Chapter Text
The door to the coffee shop chimed as Norman pushed it open. He slid inside, aware of the blast of winter air rushing in with him, and started untangling his scarf from around his neck as it swung shut behind him.
The shop was blessedly warm, and he stood massaging his numb fingers for a moment, taking it in. It was cosy, and kind of homey in a way that was trying very hard to appear nonchalant about it. The tables were dark wood, worn with age, and the lamps hanging over them cast a soft, hazy yellow light. There was the smell of something baking in the air, and Norman was abruptly reminded that in the rush that morning he’d forgotten about breakfast.
He joined the queue behind a couple with nice-looking shirts and impeccable hair, and tried not to feel out of place. The shop was pretty quiet - Norman figured weekday mornings were kinda slow - and he tuned out to the low chatter and the buzz of the espresso machine. There was a hissing noise, the sound of milk being frothed - occasionally the clank of what sounded like an oven door - someone calling out above the low clatter of the shop -
“‘Scuse me, mister, were you gonna order, or…?”
Oh, hold on a second.
Norman looked up at the person behind the counter. They were leaning forward expectantly, one hand on the hip of their apron. The other couple were gone.
“Sorry!” Norman stumbled forward, giving the barista an apologetic smile. “I, uh, zoned out there for a second.” He ran a hand through his hair, wincing slightly at how stiff it felt. “Late night.”
“Sure.” The barista cocked one delicately plucked eyebrow. “So, your order?”
Norman resisted the urge to apologise again. Instead, he said, “I’m actually looking for someone who works here. Her name is-”
“ Norman! ”
He’d recognise that voice anywhere. Norman’s gaze slid along the bar, and when he found its source his face broke into a wide grin. Mabel returned it from behind a glass case of pastries, and wound her way past her coworkers to the till.
“Lemme take this one, Val,” she said, patting the other barista on the shoulder. “Me ‘n’ Norm here go waaay back.”
“He’s all yours, Mabel,” Val replied with a shrug, sidling out of the way as Mabel did her best to bring Norman into an awkward hug over the counter.
“It’s good to see you too, Mabel,” Norman wheezed as she inadvertently crushed his neck. He patted her on the back, and when her hold was relinquished he straightened back up, feeling somewhat dishevelled.
“How have you been , my dude?” Mabel beamed. She reached up to pat him on the cheek, then recoiled with a yelp. “ Oof , that’s a chilly one. Tell you what, hot drink first, then BFF catch up. What can I get you? On the house.”
“That’s OK, I - You don’t have to -” Norman paused, chewing his lip. “Actually, a coffee would be great,” he relented, and Mabel’s grin got impossibly brighter.
They took a table over by the window. Mabel slung her apron over the back of one of the chairs, and as Norman pulled the other one she set down a tray with two steaming mugs and a tempting-looking pastry.
“My treat,” she said, sliding it across the table towards him. “I’m pretty sure I could feel every one of your ribs when I hugged you back there.”
“You sound like my mom ,” Norman laughed, but he took the pastry gratefully and shoved half of it in his mouth as Mabel stirred her hot chocolate.
“So how have you been , Normaduke?” she gushed, as Norman licked syrup off his fingers. “I feel like it’s been ages. How’s life up in Montreal?”
“Good,” said Norman, curling his fingers around his coffee cup and letting the warmth sink in. “It’s good. Cold, but you get used to wearing five scarves in the winter pretty quick.”
Mabel made a face. “Bleh, I can imagine . Portland winters are cold enough for me as- is , thank you very much.”
“Sweater season is longer if it’s cold,” Norman offered, and Mabel rolled her eyes.
“Norman, please , sweater season is twelve months a year because sweaters are eternal . You better be- lieve that as soon as I get home it’s bye-bye this -” she tugged at the collar of her work uniform - “And hellooo sweaters.”
“Plural?” Norman chuckled.
“Oh, yeah,” Mabel said, “Sometimes I just pile ‘em all up and bury myself in the yarn-y goodness. Make a little hamster nest, y’know.”
She gave him a gleaming smile that didn’t help Norman figure out whether or not she was joking.
“You’ve had your braces off,” he noted instead, bringing his cup to his lips. “When did that happen?”
“Last summer!” Mabel tipped her head first this way, then the other, showing off two rows of perfectly straight teeth. “I still have to wear these little plastic covers over them at night, but Mabel is a braceface no longer!”
Her smile faded a little. “It’s too bad you couldn’t make it. Coraline’s exams finished early so she came down for a whole month , it was a blast!” She glanced over her shoulder, then leaned forward and continued in a lower voice, “ Raz even stayed over for a few days!”
“You don’t say,” Norman mused. “It really has been forever since we saw those two.”
“He’s, like, a proper secret agent now,” Mabel said conspiratorially. “He had a badge and everything.”
“Black suit?”
“Nah. He was all, ‘Mabel, good agents don’t go around looking like agents’, but I was like, well, you sure like to show off that dorky green turtleneck though, huh?”
Norman snorted. “That’s pretty rich coming from you , sweater queen.”
Mabel gasped in faux outrage, before giving Norman a playful shove, and he couldn’t help but laugh.
They sat in silence for a while. Norman finished his pastry with enthusiasm, and was savouring his coffee when Mabel spoke up again.
“He really misses you, you know.”
She was staring at the surface of her drink, turning the cup slowly in her hands. At the sound of Norman setting his mug back down on the table, she glanced up, and their eyes met. “Dipper, I mean. I think he’d been really hoping you’d make it over the summer.”
Norman turned to look out the window, and from the corner of his eye he saw Mabel’s eyes widen. “Oh, I - I’m not tryna, like, guilt trip you over it, Norm, really. It’s cool. I just - he talks about you a lot, and I know you two were kind of…”
She pursed her lips like she was trying to find a word to finish the sentence, but gave up after a moment and let it trail off. Norman turned back to the table, his eyes lingering around Mabel’s elbow.
“He talks about me?” he ventured, and Mabel nodded.
“Not in a gossipy way,” she clarified. “It’s just, you know, he’ll be reading an article or we’ll be scouting somewhere out and he’ll say, ‘Hey, I wonder what Norman would -’, or ‘If Norman were here, we could -’, or ‘This reminds me of the time when Norman and I’ et cetera, et cetera.” She gave a wry smile. “Like I said, it just feels like it’s been ages since we saw you. I bet he’s in your inbox all the time, but -”
“He’s not,” Norman said, and Mabel cut herself off mid-sentence, blinking in astonishment. “I actually don’t think I’ve heard from him in - two, nearly three months. I don’t even know where he is right now.”
He shifted in his chair, then met Mabel’s gaze with a furrowed brow. “That’s actually why I came to find you.”
It was a few hours later when he and Mabel finally left the shop. She’d managed to get the afternoon off, but (she apologised as they made their way through the busy Portland streets) she couldn’t exactly up and leave in the middle of a shift unless it was an emergency.
“And I don’t think it is ,” she’d frowned, pulling her plaited scarf tight against the biting wind, “I think it’s just a Dipper Weirdness Event, but…”
Norman hadn’t minded the wait; he’d bought himself a sandwich to pass the time, and at about half past eleven he’d moved tables to sit with a ghost who’d drifted in. She had a seat near the bar, floating about an inch or so above it, and was watching one of the baristas - he looked about the same age as Mabel, with dark skin and hair and a kind, doughy face - with a wistful expression.
( “He never had great self-esteem,” she’d sighed, chin propped up with one hand, “And when I, y’know - he took it really hard. I’ve been coming here every day to check on him.” Norman had nodded, and patted her hand, and tried to avoid looking at the place where the car had hit and her ribs stretched open like reaching fingers. )
Norman drove the two of them to Mabel’s place in his old jeep. It was a run-down car with shitty mileage, but despite explaining as much to her Mabel still seemed unduly impressed. Norman put it down to the fact that she didn’t drive - “I only really work on holidays and weekends, the rest of the time I’ve got college,” she explained, eagerly running her hands over the cracked pleather of the doorframe, “so I can’t really cover a car.”
“This old rustbucket belonged to one of my dad’s friends,” Norman told her, shifting gear as they rumbled round a cul-de-sac corner. “When I moved north I needed something that could handle the roads in winter, with enough boot space to lug all my film equipment around.”
“Does it have a name?”
Norman rolled to a stop at the side of the road, pulled up the handbrake with a creak, and turned to give Mabel an odd look. She held his gaze, and wiggled her eyebrows for emphasis. “ Tons of people name their cars, Norm. You know, like… Jessica!”
“I’m not ,” Norman clicked his seatbelt free, “naming my car Jessica .”
Mabel slid out of the passenger door and pouted at him from across the roof of the car.
“Jessica’s a great name!”
“It’s a people name, Mabel, you can’t give cars people names. Don’t ask me why, it’s just weird!”
Mabel was in a house share with three other students, and the kitchen definitely had a lived-in feel (not that Norman, of all people, was about to judge). Mabel filled the kettle, and spooned several heaps of a colourful-looking leaf mixture into two teacups whilst trying to sell Norman on the merits of naming your car. Norman tried not to look suspicious as he studied the resulting garnet-coloured liquid.
She kept up the discussion as the two of them made their way upstairs, pausing to greet a housemate who’d poked their head out the door to see what all the noise was about (they looked about as sleep-deprived as Norman felt, and quickly ducked back into their room). It was only until they were both safely inside her own room that she pushed shut the door, let her shoulders sag and turned to look at Norman with a serious expression.
“We gotta get to the bottom of this, Norman,” she said, clearing a space for her cup and saucer among the colourful stationery on her desk and flopping onto her bed. Norman did a brief scan of the room - the furniture wasn’t really Mabel’s style, but she’d made the space her own with posters and a string of buttercup-yellow fairy lights above her bed - and decided the small office chair at her desk was probably the safest place for him to sit.
“Nothing’s happened recently, right?” he ventured as the chair took his weight with a groan. “I mean - there hasn’t been a sudden alien invasion, or a zombie plague outbreak or something?”
Mabel swung her feet and hmm-ed loudly - Norman could see that her face was scrunched in a tight frown. “He hasn’t told me about anything like that, but - that doesn’t really answer your question, I guess.”
Norman gave her a tired smile. “So much for the days when he’d babble on about monsters to anyone who’d listen, huh?”
“I blame Ford.” Mabel wriggled upright on the bed with a grunt, propping herself up with her arms. “No offense to him, but he’s always been a bit of a coo-coo conspiracy nut, and I think some of it has rubbed off on Dipper.”
She spun her finger next to her forehead, and Norman stifled a laugh. “Ok, so no leads there. But you still hear from him, right?”
“Sure,” Mabel shrugged. “I mean, not that often, but yeah. I don’t know the last time we had a proper chat, but before last month he used to message me about every week or so.”
Norman took a moment to digest this information. “Really? That infrequently? I kinda assumed you two would be, like…”
“Chatting every day?” Mabel gave a chuckle, but it rang hollow. “Nah, Dip’s not that talkative nowadays. I used to message him a whole bunch, but he’d only reply a couple times a month, so… eventually, I just kinda stopped. We still meet up every summer, of course, and we visit our parents most Christmases if we can help it, but Dipper wasn’t around this year - he said something came up, and with Dipper, you just gotta kinda… accept it at face value! I’m sure he’s got some kinda super-important mission that means he can’t take a few days off to come see his twin sister, right?!”
She sucked in a deep breath, and puffed her cheeks like she had more to say, but all that came out was a long sigh. She deflated, leaning her elbows across her legs and glancing at Norman with a tight grin. “Yeesh, listen to miss lemons over here. I must sound super bitter, huh?”
Norman didn’t really know what to say. He gave a timid nod, and Mabel laced her hands together.
“I’m sorry, I don’t wanna dump all this dumb negative stuff on you. I mean, you’re the one he stopped talking to! Geeze, Mabel, selfish , much?” She shook her head, grabbed the teacup from the desk and took a swig from it, and jumped to her feet, forcing a grin on her face. “Don’t worry, Norm-o, I know just the way to help us get to the bottom of this!”
Norman nodded again, glad he hadn’t needed to mention that - prior to the sudden cutoff - Dipper had been messaging him nearly every day.
Mabel strode over to her closet, and spent several seconds rooting through it before pulling out a small case. It was a dull camo green, and as she sat back down on the bed with it across her lap Norman noticed the wires attached to the back, leading back into the darkness of her closet.
“This is supposed to only be an emergency contact measure,” Mabel said, and Norman heard a click-click as she fiddled with it before pushing the lid up. “But I’ve also used it to tell him happy birthday before, and this is way more of an emergency than that.”
Curiosity getting the better of him, Norman rose from the chair and moved to stand next to Mabel, craning his neck to get a better look at what was inside.
“Is this… a radio?”
“It’s basically a low-tech landline phone,” Mabel replied, tugging an antenna up out the box. “Ford made some modifications to it. Dipper told me once about how it hijacks some kinda signals and blah blah nerd stuff, but basically it’s supposed to be super-secure. He went on this whole thing about a year ago on how mobiles can’t be trusted, so now this is one of the only ways to call him.”
Norman watched, impressed, as Mabel tweaked dials, pressed buttons, and crooned in triump as the unit suddenly lit up. She plucked the reciever from its alcove and held it up to Norman with a grin. “Want to do the honors?”
Norman’s face suddenly felt extremely hot. He stammered as Mabel waggled the reciever at him, reaching out to take it with hands that seemed to be unreasonably sweaty for the temperature of the room.
His eyes met with Mabel’s - her hand was hovering above a single button on the console, lit up with a hard orange glow. She was hesitating, watching his face for some kind of a signal. He held his breath for a beat, then nodded.
That was all Mabel needed. She pressed the button with a swift motion, and Norman heard the reciever hiss to life. Swallowing, he pressed it to his ear, listening as the buzz of white noise warped into a crackly dial tone, and then -
A click. Someone had picked up.
Norman licked his lips. “D- Dipper? Are you there?”
For a second, there was nothing except the faint hiss of dead air on the other end. Then:
“ Five. ”
That wasn’t Dipper’s voice.
“ Seventeen. Zero. Nine. Seventeen. Zero. Nine. ”
Something must have shown on his face, because Mabel was on her feet now, peering closely at him.
“ What? ” she whispered, leaning in. “ Is he there? ”
“ Six. Twenty-two. Zero.”
“ It’s - numbers ,” Norman mouthed. “ It’s just numbers! What the heck!”
“Two. Twenty.”
“Gimme that,” Mabel said, making a wild grab at the reciever. She held it to her ear, and Norman watched her eyes slowly grow wider and wider. Eventually, she thrust the receiver back at him.
“Ok, this is weird.”
Norman took it in his hand and held it out, stooping slightly so his head was at the same height as Mabel’s. The two of them crowded in and listened as it rattled off more of the numbers in that calm, eerie voice:
“ ...Zero. Six. Five. Fourteen. Nineteen. Five. Twenty-two. Eleven.”
Then there was a burst of static that made Norman flinch away from the receiver - and then, nothing.
He looked at Mabel, scanning her face for clues to what the hell was going on. She was still listening closely to the receiver, befuddled expression gone in place of one of concentration.
“Is it - ” he started, but Mabel cut him off, shushing him aggressively.
“ Listen, it’s started back up, ” she muttered, beckoning him closer. True to her word, that same artificial-sounding voice was reading off numbers again.
“Five. Seventeen. Zero. Nine. Seventeen. Zero. Nine. ”
Something about that rang familiar with Norman. “Those are the same ones,” he said slowly, “the same numbers it started with. It’s repeating a sequence.”
Something like recognition flashed across Mabel’s face. She pulled away abruptly, hands scrabbling over her desk. Norman saw her snatch up a piece of blank paper and a fuzzy pink pen with an urgent haste.
“Bring that here,” she ordered, and as Norman lifted the receiver up to her the listened for a moment - then began scribbling frantically over the paper.
“It’s - a code,” she explained distractedly, pausing to scratch through a number and replace it with another. “It’s gotta be.”
They went through the sequence three more times before Mabel was confident she had everything right. Hanging the receiver back up with a ‘ clunk ’, she held the paper out at arm’s length and sighed loudly, puffing out her cheeks.
She laid it on the desk, and she and Norman crowded around it, staring intently at the incoherent series of numbers.
“It’s gotta be a code,” Mabel repeated, threading her hands through her hair. “Dipper wouldn’t set something like that up for nothing.”
“Why the secrecy, though? What’s wrong with a regular answer-phone message?” Norman paused. “Who else has access to this connection?” he said, slowly.
“I dunno.” Mabel was clenching her scalp, elbows on the desk as she hunched over the code. “He always said it was ‘secure’, whatever that means, but I don’t know of anyone else with one of these receivers.”
Norman sat on the bed, deep in thought, as Mabel unburied a laptop from her desk and coaxed it to life. “Ok, number ciphers. Uh, first thing to do is probably rewrite it as letters, that’ll make it easier to work with.”
She pulled up a webpage and turned the screen to Norman, tapping it with a glittery pink nail. “The numbers don’t go higher than twenty-five, which means there’s a good chance they correspond to the letters of the alphabet, plus zeros for spaces. If we can convert them, that’ll make it easier to figure out what kind of cipher we’re looking at.”
She ran a hand through her hair, tugging it out of its ponytail as Norman’s eyes scanned over the cipher. “The other possibility is it’s coordinates, but the numbers don’t match up unless we’re looking for somewhere in the Arctic, which, uh, I hope not.”
“Alright,” Norman said. “Where do we start?”
They split the list of coded numbers between the two of them and sat in silence as they worked, hunched over what small desk space there was. Mabel was finished first, and when Norman finally looked up from his series of numbers she’d filled her paper with various scrawlings, glaring at them intently.
“We don’t have a cipher key,” she explained, “so this is probably brute-force-able, like an Atbash or a Caesar or something.”
“It’s a good thing I’ve got Detective Mabel on the case,” Norman chuckled as Mabel tapped away at her laptop. “I wouldn’t know where to start with this stuff.”
“Pshh, it’s nothing,” she said, tossing her head dismissively - though Norman didn’t miss the way the corners of her eyes crinkled with pride. “It’s all just stuff I learned on the job,” she continued, reaching across to tug the papers onto her lap. “After pulling so many all-nighters codebreaking with Dip, you kinda pick up a few things.”
After putting the code through a few online decoders yielded nothing (“Worth a shot”, Mabel shrugged) they took to task breaking it by hand. Norman’s tea had long since cooled and the hour crawled late into the night before they made their first breakthrough, Norman suddenly bolting upright and grabbing his pen in a moment of frenetic energy.
“ Everything ! The word here is everything!”
After that, it all came together quickly, and the two of them stared in silence at the completed message:
GO TO THE PLACE WHERE EVERYTHING STARTED
The moment stretched out between them. When Mabel finally looked up, her face was set in determination.
“Gravity Falls,” she said. “It’s gotta be.”
Norman slept poorly that night.
Part of it was Mabel’s couch - it was old and worn, and he had to tuck his limbs in awkwardly to fit, sleeping bag draped over him in an effort to ward off the draught. But more than that, there was a buzzing undercurrent of excitement - the sense of impending adventure that took him back to that first summer, all those years ago…
He woke to the chatter of birds and the rumble of traffic outside. The time on his phone read 6:24, and it took him a moment to groggily do the maths - they’d worked late last night, and he’d only managed to get a handful of hours.
Despite that, he couldn’t get back to sleep. Rolling off the couch with a groan, he stretched with a satisfying click, and went in search of a cup of coffee.
The morning light cast the kitchen in shades of pale grey as he blearily filled the kettle and set it on the boil. He opted to reuse his mug from last night, watching the dregs swirl away down the drain in a half-asleep daze. It was only when Mabel cleared her throat from behind him that he realised he had company.
They sat side-by-side on the sofa, nursing their cups of coffee as Norman plugged an address into his phone.
“It’s about two and a half hours from here to Gravity Falls,” he said, scrolling the route on his phone. “Probably less if the traffic’s not too bad, it depends.”
Mabel had pulled the sleeves of her dressing gown over her hands, and was staring at the surface of her cup. “I’ll need to pack a couple things. Did you bring a change of clothes?”
“I brought a suitcase down with me,” Norman said slowly. “Enough for a week or so.”
“Good.” She took a slow drink, and glanced over at him. “Knowing Dipper, it could take a couple of days to hunt him down.”
Breakfast was a rushed affair; Norman rinsed out their bowls as Mabel threw some clothes into a sports bag, and they were on the road by the time the sun had started to peek above the horizon. They stopped for gas at a roadside station on the outskirts of the city, and as Norman filled the car up Mabel was fiddling with her phone. She hung up the call as Norman swung back into the driver’s seat.
“I’ve got the next couple days off my shift,” she said as they pulled off. “I said it was a family emergency.”
Out of the corner of his eye Norman saw her face twist in discomfort at the lie. “It’s half true,” he consoled, and Mabel gave a hollow laugh.
“Yeah.”
The freeway wound its way past Mount Hood, turning steadily south as the pines fled past. There had been snow recently, and the forests on either side of the highway were crested with white, stark against the bright winter blue of the sky. Norman spotted an eagle, wheeling in lazy circles on the updraft from the roads, climbing higher and higher until it was a black speck swallowed in the endless blue.
The tinny car stereo was tuned into a station playing 90s pop, and Norman let it drone into the background as they sped onwards. It had been a while since he’d been in the state, and he eagerly drank in the view. Had it always been so beautiful here?
The three lanes became two, and then one, and it wasn’t until the sign for Gravity Falls: 12 miles shot past that Norman finally spoke up.
“What’d’you think it means? The message,” he asked, the car wallowing as they crested a pothole. Mabel stifled a yawn, sitting up straight in her seat. Her face was red where it had been propped up on her palm, and she looked like she’d dozed off at some point during the journey.
“I’m not totally sure,” she said, rubbing her eyes absentmindedly. “ The place where everything started … did he mean the shack?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Norman nodded, slowing the car as they rounded a sharp bend. “It’d seem like the obvious place to hide… whatever it is we’re looking for.”
Mabel hummed her assent, gaze travelling back to the window. “I’m not sure. What does he mean by everything started ?”
“I was hoping you’d know the answer to that.” A shape caught Norman’s eye at the side of the road - a spectral deer, staring wide-eyed at the car before scrambling away on bent-backwards legs. “Maybe once we get there, the fresh air will help to clear our heads.”
“Tell me about it,” Mabel groaned, biting back another yawn. “I feel like I barely slept last night.”
They broke out of the treeline, and Norman felt something warm swell in his chest as they were greeted with their first glimpse of the falls. The town was spread out before them, cupped in the valley and still shrouded in a thin veil of morning mist. In the distance, the old railway track split the skyline, the cliffs either side looming blue-grey in the faint light. Mabel eagerly craned her neck, watching it spin past as they turned onto a side road down to the shack, and keeping her eyes trained on the sight until it was once more swallowed up by the pines.
“ Soos! ”
Norman had barely engaged the handbreak before Mabel launched herself out the passenger door. Soos was speaking to a crowd of tourists in front of the shack, but at Mabel’s exclamation he broke off his speech and turned, his face splitting into a wide grin.
“Dudes!” He caught Mabel’s tackle with a laugh, wrapping his broad arms around her. The fez on his head wobbled dangerously, and Mabel wiggled free to catch it. Norman couldn’t hear what they were chatting about, but as he locked the car and came over Soos gave him a hearty wave.
“Norman! How’s those ghosts holding up?”
“You know,” Norman said with a shrug, “still dead.”
Soos invited them into the living room of the shack while he finished showing the group of tourists around. Norman took a few moments to take the room in as Mabel sank into the TV chair with a contented sigh. Soos’ influence definitely showed; the old stone walls had been plastered over, painted in an antique white that set off the deep burgundy of the new carpeting. The axolotl tank was still here, he noted with a smile, set above the small chest of drawers. Its inhabitant met his gaze with a belligerent, black-eyed stare.
There was a snuffling noise, and Mabel gave a delighted squeal, leaping to her feet as Waddles trotted into the room.
“Waddles!” she cooed, laughing as the pig tackled her ankles, grunting happily. “Look at you, fatty face! C’mere, you.”
She scooped him up, with some difficulty (“Sheesh, what has Soos been feeding you?”), and collapsed back down onto the chair with Waddles across her lap. “What do you wanna watch, mister? Ooh, the infomercial channel! Good choice…”
Soos poked his head in twenty or so minutes later. Mabel sat up in the chair, plopping Waddles down onto the carpet; Norman slid off his perch on the arm, and the two of them moved to stand expectantly side by side as Soos stowed his fez. When he turned to them, his expression was serious.
“So what’s the sitch?” he asked, nodding towards the table at the far end of the room. Mabel had spread out their papers from last night’s codebreaking over its surface, and as they moved over she scooped up the one with the message on it, holding it up.
“Dipper’s gone off the grid,” she said. “Norm and I tried to contact him holding the old phone he gave me, but instead we got this weird coded message. When we decoded it, this is what it said.”
Soos took the page, mouth twisting as he read it over. “Huh. You’d think he could just leave an answerphone message, or something.”
“Any idea what it means?” Norman asked. “We assumed it had to do with something here in Gravity Falls, but we don’t know where.”
Soos tugged his whiskers in thought. “Maybe somewhere here in the Shack? If I was gonna hide a spooky message, it’d probably be here.”
Mabel nodded. “Has Dipper visited recently? We think he only set this up in the last few months - did he swing by at all?”
“Oh, sure! It was, uhh, maybe a month or two ago?” Soos paused to count weeks on his fingers, then shrugged. “Anyway, yeah, he’s been by. The dude seemed pretty frazzled, though. I kinda chalked it up to him being on the tail of another mystery, heheh.”
“How long did he stay for?”
“Eh, not long. He spent the night here, but when I went to open the Shack the next morning, boom, he was gone. Not even so much as a goodbye for his ol’ pal Soos.”
Norman frowned.
“Did he say or do anything that seemed… odd to you? Anything that could give us a clue?”
“He wasn’t, uh, talkative - but again, I just chalked that up to how he is,” Soos replied with a shrug. “Oh, I saw him go down to Ford’s lab, though. Could be there’s something down there?”
“Then that’s where we’ll start,” Mabel said, rising from her chair. “Thanks, Soos.”
“Hey, no prob!” Soos flashed her a thumbs up. “I’ve got a couple more tours of the Shack today, but lemme know if there’s anything else I can help you twos with.”
Mabel and Norman made their way to the gift shop, and waited until the coast was clear before entering the code on the vending machine - Mabel gave a soft sigh of relief as it swung open - and making their way down.
“I think I’ve only ever seen the lab once,” Norman admitted, as the elevator descended with a worrying rumble.
“Me too,” Mabel said. “Twice, maybe. I know Dipper used to come down here a lot, but…”
She shivered, hugging her elbows. “It’s claustrophobic. I hate it down here.”
There was a ding , and the elevator doors slid open. Norman had to duck as they exited the lift. He gave Mabel a solemn look.
“Hopefully we’ll find what we’re looking for soon.”
“Yeah,” Mabel replied. “Hopefully.”
They stepped out into the small pool of light from the bulb above the elevator doors. Mabel took a few hesitant steps forward, fumbling uncertainly along the wall until her fingertips met the light switch. There was a hum as the strip lighting overhead flickered to life, throwing the room into stark illumination. Blocky consoles and cabinets lined the walls, and through the glass on the far wall Norman could see the faint outline of a huge shape in the main chamber.
Mabel let out a shaky breath. “Let’s get all the lights on first,” she said, leading the way into the next room. “Then we can start looking around.”
There were no ceiling lights in here. Instead, Norman managed to find a spotlight, nearly falling over its cable in the gloom. There turned out to be four of them, set in each corner, and together they lit up the contraption in the center: a lumpy, egg-shaped machine over twice as tall as Norman was, mostly covered in a dusty black tarp. In the places it was uncovered Norman could see twisted pipework and worn pieces of plating, thick cables running over its surface like veins. Mabel was able to shed no light on the nature of the machine; she explained with a shrug that she’d never seen it without the tarp off. By the layers of dust, Norman assumed it had been untouched for quite some time.
The air in the lab was stale and heavy, and there was a lingering scent of smoke and ozone. Despite the dust, it seemed that several systems were still active, soft whirrings and blinking dashboard LEDs somehow reminding Norman of a slumbering beast stirring in its sleep. The lab wasn’t big, but there were a lot of nooks and crannies to inspect; Mabel and Norman uneasily agreed to split up to have a look around.
Their initial sweep of the area yielded nothing. At one point, Mabel gave a high-pitched shriek that brought Norman running - but it turned out to just be a dead rat, the metal floor around it a dark stain. Norman found himself starting to jump at shadows, freezing in alarm only to see the ‘figure’ that he’d seen was really just the flickering of the artificial lighting, a stack of paper swaying in a stagnant breeze. He could feel his unease building as they decided to try a more thorough search.
As Mabel started to rummage through file cabinets, Norman gazed around the room. The desk in here was fairly bare; Stan and Ford must have taken everything with them on their latest expedition, leaving only old coffee stains and a rectangular break in the layer of dust to show it had once been in use.
...except, wasn’t that weird? Norman knew that they hadn’t been back to the shack in the best part of a year, maybe longer. He paused, running his fingers over the clean patch.
“It’s pretty dusty down here, huh?” he called. From behind him he heard Mabel drop a stack of files with a groan.
“Eugh, tell me about it, man.”
“So… isn’t it weird that there’s this one space here that isn’t? Look,” Norman said, drumming his fingers across the desk.
Mabel’s eyes widened. She hopped a stack of files and came over, running her finger across the clean patch of the desk with a frown.
“...hmm. Norman,” she said, inspecting her spotless fingertip, “I think you might just be on to something.”
“There was something here,” Norman continued, excitement building, “something that Stan and Ford left behind - otherwise, there’d be dust where it had been as well.”
“But it was moved recently ,” Mabel continued, “by someone who knew about the lab and came down here looking for it.”
Norman nodded. “We know what Dipper was looking for down here!”
The mood sobered as Mabel looked between Norman and the patch on the desk, smile deflating.
“...except we don’t, because whatever it was, he took it with him.”
“Yeah,” Norman sighed. “At least we know what he came down here for, though.”
Mabel tugged her hands in her sleeves. “Maybe we should have a look around the rest of the Shack, then. This place is giving me the creeps.”
He wasn’t sure if it was the dust, the chill, or the uncomfortable prickling sensation in the back of his neck that he hadn’t been able to shake since they got down here - but Norman was all too keen to agree.
They spent the rest of the day turning the Shack upside-down.
(Metaphorically, of course - Soos had put a lot of work into sprucing the place up, and it held too many sentimental memories to wreck outright - but Mabel was a whirlwind of destructive energies when she wanted to be.)
The axolotl in the tank watched as they picked over the living room, upturning chairs and lifting carpets. Mabel ran her hands along both walls of the Shack’s winding corridors, searching for some hidden cubby or compartment. They poked their heads into rooms Norman didn’t even know existed, combed through every closet and cupboard they could find.
When it hit closing time they gave the museum and gift shop a once-over. Mabel rapped the wooden floorboards with her knuckles as Norman checked behind the stuffed jackalope, and they had to get a stepladder to investigate a suspicious area of the ceiling that turned out to just be the stains from the boiler on the floor above.
Soos poked his head in to suggest they order pizza, making Norman do a double take at the time (it was that late already?!). They ate in silence in the kitchen, listening to the rattle of hail on the roof outside. Mabel leapt to her feet as soon as she was finished, doing her best to drum up enthusiasm for another sweep of the house, but as the clock ticked steadily towards midnight even she was forced to give up.
Nothing. There was nothing here.
As they were making their way upstairs to the twins’ old bedroom, Mabel turned back, giving Norman a wan smile.
“Hey,” she said, “I know today was kind of a bust, but you don’t always get it on the first try, right? We’ll sleep on it and have a proper think on the clue he left tomorrow.”
Norman bit his lip. There were so many things he wanted to say - what if there was nothing to find? What if this whole thing was a bust? What if there were no clues, this was just a plant to distract attention - worse, something had happened to Dipper, or someone had already been through and taken whatever they were looking for, or…
Instead, he just nodded. “Yeah,” he replied. “Thanks.”
He balked at how insincere it sounded, but Mabel’s smile brightened a little nonetheless.
They made the beds with spare sheets Mabel dug out of a cupboard, and when the lights went out Norman pulled the covers up over his head, curling up in the small space. The sound of wind and hail outside was muffled, and the covers blocked out all light, leaving Norman with only the sounds of his own breathing, hot and humid in the pocket of air around him.
The day’s events had been gnawing at him, and now the low buzzing in his skull felt like it was going to erupt. He knew it was irrational - that Dipper was probably fine, he was worrying over nothing - but he couldn’t help himself.
He tucked his arms into his chest, suddenly reminded of how empty the bed felt with only him in it.
That night, Norman dreamt of storms.
He was floating, looking down (or was it up?) on a great tumultuous vortex of clouds. Lightning sped across its surface, and it made his teeth tingle and his hands ache with a familiarity he couldn’t quite place. The air felt thick, heavy, almost like he could taste it, like sulfur. He was damp, he realised. Had it been raining?
The storm began to boil and rush, and he was tumbling in a wild freefall. A cloud bank rushed towards him, painted unearthly green in the setting sun, and the world became muted around him as he plunged into its depths.
Then there were stars winking into life around him, blazing in the twilight of the storm, their constellation cascading down into the heart of the maelstrom. Past, present and future were three, and a cross made five, and then nine; the thunder crashed like galloping hooves, and Norman swore, through the chaos, he heard someone calling out to him.
He awoke in the middle of the night with a start. The dream was already fading, and even as he tried to recall it the thunder dulled, and he was left with only a vague sense of unease. He rolled back over, shaking his head to clear it, and slept soundly through the rest of the night.