Chapter 20: Into the Mindscape
Falling into Grunkle Stan’s mind had felt like nothing. As far as Mabel remembered it, one moment she had been standing in the living room next to Stan’s armchair, and the next minute the world had fuzzed out of focus and she had been standing in front of the washed-out Mystery Shack.
Falling into Dipper’s mind was completely different.
She was compressed on all sides. The air was thick and sticky like craft glue – for a moment she wasn’t even able to breathe. It was dark and when she opened her mouth to call out, the darkness flowed in across her tongue. It tasted like mildew and she tried to spit it back out into the void, but it stuck. The fuzzy damp feeling of it spread throughout her body like ice water. She looked down at herself and realized with mounting horror that she was disappearing into the darkness. The only light she could see was emanating from the unicorn hair bracelet still tightly affixed to her wrist. For one horrible, disorienting moment she couldn’t remember why she was there.
She focused on the bracelet, she knew she was here for a reason. She tried to press forward, tried to break through whatever she was stuck in, but every direction she tried she was met with resistance. Her chest felt tight, and her vision began to blur again.
Frustrated and afraid, she opened her mouth again, pulling a name from the recesses of her mind.
“Dipper!”
The word sounded muffled, like it was being shouted through several layers of thick blanket, but the moment it left her mouth, the darkness around her shattered. She gasped in surprise, breathing in cold night air, and fell backward onto wet asphalt.
She scrambled up, brushing water and grit off her pants and looked around in confusion. She remembered why she was here now; she just hadn’t expected it to look like this.
She wasn’t entirely sure what she had expected, but she had sort of secretly hoped it might be their attic bedroom in the Mystery Shack. A few years ago, Grunkle Ford had taught both of them how to meditate in the mindscape and after that, she and Dipper had spent a few lazy summer afternoons trying to construct a shared one. It had only worked a handful of times over the years, mostly they remained stuck in their own separate mindscapes, but every now and then they would tumble into an imaginary version of the attic. She had fond memories of laser battles, inventions and giant forts, but those felt like an entire lifetime ago now.
Really, it was silly to think it could have been the attic he was trapped in though. If the purpose was to get away from everyone then there was no reason he would have wanted to be in their shared space. Still, she had been expecting at least something familiar — the Mystery Shack, their house in Piedmont perhaps, or even Grandpa Shermie’s house from when they were little. Instead, it was nighttime and she was in a random alleyway in what was, as far as she could tell, a completely unfamiliar city. Worse, she didn’t see any evidence of Dipper anywhere.
A police car zoomed by at the end of the alley, lights painting the wet brick on the buildings around her with smears of red and blue, and she darted into the shadows of the nearby wall, hands over her ears.
Okay, okay. She had to think. If she were Dipper, where would she be? A bitter little voice at the back of her head spat out ‘not in this situation’ but she pushed back against it. That wasn’t true. She had done exactly this before. Bill had slipped into her head, offered her the chance at whatever she wanted, and she had awoken in a nightmarish pink bubble of endless summer and permanent joy.
Whatever had done this to Dipper had offered him something. Something he had wanted more than anything else in the world. Something that had made him overlook all precautions; made him see past his paranoia around deals and supernatural beings. If it had been Mabel in that situation, faced with a boy who felt like he belonged nowhere in the world, faced with someone too angry and sad to see a way forward, what would she offer him?
All at once she knew. Because now that she thought about it, she had been in this situation before. What felt like weeks ago now, she had sat in a dingy little hotel room and tricked her twin into going on a monster hunt with her, hoping that it would buy them time to figure things out before heading to Gravity Falls.
She tilted her head back, letting the imaginary rain of the mindscape patter down onto her face. She didn’t know what Dipper was hunting out here, but she figured chances were good he didn’t know precisely what it was either – after all, a monster hunt became a lot less fun once you actually found the monster.
Mabel closed her eyes and concentrated. Claws, fur, too many eyes, enough teeth to be unsettling, a strange whistling cry that sounded similar to the pipe organ from the Luray Caverns, footprints that left glowing shadows on the pavement. She pictured it, holding the echoes of it in her mind, trying to plant a trail of evidence, a trail of clues. It was difficult. That strange cold fuzzy feeling from earlier danced along her skin as she tried to envision it, and the more energy she put behind it, the tighter her chest began to feel. She gritted her teeth and focused so hard she felt like her brain would melt. Then suddenly the resistance vanished and she heard a cry ring out at the end of the alleyway, echoing the one in her mind.
She opened her eyes just in time to see a blur of dark purple fur streak by, claws skittering along the pavement as the monster of her imagination vanished into the wall at the end of the alley, leaving faintly glowing footprints behind it.
She held her breath, staring at the street beyond the alley. He had to have heard it, surely his mindscape couldn’t be that large, he had to be on his way—journal in hand. She just had to be patient.
The footprints had just started to fade away when he appeared. In one hand he held a small metal net. He was wearing a backpack and had his old blue pine tree hat pulled low over his eyes, but as he crept forward into the alleyway, Mabel leapt up in excitement.
“Dipper!! You came!”
Her brother froze and then surged forward and shoved her back against the wall.
“How do you know my name?”
“Dipper—what—”
“My name.” He hissed. “How do you know who I am? I’ve never been to this city before.”
Mabel struggled to push him off of her. “Dipper, what are you talking about? It’s me, Mabel, your twin??”
He let go of her arm and stepped back looking confused.
“I don’t have a twin.”
Angry now, Mabel closed the distance between them and gave him a shove in return. “Just because you’re still mad at me doesn’t mean you get to say that! I’m sorry, alright, I know I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know I messed up, okay? I know. Look, you don’t have to forgive me, but saying I’m not your twin isn’t going to make me go away. You have to wake up, and you’re not getting rid of me until you do.”
“Hey, hey” Dipper dropped the net at his feet and held up his hands placatingly. “Look I’m sorry. But I really have no idea what you’re talking about or what you mean by waking up. I don’t know you, and I definitely don’t have a twin. I’m sorry, but you must have mistaken me for someone else.”
Mabel felt unmoored, like she was missing a limb she hadn’t even known she could lose. Dipper bent down to pick up his net and then turned to look for the footprints which had faded away while they talked.
“Wait, please? How could I have mistaken you for someone else, what are the chances that my twin looks exactly like you and has the nickname Dipper? What are the chances that both you and my twin have a birthmark shaped like the Big Dipper on their forehead? I know you, I know pretty much everything there is to know about you. For instance, I know that right now you’re hunting a monster, something that most people think doesn’t even exist. It's purple and furry and has too many eyes and teeth and it leaves glowing footprints behind it in the rain.”
Dipper turned back to face her, net clenched so tightly in his hand that his knuckles had turned white. “Who are you?”
“Can you at least let me try to explain? I promise, I’m not trying to hurt you. But I think I have an idea of why you don’t remember me.”
He stared at her and Mabel held her breath. Her heart was racing so fast she thought he must be able to hear it. She didn’t know what was going on, not really. In Mabeland she had always been aware of herself and of who she was. Bill had managed to warp how she felt about things, but he had never tried to erase her memories. This was entirely new territory, and she desperately wished Stan or Ford were here to help her. But it was just her and she had to try to fix it.
“There's a diner about a block from here. We can at least get out of the rain. Trail’s gone cold anyway.” He gestured limply towards where the creature had vanished and started walking towards the entrance to the alley.
-
Mabel stared at the menu with a frown. What kind of diner didn’t have pancakes? Not that she had really been planning to eat mindscape food anyway, but she had been hoping to catch pieces of the Dipper she knew in the diner. Maybe it would have been reminiscent of Greasy’s, or even the ghost roads diner they had stayed at. Instead, it was flat and modern, no touch of Gravity Falls charm or 50’s neon and checker. The menu was equally boring and unfamiliar, breakfast sandwiches, eggs, and variations of coffee. There were no pancakes, no waffles, and definitely no sprinkles. She sighed and closed the menu, looking up at Dipper.
He was staring at his own menu, but she could tell from the way he was frenetically tapping one hand on the table that he wasn’t actually reading it. She cleared her throat slightly and he jumped.
“Look, clearly neither of us is planning to order any food. Can we talk please?”
Dipper set the menu down carefully, lining it up with the edge of the table, and began fiddling with one frayed corner where the edge was peeling away from the plastic. “I don’t have anything to say to you. You asked for a chance to explain. This is it.”
“O-kay.” Mabel had been trying to think of a way to get through to him since the moment he hadn’t recognized her, but honestly, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never had to prove who she was to Dipper before—back when they were dealing with the shapeshifter the person Dipper had needed to identify had been Wendy.
“Um. I don’t really know how to do that. See you have no memories of growing up with a sister and I have no memories of growing up alone. One of us is wrong. I don’t really know how to prove which one of us is wrong. So, I’m not going to try to do that – It’s not really what I’m here for anyways. My name is Mabel Pines, and despite the fact that you have been my twin since birth, it’s nice to meet you.”
She stuck her hand out in front of her, across the table, and was proud of the fact that it wasn’t shaking.
Dipper stared at it suspiciously for a long time. Then carefully reached out and shook it.
“So why are you here then, and what did you mean about needing me to wake up?”
Mabel shrugged ignoring the second half of his question, “You’re trying to solve a mystery right? Can I help?”
Dipper’s eyes lit up and for a moment he was her brother again, before that guarded look slammed back across his face. “Look. I appreciate that you’ve realized I’m not who you think I am, but that still doesn’t mean I trust you. This thing I’m doing right now is really important and I don’t need someone like you messing it up.”
That stung, but Mabel kept her smile on her face, reminding herself that at the moment he didn’t know who she was. Besides, she had said worse things to him. That was why they were in this whole mess to begin with.
“Can you tell me why it’s really important? I definitely don’t want to mess things up, but I do have some experience with monster hunting.”
Dipper chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “You have experience with monster hunting?”
“Sure!” Mabel grinned. “You—I mean, my twin—was always better at it than I was. But together we found all sorts of things growing up. Ghosts, unicorns, plaidypus, even a hide-behind!”
“What is a plaidypus?”
Her heart sunk slightly as she realized how much he had forgotten. “Um. It’s like a platypus but it has a little plaid jacket as its fur? They’re really strange but super cute. They live in a remote part of rural Oregon!”
“Huh.” He frowned at her and she could see him trying to work something out. “You really have encountered things like this before, haven’t you?”
“What, ghosts, unicorns and a hide-behind didn’t convince you but the plaidypus did?” Sometimes she did not understand her brother.
“Well sure. I mean. Pretty much everyone knows about those things. The hide-behind is a bit obscure but you absolutely could have read about it somewhere. Listing those things doesn’t make you seem credible, it makes it seem like you’re humoring me or lying to me. The plaidypus though. That’s weird, like properly weird. It just doesn’t feel much like something someone trying to con me would bring up.”
“I mean if you want weird I’ve got it. My great uncle found something called a hawktopus once and—”
“Stop.” Dipper’s face twisted up in annoyance. “I don’t even want to know what that is, it sounds like a mistake.”
Mabel grinned, remembering how furious Grunkle Ford had been to discover that the hawktopus was still alive and well in Gravity Falls, after his return from the portal. At least some of her brother was still in there.
“He thought so too.”
Dipper laughed then looked surprised at himself. “Alright. Fine. You’ve convinced me Mabel. What do you want to know specifically?”
“What are you actually hunting for and why?”
“You know what I’m hunting for, you described it to me yourself in the alley.”
“No, not the thing I conjured up for you to find. Before me, what were you hunting? There must have been something.”
“What do you mean, conjured up?”
Mabel rolled her eyes. “This is going to make you not trust me again. But to reiterate, I’m here because in the real world, you're asleep and I need you to wake up. As far as I know, we are currently in your own mindscape. Some, warped version of it anyway. In here both of us should be able to materialize anything we want. When I got here, I was looking for you and I figured you’d be tracking some kind of anomaly, so I came up with something weird enough to be intriguing. No matter what you were actually looking for, I thought my fluffy purple guy could probably derail you.”
She sighed, watching him start to drum his fingers on the table again. “Look here, y’know how there’s no pancakes on the menu?” She pointed at the empty space in front of her on the table, “boom, pancakes!”
As the heaping plate of pancakes topped with a cavity inducing amount of whipped cream, maple syrup, and industrial sprinkles, popped into existence, Mabel noticed something. Similar to the creature she had conjured up, the pancakes took slightly longer to appear than she was used to. That cold feeling didn’t return but it definitely took more energy to conjure them up than normal, and in the space between her imagining them and them appearing, the unicorn hair bracelet around her wrist glowed slightly. She had been too busy panicking while trying to conceptualize the monster earlier to see it, but thinking back she remembered feeling a heat around her wrist in that moment. Almost as the more complicated her creation, the harder the bracelet had to work to dispel whatever was affecting Dipper’s mindscape.
She opened her mouth, the muscle memory of years spent working out theories together making her want to tell Dipper what was going on. But before she could say anything he was pointing at the space in front of him.
“Coffee!”
Nothing happened.
He frowned and pointed at the table with both hands.
“Coffee!!”
Nothing happened again.
“How did you do that?”
Mabel remembered that Dipper wasn’t wearing his own bracelet anymore and felt a flash of annoyance.
“Okay, I don’t know why you can’t do it, but clearly I can. So, what were you chasing before my monster?”
Dipper slumped back against the booth. “I don’t know.”
“You mean you don’t remember?”
“No. I mean. I don’t know. There’s this magical travelling circus I ran away to. I know it’s cliché and whatever, but I graduated early from high school, and my parents were starting to have some marital problems. We didn’t have the money for me to go to college yet and I needed to get out. I heard about this circus in the paper, and I hitchhiked out to it and asked for a job, figured I could work there until I had the money for college. I’d done some monster hunting in and around Piedmont with friends growing up and so the guy in charge of the circus hired me to find oddities for them. This is my first contract and all I was told was that there was something weird in Boston and I needed to go find it and bring it back to the circus.”
“We’re in Boston?”
“That’s the part of this that’s weird to you?”
“I’ve just. I’ve never been to Boston before. That’s all.”
Dipper sighed. “So, that’s my version of the story. What’s your version?”
“Um. Well. My twin and I grew up in Piedmont. A little two-story house on Acre Street, we had a nice yard and a trampoline and things were great. But then, some stuff changed and our parents divorced and for a few years that was okay, but then Mom decided to try and get back together with Dad. She moved us all to DC and their relationship was just as bad as before the divorce, and Dad’s relationship with me and my twin was worse. We got kicked out, and were in the process of driving to Oregon to meet up with family. You and I—my twin and I—got into a really bad argument, and he left. He hitchhiked to the Green Fairy Circus and asked the ringmaster, Lucian, for a job. By the time I got to the circus, my twin was in some sort of magical sleep. He’d signed some contract that wasn’t one Lucian had written, and I’m here to try and get him back.”
“Right.” Dipper’s face was completely blank. “You think that I’m your twin, and I’ve just had my memory augmented or something, by some deal I made?”
“Yes, exactly!” For a moment Mabel was hopeful she’d gotten through to him, and then everything fell apart.
“Well. I don’t know about your twin, Mabel. I’m not stupid enough to do something like that. I signed a contract with Lucian sure, but I read it before I signed it.”
“It’s not about you being stupid. You’re not stupid! But you’re angry and upset and sometimes that makes us do things we wouldn’t normally do, trust people we wouldn’t normally trust!”
“Sure, and what would you know about that exactly?”
Mabel had been trying so hard to be calm and to hear him out, she had been trying so hard to not to argue with him or yell. But that hurt in a way nothing else had. “At the moment, you remember nothing about me or what I’ve done. So, I’d be really careful about what you say next.”
Dipper slammed his hands on the table and pushed himself up out of his chair. “You’re right! I don’t remember you, because I don’t have a sister. I don’t need this. I finally got something good and now you’re here telling me it’s all a lie? I don’t want to hear that! Maybe you’re right and I am your twin, but who cares?! As far as I can tell, his life is shit. If I were him, I’d want to forget everything too. Maybe you should just let him sleep. Clearly, it’s what he wanted.”
He slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked out of the diner. Mabel sat at the table stunned and hurt. She couldn’t remember ever being this angry before. Maybe it was because the Dipper who had just left didn’t feel like her brother, maybe it was just the culmination of everything that had ever happened to them. She didn’t know. But she was shaking so badly she could feel it in her bones. Growing up, all their fights had been sharp and short. They never stayed mad at each other for very long, and they always made up within a day or two. But the last few weeks had felt like one drawn out fight, their last moment of solidarity had been driving away from their parent’s house together, and everything after that had just been pieces of a fight neither of them wanted to admit they were having. Mabel was done.
She stood up from the table and followed Dipper out into the rain.
He was walking away from her, down the street, whistling softly to himself.
“Goddamn it. Dipper you don’t get to do this!”
He kept walking without looking back, picking up his pace and pulling his hat down more securely onto his head.
“Come back! You don’t get to walk away from me! You don’t get to refuse to see what’s happening here! You wouldn’t let me do that, why the hell do you think I would let you do it!?”
The burn on her palm began to sting as she clenched her fingers so tightly into a fist, she could feel the bandage shift and tear. Dipper continued to walk. He was almost back at the entrance to the alleyway now, and she knew that the second he vanished he would be lost to her forever. She screamed, part anger, part fear, part grief and threw her arm out in front of her.
The bandages shredded away into ash as a bright ball of fire flew out of her palm and burst across the ground at Dipper’s feet with a hiss. She threw another and another, ignoring her exhaustion and the way the unicorn hair bracelet around her wrist was beginning to burn her as its glow intensified.
“I! Hate! You! So! Much!” It was childish and she knew it but she couldn’t help it. She ran, chasing him down the street, feet pounding through puddles as rain and tears streaked her face. “You’re supposed to be my brother!” She threw another fireball, breathless and angry.
Dipper ducked, and threw himself behind a trashcan on the street.
“You’re allowed to hate me!” She threw another, and it grazed the top of the trashcan with a crash. Dipper fled into the alcove of a nearby building.
“You’re allowed to never speak to me again!”
Her arm ached with old burns and her wrist stung with new ones. This time her fireball went wide and burst against the side of the building in a spatter of cinders.
“But you’re not! Allowed! To! Give! Up!”
Each word was punctuated by another fireball, which grew progressively smaller and smaller as her energy finally ran out. She sank to her knees by the steps of the alcove, cradling her arm against her chest and sobbing.
She knew what would happen next. Dipper would walk away, just like last time, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Grunkle Ford had been right, she wasn’t ready to do this, she should have let him do it, or Stan do it. Both of them understood Dipper, both of them understood magic, both of them could have gotten through to him. She had never been able to do anything more than make everything worse. She had no clue why she had expected this to go any differently.
She heard footsteps splash softly towards her, and then an arm settled hesitantly across her shoulders.
“That bad of a brother huh?”
Mabel stared over at Dipper in disbelief and made a weak attempt to push him away. “No! No, its me that’s the problem. It always has been.”
Dipper shrugged and scooted closer to her. “Not that I remember or anything, but in my experience, it takes two people to make a problem. Besides. You can’t be that bad. You came looking for me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Mabel mumbled into her sweater. “But all I did when I found you was yell at you and tell you I hated you. And throw fire at you.”
“You did do that.” He pulled away and rubbed his hands down his face in a way that was so quintessentially Dipper it made her heart hurt. “But you tried to explain first.”
He sighed and pushed his hat up out of his eyes. “Look, I’m still not sure I understand everything you were trying to tell me. But. I don’t want to give up. I also don’t really want you to try and kill me again—”
“I wasn’t trying to kill you I just—”
“Wanted me to listen?”
Mabel nodded, wiping uselessly at her face to try and dry it despite the continued rain. “I’m sorry. Really Dipper, I’m sorry. I know you don’t remember, but these last few weeks it’s like all we’ve done is fight with each other. But it never really turns into a fight we just yell and then pretend like it didn’t happen. I’ve just been so, angry, I guess. I don’t really know how to fix it, I don’t know if it even is fixable I mean, I just threw fireballs at you—”
“Totally mature and calm of you.”
She glanced up to see that he was giving her a half smile. Then he sighed and stood, offering her his hand.
“Well, we won’t know if it's fixable until we try right?”
“Right. I don’t really know how we do that though, especially if you don’t remember anything. Before all of this, I thought we were trying but then it seemed like everything we did just made it worse. The last fight we had was so awful, Dipper. I…” She trailed off, staring at the blistered burn on her hand.
“Seems like I need to wake up then.” He sounded determined. “Any idea how we go about that?”
“I know how.”
Dipper and Mabel spun around. There was a man standing on the corner under a streetlamp. He was tall and thin, wearing a nice suit and gripping a silver topped cane in one hand. “But you’ll have to do something for me first.”
Mabel frowned and concentrated, feeling the bracelet around her wrist begin to heat up again. For a second she saw the man’s outward form fall away. Beneath was a hulking shadow. A spine of pure white bone jutted from its back, and a long thin hand was held out towards them, a silver pocket watch dangling from one clawed finger. She saw the shadow grow taller and twitch it’s fingers before the shape collapsed back into the man from before.
She watched in horror as the bracelet around her wrist disintegrated into ash. The man clicked his tongue in disapproval.
“None of that now. My world, my rules.” He smiled at her and she shivered at the sharpness of his teeth.
“You want your brother back? First, you have to find him.” His hand flicked towards Dipper and Mabel watched in horror as shadowed hands sprung up from the pavement and fastened tightly around Dippers legs. He screamed and tried to pull away. Mabel reached out for him but with another flick of his hand the man rendered her frozen, forced to watch as her brother was dragged through the sidewalk into the ground. Right before he vanished the man snapped his fingers and Mabel saw recognition finally spark in Dipper’s eyes.
“Mabel, don’t believe anything he says! You have to get out of here! Please—”
He was gone.
The man smiled at her again and tipped his hat. “Happy hunting.”
He walked away down the street, cane tapping next to him as rhythmically as a clock. She was forced to watch him, unable to move or speak, until he finally vanished around the corner, and the world around her twisted into something new.