Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Dipper and Mrs. Taylor ran to the stair, Dipper in the lead. He tore up ahead of her to the second floor and tried to open Chuck's door and found it locked. "Mabel!"
From inside the room came Mabel's frantic voice: "Dipper! Something's wrong with—"
"Go away!"
Dipper heard Mrs. Taylor gasp. The voice was Chuck's but then again it didn't sound a bit like Chuck's normal tone—lower, grating, more guttural. Dipper pounded on the door. "Come on, this isn't funny! Open up!"
He flinched as a shattering crash of glass came from the far side. Mabel screamed. Dipper threw himself against the door, bounced off, and went sprawling. He got up and charged the door again—
And bowled over Mabel, who'd just thrown the door open. They tumbled to the floor together. Mabel waved her arm wildly. "He broke the window!"
"Chuck!" Mrs. Taylor yelled, stepping over and around the two fallen Mystery Twins. "What—where is he?"
"He broke the window!" Mabel said again, getting up. "With the chair! And then he jumped out!"
"From up here?" Dipper asked, standing up. Mrs. Taylor went to the broken window, next to the bed, and he stood beside her looking out. The window had been one big pane, completely gone now, except for half a dozen sharp shards left clinging to the sides and top of the frame. A window screen had been pushed out and hung crazily off to the left. The blue curtain on that side hung out of the opening, ripped so a piece of it flopped loose.
"Where is he?" Mrs. Taylor asked. She turned and ran out to the hall and down the steps. Dipper leaned out.
Below him, fragments of broken glass from dinner-plate size on down littered the grass below the window, and a few feet away the desk chair lay on its back, as though it had been hurled out in a fit of anger. No sign of Chuck.
"He just—he went crazy!" Mabel said, sobbing. "He told me to get out of the chair, I stood up, he pushed past me and locked the door and picked up the chair, and I yelled—then he threw the chair right through the window!"
"You OK?" Dipper asked her.
"I'm scared! He looked so—wild!"
"You're not hurt, though?"
"No."
"Come on—let's see if we can find Chuck!"
He wasn't in the back yard—but some of his blood was. A splash of it as big as Dipper's hand was right under the window, and a smear of it on the fence showed that Chuck must have climbed over it at the corner of the house, where he could head to the street. Mrs. Taylor was yelling Chuck's name and staring all around the back yard, though he couldn't have been there—no place to hide.
"Take care of Mrs. Taylor," Dipper told Mabel. "Get her back inside and have her call the police. I'm gonna see if I can track him."
"Track—how?"
"He's bleeding," Dipper said. "Not too bad, but I can see a drop here and there. I'll try to follow him."
"What—what will you do if you catch him?" Mabel asked.
"Not hurt him. Try to hold him until the police come. I'll call if I find him."
They went through the house, and Dipper ran to the front door. "Go get Mrs. Taylor inside," he told Mabel. "Make sure she calls the police. They wouldn't believe you or me."
"I'll do it."
As he opened it, Mabel called, "Dipper—"
"Yeah?"
"Be careful!"
Tracking proved harder than he'd thought. The outside of the fence showed a small streak of blood, but no spots showed on the lawn—none he could find. Oh, man! I wish Wendy were here—she knows all about this tracking stuff, and I don't know anything!
He walked to the street, taking the most direct path across the lawn, and went ten feet one way, ten the other, before he caught sight of a nickel-sized red splotch, roughly pear-shaped and already drying.
Forcing himself not to run—he might miss something—Dipper walked along the sidewalk of Selborne Drive, head down, gaze on the pavement. He took out his phone and called Grunkle Ford's number. When Ford answered, Dipper said, "Ford, I've got a big problem."
"Go on," Ford told him.
Quickly Dipper sketched in what he knew, what he had deduced, and what he feared. "Mabel says he went crazy and jumped out of the window," he finished. "And I'm almost sure he did that the instant I mentioned Northwest's name, but I wasn't in the room. Not even on the same floor!"
"Possession," Ford said. "Ghosts can gain a sudden energy by being called by their earthly names—and they have the uncanny ability of being several places at once, or it seems that way. The odds are high that's what happened. Let me consult some resources and I'll call you right back."
"Hurry. I'm trying to follow him, but I don't know how long I can stay on the trail."
A nickel-sized drop every ten steps or so, that was the track. And when he reached the intersection with Estates Drive even that vanished. At the corner, down on the sidewalk in the curve of a split-faced fieldstone wall, he saw three somewhat larger drops, spaced close together, as though Chuck had stood there considering which way to turn. Nothing from there on, one way or the other, on Estates Drive. He had seen no one to ask—no potential witnesses. "Come on, Grunkle Ford!" he muttered coming back to the corner with the blood spots and feeling the afternoon sun warm on his face.
As though in response, his phone chimed. "Hello!"
Ford didn't even greet him before diving in: "Dipper, here's what I have. It's based not only on research but also on my helping Fiddleford clear out some of the things the Northwests left behind when they had to sell their house. Listen carefully."
"I am."
"You may want to take notes."
"I'll remember, just tell me," Dipper said.
"Very well. I'm pretty certain, judging from some things he'd collected—one room was full of Nathaniel Northwest memorabilia, though of course Preston took most of it, but he left some things in bad condition behind—"
"Please, Grunkle Ford! I don't need the whole backstory!"
"Yes, forgive me. Anyway, from some of the memorabilia, it's clear Northwest was a man who believed in superstitions—some of which might not have been just foolish imaginings at all. When he first came to Gravity Falls—the valley, I mean, because the town—"
"Hadn't been built then, I know," Dipper said impatiently. "He started out building a log hut and trading with the Native Americans in the area. I think Pacifica told me that much."
"Yes, trading for furs and food among three tribes: the Shoshone, Klamet, and Liksiyu," Ford agreed. "The valley is near where all three territories touch—but I'm off the subject. Now, you may know that the Indians—I'm sorry, Native Americans, that term wasn't as widely used when I was in school—no, sorry, sidetracked again, let me just go on. The tribes were afraid of the valley and rarely ventured very far in. Northwests' trading post was near the valley entrance, at the Twin Buffs, and the Native Americans warned him of ghosts and spirits farther in."
"Come on, Grunkle Ford!"
"Patience, Dipper! Northwest was interested in their ghost tales and seemed to accept them as true, and so the Native Americans told him more of their beliefs and lore. Anyway, an idea that he may have picked up from one of those groups is that the spirit of a warrior can refuse to go to the afterlife—can become a ghost—and can reincarnate in the body of a descendant or relative. Listen: The possession cannot be complete until the spirit forces the body of its host to 'walk the path of twisting fate.'"
"What does that mean?"
"I have no idea."
Dipper slumped, ready to scream in frustration.
"However, let me tell you a little more that may be a clue," Ford returned. "In one room that Fiddleford and I cleaned out, we found an old notebook pages brown and brittle with age, obviously from the nineteenth century, in which someone had drawn in pencil page after page of labyrinths. The little story about the spirit and possession was on the first page, just six or eight lines, but probably not in Nathaniel's handwriting. He seems to have been next door to illiterate. Perhaps his wife wrote it for him. The drawings of the labyrinths are crude and I think it likely that he did them himself."
"Labyrinth." Like the one in Greek mythology where Theseus confronted the Minotaur.
"Labyrinth, yes. Not a maze," Ford said. "Most people confuse the two. The difference is—"
"A maze has intersections, different branches and a complex path in and out," Dipper said. "A labyrinth has only one very complex path, and no branches or intersections. With a labyrinth, the goal isn't to find a different way out, but to take a long twisting walk and then retrace your steps back to the entrance, it's a ritual meditation thing, I know."
"Very good!" Ford said. "Now, independently of the old notebook, I have learned that one of the tribes, I think the Liksiyu, though I may be wrong, made ritual labyrinths just for this purpose—not walled in, just patterns of stones laid out on the ground for the host of a possessing spirit to walk, a guide for his or her steps. If Northwest can force your friend to construct one of these and to walk through it and out again, then the possession may become complete. The soul of your friend will be cut loose from his body and Norhtwest will own it for the rest of its life. However, time is of the essence. If it doesn't force the body through the labyrinth ritual, the possessing spirit cannot control the body for more than three days and nights before it will lose its hold, and then the original owner of the body will re-emerge as dominant. You don't want to let that happen. If it does, invariably, though the original spirit is back in the body—the person becomes insane for life."
Dipper's heart pounded. "If I find Chuck, how can I stop that from happening?"
"You must exorcise the possessing spirit. I'll send you full instructions on how to do that by—what is it called? Electric mail?"
"Email," Dipper said. "Do it!"
"Within the hour. I hope all this helps."
Something nagged at Dipper, but it was just beyond his mental reach. "Yeah, it does," he said to Ford. A black-and-white police car with the blue, gold, and white Piedmont Police shield painted on the front door pulled up to the curb near the intersection, stopped, and two patrolmen got out. "Gotta go," Dipper said on the phone. "Call you later."
One of the officers said, "Hey, kid. You Chuck Taylor?"
"No," Dipper said. "I'm his friend, Dipper Pines. I've been following him, though. He cut himself going through the window and left a trail of blood up to here, and it just stops. See these?" He pointed to the three red spots on the sidewalk.
"You have any ID, kid?" the other cop asked.
"I'm too young for a driver's license or learner's permit," Dipper said, taking out his wallet, "but here's my school ID." He pulled out the card, and another one, laminated cardboard, tucked behind it slipped out too and fluttered toward the ground. The first cop caught it in mid-air.
"Mason Pines," the other policeman read from the school ID card. "What did you say your first name was?"
"Dipper," the second one told him.
"It's a nickname," Dipper said. "I don't like my real name."
"Mason's an OK name," the policeman who had caught the dropped card said. Smiling, he held it up and asked, "Official Junior Ghost Harasser, huh?"
"Uh—I was a big fan of that show when I was a kid. I mean younger," Dipper said. "The stars were at a convention in San Francisco, and they handed these out as souvenirs. They've got both the guys' autographs."
"I like that show myself," the policeman said, handing the Ghost Harassers card back.
As Dipper tucked both cards into his wallet, the other cop hunkered down and studied the spatters of blood. "What do you think, Joe?" he asked.
The other policeman looked up and down the street. "No more blood spots?" he asked Dipper.
"No, sir. Not in either direction."
Joe nodded and said, "My guess is he was picked up, Frank."
"Not by one of our cars," Frank said straightening up. "We'd have heard."
"No. I think he waited here and tried to thumb down a passing car. He waited long enough for three drops of blood to fall, and then it happened."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Somebody stopped for him."
"Let's go."
Joe said to Dipper, "Good work, son. You go back now. We've got this."
"Sir," Dipper said, "you ought to know—Chuck's a good guy. Never been in trouble, never. But right now—he's not himself. When you find him, don't hurt him."
"We won't, son. But you have to worry about something else."
"What?"
"He's already hurt himself."
To be continued
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Note from the Authors: This was just an idea I had but the one who really worked his magic and wrote almost all of this is none other than BillEase. He's an amazing author who usually hangs out at fanfiction.net. Don't pass up on a chance to check out his stuff. This guy is AMAZING. He wrote the story, I just gave the plot.
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