Chapter Text
As the train slows, Dipper puts away his book and starts to stand. Outside, the small, city-worn trees are showing their first streaks of red and gold. They make him think of the leaves beginning to carpet the lawn, the raking that this trip is partially an excuse to get out of, and of the trees back in Gravity Falls. He wonders if autumn is in full swing there, with thick clots of burnt gold forming and reforming in response to every attempt to rake the leaves away. Perhaps the people there are all wearing thick sweaters and eating pumpkiny baked goods. Or maybe it’s already too cold to stay outside unprotected, and everyone vanishes inside when evening comes to escape the skeletal gray trees looming over them. Maybe Soos has started adding scarves or sweaters or earmuffs to the Mystery Shack’s merchandise. Wendy’s probably chopping firewood to stock up before the first snow falls.
The doors slide open and Dipper steps out. What few trees there are flank the platform left and right, arranged at orderly intervals like servants standing at attention. Instead of wood and moss and rain, Dipper just smells metal and exhaust.
California isn’t quite the same place it was in the spring. Before last summer, the Bay Area had been the only truly real place in the world to Dipper. Everything outside had been a blur, places where, presumably, people lived and things happened, but not with the same solidity as in Piedmont. Now, it’s as if the world has been turned inside-out. The anchor of the world is a nothing town in central Oregon, and Piedmont is a place populated by shadows, where nothing real happens. When they’d arrived back at their little suburban house, he’d felt as if the moment he stepped across the threshold he would fall off the edge of reality and jerk awake in the attic of the Mystery Shack.
But he hadn’t. The next morning, he’d awoken on a bed that was not quite real, in a room that was as insubstantial as smoke. The house smelled of fresh laundry and Windex, not mildewing wood and dust that’s drifted in the air for decades. The trees and hedges were carefully arranged beside and around the streets and driveways, never permitted to disturb the order of suburbia. Even now, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t look at the things in Piedmont and the towns sprawling away from it without being reminded of their true counterparts in Gravity Falls.
When he arrives at his destination, he finds a brick building a few stories tall. It looks old, or at least as old as things get in San Francisco. Its walls have faded to a pale brown, and in many places they’ve worn through to bare mortar. A few patches have been replaced with fresh bricks of rust-red. A sign juts out from above the door that reads “Midway Used & Rare Books.” A few narrow windows grudgingly disclose views of cramped, labyrinthine bookshelves.
They don’t have bookstores like this in Gravity Falls, Dipper tells himself. There’s just a library with two rooms. And that shelf in the Mystery Shack with photocopied pamphlets about Area 51 and the cloud people.
And of course, it’s true. Gravity Falls doesn’t even have a Barns and Nobility, much less a place to delve for books about ancient mysteries and long-lost secrets. But it doesn’t need them, it has real ancient mysteries and long-lost secrets. Unicorns and gnomes live in its woods, relics of government conspiracies lie buried beneath it— hell, the entire town is built on a crashed UFO! Gravity Falls is a place for writing new books, about secrets no one else knows. In Gravity Falls, you don’t need books written by people who’ve never seen anything truly strange in their lives.
Even so, the smell that greets him when he opens the door and steps through is enough to lift his spirits a bit. The air is thick with leather and old paper and dust, and below those are undercurrents of mildew and gently rotting wood. It reassures him that, even if there’s nothing new under the sun, perhaps there is something old in the places hidden from it. He’s been to every bookstore in Piedmont (well, both of them) and in Oakland, and this is the first place he’s been that feels even a little bit as real as the Falls.
The front desk attendant doesn’t take much notice of him as he enters, and while there are some people scurrying between the constricting bookshelves, there are few enough for him to be alone with his melancholy. So he wanders, through tight passages and up and down staircases, beneath sagging roof beams and over worn plastic flooring, between stories true and false and neither. As he explores, Dipper scans the assembled spines, plucking from the shelves a collection of local urban legends, what a UFO abductee claimed was a list of the aliens’ demands for humanity (apparently they required total nuclear disarmament and the end of all cheese production), a book about the survival of Egyptian cults into the Middle Ages, and a romance novel set in the time of the Vikings (for Mabel, of course. Just for Mabel. Who else would it be for?).
Eventually, he decides his hoard is large enough for now, and he finds a stretch of hallway that looks little-trafficked enough for him to simply sit down on the floor. But just as he opens The Space Brothers are Here (and They’re Lactose Intolerant), he hears hushed speech from the next room over.
He doesn’t know why it catches his attention. Bookstores are supposed to be quiet, just like libraries, and it makes sense that normal conversations would be whispered. It isn’t even a little bit suspicious.
But even so. Something about it makes him close the book as quietly as he can and lean his head a little closer to the doorframe.
“… useless,” he hears. “Crowley was a hack. Blavatsky was a hack. Everyone after Lévi was a hack. I don’t know why you brought me here, unless it was to torture me with the works of frauds.”
“I brought you here to show you that Brother Marwood wasn’t so quick to judge less inspired thinkers. Even in a hoarder’s house, there may still be gems to—”
“Oh, spare me your aphorisms. Michael was a senile old man. All the progress we’ve made has been in spite of his contributions, not because of them. Do you really think, if this group was still trawling through all this dreck about Atlantis and Lemuria, we would have found the places we’ve found? I certainly don’t want to be stuck in this world forever.”
Now Dipper’s leaning so far over he’s afraid he might fall, but he doesn’t dare put a hand down in case a squeaky floorboard is lying in wait to give him away. The Space Brothers book balances precariously on his knee, forgotten. His mind races to try to make sense of the conversation on the other side of the doorway. Atlantis is obvious, of course. All the other names are… well, he doesn’t recognize any of them immediately. Some of them evoke a distant echo of familiarity. All of them are redolent of hidden and forgotten lore, of knowledge and history that the world scoffs at. Of something, at last, that’s real.
“A little discretion please, Sister Farren?” The first speaker sounds clearly annoyed, like this is something he’s used to saying. “In spite of its desolation as of late, this is still technically a public place, and one never knows who might be listeni—”
As if on cue, the thick book on Dipper’s knee finally loses balance, and tumbles to the floor with a clamorous THUNK. The man cuts himself off, and Dipper freezes in place.
Uh-oh.
As footsteps approach from the next room, he grabs the book off the floor, opens it to a random page, and shoves it into his lap. A heartbeat later, he yanks his earbuds from his pocket and shoves one in. The two speakers come to a stop beside him, and after what feels like a normal amount of time, he looks up and pretends to notice them.
“Oh, hi,” he squeaks out. His voice cracks in the middle of the sentence, and he suddenly realizes that he hadn’t untangled his earbuds. There’s just a spaghettified mass dangling from his left ear. “Can I help you guys find something?”
Wait, I don’t work here, Dipper thinks to himself. Why would I offer to help them like that? Did that sound suspicious?
The woman looks down at him with an expression of forcefully composed neutrality. She’s tall and thin, with brown hair coming down to her ears. She certainly looks older than Dipper, although he’s not quite sure if she’s Wendy-older or real-adult-older. Both ages look a lot the same to him. But the man, standing a little behind her, is much older. The wrinkles lining his face seem fragile enough to tear if you pulled on them too hard. He’s wearing a kindly smile, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Neither of them say anything. Dipper stares back at them, his expression, he hopes, one of mild surprise, as if he’s any other patron of this normal bookstore interrupted while he was deciding what to buy.
Oh God, am I too sweaty? They’re going to notice that I’m sweaty. They know I was listening in and they’re going to—
“That’s very kind of you, little… boy,” the man says. “But no thank you. I think we’ve learned everything we came here for.”
He looks back at the woman (girl?) and the corners of his lips drop ever so slightly. Somehow, this minuscule shift turns his feigned smile into an expression of iron-hard reproach, one that’s uncomfortable for Dipper to see even when it isn't directed at him. Even with his gaze coming from behind her, the woman seems to cringe away from it, and when he puts an arm around her shoulders she lets him pull her down the hallway without resistance.
Their steps fade quickly. A chill comes over Dipper, like a window has just opened behind him onto a winter night. For no reason he can name, the feeling makes him think of wet cement, and of a vast space yawning open.
He turns. Nothing but bookshelves.
What, did I think there was gonna be a portal to a parking garage on that wall?
He hadn’t, of course. But a part of him had expected, hoped even, that the sensation had been a symptom of something mysterious, malicious, and vast lurking just out of his reach.
By the time he gathers his thoughts enough to get up to look down the hallway, the two speakers seem to have disappeared. He turns to the bookshelf they were standing in front of. Most of the floor-to-ceiling shelves have books standing in neat lines, even if they aren't organized according to any cataloging system comprehensible to mortals. But there’s one stretch where they've been hastily pulled out and piled back on. He pulls one down, a green volume with nothing printed on the spine or covers, and opens it to the first page.
On the inside cover is an ex libris stamp reading “From the library of Michael Marwood.”
Skimming the rest of the shelf, he finds a few more texts with the same stamp. He adds them to his pile, and lingers a little longer in the hopes of stumbling back onto that feeling of cold immensity, but whatever magic conjured it seems to have dissipated. So he navigates back to the front desk (looking over his shoulder every so often), makes his purchases, and steps out into the warm October air.
The urban landscape that greets him still possesses all the solidity of a shadow. But now, it at least feels like reality might be out there somewhere in the city, if only he can find it.
He fishes out his phone and texts Mabel.
Do you have any plans for tonight?
Her reply comes quickly.
just evening tea with waddles and lord elephantington 🐷🐘
why? what’s up?
Tea will have to wait. I’ve found something.