Chapter Text
And now, I scream. That is the best way to describe my situation, where all around me is nothing but darkness, nothing but the horrors of the everlasting shade. I cannot run, cannot escape. I kneel to the force that suppresses me, the weight of my chains too much to bear, too much to resist, though by all the stars and all the saint’s I’ve tried. And tried. And now I am spent. I kneel to my master, like a beaten dog I submit, as passive as any slave who has come to accept their fate, their wrecked lot in life.
My friends are dead, I watched my own body destroy them, I watched as my home, my family and everything I had ever known or loved slipped through my hands. If I could have but the strength to grasp them, to resist but they slipped through my slackened fingers and all I could do was watch and obey the will of my master. My brutal, wicked master.
I hate him. With every ounce of my soul, I hate him. I wake hating him, I lie down to sleep hating him and every moment in between I live and breathe and exist only to hate him. But what does it matter by how much I hate him? When have my writhing feelings ever so much as led to a single scorched stitch on his sleeve? A single misplaced dotted i on his papers? I still bow to him, and his command is mine to suffer and obey.
Mine is to suffer as his angry blows fall upon my non resisting form, mine to seethe as he heaps one insult upon the other, as heinous tasks follow one another like marching ants crawling over my skin. I am trapped, I am hopeless, I am lost. And there is nothing left to me but to scream.
***
Dipper had chewed through all of his pens again. It wasn’t his fault, in his protest he was in the midst of a project and whenever he was working, it had the tendency to leave his teeth worse for wear and his pens in relatively short supply. So he was scrounging through his sister Mabel’s junk on her side of the attic in search of something to write with.
It was easier said than done, as Mabel’s side of the room could be described as a glittery cacophony of chaos, consisting of everything ranging from a nine headed stuff animal with a single marble for an eye (which animal it was trying to imitate, Dipper would never know), to ten varying shades of glitter glue, to heaps of teen boy magazines their parents would never be contented with her having if they ever knew Grunkle Stan bought them for her, to a collection of decoratively drawn eggs that smelled like they were starting to turn.
It wasn’t until Dipper threw the eggs out (he was wondering what was starting to smell) when he found Mabel’s colouring kit sticking out from under her mattress and extracted a silver glittering pencil with a googly eyed alien where the eraser ought to have been. Dipper smirked, pleased at his discovery and yeah, the alien was kind of cute. He stood up and wandered back over to his side of the slanted, sparrow infested, rickety in all its perfection attic that served as their summer bedroom while staying with their Grunkles in Gravity Falls.
His side was no less cluttered and messy than his sister’s, just in varying ways. His Grunkle Ford had lent him his blackboard in order for him to organize his research but snippets of information had spread like a fungus to cover the rest of the back wall behind his bed, even going so far as to cover the painting of a venturing ship over a tumultuous green sea that was the favoured feature of his side of the room.
There were strings of coloured coded yarn (curtsey of Mabel) connected the flow of information, giving it a erratic look, like a spider with Mabel’s lust for vibrant colours had been hyped up on three cans of power drinks and set loose on the wall. Dipper stared at the board, added a sticky note here or there to the display, a few more thoughts, a few more theories and paused to stare at the board some more. Absently he brought Mabel’s pencil to his mouth to chew on the end as he thought but regretted it instantly as he was left to spit out silvery sparkles like a sickly gnome.
He turned his gaze back to the board and shook his head. He’d have to ask Ford his opinion on it; maybe he could ask to borrow some of Grunkle’s old notes. The Journals might be long burnt to a crisp but some of the old notes of the first draft were still lying around in a dishevelled mess down in the basement.
There was a bang downstairs as the door flew open, an excited squealing of the term “Dipper!” which, for the moment, Dipper wished wasn’t his name, followed by the thundering of footsteps and the practically kicking down of their bedroom’s wooden door.
“Diiiipppppeeeerrrr!” Mabel screamed, running into the room and plowing into her brother with the force of a runaway train, sending him down on his bed, his sister tumbling after him and sitting squarely on his chest to beam down at him.
“Mabel…” Dipper croaked, the wind knocked out of him.
“Sorry, Dipper!” Mabel, scrambling off of her brother with a giggling laugh that sent her tumbling to the floor. “Guess what? Guess what? Guess WHAT??”
Dipper rolled onto his stomach to study his sister, dressed in all of her outrageous splendor. She had a pair of hot pink leggings on under a skirt of frilly blue, running shoes that were still splattered from paint of her last art project, a star spangled white t-shirt of her own design and star stickers crowding her plump cheeks and climbing in her tangled long brown hair. Which was to say, she was dressed in her casual attire.
“You’re…testing whether or not you can communicate with dolphins on a sonar level?” Dipper asked, an amused smile costing on the edge of his lips. Mabel tilted her head towards him; her eyes alight with their usual merriment. She scrunched up her face into a teasing fake annoyed look and she stuck out her tongue and blew him a raspberry.
“Please.” She answered, rolling onto her side so she and Dipper were mirrored images of each other. And in many ways they were anyway, same features, same hair, same height (much to Dipper’s dismay at them being fourteen and still rather short for their age), same everything except for the stuff that mattered. “I can already do that. Mermando taught me.” As if to prove it she gave an exaggerated chip in order to mockingly mimic Mabel’s old merman flame.
The absurdity of the noise made Dipper break out into a light laughter, which in turn made Mabel beam. It was a known fact to Dipper that nothing pleased his sister more than making him laugh and so he liked to indulge her whenever possible.
“Besides, that’s not it.” Mabel went on, and digging into the waist lining of her skirt in a way their mother would have classified as indecent, Mabel produced a flyer that was nothing but pure black, save for the purple spider web design, flames and skulls lining the borders. At first glance, Dipper thought it was a flyer for Robbie’s third attempt at a band (this one was called Nightmare of the Living Dead (soooo original)), which made Dipper’s lips instinctively bubble with protests that they were not, in any way shape or form, supporting Robbie’s misguiding career in music.
Despite the fact that the boy had been Dipper’s tormentor two summers ago (though not more so than Bill had), Mabel had kindled a strange friendship with moody teenager. Dipper wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Robbie had a misunderstood loner kind of vibe to him and Mabel had a talent of feeling sorry for anything. But upon closer examination, Dipper saw that it wasn’t a flyer for Robbie’s band (thank the gods) but something called Circus Gothica.
“Um….” Dipper had no response to this. He looked at the poster; he looked at Mabel’s glitter flecked eager face and was stumped at what to make of it.
“A…Goth Circus? Where ‘Your Darkest Nightmares Come Alive’….” Dipper read under the off putting title. “Mabel, I know you and Robbie are…ugh…friends but this-”
“No, no, this has nothing to do with Robbie, oh, though I should definitely send him a picture of this! He and the others of our older friend group would love this, don’t you think?” She said with a playful smirk as she took out her phone, snapped a quick picture of the poster on the floor amongst a dried out glue gun and a pink bedazzled model of Waddles Dipper had made for Mabel for their birthday last summer.
“I…guess they would,” Dipper said, thinking of Tambrey and Robbie, who would certainly like it the most, to Nate, Nelson, Tyler and Wendy, who would probably like it the least. Or at least, Dipper thought they would, apparently he was currently living in backwards country. “The more important question is why you would think you would like it, Mabel. Circus Gothica. A Goth Circus. Why would that even interest you? Right before we left for Gravity Falls you complained about the classroom not colour coordinating the periodic table.”
“It’s a valid argument! How is anyone supposed to learn what’s on the table, when all one can think of is how drab and un-matching the colours are!”
“And when you say one, do you mean literally only one and that one being you?” Dipper asked playfully, sitting up and ignoring his sister sticking her tongue out at him in her defense again.
“Mabel, if we go to a Goth circus, I think all the colours are going to be drab, black in particular, a lot of black.”
A silly smile painted Mabel’s face as she giggled into her knuckles. “Yeah.” She said dreamily and Dipper frowned at her in puzzlement but a sense of the answer lingered just outside his scope of vision.
“What?” Mabel asked quickly when she caught her brother glaring.
“Why do you want to go to this thing?” Dipper said resolutely and at last Mabel let out a great burst of excitement like a dam being broken.
“Alright, alright, you caught me! This boy gave me the flyer for the Circus. He was so hot Dipper, you should have seen him!”
“Unless he was actually on fire, I’ll pass.”
“No silly, not like that! He was tall and mysterious. Oh so mysterious! He had white hair! White hair and he was our age. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? He said that he’s a performer at the circus as an acrobat and he said that he’d be looking for me in the crowd. So you see Dipper, I have to go! The mysterious circus boy is expecting me to be there!”
Dipper rolled his eyes to the ceiling with a groan. That explained it, that explained everything. A tall, mysterious boy with white hair might have sort of almost flirted with Mabel. Her heart was as good as won.
“Wait. Did you say white hair?” Dipper asked, sitting straight as his eyes suddenly turned to Mabel. She blinked and nodded.
“Yeah. Why?”
Dipper looked back over to his board, chewing his lip in thought before rising from his bed.
“Um…nothing. Probably. Can I see that flyer?”
Mabel quirked an eyebrow at him but shrugged. “Sure, I guess. So are you coming?”
Dipper stared at the flyer, a blank, wordless expression painting his face before he even registered that his sister had spoken at all.
“What? Oh, um…I might be. Just don’t leave without telling me, okay? I’ll be in the basement with Ford.”
“You got it, bro-bro.” Mabel said with a wink and a click of her teeth. “What do you have to talk to Ford about? You’re not saying this circus is…weird, are you? It’s not from Gravity Falls, dude. It’s not from anywhere, really. It just kind of-”
“Showed up?” Dipper said with a meaningful glance over at his sister. “Wouldn’t a circus advertise its tour? Or make a spectacle of showing up? When did this circus get here anyway? Why is it that its opening act is tonight and I’m only hearing about it now?”
Mabel stared at him, a stunned expression crossing her face as the inquisitive nature that Dipper was naturally inclined to only now settling into her features.
“It…showed up sometime last night. Yesterday there was nothing, today: shabam, circus train. But…but I’m sure it’s nothing Dipper. Really. Maybe it’s all just a part of its mystique.”
“Fine, then do a search for them online, I’ll go ask Ford about this.”
Mabel rolled her eyes, the inquisitive nature quick to vanish. “Do we always have to do a background check on everything we do?”
“Maybe, if one of these times one of the things we do in Gravity Falls didn’t lead to life threatening situations.”
Mabel twisted her mouth to the side of her face in annoyance. “Good point.” She said dully before getting to her feet and wandering over to her laptop.
Dipper smiled at the back of her head, for no other reason than because his sister could sometimes, on the rare occasion, be the best. Like now, as she played along with his conspiracies, which as of two summers ago, had stopped being so crazy.
Then he walked down the rickety, splitter inducing staircase, his thoughts whirling in his head as he tried to shake Mabel’s voice from his brain: ‘probably nothing, probably nothing’. Sure, but first we’ll be certain Mabel.
Grunkle Stan was in the living room, indecently clad in boxers and a muscle shirt, as was his usual attire when at home, and sometimes even when he was out and about the town. People often cringed but had long given up caring. He was throwing back a large can of pit cola and watching the squat television set that was more wood and bunny eared wiring than anything else. The room smelled like that vivid scent of pine needles and rain that tended to permeate the place. Dipper continued to love it, even after all these years.
“Hey Dipper.” Stan growled, lifting one of his thick, very post wrestling arms up to scratch under the beanie that had replaced his fez to cover his snowy white hair. “Wanna watch some TV? The sequel to ‘The Duchess Inquires: The Duchess Entreats’ is playing in two hours.”
Dipper tilted a questioning eyebrow towards the screen, where a commercial was complaining about binders that don’t clip all the way shut. Real epidemic, according to the actors.
“So…are you just going to sit here until the movie comes on?”
The old man blinked at Dipper, his sharp blue eyes (though they be the only thing that had remained sharp in his old age) looked to Dipper, then to the screen again.
“It’s….it’s been a slow day. Ever since Soos started running the Mystery Shack with his girlfriend.” Stan paused to shake his head in disbelief. “Soos. A girlfriend.”
“They’ve been dating for like, two years, Grunkle Stan.”
“I know but still. Soos. Soos got a girl to like him. A living, breathing girl. Without any bribes or hostage situations involved. Huh. Shows what I know.” Stan said with a final shake of his head as he downed the last of his cola and proceeded to crinkle it up into a metal hockey puck against his skull and threw it, Frisbee styled into the recycling bin at the other end of the room to join its collected hockey puck brethren in congregation.
“As I was saying, ever since Soos and his….girlfriend. Seriously, the last girl he dated was an actually computer virus. And the girl before that was in love with the personality of a pig. I just….anyway. Since those two took over the Mystery Shack and since Ford and I came back from monster hunting things have been slow. Not a lot to do, you know?”
“Maybe you could take up golf or something. Or maybe Soos’ abuelita will want to hang out, you know retired person to retired person?”
Stan’s brushy caterpillar eyebrows shot up until they disappeared under his beanie as his eyes slide over to where Abuelita was busy vacuuming the side of the fish tank where Mabel’s lobster had reproduced and was now forging a formal matriarchy. At least that was what Mabel claimed. Abuelita was a sweet, soft-spoken woman, whose demeanor never seemed to waver beyond her constantly pleasant smile. If she knew that she was being addressed, she didn’t acknowledge it and continued to hum to herself something that Dipper thought sounded suspiciously like AC/DC but couldn’t be sure, having only experienced the band via Robbie.
Stan looked back at Dipper with an incredulous look that seemed to ask if Dipper was joking. Dipper shrugged haplessly and turned to head out towards the gift shop. As he left he could hear Grunkle Stan addressing Abuelita.
“So...you’re....you’re old. How’s that working out for you? I mean that is to say I’m old too, we’re both old. Just two old prunes in the same can, I guess....sigh....you know any card games?”
The gift shop was the same as it ever was, save for the Stan bobble heads had been moved to the vintage shelf and were selling for twice as much. Dressed in the three piece suit and fez was Soos and accompanying Wendy in her typical cash registering duties (that is to say, doing them for Wendy) was Mandy, Soos’s girlfriend.
“Step right up and witness, the fearsome, the terrible, Jackal-raptor!” Soos exclaimed with a dramatic flourish Stan would have been proud of, unveiling a taxidermy spectacle that made Dipper jumped slightly and found that he was actually quite thankful for the fact that it wasn’t real, however well done the stitching were. It was basically the taxidermy body of coyote with vulture wings stitched on its back. And the fact that it was stuck in mid leap with its teeth barred in a frozen snarl didn’t help.
“Man, Soos that thing is...kind of disturbing to be honest. Whatever happened to the Cornerella? Or the Snow White and the Seven Gnomes?”
Soos turned and at the sight of Dipper, his face lit up like a firefly, as though it were some sort of constantly delightful surprise to have the Pines family living in his house.
At first, when his Grunkles had come back from their adventuring, they’d been thinking about taking up residence in Abuelita’s old house, now vacant, but the new Man of Mystery wouldn’t have it and insisted the Pines spend the summer in their old home and though it was a little more crowded now, Dipper couldn’t help but be eternally grateful.
“Oh, how’s it going, not-so-little-dude. You don’t like the new attraction? Yeah, it is a bit too spooky. It’s for the new crowd that’s rolling in with that creepy circus that came into town last night out of nowhere. You gotta know your audience in order to be a good businessman. That’s what Mr. Pines always told me. Therefore, Cornerella and Miss White will be in the back until the kid tours come back.”
“Though I’m prone to agree with Dipper, our new exhibits might be going a bit too far on the scary side, Soos.” Mandy put in, leaning up against the bear toothed beaver with that smiling casual manner that had always made her wonderfully likeable in Dipper’s books.
“Fear is good, Mandy. It’s what this new crowd wants, to be spooked.”
“It’s turning us into a haunted house. That’s not what the Mystery Shack is about.”
As the two fell into playful bickering with one another about the nature and scope of the Mystery Shack (one of their favourite topics), Dipper caught Wendy’s eye. She flashed him a typical Wendy smile, all fiery eyed and mischievous that made him confirm why he had spent so long crushing over her two summers ago. He smiled back at her and she lifted her phone screen so he could see the picture Mabel sent of Circus Gothica.
“Hey Dipper, am I reading this right? Mabel wants to go to a Goth Circus?”
“Handsome acrobat flirted with her when she got the flyer.” Dipper explained and Wendy gave a small little snort laugh into her flannel sleeve.
“Yeah, that makes more sense.”
“Are you going to go?” Dipper asked.
“Hmmm....” Wendy twisted her lips into a lazy half smile as her honey brown eyes pursued the message before shrugging carelessly. “It’s not really my scene but I’ll go for Mabel. Robbie and Tambrey would love it, though they’d be too ‘cool’ to say so. It might be fun, you never know. Never too early to celebrate Halloween, eh?” Wendy said crinkling her nose playfully as she sent a quibbling message back through her friends’ group chat. Dipper felt his phone vibrate as he got the notification.
“Yeah, I suppose. Every day in Gravity Falls feels like Halloween though.”
“Like that time we got trapped in that grocery store by ghosts.” Wendy chimed in.
“Yeah that was horrifying. Or when we watched a shape shifted version of you writhe in green blood.”
“Oh yeah, that one kept me awake for a good solid week.” Wendy said with the casual manner of one who is discussing the weather. “But, I mean...it’d be fun to see what these clowns do to try to scare us. Once you fight a chaos god in an apocalyptic hellscape, nothing bothers you.”
Dipper laughed, since that was the best way to deal with the horrors that they’d experienced in that torturous week when Bill had run the world. They laughed until their laughter died off and after standing beside each other for a moment too long as they each were absorbed in their own traumatizing thoughts, Dipper shook himself and announced.
“Well, I’m going to just check this with Great Uncle Ford. Make sure nothings...you know....too real.”
Wendy gave a small little snort as she began to once again flip through her magazine. “Whatever, dude. Don’t sweat it though, if there’s anything you and your sister can handle, it’s the supernatural weirdo stuff that’s attracted to this town like hornets to a rotten apple.”
“Gross. But...um...thanks.” Dipper said, before pulling back the vending machine and with a last wave to Mandy and Soos, disappeared down into the basement.
The basement’s usual dust and moth-eaten smell clouded Dipper’s nose as he descended the staircase. It was always dark down here since it had no access to natural light and the little light bulbs that were scattered about the staircase was few and far between to leave plenty of shifting shadows free to roam about the corners and shift into horrible dreaded shapes.
Dipper would never admit that the darkness set his teeth on edge. He was very careful to act as though it was nothing, just the mere absence of light when his parents asked him to go to cellar to fetch a fresh jar of peanut butter or when he and Mabel had to haul the garbage out to the curb at night. He was so careful to make his stiff limbs into a casual look, tried so hard to paint his face with a complacent smile, as though even he could be convinced.
But in truth, he couldn’t stand the dark, couldn’t stand the faceless shadows that leered at him through his window where the pine trees whispered their night song and the night things howled and shrieked as they went about their nocturnal business. Because he had learned too well what lives in the darkness and what can come from the shadows at the corners of his room. And in his sleep, in the nightmares that had plagued him for years now, his mind ran wild with his fears and the night things always managed to chase him awake, sweating and trembling and muttering nonsense, usually the phrase over and over again can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep.
If Mabel was aware of his growing phobias, she was blissfully ignoring them and once again, Dipper was reminded how sometimes Mabel could be the best.
He never liked the basement for more reasons that the fact that it was dark, the fact that so much had happened down here, so much turmoil, so much distrust, at least throughout the rest of the shack there were fond memories to outweigh the bad, down here not so much.
He found Ford in his study on the second floor of the basement (yes, the basement had three floors and a fancy elevator to match). When the elevator doors opened and Dipper stepped into the elaborate underground study, he stepped on a piece of paper labeled in his uncle’s decorative scrawl ‘Baobab’s and their Ultimate Danger to Humans’.
“Oops.” Dipper hissed unpeeling it from his shoe and looking around at the effects of the tornado that had run through here. Amazing to think that of all the Pines family, Stan was the most organized.
Boxes were stacked up to the ceiling stuffed with old papers, scales, weights and, in a box marked as trash, was Ford’s old Bill Cipher regalia including a tapestry, a Tibetan idol, African decorative urns and a copy of a Aztec mosaic, all in dedication to the evil triangle. Dipper starred into that venomous slit of an eye and shuddered.
“Grunkle Ford?” Dipper called and there was a smart thump of metal against flesh a little oof.
“What? No, sorry, no my nephew just walked in....no, no, he’s fine. A good lad, you’d like him. Ha, so you say but I’ve always had my doubts about you.” A six-fingered hand appeared on the underbelly of a machine Dipper knew had once been an encoder of thoughts...before Dipper had broken it and his Great Uncle Ford pulled himself into a standing position. Stan’s older twin brother was the hardened, more stylized twin, in Dipper’s opinion.
From his brown trench coat always bulging with tools and weapons of Ford’s own make and design (so cool) to the leather satchel where he carried all of his notes in (so cool!), to the glasses with the single cracked lenses that hide his brilliantly blue eyes that possessed an equal amount of depth and shrewdness as his brother. Needless to say, Dipper struggled not to worship his uncle, but how could he not?
His uncle was an adventuring hero, a man who had spent all his life dedicated to science and research in the field and everything Dipper wanted to be. He grinned and waved at his uncle before stopping himself from looking too eager and Ford smiled and waved back despite the fact that he was talking into a strange devise that was most certainly not a cell phone.
“Yes, yes I’ll send you the blueprints. Though if this ever comes back to me I will firmly deny it, you understand that, right? Though I insist stating my opinion, my friend, that this is dangerous, extremely dangerous and most likely illegal and will most likely result in you getting eaten.”
There was a beep on the devise that made Ford pull the devise away from his head in time catch sight of the hologram that materialized in the air above the device. It looked like a text message and it was titled only with the words.
I do what I want. So suck it.
-R.
Ford looked through the hologram at Dipper and frowned.
“Not funny. My nephew is right here.”
Another beep, another hologram appeared in the air.
Hi nephew. Be a peach, will you? And tell your uncle to lick my steamy, wet-
Ford threw his hand over the light of the devise to cover up the message.
“Yes, thank you, you made your point. I’ll send them to you. Just...be careful.” He said the words with a surprising amount of tenderness. There was a pause and the light blinked again, Ford took away his hand to watch the words appear in the air one by one, more carefully this time than the others have been, as though they were bubbling up from some unspoken depth.
Fordy....thanks. If I don’t hear from you again....enjoy the time with your family. You were a good friend. Tell your nephew he’s lucky to have you....goodbye.
-R.
Dipper watch his uncle read the words, the corners of his blue eyes suddenly misty as he clicked off the device and set it gently on the table.
“Um....” Dipper said, watching his uncle remove his glasses to rub at his eyes, quietly. “Should I come back?”
“No, no, its fine, Dipper my boy. Quite fine. I was just...saying goodbye.” The pain in his voice made Dipper indeed wish that he could come back later, he didn’t like to see his uncle like this but in a moment it was gone and Ford was smacking and rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that seemed almost genuine. “What can I help you with, Dipper?”
“Oh...um...it’s nothing. I was just wandering if...if I could go through some of your notes again for my project.”
“Ah, yes. An investigation into Anomaly X.” Ford said with a knowing smirk as he walked over to the box heap that took up most of the room. Ford’s attempts at cleaning up this mess, two years and running. “Have you made any headway with the grocery store?”
Dipper shook his head grimly, wrestling down the disappointment that was rising in his throat like bile. “Nothing new on that front. All my research has found is that it’s nothing but a regular grocery store now.”
Ford clicked his teeth in disapproval as he worked on stacking his arms with boxes from his heap.
“Isn’t that the worse sort of luck? I always hated it when the abnormal revert back to the normal. It’s such a let-down in my opinion.”
“Right!?” Dipper exclaimed, leaping at the opportunity for someone to vent to. Mabel was usually his first pick for the role but her sympathies could stretch no farther than nodding and mumbling a ‘yeah, that sucks or cool, sounds great’ in accordance to the reaction Dipper was seeking. Ford was much more serviceable in the matter but was hardly ever available for it.
“Two summers ago, it was a teeming cesspool of supernatural activity. This summer, nothing. Absolutely nothing. I stacked out the grocery store for two nights in a row. I’ve even gone inside the ghost’s old territory and I received no response. And I’m fourteen, a fully fledged teenage now.”
“Are you sure that teenagers and hooligans was the right obsession for the ghosts?” Ford inquired, “More dormant ghosts can only be roused into activity by their obsession and if you get their obsession wrong they won’t come out.”
“Oh trust me, Great Uncle Ford,” Dipper said, leaning up against the wall and folding his arms in a casual slouch that he had developed specifically for this experiment when he had infiltrated the haunted grocery store but now he was starting to like it. “Teenagers were definitely the obsession of those ghosts. They turned Tyler into a hot dog just because he was being sarcastic. The only thing I could think of is that they’re gone.”
“But where exactly, that’s the question.” Ford said, setting the boxes down before Dipper so that he could scratch his chin contemplatively.
“Anomaly X, I suppose.” Dipper said, bending down to shift through his uncle’s notes and theories on Anomaly X, the theorized dimension where souls from other worlds collect and wander, souls of things, plants, animals and people, even demons.
That note had been the thing to catch Dipper’s eye, though he would never admit it to his uncle, even less likely would he admit it to anyone else: the growing fear that perhaps a certain demon of nightmares and chaos had meandered his way into the aimless realm of ghosts to cause who knew what mischief. Dipper knew he shouldn’t care, should be grateful that at least Bill was gone from this current plain of existence but still there remained the nagging feeling that he needed to be sure, that he needed to find Bill before Bill found him.
Unless Bill was living his afterlife as a smear on some other, more powerful ghost’s shoe than Dipper knew it would only be a matter of time before clever Bill made enough deals and played enough ticks to win himself the title of king of the dead. And that was hardly a title Dipper was comfortable with the demon having. But fretting about what Bill might or might not be doing in another realm of existence was one thing, finding that realm was purely another. In all of his Great Uncle Ford’s traveling, he’d never stumbled upon that particular realm, merely having documented speculations and theories that he had collected over the years.
Dipper had been digging through them all summer, trying to find a link that would tell him how to achieve connection with, or even travel to this kingdom of ghosts but the only conclusion he could draw was that the only things that could get there were ghosts themselves. So...he just had to catch a ghost, and how hard could that be right?
Turns out, in Gravity Falls weird stuff will push through the cracks of your window panes, sprout like grass between the floor boards, crawl into your bed and whisper goodnight kisses on your eyelashes but open your eyes and it’ll have faded into the shadows again, to taunt and lure and little else.
“Hmmm...shame.” Ford observed absently. “For your next step in your investigations, I would suggest the cave witch. She might know a thing or two, besides you know how she likes visitors.”
Dipper shuddered at the memory of the witch’s squirming cave walls crawling with severed human hands that the witch had animated to do her bidding. Her noxious breath of his face, her yellow dying skin and her dead eyes like those of a gutted fish, a pale foggy red that always seemed to find its way to your face and then to your hands, as though she were calculating which she would prefer as a trophy for her collection.
“I hate visiting her, she’s creepy and possibly dead and her pet hands always pinch my cheeks.” Dipper moaned, knowing he sounded like he was complaining but he couldn’t help it. He hated, hated, hated visiting Auntie Witch, a title she insisted being called.
“Now, Dipper, that’s no way to speak of a lady. Even if she does collect human hands and yes, she may or may not have reanimated her own corpse at one point in time. You can take Mabel for moral support if you wish. Also, if you do go visiting her, make sure to bring a gift.”
“Mabel usually brings her cookies and the latest season of the Bachelor.” Dipper said and Ford smiled, “See? There you go, Mabel is a magician when it comes to making friends. I’ve always told her she should consider a career in politics, I have highly influence ties that she could tap into if she ever wanted to be a diplomat for this dimension.”
Dipper laughed at the notion of Mabel being professional enough to be an ambassador in any setting. “It’d be funny explaining that to our parents. Yeah mom and dad, sorry Mabel can’t come to the phone right now, she’s in a conference meeting with the Squahtar of B-890.”
Ford smiled too but the mirth didn’t quite reach his eyes and Dipper was stabbed with the realization that his uncle was putting on a show just for him.
“Um...anyway. Do you know anything about a circus?”
Ford blinked, his bushy eyebrows twisting themselves into a perplexed look.
“Circus?”
“Yeah, this goth circus Mabel wants to go to, did you ever write about something like that in your journals?” Dipper asked, holding out the flyer for his uncle to take and examine.
Ford scratched his chin thoughtfully, his shrewd eye pursuing the page before he handed it back to Dipper with a shake of his head and shrug.
“I can’t remember. This brain’s getting a bit old Dipper. I’ll look through my notes but I don’t recall a circus.”
“Oh.” Dipper said, feeling the strange sensation of disappointment swell in his chest. So he’d wasted his uncle’s time for nothing. Ford noted Dipper’s moment of melancholy and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll do some research though, Dipper. Not to worry. It’s always important to keep an inquisitive mind, never stop asking questions. But sometimes things just may be exactly what they seem to be and this case, a circus with a gimmick.”
Dipper nodded again and Ford twisted his lips to the side in a very Mabel like fashion. “Here,” He snatched up a coiled notebook and pen from the desk. “Go to the circus and observe what you find there. If there’s anything suspicious, make note and report back to me. No stone left unturned, right?”
Dipper accepted the notebook and smiled up at his uncle in his best attempts to squash his earlier disappointment.
“Sure thing, uncle.” He said, and now it was his turn to pretend.