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Super A Foods, Staten Island – 1:37 am, Tuesday
Mabel had said she was waiting at the checkout, but she’d disappeared some time in the 30 seconds since her last text, so Dipper decided to go ahead and pay for the rest of their haul. Either she was about to tackle him, or she’d take all night haggling at the deli counter. In any case, he wanted legal access to his snacks. He emptied his basket onto the conveyor belt, then nearly snapped his neck with the force of his double take.
“Oh my god, it’s– aah, ancient coins!”
The cashier looked blandly confused, but mostly exhausted.
“I’m sorry, do I know you from somewhere?”
Dipper cringed and lowered his accusing finger, suddenly embarrassed by his enthusiasm. There were roughly a billion grocery stores in New York City, as he’d had the misfortune to experience over the past eight hours, and the odds that this was the same underpaid employee from a probably staged interaction three years ago were slim to none.
The guy had stopped scanning Chipackers to stare dully at him, so Dipper put on his “cool, uninvested grown-up” voice and tried to play it off.
“Yeah, uh, you know, you just kind of look like this guy on TV. Not that much, but enough. Must’ve been, like a trick of the light. I’m sure you get that all the time, right? It’s nothing … nothing weird.”
He carefully examined the row of magazines to his left. Apparently he could lose 40 pounds instantly with one neat trick. Maybe if he did it enough times, he’d just vanish.
On the other side of the counter, the guy perked up. He still looked dead, but slightly less soupy.
“Oh, you mean that “My Weird Obsession” thing with the goth guy a while back? I didn’t think anybody watched that but my mom.”
Dipper laughed in disbelief.
“Yeah, uh, What We Do in the Shadows. It’s a web show.”
“Sure.” The automatic doors chimed behind him, but there was nothing outside but a cloud over the moon.
“Wow! I mean, I thought you were an extra, but you actually work here.”
The cashier went back to checking out scrapbooking supplies. “Well, it’s not like they paid me.”
“Oh, huh.”
“I think they’re still making it. Those creeps come by all the time, but my manager won’t let them film in here anymore. Kept setting shit on fire.”
Dipper was saved from trying to come up with a response when Mabel came rushing up in a cloud of glitter, bags of googly eyes rattling as she ran.
“I got it!” she panted.
“You found the toffee peanuts?”
“No, it’s–!”
He groaned. Another bust.
“Wait, yeah, actually, they were hidden behind the drain cleaner. But,”
“Huh.”
“Check THIS out!”
She shoved something rubbery and flesh-colored to his chest, and he immediately dropped it, disgusted.
“NO!” she hissed, gathering it in her arms like it was an elderly cat. “Do you have any idea what I had to do to get this? This is the freaking Hope Diamond, Dipper. This is the Ark of the Covenant!”
“What even is it?” he asked.
She glanced around surreptitiously. Someone in the back of the store was having a muffled argument, tin cans rattling to the floor. The cashier gazed blearily into the middle distance. Dipper frowned, suddenly paranoid.
Apparently Mabel was appeased, though, as she gestured him closer, so he leaned in to get a better look.
He was greeted by the deflated, eyeless visage of some vaguely familiar bald man.
“Mabel,” he said.
“I know right? He’s beautiful.”
He looked harder, in case he had missed something. The angry squabbling sounded closer.
“Can you believe I got the last one?”
“Somehow, I can. Who is it?”
“The tag said it was a Victor Garber costume. There was a matching suit, but I had to leave that behind. Speaking of, we should leave right now.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now, those spooky ladies really wanted him.”
Someone yelled wordlessly just a few aisles over.
“Crap, okay, yes, let’s go.”
“Go! Go!” she laughed, grabbing handfuls of junk food and sprinting towards the parking lot.
Dipper rifled through his wallet and chucked a couple bills at the cashier, swept the rest of their travel provisions into his arms to run, then pivoted so abruptly he almost flung the bag of jelly beans clear across the room.
“Oh shit, I’m so sorry, man,” Dipper cackled.
“Happens all the time,” he sighed, picking the cash off the floor.
“DIPPER!” Mabel screamed, and he jogged into the night.
Vampire Residence, Staten Island — 9:13 pm, Saturday
“The Guide has been acting very strangely these past few days,” murmured Nadja, draped over Laszlo like a fur coat and still half asleep. He made an affirmative noise and patted her hair indulgently.
“She has been running about like a wild boar before it is slaughtered, in the case where the boar knows it is to be slaughtered and has a few days to get its affairs in order. Very destructive, very stressful for everyone involved,” she said, lazily waving a hand to illustrate the familiar analogy.
“It makes you almost want to call off the slaughter, because then it might stop destroying all your pots and trying to gore you in the leg with its cute little tusks, but doing so at that point would just give it the power to kill you. This is what happened to my oldest brother, and it was very, very messy.”
She pointed a lecturing finger at the camera.
“That’s why you never tell a boar you intend to slaughter it, and you especially never tell a boar you don’t intend to slaughter it.”
“Yes, much better just to whack it straight off,” Laszlo added. “Cleaner that way.”
“This is where I believe we went wrong with Guillermo. That little shit has been very cocky ever since we spared his life.”
Laszlo hummed, and nodded sagely.
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, but the crew had other interviews to film tonight and Nadja had begun to gently snore, so the producer cleared his throat.
“Uh, you said something’s going on with the Guide?”
Nadja surged forward and clapped.
“Yes! She has completely neglected her duties!”
“And this is strange, as she is usually quite dutiful, you see.”
“Yes, yes.”
“It’s fucking exhausting to be around.”
“It’s even more fucking exhausting now that I have to do fucking everything because she is taking fucking human cooking classes!”
Laszlo paused, and turned to his wife.
“My dear, did you intend that last “fucking” as an expletive, or as a descriptor? Because I have no interest in human foods, but if there were an erotic element…”
“I don’t know!” Nadja cried. “I haven’t had the time to investigate, because this is the first time I’ve sat down in a week!”
“Do you know what happened?” the producer prodded.
“No, no, I know what happened, but I do not understand it. We were at the market, searching for a replacement bust for the Chamber of Curiosities. Eh, not bust as in boobies,” she clarified, “but rather the false head of a man. Still very sexy.”
“Indeed. And the original bust, which had been uncovered here in Staten Island during the British occupation of the American Revolutionary War, was unfortunately damaged by myself and my good friend, Colin Robinson, some time ago.”
“Yes, you did a real number on it,” she interrupted.
“Mm, I can’t remember precisely why we did that, but no matter. The Guide was pissed. That can’t be why she’s slacking off, though, because it’s pretty par for the course.”
Nadja plowed on with her tale.
“The only thing is, Tilda, the leader of the Supreme Worldwide Vampiric Council who sentenced us to death a few years ago and is now my boss— she really liked that bald man head, so instead of just pretending it never existed, we had to find a new one. Luckily, they had one at the first store we checked, but then the Guide turned into smoke and blew away and this colorful little girl stole it right out from under us. All we got was this shitty smock thing made out of plastic cloth,” she said, and dug it out from between the couch cushions to wave at the camera. It looked to be a child-size tuxedo that tied closed in the back like a hospital gown. Laszlo frowned at it, thoughtful.
“That was last Tuesday, and she has been distracted ever since.”
The same, 9:46 pm
“Frankly, I don’t spend much time with the Guide. My schedule is packed just—” here he sighed, casual but deliberate. “Holding down the fort, you know?”
Guillermo bit his lip and glanced up from his computer.
“That’s not to say I haven’t noticed something. That’s my job, as a bodyguard, to keep an eye out for any potential threats. We haven’t had any trouble with assassins since the Nouveau Théâtre des Vampires,” he said, carefully butchering the pronunciation, “but you can never be too careful.”
“Nadja had me do a background check on those kids from the store. I got their license plates from the security footage, and traced that back to a rental agency in New Jersey nine days ago. From there, I found their names, addresses, criminal records, report cards, and family history dating back to the 1600s.”
Guillermo smirked at the camera.
“That’s what I’m planning on telling Nadja, anyway. She’d just spit everywhere if she knew I asked Lilith.” He turned his laptop around to show a private chat on what looked like a recipe blog.
“Anyway, they’re pretty weird, but it doesn’t explain what’s going on with the Guide. Apparently they were involved with some local apocalypse like ten years ago, but that was on the other side of the country, and the Guide barely ever leaves Council Headquarters. I don’t know why she would care about some rinky-dink town in Oregon.
“Now that the prophecy is fulfilled they’re not really a threat. I actually have a personal commendation letter here from someone called the “Hand Witch”, and it says that the whole family is kind of nosy but generally live and let live.”
He shrugged.
“They’re just college kids.”
Vampiric Council Headquarters, Staten Island — 11:08 pm, Saturday
The Guide was flying from shelf to shelf in the storage closet, flinging boxes down to the wraiths below.
“I’m very sorry, I don’t have time to talk tonight!”
The same, 11:16 pm
One unlucky wraith screeched from the middle of a writhing swarm. They had somehow gotten tangled in a skein of worsted-weight yarn, and their erstwhile rescuers had been caught up in the snarl as their claws snagged in the fibers.
“For fuck’s sake!”
The Motel $60, New Jersey — 4:04 am
Dipper sprawled on top of the covers, scrolling through apartment listings and wincing. College had been expensive, but this was just painful.
The weird half-quilt thing he was laying on was also painful, and unpleasantly greasy. Dipper expected to find some manner of rash on his stomach where his t-shirt had ridden up.
At least the water pressure here was the blast-your-skin-off kind of bad. Mabel’s screams when she started it up had been almost completely drowned out by the shower. That was half an hour ago, now. Hopefully she survived, and hadn’t used up all the hot water.
He sighed and rolled over to try and mitigate the damage in the meantime, and promptly fell off the bed.
“Oh! Oh no, no, no! Are- are you okay?” stammered the intruder.
Dipper spat out a dust bunny and disentangled himself from the bedside lamp.
“Blendin Blandin? What are you doing here, man?”
He was even sweatier and paler than normal. He hadn’t returned the time tape to his belt, gloved hands fiddling nervously with it like he might need to make a quick escape.
“I - I - I’m not supposed to be here,” he said, which was obvious.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Listen, Dipper, I’m so so sorry about this.”
“What is it, Blendin? Are you trying to kill us again?”
Blendin stayed quiet for an awkward moment, chewing on his lips.
“Oh, come on. Seriously?”
“No! No, no, never, I wouldn’t.”
Dipper privately doubted that.
“I just came to - to say I’m sorry. We can’t do anything, I - I asked. It’s a closed loop, it’s all already happened, we can’t —”
“Can’t what? What’s going on?”
The water turned off with a loud squeak, and then it was suddenly quiet, like his ears had popped.
“Don’t worry. You don’t - don’t have to worry. She’ll be right back, like, like, like she was never even gone.”
Blendin’s thumb rubbed the time tape over and over, catching on the metal tab on the end.
“Like who was never gone, Blendin? Is something going to happen to Mabel?”
“Go-going to — she’s still here?” he shouted.
Three things happened at the same time.
- Blendin pulled the time tape to flee, shaking and stammering that he’d messed up.
- Dipper lunged for him, toppling them both to the musty carpet.
- Mabel leapt out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam to greet their guest, creepy Victor Garber mask pulled over her wet hair.
The time tape went flying across the room as they all screamed, tape retracting.
On instinct, Mabel punched it away from her face, and at the moment of contact, the metal tab snapped into place.
She disappeared in a flash of light.
The time tape thunked into the wall and fell to the floor.
Dipper gaped. He was lying on top of Blendin, both of them completely still.
“I … I … I …”
“Where’d she go?”
“I - I shouldn’t have - shouldn’t have come here.”
Feeling was coming back to his fingers now. He clenched them in the slippery fabric of Blendin’s jumpsuit.
“Where did she go, Blendin?”
He was squirming beneath Dipper’s hands.
There was a knock on the door.
“I - I should go. I shouldn’t have — I’m sorry, Dipper. I should —”
“Blendin —”
He bucked Dipper off and crawled to the time tape, and just like that, he was gone.
Dipper was alone.
Staring up at the mold on the yellowed popcorn ceiling.
She’d be right back.
There was another knock on the door. Polite, but insistent.
The same
The Guide knocked on the door.
The crew peeked their equipment over a minivan, one of the few vehicles in the parking lot. It was hard to really see anything from this distance.
She seemed to be rocking gently from foot to foot.
The producer gestured from a nearby hedge, and they sprinted to closer cover — a rental sedan parked in front of the room in question.
Camera 2 turned to the window. The curtains had been drawn, but they still let a little light through. Someone was definitely in there.
Camera 1 was focused on the Guide’s face. She was smiling, but her cheeks were twitching like it was uncomfortable. She took a deep breath and let it out in a raspberry, going through some of the mouth stretches they recommended before interviews, but then it was right back to that close-lipped smile.
She tugged at the turtleneck of her sweater. It was lumpy and strangely proportioned, and the bright colors washed her out under the buzzing lights of the motel. Standing there waiting, she looked small and ordinary.
The door opened.