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One morning in the winter of 1982, the Gravity Falls Gossiper led with the headline, LOCAL HOME BURNS TO THE GROUND. It was a slow news day otherwise.
The current cause of the fire is unknown, the paper said, but it was a blaze powerful enough to burn the house to ashes. Almost nothing of the structure remains. Fire Chief George Pitch says it’s a “near miracle” that the fire did not spread to the surrounding woods, though he also says that the heavy snow contributed to blocking off the fire. The owner of the home, Doctor Stanford Pines, has not been located and is presumed missing until further investigation proves otherwise. If anyone knows more information on him and his whereabouts, please contact local authorities.
Gravity Falls gossiped madly about this for a good long while afterwards. Stanford Pines had already attracted plenty of attention as the town recluse, his home and its strange noises and lights a source of worried whispers for the adults and giggling dares to go up to it for the children. They speculated about how the fire started, if it was a matter of science or black magic. They wondered what would be done with the property.
They didn’t mourn Stanford Pines. None of them had really known him. The only one who ever had ensured he’d already long forgotten that fact.
Soon enough, the gossip faded. It was simply another old tragedy, like Ma and Pa Duskerton passing away in their own store or, much later, like poor Dan Corduroy's wife.
(What went unreported in the paper was that the basements, plural, below the structure of the house were trashed to pieces as though bombed and filled up completely with concrete.
What went unreported was that an old, old mural hidden deep in the local caves had been desecrated with a powerful acid.
What went unreported was that the source of the fire was a pile of torn papers from three hand-bound journals being burned in the living room, and that after the house had gone to ash, a man drove away into the night.
What went unreported was that the man was laughing, laughing like he had finally gotten one over someone, as he drove away.)
Stan generally tried not to open his mail too often.
That was pretty easy, because he didn’t really get that much mail. He didn’t have a house or a permanent mailbox to send them to in the first place. The only ones who would think to mail him something were Ma, who just accepted his calls when they came, and maybe Shermie, who didn’t know jackshit about Stan’s whereabouts and terrible circumstances if Stan could help it.
Pa wouldn’t send a letter. Neither would Stanford. Neither of them had anything to say to him at this point.
So, needless to say, Stan was pretty damn shocked when the bored receptionist at his latest motel flagged him down while he left to sell his latest terrible product. She barely looked up from her game of solitaire on the desk as she spoke.
“Mail came in for you,” she said, flipping over a king of spades. “Postcard. You want it?”
Ah, fuck, Stan thought.
“Sure,” he said aloud, trying to think of which of his old buddies had found him this time.
He hoped it wasn’t Rico. Rico was a real vicious bastard when he wanted to be, which was most of the time. That came with being a hardened criminal, he guessed. Not that Stan himself was that good at it even after this many years of the game. A postcard wasn’t the man’s style, but there was still a chance.
The receptionist switched her cigarette to the other side of her mouth as she rummaged into the desk and produced the postcard, tossing it onto the desk carelessly. Gravity Falls, Oregon, it said. That was the first thing to throw Stan—he didn’t know any criminals in Oregon. He’d never been there. Still, the name was familiar…
The second thing to throw Stan came after he picked up the postcard and flipped it over. Laying there next to the address box was handwriting that Stan couldn’t forget even if he wanted to, shaky as the letters were. The card was from Stanford.
“PLEASE, I NEED SOMEWHERE TO GO,” the scrawled words read. Then, smaller and tucked beneath as though Ford had added it later, it said, “Call me here: XXX-XXX-XXXX.”
The phone number was in their old secret language, crafted back when they were idiot kids who thought that the only one they ever needed were each other. Stan hadn’t thought about it in years. He shouldn’t remember a lick of it.
He absolutely did.
Without another word to the receptionist, Stan whirled around and marched right back to his shitty motel room. Well—not too shitty. It had a phone. As soon as he was in the room and the door was locked again, he went to that phone and deciphered the coded phone number.
Every ring of the phone felt more ominous than the last. Finally, just as Stan thought the call would be ignored for one reason or another—what time was it wherever Ford was, anyway?— the other side of the line picked up.
“Who is this?” Ford demanded.
His voice was rougher than Stan remembered from the last time he called and failed to talk, raspier, like maybe he was sick. But it was undeniably Ford’s.
For a second Stan wanted to hang up like all of the other times he had called. He looked at the shaky letters on the postcard and reminded himself that Ford had asked him to call, that this wasn’t Stan failing at keeping his distance yet again. Ford wanted this.
“It’s me, poindexter,” he said.
That was probably a vastly inadequate thing to say to your brother for the first time in a decade, but hey, Stan only ever claimed to be more than inadequate when he was scamming someone.
The change was immediate. Ford’s voice brightened impossibly. “Stanley! I was hoping—I wasn’t sure—” he seemed to struggle for a moment to figure out what to say. “I’m glad. I’m so glad you called. There are so many things—things you wouldn’t believe—that I need to tell you about. I had to get out. I need somewhere to go, Stanley, and I was hoping—”
There was another silence. Stan found himself unnerved by the way Ford was talking. It was altogether too fast, too stumbling and scattered, like some guys he’d known who’d get wired as hell to get through the day.
“Uh, Ford…” he said. “I know you had a different phone number before. What happened to it?”
He winced as he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to know Ford’s phone number on account of the ten years they’d gone without talking. Ford didn’t seem to notice the oddity, which was alarming in its own way.
“Oh, that phone burned with the rest of the house,” Ford said airily.
“Wait, what? Your house burned down? How? Where the hell are you, Ford?” he demanded.
Ford answered the questions in order. “Yes, I burned it down myself, and currently I’m in a hotel.”
“I—you burned your house down?” Stan said, more alarmed by the second. “What the fuck? Are you crazy?”
“I’m the most sane I’ve ever been in years, Stanley,” Ford assured him, his voice bright and giddy in a way that wasn’t assuring or particularly sane at all. “I had to do it. It was the only way, I’d have taken a different path if I thought it would work—I had a plan where you…well, it doesn’t matter. There are a number of factors I cannot explain right now. Can I come see you?”
“You need to come and see me? I can’t come to you?”
Ford laughed sharply. “No, no, no. It’s best I get as far away from Gravity Falls as possible. I’d rather come to you.”
He had officially lost the plot on what was going on. It almost sounded like Ford was in some sort of trouble with a gang, or maybe the mob. But what gang operated in Nowheresville, Oregon and went around menacing scientists?
“I’m not exactly livin’ the high life over here,” Stan warned.
“Anything will be better than Gravity Falls,” Ford repeated firmly. “And what I have to say must be done in person. It won’t make sense otherwise. Just…please, Stanley?”
Stan squeezed his eyes shut. There was a part of him still stuck on that night ten years ago, a part that wanted to slam the phone back onto the receiver and let Ford get a taste of what it had felt like to have his own twin turn away from him when he was desperate. It’d be fair. It’d be exactly what Ford had coming for him.
And yet… “Fuck. Sure, Ford. You can come down here and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Thank you,” Ford breathed.
The relief in his voice was enough for Stan to decide that whatever happened, letting Ford come by was the right choice. Ford may not have cared that he and Stan were brothers, but Stan cared. Stan couldn’t make himself stop caring.
There was quite a bit of noise on the other end of the line, the shuffling sounds of paper and the scratching of a pen. It was almost nostalgic.
“Alright,” Ford said. “Alright. You must still be in Albuquerque if you got the postcard. I could get there in one day if I really tried, but I’d rather just let it be two days. I’ve gone without sleep too much as it is, lately. So. Two days. Will that be alright?”
“My schedule’s wide fuckin’ open, man,” Stan said. It was mostly true.
“Good. Good, good, good. Thank you, Stan, I’ll be there in two days.”
Ford hung up.
Stan stared down at the phone. All at once he was seized with the hysterical thought of what the hell am I doing? He thought about calling back and saying that no, Ford couldn’t come to see him here, they’d just meet in the middle or something. Whatever Ford had going on in Oregon couldn’t be worse than the clusterfuck that was Stan’s life. Ford may think he needed Stan, but he didn’t, really. No one needed Stanley Pines.
Except… maybe he did. Because the way Ford was talking was unfortunately familiar.
He put the phone back down on the receiver. Well. It wasn’t something he could deal with until two days from now. Until then, he could just try and tie up his current scam so he could handle whatever the hell Ford needed to talk about once he got there. Probably the mob, from the looks of it.
Moses, what was Stan’s life?
Ford arrived in a whirlwind of chaos.
That’s what it felt like, anyway. What he really arrived in was a sensible four-door sedan with several bags of luggage in the back. Stan happened to see it roll into the parking lot of the motel from the window just as he was packing away the shitty products he couldn’t sell to trash them somewhere. It was easier than wasting the time to hawk them.
As Stan stood there gawking at his first look at his brother in ten years, Ford hopped out of the car. He looked… unwell. There were huge bags under his eyes like he hadn’t gotten a full night of sleep in ages, his skin was sallow for probably the same reason, and there were bandages peeking out of the sleeves of his ragged trenchcoat and covering his hands up to the knuckles. There was an old yet obvious bruise at one corner of his jaw.
His hair was longer than Stan remembered, but at least it wasn’t a mullet yet. Both of them having mullets at the same time would’ve been a sign that everything was beyond repair.
If the motel were slightly less seedy, Ford probably wouldn’t have been allowed in—or would’ve been questioned a little bit, if nothing else. As it was, it took him maybe a minute to start knocking furiously on Stan’s door, so clearly the receptionist hadn’t found him alarming enough to refrain from telling Ford which room a “Stanley Pines” was in.
Not that Stan was going by Stanley Pines right now. That would've been stupid of him. Ford probably just pointed at his own face and asked which room had the other guy wearing it.
Stan let him in before he knocked the door down.
“Stan!” Ford said, again with that weirdly giddy energy.
He grinned at Stan, honestly and truly grinned, and for a second his arms raised up like he was maybe going to hug him. But then he didn’t, instead re-adjusting the backpack slung across one of his shoulders. He was also carrying a battered briefcase. His hands shook around its handle.
“Uh, good to see you too, Sixer,” Stan said lamely. “Come in?”
Ford’s face twitched oddly at the old nickname, but he came in anyway, turning around and making sure the door was locked before Stan could. Another thing for the ‘oh shit, Ford got in trouble with someone’ pile. Then he stuck a sticky note with a weird drawing on it to the door, and crossed the room to bring the blinds down and then close the drapes over them.
“Right—so—okay,” Ford jittered. He whirled around. “He shouldn’t be able to follow me here, he’s stuck in Gravity Falls, I think, otherwise he would’ve just found someone else to do it—but better safe than sorry; Gravity Falls is an epicenter of weird, but there are exceptions everywhere…”
Stan was quickly growing tired of this. “Ford, what the fuck is happening? Who’s ‘him’?”
Ford’s expression dropped. “That’s the hard part to explain.”
“Try,” he said flatly.
He sat down heavily onto the chair next to the desk in the room, glaring at Ford to make it clear he wasn’t moving until he had some answers. The chair was pretty damn uncomfortable, but getting up again and sitting on the bed instead would undermine the gesture, so Stan stayed where he was.
“I will, I just need—” Ford threw his briefcase onto the small bed, slinging his backpack off of his shoulder to search it for something. He pulled out a hokey looking book with a gold foil six-fingered hand on it—had he made that himself?—a pill bottle, and a candle for some reason.
Continuing on, he said, “I’m about to do something very odd, but it’s the simplest way to make sure you don’t think I’m out of my mind. I’ll knock myself out, and you’ll read an inscription in my journal.”
“What, right now?” Stan said.
“Yes.” Ford shook the bottle. “That’s what these are for. Do you have any water? I can dry-swallow them if not.”
Stan stood up from the chair, marched forward, and snatched the bottle away. Ford surged towards him at once, trying to take them back, but while he was stronger than Stan remembered, he seemed to be holding himself back from actually hurting him.
“I’m not letting you take fuckin’ mystery pills right in front of me!”
Stan didn’t think Ford would do something as fucked-up as like… poisoning himself in front of his own brother over that stupid mistake with the school fair, but it had been ten years, and Ford seemed kind of unstable at the moment. He’d admitted to straight-up burning his house down like it was a normal thing to do. So who knew.
Ford’s expression dropped further. “I know you have little reason to trust me right now, even without knowing what’s happened, but I promise it’ll all make sense soon enough.”
“No,” Stan said again, attempting to regain control.
“Please.”
“No!”
Ford frowned. “I can do this by falling asleep naturally, but that will take time.”
That did not explain any of the situation.
“Stop it with this whole putting yourself to sleep thing,” Stan said, almost wincing at his phrasing. It sounded like Ford was a dog being put down. “Just use your damn words, Stanford. ”
With that said, he backed up, sat back down, and pointedly placed the pills on the desk where Ford would have to move Stan to get to them.
“Fine!” Ford dropped his backpack on the floor too, dumping his weird little collection of items on the bed. He sat down next to them, thoughtlessly reaching up to tug at his hair in frustration. Stan hadn’t seen that little tick in a long time.
Ford took a deep breath. “Let’s start…right after college. I went to Backupsmore. I don’t know if you knew that or not. Ma still keeps in contact with you, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” Stan said.
“Anyway. After I got my degree and went through the graduate program, I put my focus into studying anomalies around the world. Cryptids, spirits, folkloric creatures; whatever one wants to call them. And my research led me to Gravity Falls, a complete hotspot for them.”
A new smile widened on his face, excited and proud and nostalgic. “Gravity Falls was exactly what I was looking for. You wouldn’t believe everything I found there, Stanley. The strangest beings imaginable, an alien crash site—real, actual fairies! I was over the moon. But I couldn’t figure out the why. Why Gravity Falls? What drew them to this place? I thought that if I could crack that, it would lead to even more thorough study of anomalies.”
“Uh-huh,” Stan drew out.
Ford losing his marbles was becoming more and more likely. If he noticed that Stan didn’t quite believe him, he ignored it.
“While I was still pondering that question, I came across an old mural hidden in a cave system, including an inscription to summon an extra-dimensional being named Bill Cipher.”
“Wait, hold on,” Stan said, raising a hand up to punctuate the words. “Bill? You summoned an alien and his name is Bill? ”
“I would call him more of a demon than an alien,” Ford corrected, pedantic ass that he was. “He makes deals with unwitting beings and uses magic to enter their dreams, that’s rather demonic to me. But yes, his name is Bill. I don’t know if that was his original name, though. I never asked. It might be some sort of pseudonym.”
Stan rubbed at his eyes. “You know what? Whatever. His name is Bill. Sure.”
“Right… well, after I summoned him, he appeared in my dreams, telling me that he chose one great human mind a century to act as a muse and that if I made a deal with him, he’d help me with my questions about the oddity of Gravity Falls by inventing something that would revolutionize the world.”
“And you bought that,” Stan said incredulously. He’d heard that kind of line tons of times before, both said to him and said to others around him.
Hey, girl, you aren’t like anyone else. Come and drink with me. Hey, Stan, I only work with people who know their way around this town, and you’re the only one who can do it. Hey, Stan, you can charm the pants off of anybody, now go and sell these pugs for me.
Flattery at its simplest. Hell, it was a tactic both their parents used on customers, especially Ma. Ford should’ve known it like the back of his hand.
For a second Ford bristled at Stan’s tone, but then deflated.
He grimaced, shame-faced. “Hook, line, and sinker, I’m afraid. I didn’t even stop to ask why it was only once a century, or why me. I accepted a deal with him, and enlisted a college friend of mine to help build the machine Bill wanted me to make. It was—well, in simple terms, it was to be a portal that could open our world to other dimensions.”
Stan stared at him. “You’re shitting me.”
“I wish I was.” Ford leaned down and picked up his backpack again, pulling out an envelope.
It turned out there were a bunch of photos inside. He handed some of them off. Stan flipped through them with raised eyebrows. The pictures showed a huge, incredibly sci-fi looking contraption in the shape of an upside-down triangle with a hole in the middle. The other photos seemed to show other parts of it, like a control panel and bits of the wiring. Some weird glowing-red sigil too. What would that have to do with other dimensions?
Stan was no engineer, but it definitely looked weird enough to punch a hole in reality. Where the hell was this thing, anyway?
“Okay,” he said. “Say I believe you. What happened next? ‘Cause it looks like this thing was finished.”
Ford let out a breath. “Building it progressed…slowly. To Bill, anyway. In my estimation we were making fantastic time considering the complexity of its construction and the science behind it. But Bill wanted me to work harder and harder on it. I feared that if I didn’t measure up, he’d renounce our end of the deal. So when he came up with a solution, I agreed. I made a second deal that he could take control of my body and operate it in perpetuity so he could work on the portal while I slept.”
Stan nearly dropped the photos. “I— Ford! You sold your body to a demon?”
“I know!” Ford snapped, eyes wide. “I know! It was a terrible idea. But I was desperate. By that point I needed the portal to work, needed to prove myself, and from my perspective I had already let him into my mind, so what more was my body as well?”
As he spoke, Ford began to pick at the bandages wrapped around his fists, scratching at the first joints in his fingers. Stan noticed pink, fresh scaring peeking out of the white bandages.
“...but yes, it was a bad idea. He broke his half of the deal almost immediately, taking my body on joy-rides through the town rather than working on the portal. I should’ve known then, should’ve known he was playing me, but I was in so deep with his lies—nevermind that. Eventually he committed to the work, and the portal was ready for the test run.
Fi—my college friend and I had a dummy with a rope tied around it to send into the portal, to see if there were adverse effects on what went through it. We powered it on, and…I’m still not sure on exactly what occurred, but the portal’s vortex started pulling things into it after a certain distance. The rope caught around his arm, and my friend was dragged in as well, his head submerged into the other dimension.”
Ford already hadn’t been looking good during the recounting, but now he was chalk-white, his breathing labored as his fists clenched. It clearly took effort for him to keep talking.
“When I pulled him back out and killed the machine, he was… rattled. I couldn’t get him to tell me what he had seen, but it had a profound psychological effect. He demanded I get rid the portal, said that I was going to destroy everything if I didn’t stop right now. I—I hate to say it, but I refused to listen. He left, and I let him go.”
His lips pressed together. “I should’ve listened to him then and there. I didn’t. I tried to convince myself that he didn’t know what he was talking about, but soon enough I couldn’t ignore it. I confronted Bill about the exact use of the portal a few weeks later.
“Bill stopped pretending at that point. He told me that it was exactly as my friend had feared—that he intended to use the portal to finally enter our world without the use of a human puppet like myself, and that once he was there he was going to ‘free our tiny mortal minds from the shackles of sanity, order, and reality’, all but destroying our dimension in the process. And he would do it with ease, since I’d gone and given my body up to him.”
“But… uh, the world seems fine to me,” Stan said.
A wide, brittle smile broke out on Ford’s face. “Yes, well. There’s a limitation on Bill using my body. He could only do it while I slept. As long as I stayed awake, and slept little enough, he couldn’t work on the portal long enough to make it power on again after the test run. I sabotaged several of the parts to gain more time, and committed myself to finding another way to keep him out. It worked. Bill can’t get to me anymore.”
Then he reached up towards his head—Stan only now noticed the thin line of stitches curving around his right temple—and knocked on it with his fist. His head made a clanging sound.
“What the fuck,” Stan said with feeling. “How did you—?”
“One of the anomalous objects I found in Gravity Falls was an amulet that gives one telekinetic powers at the cost of blackening their heart. I used it to install a metal plate in my head.”
“Last time I checked, you’re not that kind of doctor,” Stan felt the need to point out.
There were a lot of other things to say to that, like, say: There’s an amulet that can do what? How did you find that thing? Did you at least numb your head? Where’d you get the rest of the medical equipment? But the ‘you’re not a medical doctor’ thing was a big one.
Ford shrugged. “It was my only option at the time. And really, telekinetic surgery is the most sterile kind there is. My likelihood of infection was probably lower than it would’ve been at an actual hospital!”
Stan was pretty sure that wasn’t how anything worked, but hell, he wasn’t a doctor either. Besides, he’d stitched himself up in the back of his car plenty of times, so being worried about Ford giving himself surgery was maybe hypocritical.
“Putting that aside,” Ford said. Stan really didn’t want to, but whatever. “Once I had blocked him out, I could rest and consider what to do next. I realized very shortly that I needed to get rid of everything to do with Bill and the portal. I destroyed the mural I found, and after dismantling the portal as best I could, I filled the basement it was in with cement. Then I burned the house down, starting with every piece of writing about him I had.”
“Wait, wait, wait—your doomsday portal was in your basement? How the fuck did no one notice you had that?” Stan looked back down at the photo of the portal. “It looks huge. Did you dig the basement yourself?”
“Oh, no. The people of Gravity Falls are extremely, deeply incurious,” Ford said. “It’s how they deal with being surrounded with so much strangeness, I think. I told the workers that the basements were standard for researchers and that it wasn’t worth talking about, and they accepted it.”
Stan rubbed at his eyes some more. Yeah, alright. That was one of the less weird things Ford had said so far. When he opened his eyes again, he found Ford just sort of… looking at him.
“You don’t believe me,” Ford said plainly. It wasn’t a question.
“Fuck no, I don’t. You’re talking about—about demons and sci-fi portals and magic necklaces, Sixer. That’s some crazy shit.”
Ford frowned. “Bill called me Sixer as well.”
“Well, fuck him,” Stan said immediately. “That’s my nickname for you. I came up with it first.”
A smile briefly flickered on his face. “It’s not a very unique name, Stanley. I’ve got six fingers. Anyone could come up with it.”
“Don’t care. I still called you that first, I get to keep doing it.” Then he hesitated. “Unless, uh…”
He didn’t manage to ask the question, but Ford understood him anyway, just like when they were kids. He shook his head.
“You’re right, though. It is your nickname for me. I don’t mind if you keep using it.”
Something about that felt very important in one of those inexplicable ways. A sort of olive branch, the presumption that Stan would be around Ford for enough time to keep calling him Sixer.
Stan had never been great at emotions, so his only response was, “Damn straight.”
“Back to the point,” Ford said. Irritably, he said, “Since you won’t let me just take the pills—”
“No one just goes and takes random mystery pills, Stanford.” Stan had been to enough parties to know that wasn’t true, but bet on Ford never being at enough parties to know as well.
Ford just ignored his interjection altogether. “Since you won’t let me take them, I’ll use a different spell to prove magic exists. And if magic exists, it can’t be too far to say that the rest of what I’ve said is true, can it? So I’m not crazy.”
That felt like it was definitely some kind of logical fallacy. Stan was a high school drop-out, though, so he couldn’t name how or what kind of fallacy it would’ve been.
“I guess?” he said instead. Mostly to see Ford pull off a magic trick.
“Let’s see…” Ford muttered, picking up the candle. “I should be able to do this from memory…”
Then he cleared his throat, and holding the thin candle in front of him, commanded: “Scintillare, scintillare, stellula, quam ego miror quid es. Splendet, splendet, in tenebris noctis.”
The candle lit itself in a burst of color. Stan let out an involuntary yelp, leaping from his chair again and wondering how quickly they could book it from the motel, because for a second that fire looked big enough to hit the ceiling and start burning shit.
But just as quickly, the fire shrank down to only a slightly large flame on a candle wick. It was glowing purple, though, which fire usually wasn’t.
Just as Stan was going to ask what kind of chemicals he used to pull the trick off, because it probably was just science Ford was passing off as magic for some reason, the lick of flame sort of… detached itself from the wick, floating in the air. It flickered and pulsed, swaying from side to side as it went vaguely towards Stan.
It had a little face, pale dots for eyes staring at him. It winked at him, and a small giggle emanated from the space the fire was in. He was pretty sure some basic chemicals couldn’t make fire do that.
He proceeded to experience his entire worldview flipping on its head and crumbling like wet sand in one go, because hot damn, his brother just cast a spell. And it worked. His brother was a fucking wizard now, apparently.
The experience felt like a rapidly approaching migraine.
“Holy shit. Hoooly shit,” Stan said. “So, all of it—?”
“I swear that everything I’ve told you is the truth, Stanley,” Ford said.
With a clap of his hands, the little wisp vanished.
“Fuck, alright,” Stan said, still reeling. “But why the hell did you come to me about this?”
“Who else was I going to go to? Shermie? Ma? Pa?”
Stan couldn’t even begin to imagine their father’s reaction if Ford came home rambling about the end of the world and demons in his brain. Nothing good would come if it, that was for sure.
“...okay, but why me? After the fair—”
He didn’t want to bring up the fair, didn’t want to reignite the hate that Ford surely must’ve been harboring over Stan ruining his chances all those years ago, but it was sitting there between them and the more time it took to be brought up the antsier Stan was getting. And that was on top of the antsiness of seeing Ford so wound up.
“I was furious,” Ford said bluntly. “I was furious with you for so long, sabotaging my project like that.” Stan wanted to object to the word ‘sabotage’, but this was clearly not the time. “I still am, I think. But how much can that matter when all I’ve managed to do with my smarts was nearly allow a demon to destroy our world? You didn’t know it at the time, but that was the right thing to do. Getting what I want doesn’t lead anywhere good, Stanley. I can’t imagine what I would’ve accidentally done after West Coast Tech, had I gotten in.”
Stan licked his lips, thoroughly unsure of how to respond to that. “Ford…”
“You would’ve seen right through him, Stan. I kept thinking to myself, ‘if I could’ve just sucked it up and gotten over that stupid project, he’d have been there to tell me Bill’s a sham.’ You were always better at that.”
“I—maybe?” Stan said. “Look, I’ve trusted guys I shouldn’t have too, man. That’s not your fault.”
“Oh, it is,” Ford said with unshakable certainty. “But I’ve dealt with it.”
“Yeah, uh, the metal plate and the arson and all that,” Stan agreed.
“It’s not arson if it’s my own house, is it?”
Stan shrugged. “I dunno. I never went in for that kind of crime.”
“But you have gone in for others,” Ford said.
His tone wasn’t particularly judging—and wasn’t that a damn miracle, Ford had never been shy about being judgy—but Stan still felt his hackles raise with his defenses. He didn’t need his successful twin brother knowing how deep Stan was in shit, his tangling with gangs, the drugs, any of it.
But Ford clearly knew. Maybe he could just smell it on Stan.
“Didn’t have many options, did I, poindexter?” he snapped, and was viciously pleased when Ford flinched a little. “How the hell do you know about that, anyway?”
“Stan, I’m not…” Ford visibly took a deep breath in, then let it out. “I don’t like that you’re living like this, but it’s more that you’re stuck in all those debts than the crimes themselves. I mean, hell, I was nearly the architect of all our doom just because a demon told me he thought I was smart. I can’t get on my high-horse about some fucking pick-pocketing after that, can I?”
Suspicious of this gregariousness, Stan said slowly, “Nah, you can’t. But really, how the fuck do you know about it?”
Ford drummed his fingers against his legs. “Uh, well. Bear with me: there was a magical mailbox not too far from my house that would answer any question you ask via writing it down on paper and mailing it through the mailbox.”
Stan opened his mouth, wanting desperately to object to the idea of an all-knowing mailbox in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, then shut it again. Sure. Whatever. To hell with it all, why not an all-knowing mailbox?
“I asked it where you were and what you were doing, and when it said ‘Albuquerque, New Mexico; money laundering.’ I naturally had a few follow-up questions,” Ford said.
“I have a couple fuckin’ follow-up questions too,” Stan said. “First, what the fuck. Second, please tell me you asked for winning lotto numbers before you left.”
“That isn’t a question, it’s a demand.”
“Shut up,” Stan said. “Do you know the lottos or not?”
Ford sighed, picked up his book, and flipped to a far-back page. “ Obviously I asked for the lotto numbers. And several other money-making avenues, legal or no. If I’m going to commit crimes with you, I may as well bring something to the table right off the bat.”
“Wait, what?”
“Um,” said Ford. He lifted the book to hide his face, mumbling into the pages. “See, I’ll have been declared dead by now, and I have a fake identity so that Bill has a harder time tracking me even though he shouldn’t be able to, and if I’m going to fake my identity I figured I may as well go ahead and prepare myself to be a criminal—and, well, I have a criminal brother, don’t I? And I figured, maybe…”
His rambling slowed for a second. “I—I know it’s not exactly going off and sailing to find treasure, but I thought maybe—”
“Ford,” Stan said meaningfully, stopping his twin in his tracks. “It was never about the damn boat. It was about doing stuff with you.”
“...so you do want to commit crimes with me?” Ford said, lowering the book a little.
“Hell yes! Obviously!”
Ford grinned. Stan grinned back.
This was all insane, but it was also somehow the best day of his life: his brother was back, the science fair thing was (mostly, probably, maybe) water under the bridge, and together they were gonna make a shit-ton of money.
“Great! So, I have some plans on how to get you a new identity to match mine—no offense, Stanley, but you have a lot of debt tied to your current ones—and then we can fake your death too and be on our way. Then, the lotto numbers!”
The sound of a pen scribbling against paper filled the room as Stan leaned back and listened. Just like old times.
A few weeks later, over in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey, a woman named Caryn Pines raised her eyebrows at a letter on the dining room table. It was a very innocuous letter, some bit of junk advertising one service or another.
The return address came from a “Lee Birch.” Filbrick Pines would not recognize the name a young Stanley Pines gave himself as he played spies with his brother, but Caryn did. She often had to shush them from disturbing her psychic phone calls back when things were much simpler.
She opened the envelope. Enclosed within it was a letter typed out on plain printer paper and two poker cards. The king of spades and the king of diamonds. The letter was written in code except for the very first sentence.
Ma, you’ll find the cipher to this in the baseboard cubby in our old room.
It took a lot of poking around and much more time spent on her achy knees than Caryn appreciated as a woman getting up there in the years, but eventually her fingers snagged against a catch in the baseboards and she found the cubby. In it was an old, stained piece of paper that listed each letter and number to a corresponding symbol.
She sat at the old desk that still remained in the room alongside the rest of the furniture—why waste the time to move it all out, Filbrick had said, and Caryn was glad for it—and carefully re-wrote the letter. It was short, so it didn’t take her too long.
The contents were simple: Ford had gotten into some trouble, and needed an out. Stan gave him an out, and they were thick as thieves once more. For that to work, they needed to be dead in the eyes of the law. But Caryn deserved to know that they were still kicking. Money and further letters and maybe some phone calls were to follow.
Caryn laughed and burned the letter as instructed with her lighter.
She then used it to light herself a fresh cigarette, considering the news. One couldn’t be an unrepentant liar and a sham phone psychic taking cash from gullible fools without having a bit of a loose moral code. If Ford and Stan were keeping each other safe in this new line of business, whatever legality it may possess, then she was glad for it. That was all she needed to hear.
Then she went and stored the playing cards in an old shoebox where she kept the rest of her old mementos. She’d need to go buy one of those odd little black-light flashlights and see if there was anything written there. Ford had loved that little trick as a kid, always scrawling notes down on lemon juice for her to find and bring into visibility with her lighter. The cards probably had the same idea, just fancier.
Later, Filbrick finished up with his work at the pawn shop and made his way back into the dining room. Caryn watched him come through the door, a list of things to do at her elbow, dinner in the oven. Perfectly ordinary.
“Anything interesting happen?” he said to his wife.
Caryn didn’t even blink. “Eh, nothin’. Same schmucks as always.”
Filbrick snorted. He asked no further questions. He snapped open the newspaper on the dining table and perused the smaller articles he’d left for himself to read. That was that.
Caryn smiled to herself.