoke into on occasion. From what I was able to gather, they found the heart in the woods and were placed into the maze, just as you were. But something obviously went wrong when it generated."
"Is the recorder in there?" Dipper asks.
"No. He either lost or discarded it at some point, and I never ran across it. I doubt any tapes would be viable after all this time and moisture."
"What I don't get is why we can see them. What's the point of recording them and playing it back?"
"I've been pondering that, given there's little else I can do," Ford says gruffly, his irritation with his situation evident. "We speculated that the mazes may be a test more than a trap. If so, then whoever made the hearts could have made them to keep a record of what happens inside. Now, as to why the recordings are playing back, I'm not certain. Perhaps it's not intentional, part of the malfunction."
"What if it's testing our reaction? Maybe the other maze didn't have any recordings to show."
"If the three of you were the first ones in, that could be." Ford takes a deep breath, his face white with pain. "Dipper… I'm sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you into this mess."
Dipper doesn't like the remorse in Ford's tone, the finality of it. "It's not your fault this maze is broken. Besides, we're going to get out, I— I just need a minute."
"When the tunnel separated us, I found myself at the bottom of a shaft without any handholds, but a nice square ledge up above. Mabel could have grappled us out of there in no time." Ford closes his eyes; his ragged breathing makes Dipper worry even more. "I'll bet Pacifica would have been close to you. You wouldn't have been alone."
At a different time, Dipper would have been happy to be proven right. Right now, he doesn't care. "You don't know that. Maybe we'd all be stuck instead."
"Somehow, I don't think so." Ford opens his eyes and looks upwards thoughtfully. "I think it's more than strength in numbers. The three of you—and even your other friends—are so capable in the face of Weirdness. I forget that too easily. I wouldn't have made it through Weirdmageddon alone."
Dipper wishes they weren't separated by the pillars. "But… then why didn't you want to tell the others?"
"…I was afraid, Dipper. I still am." Ford sighs again, long and tired. "You know, I wrote in my old journal about my mistake with the rift. I swore I wouldn't keep secrets like that anymore, wouldn't shut out my family. One mysterious signal and I'm right back to old habits. It rattled me. I can admit that now. I spent so much time in the multiverse alone that I came to believe I was the only person I could depend on, a point of view I now see was greatly exacerbated by Bill's betrayal and Fiddleford's departure. After last summer I thought I'd put that kind of thinking behind me, but I was wrong." Ford shakes his head. "Perhaps you don't get better at dealing with your fears when you get older. You just learn to live with them. Somehow, the signal… it made them real again.
Dipper feels terrible. He'd noticed Ford's distress but hadn't really understood it. "I saw you were really upset…"
"And that was with me attempting to hide the extent of my concern!" Ford coughs and his hands instantly go to his leg to hold it still. His expression creases with agony. "…It's the multiverse, the Nightmare Realm… our sheer precarity. It always comes back to that. We came so close to obliteration, Dipper. We escaped an extinction by the skin of our teeth. The last thing we need is a beacon sending information to who knows where. I may have disassembled my portal, but that won't mean anything if someone opens their own from the other side."
Dipper doesn't know what to say. "Sure, but… we want to protect the world too…"
Ford chuckles bitterly. "You're all substantially more successful in that sphere than I've been. How conveniently I forgot that the moment I let my fear control me. And I once tried to teach you to master your fear through intellect! I should tell Stan—he'd appreciate the irony."
Dipper sits up straighter, struck by that sentence. "Wait! Didn't you tell Grunkle Stan we were leaving?"
But Ford does not share his hope. "If you can call it that. I was vague, and even if he's concerned that we didn't come back the second night, he won't know where to look."
Despite his disappointment, Dipper gathers what's left of his determination. "Well, it doesn't matter because I'm going to get the heart and get us out of here."
"You'll have to go alone," Ford says grimly. "Here, take my extra batteries, just in case. I don't think I have anything else you need. How are you on water?"
"I still have some," Dipper says, rattling his canteen. "You should keep yours. If… If I can't get to the heart, then I'll have to find the entrance again. You should take my extra water bottle in case I have to come back a different way."
"There's a fairly deep puddle on this side," Ford says. "A bit muddy, but if necessary, it could sustain me for some time. The hexagons must no longer be watertight."
"You won't have to drink that," Dipper says with far more confidence than he feels. "I can do this."
Ford's expression softens despite the pain in his eyes. "I know you can," he says.
Dipper rests for a few more minutes, knowing if he stays still for too long all the cold and hours of exertion will set into his muscles and make him unbearably stiff. He finds a gap in the wall and wriggles through, finding himself in a narrow corridor. He checks his compass—it points to his left. The heart can't be far.
For the most part, he's forced to take the options available to him, but he's always trying to move the way his compass dictates. The closer he gets to the center, the more constricted the passage becomes. He doesn't understand how the room can make all these shapes with only four walls of pillars, and he's beginning to suspect that the pillars can pass through each other despite their apparent solidity. Eventually, he has no choice but to leave his backpack behind. Either he finds the heart up ahead, or he somehow snakes his way back out in reverse.
When he was younger, his parents took him and Mabel on a trip to Colorado, to see the mountains. One of their destinations was a park with caves, and as a side attraction there was a speleobox, a wooden construction designed to mimic the tight quarters of cave exploration. Dipper crawled inside, and within the miniature maze he had discovered he had no claustrophobia that he could detect. He conquered the box in about twenty minutes.
Contrary to that experience, he has learned over the recent agonizing hours that there is a big difference between a speleobox and the real thing. If he gets stuck in here, no one is going to take the side off the box and let him out. He'll stay stuck until he figures out how to free himself, or…
It's the 'or' that's very much on his mind as he crawls, an inch at a time, into a burrow of tunnels that are maybe three feet wide and two feet tall, a ratio which changes constantly. The compass tells him the heart is somewhere below. He's beginning to wonder if he would be better off retreating and trying to find a different approach. If the path gets much tighter, it's going to be incredibly difficult to go back the same way because he can't turn around.
He reaches a dead end at his current level. There's a hole below his face, and a tunnel beneath that runs the opposite way. This means the only way forward is to do half a somersault, squeezing his upper body through the hole and bending forward to land on his back. The tunnel below is too small for him to roll over. He'll have to push himself along blindly, hoping for an exit.
He lies there and just breathes for a while, turning off his flashlight and closing his burning eyes, letting the dark wash over him. He should go back. This can't be the only way. He needs to backtrack and find another approach, one that doesn't have the same risk of getting stuck. Great-Uncle Ford is counting on him.
It's as he's thinking this, one cheek pressed to the hexagonal stone, that he realizes the pillar he's resting on is humming.
With a surge of newfound energy, he turns on his flashlight and pushes himself over the hole, letting his head and one arm fall through. Though his view of the crawlspace beneath is upside down, he can still see the way the air flickers with energy. The hairs on his arm stand up, prickly with static. The energy is familiar—the heart is close.
Slowly, he bends his head and then his upper body around the edge of the hole and lets gravity do the rest. When his shoulders are pressed against the floor, he gyrates his torso and wiggles into the lower tunnel. Then it's just a matter of pushing with his feet until he is far enough in that he can lower his legs. He does all of this blind, the sound of his exertions echoing hollowly in the ultra-confined space.
He's now wedged in a crevice so small that he can't lower his arms—they're stuck above his head. All he can see is the next layer of pillars, inches from the tip of his nose. There's nothing to grab hold of so he's pushing himself along with the soles of his shoes by sheer friction, by centimeters. He doesn't know if he can use his palms to push himself back at this point. The rectangular chute he's in feels as fitted as a coffin. The sound of his own breathing seems deafening; he can hear how strained it is. His body heat has nowhere to go and it's getting hot.
And then, the wall to his left suddenly opens. There, in a pocket no larger than the space beneath his bed at the Shack, is the heart. It's wriggling on the floor, moving slightly as its cubes undulate. He can hear them clicking against the green stone of the hexagonal pillars like a dozen tapping fingernails.
Eagerly, he bends his arm around the corner and reaches for it. Just as he's about to grab it, the cubes shift, and it rolls over, placing it slightly further away. He bites his lip with frustration, sweat rolling down his face. He strains, bending his torso as much as he can and pushing, flattening his flesh and stretching his muscles. His fingertips brush the heart, streaking it with perspiration.
He leans back, gasping for air.
"Come on," he says through gritted teeth. "Come on."
He surges towards the heart, bending his body to its absolute limit. His hand swipes the air once, twice, and on the third time he feels just enough of his palm slap down on the heart. He rolls it towards him and then he has it, clutched in his shaking hand. He lifts it from contact with the stone, waiting, hoping.
The pillars begin to shake. He wraps the heart in the bottom part of his shirt and closes his eyes as the roaring fills his ears, waiting for it to all end, one way or the other.
The sound stops. Cool air touches his skin and fills his lungs. He opens his eyes.
Light shines from above, stabbing into pupils accustomed to nothing but the glow of a flashlight. Dipper blinks and sits up. He's sitting in a pile of leaves and sticks; directly across from him are the ropes he and Ford used to climb down into the maze. He's in the pit of the maze's entrance, only now the actual maze is gone. The tunnel which ran to the left has been replaced by solid dirt; with the stonework gone, there's nothing left but a square shaft of soil and roots. Dipper can see the leaves of the tree waving far above.
A groan draws his attention, making him turn his head. Ford is in a deep cushion of half-rotted leaves, on his back and facing the sky, looking for all the world as if he's nestled down for nap.
"Well done, Dipper!" Ford says. From the way his skin is shiny with sweat, Dipper can tell his condition has not improved. "I wish the heart had deposited us at ground level, but I suppose I can't complain too much, given the alternatives."
Dipper is looking at the ropes with misery. "I can't make it back up right now," he is forced to admit.
Ford weathers this information with surprising buoyancy. "No matter. Our survival is just a question of when, not if. And that, my boy, is a marked improvement."
Dipper starts to stand, and the moment he puts his full weight on his legs they give out. Too exhausted to be embarrassed, he crawls on limbs like jelly to his Great-Uncle, keeping one hand on his shirt so the heart stays in place. He finds his backpack not three feet away from where he appeared and drags it with him. Sitting next to Ford, he digs through his pack and offers the older man some of the painkillers he keeps in a plastic bag.
"Remind me in a few hours," Ford says, indicating he's already taken some.
Despite his inability to scale the wall, Dipper is starting to feel better. The ropes are well secured at the top and aren't going anywhere. He has time to rest.
He takes the heart out of his shirt and holds it up, careful to keep it over his open pack; the last thing he wants is to make yet another maze. He can see now that this heart is a slightly different color, a darker and more sickly green. On one side, the cubes are shot through with fine cracks.
"Damaged, as we suspected." Ford puts his hand on the heart for a moment, then withdraws it. "If the heart records what happens in the maze, does it record what happens to itself? The answers may lie within it."
Dipper puts the heart inside the pack and makes sure to zip the canvas firmly shut. "Just so long as it doesn't touch the ground again."
"Indeed," Ford says with a thin laugh. "I can't imagine we'd make it through a second go round." He nods at something across the pit. "We need to address that, as well."
Dipper follows the indication and spots a patch of blue at the other end of the pit. He recognizes it right away. "Emilia's backpack…"
"Jacob's belongings are likely somewhere nearby. We should return them once we locate the family."
Dipper knows it's the right thing to do, even if the news isn't good. Too exhausted to think about it, he pulls a granola bar out of his pack and eats it without tasting anything. He can already feel the stiffness setting in, and knows it's going to be horrible trying to climb the rope. Once he's out of the pit, he'll have to walk back to the truck and take some water bottles out and bring them back to Ford, just in case. Then he will either have to find a signal with his phone or use Ford's keys to drive back to town. He can probably handle it; driving a truck is pretty different from driving the golf cart, but it's a straight shot back to the valley with no sharp turns or obstacles.
First, though, he's going to close his eyes for a minute…
Something cold splashes against the bridge of his nose and his eyes snap open, his whole body jolting. It takes him a few moments to realize that he's just woken up. One hand comes up to wipe at his face just as another drop of water hits the top of his head and quickly soaks through his hair. He looks up—the sky has the violet pallor of evening. He's slept for a long time. Next to him, Ford is still asleep. Dipper doesn't have the heart to wake him, knowing the pain he'll be in.
When he starts to move, Dipper's arms and shoulders feel more like plywood than flesh. He limps over to the wall with the ropes, barely able to bend his knees. It's going to be a nightmare getting up this thing. There are no ledges on which to rest, so it's straight up the first time or straight back down in a hurry. He starts trying to stretch, which seems like an exercise in futility.
"Dipper!"
The sound of his name is faint, but clear. Startled, he turns to look at Ford. "Yeah—" he starts to say, only to cut himself off when he sees that Ford is still asleep.
"Dippeeeeeeer!" someone yells.
That's close, and from above. His heart leaps as he backs away from the wall, craning his neck to look up through the mouth of the pit.
"Hello?" he shouts.
"Dipper?" Ford has roused, looking blearily around.
"Here! We're down here!" Dipper is yelling at the top of his lungs, trying to be as loud as he can. "WE'RE DOWN HERE!"
Silence. Just when he's about to shout again, the silhouette of a head appears far above. He waves his arms frantically.
"Hey!" he yells.
The head leans away. "OVER HERE, GUYS!" the person bellows, and that is a hundred-percent Mabel-volume, no question.
Soon he's looking up at three different outlines, squinting as he tries to discern their features. The fading light makes it hard to see them.
"Who's up there?" he asks.
"Why, you takin' a census?" the one on the left says sarcastically with Grunkle Stan's inimitable delivery. "We're here to save your butt, kid."
"And then kill you right after, and you know why!" Pacifica's snaps from the right.
Dipper is too relieved to care. "You have no idea how glad I am to see you guys! Ford's hurt, he twisted his leg, or maybe it's broken, I don't know…"
With a ratcheting sound, Mabel descends on her grappling hook and catches Dipper up in a fierce hug before running over to Ford. "Can you grapple up?" she asks him.
Ford shakes his head. "You'll have to pull me up, slowly. We can tie a loop in one of the ropes so I can rest my good leg in it. Bring Dipper up first so he can help."
Dipper follows Mabel back to the ropes, still unable to believe his luck. "How the heck did you guys find us?"
"You're not that sneaky," Mabel says with a roll of her eyes.
Dipper finishes tying the knot for Ford. "Yeah, but, we didn't tell anyone where we were going, and this is the middle of nowhere!"
"Turns out we're just as good at sciencing as you smartyheads," Mabel says archly. As Dipper turns to go and help Ford over to the wall, she adds, "Well, it was mostly Pacifica and Grunkle Stan. But I totally helped."
With great effort, Ford manages to get upright on one leg. Dipper puts Ford's arm over his shoulder and together they hobble over to the ropes.
"I can't believe they found us," Dipper marvels.
"A good reminder that… our loved ones are—ah—more resourceful than we give them credit for," Ford grunts as he leans against the wall.
Dipper takes hold of the grappling hook and Mabel zips them up to the top. He grabs on to the tree roots and hauls himself up and out, reveling in the sensation of the cool summer evening and the breeze that tugs at his hair. He stares up at the clouds, knowing he's never been so grateful to see them before.
Grunkle Stan is yelling at Ford from his superior position. "I should leave you down there you chowderhead!"
Ford's faint reply drifts up. "Stan, I know you're enjoying this, but you can berate me at the hospital!"
Dipper's reverie is interrupted when Pacifica hugs him from the side. He twists in her arms to return it, aware that after his ordeal he's about as disgusting as someone can be. He doesn't have to worry about that for long, however, because she soon pulls away with her eyes cutting into him like blue lasers.
"You're the worst," she says through clenched teeth.
He manages to crack a tired, apologetic half-smile. "I know."
"Hey! I'm not pulling my idiot brother up by myself," Stan tells them. "I know he doesn't look heavy, but that trench coat hides a whole lotta Stanford."
Between the four of them, it's not too difficult to pull Ford up. Stan grabs his brother and hauls him back to solid ground. The look on Ford's face makes it obvious that Stan was not as gentle about it as he should have been. That look persists as Ford gets a very bumpy piggyback ride to the truck. Despite having slept, Dipper feels like the walking dead. It's not far to the abandoned house, but it might as well be the other side of the world as far as his legs are concerned.
Stan's car is parked behind the truck. Pale with pain and exertion, Ford takes one look at the car and shakes his head. "I can't bend my leg at the knee. Help me into the truck bed, I can keep it extended there."
"Huh. Guess that means one of you yahoos is driving," Stan observes as he digs his keys out of his pocket.
Dipper holds his hand out for the keys, figuring he was preparing himself to drive anyway. But Stan moves them out of his reach before he can take them.
"Guess again, hotshot. You can total the golf cart, but I draw the line at my car." Stan tosses the keys to Mabel. "Go easy on the gas, sweetie, but you really gotta jam on the brakes."
Mabel salutes him. "Aye aye, skipper!"
Dipper questions the wisdom of putting Mabel behind the wheel of anything, but he's too tired to object. He numbly gets into the back of Stan's car, giving himself more room to stretch out and lean against the window. He waits while Stan turns the car around so that Mabel doesn't have to tempt fate by putting it in reverse. Pacifica scoots into the back next to him, and the ensuing silence is frosty. He knows he messed up.
In a short time, the two vehicles are slowly driving down the overgrown path, rocking back and forth on the uneven terrain. When they pull out onto the road, it remains as deserted as before, which is lucky. Stan trundles along a good twenty miles under the speed limit while Mabel lags, continuously accelerating and decelerating as she gets used to using the gas pedal. The constant lurching forward and back would have made Dipper carsick if he had the energy for that.
"Okay, so it's a little trickier than the cart," Mabel says contritely after she steps on the gas too hard and sends Dipper's head thumping against his seat. "I'll figure it out!"
"Just go really slow. I'm not dying in a gross old car," Pacifica commands.
Dipper knows he should probably keep his mouth shut until Pacifica cools off, but he has to find out what happened. "I still don't get it, how did you find us?"
"Science!" Mabel declares, a proclamation that unfortunately involves raising both her arms and sending the car veering briefly onto the rumble strip.
"Your uncle's handheld spectroma-whatever. He left one in the basement and I set it to find your Weirdness, which was easy because you're so weird," Pacifica drawls.
Dipper gapes at her. "You figured out how to set the spectrometer wavelength?"
Pacifica scoffs. "Duh. Stan knows how to read Ford's stuff, and you're always letting Mabel read your journal. You guys have a whole chart with your names in it and everything."
Dipper is thoroughly impressed, but he can tell he should save his praise for later, when she's ready to receive it. At the moment it looks like she'd be laying into him if he wasn't in such rough shape, so the smart play is to exaggerate his infirmity in order to maximize sympathy. He coughs a couple times and leans back against the window, shutting his eyes.
It's not much of an act in the end, because within the first minute he's fast asleep.
The Underdark by Funeral Diner (Alone, 2005)