#Bonus points to you if you can identify all of the horror/spooky media I was parodying

[chronicangel]

Spooky Anecdotes to Share at Nighttime

Words: 8179 Date posted: October 25, 2024 Summary:

The twins haven't been back to Gravity Falls in over five years, and Candy, Grenda, Pacifica, Wendy, and Soos realize that they haven't caught them up on everything they've missed. Cue an anthology of spooky stories that may or may not have happened! (And that may or may not be inspired by something...)

I wrote this as part of a larger project I'll be posting next summer, but I also wrote it as part of the Gravity Falls Halloween Zine 2024! @howtokillavampire put this event together and I am thrilled to be able to participate. Tumblr doesn't have an inbuilt dividing line function, so I used these star dividers by @cafekitsune. And if you see this thing again on AO3 next year and recognize it, no you didn't!

“Well, dudes, the power is like, totally shot,” Soos says as he re-enters the living room, earning groans from everyone gathered.

“But we’ve been waiting for this Ducktective reboot for years!”

“You have,” Dipper says. “I thought that the original ending was satisfying enough.”

Everyone in the room glares at him, and he holds his hands up in surrender. “Look dawg, I get it, but with this crazy storm, the power is probably gonna be out for the rest of the night,” Soos says, punctuated by a roll of well-timed thunder.

“Curse you, weather!” Mabel yells dramatically, shaking her fist toward the ceiling. The weather only responds by flashing with lightning back, and she pouts. “Well, we’re all here. What are we going to do now?”

And indeed, they are all here. At some point between their last visit to the Falls and this summer, the long rust-colored couch had been dragged into the living room out of Ford’s old bedroom, and Mabel, Candy, Grenda, Pacifica, and Wendy are all sitting on it, with Wendy’s long legs stretched out on the chaise in front of her. Grunkle Stan’s striped yellow recliner had been stuffed into the corner, and he sits in it in his usual boxers and wife beater, still clicking the remote at the TV like he can force it to come on with no power if he tries hard enough.

The only person who hadn’t crammed into the living room for the pilot of the new Ducktective show was Ford. He hadn’t exactly been a part of their Ducktective watch parties that first summer, what with the finale airing only a few days after his arrival from his 30-year multidimensional journey and his insistence that it was a children’s show, and telling him that Pacifica had never seen the original either didn’t tempt him. With the power being shut off, Dipper wonders what he must be doing in the basement.

“Hey, I think this might be the first time that we’ve all been in one place since you two got here for the summer,” Wendy points out. Dipper thinks back to their welcome back party, but yeah, now that he thinks about it, Pacifica had only gotten there after Candy and Grenda had left.

“Y’know, this would be a good opportunity to catch up,” Candy says, tilting her head in consideration in a way that leans it against Mabel’s shoulder. “We haven’t seen you in over five years. There are so many stories to tell!”

“Oh! Let me go first!” Grenda yells, and it’s loud enough that even Grunkle Stan winces from halfway across the room. “This actually happened right after you guys left…”

Grenda doesn’t normally like flying. She and her parents have flown to visit her grandparents in Pennsyltucky for Christmas every year longer than she can remember and she’s always hated it. Her ears always feel like they’re going to explode, and it’s miserable having to sit still for so long—and that’s not even six hours! She’s stuck on this plane for ten until they touch ground in Amsterdam, and then there’s another flight after that to get to Austria.

But maybe part of that hatred has been rooted in the fact that her grandparents’ house is the most boring place on earth, filled with lace doilies and tea towels and those weird little porcelain cats that all old ladies seem to have for some reason. She’s not even allowed to wear her shoes in the house! And half of the time her grandfather slips into German without realizing it, which she guesses is actually a good thing, since it means she speaks enough German to get through dating an Austrian prince okay.

And that’s the critical difference between flying to see her grandparents and this flight, she thinks. With her boyfriend waiting on the other end of the flight for her in a fancy foreign country, her usual nerves are by-and-large replaced with excitement—which doesn’t make it any easier to stay still for a long flight, but at least makes the horrible pressure in her ears feel worth it. She’s going to spend a whole week with Marius in his palace in Austria, and maybe she’ll even get to kiss him on the mouth!

She keeps herself distracted for now with one of her mom’s age-inappropriate romance novels that she’d managed to sneak into her carry-on bag before they left for the airport. Since the sleepover where she read the first Wolfman Bare Chest novel, she’s been hooked.

Elijah stared at me with cold eyes, and I stared back. He wasn’t going to get me to bend this time.

“This is not what we agreed to,” he said firmly. I pursed my lips rather than replying, because I knew that if I tried to say anything then my voice would come out all shaky and then I would cave. I was so tired of caving.

He seemed to realize that I wasn’t going to budge, and I watched as several emotions passed over his face. Anger. Guilt. Fear. I had never seen him look so afraid before, and I wondered what he was afraid of. Me? But why would he be afraid of me? Hadn’t he realized by now that I was just Becca, and I wasn’t going to hurt him? That I couldn’t hurt him, even if I wanted to?

Admittedly, Grenda didn’t care for the switch to Becca’s perspective in the fifth book, and she has mixed feelings about Elijah as a love interest. Where Gerard was a creature of passion, Elijah is a cold, calculating predator of a man, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether he really likes Becca at all. But isn’t that so compelling?

She can’t wait to talk to Candy and Mabel in the group chat about the latest development in the series when she’s back on the ground.

Her cheeks flush as the scene starts to get steamy, but before she can get very far, a flight attendant pushing a cart leans over her with a too-big smile through nude lipstick and bright white teeth. “Hello, Miss Grendinator,” she says, with the sort of neutral accent that only journalists and flight attendants have. “Have you taken a look at the dinner menu? We’ll be doing dinner service soon.”

After Grenda places her order, she glances out the window. She hasn’t been paying it much mind because she’s been so absorbed in her book, but the sky really is beautiful from up here. It had been storming on the ground when they took off, but now that they’re above the clouds, you couldn’t possibly tell. It’s crazy how the stars still look so far away—she doesn’t know how big a lightyear is, but it must be more than 20,000 feet.

Wait…

She squints. It’s hard to see in the dark, but she swears there’s something on the wing, a barely moving shape almost like an especially short and hunched over man. She leans so close to the window that her forehead presses against the cold glass, and yes, there is definitely something out there!

It looks like a man in a really cheap costume from the Summerween Superstore. Its body is covered with the sort of flat, lumpy texture you’d expect to see on a coat for babies, like wool that was exposed to too much heat or maybe just some synthetic fabric that was meant to look like wool. Its face is much like a man’s face where all of the features have been made huge and exaggerated, with a nose that must take up at least half of its face and almost clownish lips. And it looks like it’s… tampering with the wing? She doesn’t know enough about planes to know what exactly it’s doing, but she’s sure it’s not supposed to be doing it!

“Here you go, Miss Grendinator,” says the same flight attendant, offering her a tray with her meal on it. It’s some sort of chicken dish with mixed veggies, and they don’t have Pitt Cola on this flight, so she’d just gotten water to drink.

“There’s something on the wing,” she blurts. The attendant’s eyebrows knit together and her smile grows a little tighter.

After a second of just staring at her, the attendant bends over to look out the window. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything,” she says, with that sort of customer service voice that makes it sound like she really does think it’s her fault and she really is sorry for it. Grenda whips her head to look out the window.

Sure enough, whatever was there before is gone. All that’s outside now is clear skies and twinkling stars and the blinking light at the tip of the wing. Could she have imagined it? Maybe she’s been accused of having an overactive imagination in the past, but that’s usually daydreaming about cute boys, not creepy monsters!

“We’ve got a long flight ahead of us. I’d recommend eating your dinner and trying to get some rest,” the flight attendant offers with an almost pitying expression, and Grenda presses her mouth into a flat line. She is not crazy. There was something out there! But it’s clear from her face that this flight attendant isn’t going to believe her.

She glares down at her tray the entire time that she’s eating, and it doesn’t take very long to shovel down the dinner, which is bland and not especially filling. She’s heard jokes about airplane food, but jeez! Haven’t they ever heard of salt and pepper before?

She glances at her book. Is it really possible that she was so caught up in reading that her imagination ran wild and just made up some weird creature on the wing of the plane? That’s so unlike her, though…

When she looks out the window again, she almost jumps out of her skin to see that not only is the creature back, but its face is pressed right up against the window like hers had been when she first saw it.

So it’s gaslighting her, huh? It’s just like Elijah! For just a moment, she contemplates if this thing is a viable romantic prospect, but it’s ugly and she has a boyfriend anyway, so there’s only one remaining solution: She has to fight it.

She glances around the rest of the plane. Most of the other passengers are settling into their seats to sleep, and those who aren’t are distracted with their own books and in-flight entertainment. There aren’t any flight attendants in sight.

Perfect.

As an unaccompanied minor, she has the entire row of seats at the very back of the plane to herself on an otherwise packed international flight, so she doesn’t have to interact with any other passengers to stand up. There’s nothing between her and the wing, and she gets onto it without any complication. The wind makes the loose strands of hair from her ponytail blow into her face. “Hey! You!”

The creature turns to stare at her, with its wide yet drooping eyes. There’s an almost sad quality to its face, and she thinks again of Elijah, but she shakes those thoughts away as she rushes at it with a fist drawn. Her punch lands in its gut, and it feels like punching a stuffed animal. The weirdest part is that the creature doesn’t even make a sound, like it was written into a TV script and not given any lines of dialogue so that the producers didn’t have to pay it as much… or something.

The creature is as good at wrestling as any monster in Gravity Falls, although she’s not currently in Gravity Falls and that’s not even where her flight left from. Actually, where did this thing come from? She’s heard people say Keep Portland Weird, but she didn’t think Portland’s weird was quite the same as Gravity Falls’ weird, and even if it was, an airport is barely even a part of a city, if you think about it. The creature uses her distraction to its advantage to land a punch on her face, and she yells.

“Do not bruise my face! This is my boy kissing face!” She yells, and she lugs the creature over her head with both arms, standing on the edge of the plane and staring down at the clouds below. How far must they be from the ground? Well, not her problem!

She throws the creature off the wing and marches back onto the plane victoriously, and all of the other passengers clap and cheer for her.

“And yeah, I pretty much saved the day. I mean, who knows what that thing would have done if I didn’t take it out?” Grenda says with a self-satisfied little smile, arms crossed over her chest and nodding a bit.

“Um, how did you get onto the wing of the plane? You sort of brushed over that part,” Candy says.

“I don’t really remember,” Grenda rushes to answer.

“Also, if you were 20,000 feet off the ground, I’m not sure you would have been able to stay conscious outside of the pressurized cabin of a plane…” Candy adds, and Grenda glares at her.

“Why are you casting doubt on my super cool and true story?”

“Well,” Wendy cuts in, and everyone turns their heads to stare at her. “If you want to hear a super cool and true story, I’ve got one. This happened a few years ago, in my last summer in Gravity Falls before I moved…”

People have this misconception about Wendy. They think that she’s lazy. They think that she’s not willing to work hard. The truth is that Wendy just cares a lot about her time and what she does with it, and so she doesn’t like to do things that she doesn’t want to do. That’s normal, isn’t it? What eighteen-year-old girl doesn’t refuse to do the things that she doesn’t want to do? But when something aligns with her interests, she doesn’t care how hard it is. How else would she have gotten through all that monster hunting with Dipper and Mabel?

This is not one of those instances.

For the most part, her dad doesn’t bug her about participating in the whole family logging business so long as she’s still doing something productive with her time. That’s why she likes working summers at the Mystery Shack so much—it looks like she’s being productive because she’s technically at a job, but she very rarely actually has to do anything.

But the Mystery Shack is closed for the week because Soos and Melody are out of town visiting Melody’s family. She was going to lie about it and spend the week crashing on Tambry’s couch, but Gideon stopped by the Shack to see if the twins are visiting this summer and then his dad was at Skull Fracture with her dad, and now she’s here. She seriously hates that kid.

At least her dad doesn’t actually have her chopping down trees or anything. It’s not that she can’t chop them down, it’s just that she hates how sweaty she gets and her brothers always make fun of how many pieces she has to chop the trees into to lug them back to the house by herself as if she can’t still beat up every single one of them. Seriously, though, she needs to buff up… For now, she’s marking the trees that her dad and brothers are going to come out and chop down tomorrow with spray paint.

She sprays a white X and a circle on another tree and grumbles to herself, “The next time I see that kid, I’m gonna punch him in the head.”

Her eyes catch on a flash of white on a nearby tree and she raises an eyebrow for a second because it’s not like her to walk in circles, but then she realizes it’s not spray paint, it’s a piece of paper.

The note looks like it was written against the bark of a tree, with the lines all jagged and uneven in black pen. “DON’T LOOK… OR IT TAKES YOU.” It? There’s all sorts of weird monsters and beasties in Gravity Falls, and sure, she never looked in Dipper’s journal all that much, but she’s pretty sure she’s never heard of one that takes you anywhere.

She rolls her eyes. “Robbie, this is lame even for you,” she says, crumpling the note up and dropping it on the ground. She doesn’t normally care for litter, but even if the paper was a bad prank attempt by her friend, something about it gives her bad vibes. She looks around. “Are you hiding behind one of these trees? C’mon, dude.”

She tucks the spray paint into the holster at her hip and walks deeper into the forest. It’s not intimidating because Wendy isn’t easily scared and she’s spent her whole life in these woods.

It doesn’t feel like very long has passed at all before it starts to get dark, and that’s weird, isn’t it, because it was, like, the middle of the afternoon just a few minutes ago, she’s pretty sure.

“Okay, fine, whatever dude,” she announces out loud, rolling her eyes again. “It’s getting dark out. I’m going home. Get lost in the woods for all I care.” One night in the woods won’t hurt Robbie, especially not when he’s being a weird jerk.

When she turns around, she almost runs face first into a building that she knows wasn’t there a minute ago, with another page right in front of her face. She takes a step back to squint at it. This one has a crude sketch of a coniferous tree, with a man nearly as tall as it next to it, that says “FOLLOWS” to the side. Okay, yep, this is definitely some sort of paranormal junk. She did not sign up for this today.

She leaves the page right where it is and turns around to walk away, and that’s when she notices that she’s not in Gravity Falls’ forest at all anymore. She knows that forest like the back of her hand, she was literally born and raised there, and this is completely different. Except for a small clearing of birch trees that Dad always warned her to stay out of, Gravity Falls is all redwoods, firs, and hemlocks. The only Pines in Gravity Falls are Stan and his family, and yet that’s what surrounds her as far as the eye can see.

The smart thing to do would be to buckle down in this building and wait for this… whatever is happening to pass. That’s what got her through Weirdmageddon, and that’s what’s gotten her through a million other weird things in her life. Wendy Corduroy knows when to walk away, but she also knows when to refuse to budge.

But something about this whole situation just has her totally off-kilter. It’s like, this is the place that she should know better than anyone else, and now it’s just completely wrong.

So she doesn’t just walk away from the building, she runs. She springs forward and launches herself into the comforting cover of the trees and she keeps going. She goes North toward where the Corduroy cabin should be, and she runs until she sees another building.

The building is not her house. It’s some rundown brick building unlike anything in Gravity Falls, the sort of place that she and her friends would have broken into to party like wild animals a couple of years ago. There’s another note.

“CAN’T RUN.” It feels like it’s mocking her, and she feels an irrational surge of irritation at Robbie. She knows that this isn’t just some prank by her jerky friend at this point, but without anyone else to get annoyed at, he’s the temporary victim of her ire.

“Alright, fine!” She yells at nothing, turning around to face the forest. She glares at the trees that are wrong and the dark that’s too early, and she grabs the hand ax that she keeps on her at all times to hold it out threateningly in the air. “Bro, I didn’t even want to be out here, so I am so not in the mood for supernatural kidnapping! Whatever you are, just come get me already!”

For a long minute, there’s nothing. The forest is completely silent, and that’s another eerie difference from Gravity Falls, where it seems like there’s always some critter making itself known. Just as she’s about to accept that there isn’t anything person-shaped to blame for this situation and she’ll have to start problem-solving Dipper style, which mostly involves a lot of anxiety and sweating, something person-shaped emerges from the forest. Well, she’s using the term person-shaped a little loosely there. The man—it looks more like a man than anything else—is at least eight feet tall, with arms down to his knees and a completely white face. Or, well, lack thereof.

“Ugh, are you kidding me? You’re just some sort of… Skinny… Guy.” She groans. What a waste of time.

She knows too much about the supernatural to waste time and give Skinny Guy the opportunity to do something creepy, especially with all those weird notes around. Ax still in hand, she lunges at him, swinging the ax down as hard as she can at his chest, which is about as high as she can really reach on him. With a wet noise that might make someone with less resolve wince, he collapses to the ground, and admittedly she might just be taking out frustration as she double- and then triple-taps him, just to make sure.

Chest heaving, she straightens up and looks around. She doesn’t know what was up with those notes, but whatever the problem was, she’s clearly solved it by taking this guy out, because the sight that greets her is Gravity Falls’ familiar redwood forest and the sun just starting to touch the tops of the trees as it starts to set. When she looks back at the ground, the body is gone, and that gives her bad vibes but she’s not about to go looking for it. Content that her supernatural adventure is done with, she pulls the spray paint back out to get back to work.

“Woah, Wendy! You totally took out that monster!” Mabel says, with practical stars in her eyes. Dipper got over his crush on Wendy a long time ago (for real this time), but even he has to admit that she’s still the coolest person he knows.

“You killed a man,” Candy says, though not with quite as much horror as the statement probably warrants. Wendy just shrugs like that idea doesn’t really bother her, which it probably doesn’t.

“Is it true that there aren’t any pine trees in Gravity Falls?” He asks.

“Just you, man,” she laughs, reaching out with a hand to ruffle his hair through his hat (which used to be her hat, but they still haven’t switched back and he’s starting to think they’re never going to).

“You guys are only telling stories that happened, like, forever ago,” Pacifica cuts in, and Dipper tilts his head curiously at her. The valley girl inflection (it’s not really an accent) that she had played up when they first met only really comes out when she’s annoyed now, and he can’t see any reason old stories should bother her so much. “I have a story, and this, like, just happened.”

The transition to public school had not been especially easy for Pacifica. Part of that was just how unfair it felt. Her parents were by no means poor, and they almost certainly could have afforded to keep paying for her private tutors. That would involve sacrificing any of their own comforts, though, and Pacifica had long realized by the time that they put her in public school that the things she wanted and enjoyed would always be first on the chopping block.

Whatever. She had determined quickly that she would just have to become the queen of Gravity Falls High School the way she’d become the queen everywhere else she’d spent any significant amount of time. Of course, that was easier said than done.

When Pacifica had become the queen bee of Gravity Falls’ teenage population years ago, most of that was because of her parents’ money. People want to be around you when you’re rich, and it doesn’t matter how awful your personality is as long as you have enough money. In fact, her parents had led her to believe that people would only be more inclined to follow you if you treated them poorly because then they would feel like they needed your validation. That seemed to be her father’s strategy, anyway, and she could say from personal experience that it was definitely working for him.

And it wasn’t like her parents didn’t have any money anymore. For all intents and purposes, they were still probably the richest people in Gravity Falls save for maybe Old Man McGucket. But for the first time in her life, that money and her family name had more negative connotations than positive ones. People remembered how her dad had tried to side with Bill during Weirdmageddon, and they didn’t care for it.

Plus, by high school, most of the social cliques that people were going to find a place in had already been formed, and she was on the outside of all of them. It was surreal, in a lot of ways. Here were people that she had known all her life, and it turned out that she didn’t really know anything about them.

So that sets the scene for our story. By senior year, the only other students who talk to Pacifica are Candy and Grenda, and even they barely talk to her. It’s not like she can blame them. Before Dipper and Mabel came along, she wasn’t exactly the nicest to them, and she hasn’t made that much effort to make it up to them since��not nearly as much effort as she should.

It’s not a big deal. She’ll be graduating soon and then she’s out of here—out of public school and probably out of Gravity Falls. It’s not like she has many other options.

That’s why it’s so weird when she’s practically cornered in the hallway by some boy whose name she doesn’t even know. “Pacifica, would you like to go to prom with me?” He asks, and she looks him up and down. He’s not especially tall, or at least not especially tall compared to her. He has maybe an inch on her. His brown hair and brown eyes are extremely plain, but his face isn’t bad. He’s cute, she guesses.

Still. “No.”

“No? Well, why not?” He asks, like the fact that she’s said no is the most confounding thing in the world. She rolls her eyes.

“You don’t even know me. I mean, seriously, why do you want me to go to prom with you? Because you couldn’t find anybody else who was willing to?”

He rolls his eyes. “You know, if you weren’t such a bitch, people would probably like you more,” he says, and she bristles. “I’m asking you because I think you’re interesting. Most of the girls at our school are fake-nice. You’re not. Is that a crime?”

The retort that he’s not interesting enough himself to go out with her dies in her mouth behind pursed lips as she narrows her eyes at him. Really, Pacifica’s not even that interested in the prom. Years ago, it felt like something to look forward to, but now it just seems like a waste of time.

But does she really want her entire high school experience to boil down to people ignoring her and ignoring people back? This is not how she planned for this to go. Plus, the guy isn’t terrible to look at. He’s definitely cute enough to be seen in public with, with curly hair that definitely needs to be brushed and long eyelashes.

“Ugh, fine.”

The guy lights up and she rolls her eyes again. Geez, what a dork. If she’s smiling a little bit when she walks away, it’s out of amusement at how ridiculous he is, that’s all.

When she tells her mom about it, Prscilla is less thrilled. “What? You are not going to prom with some peasant.”

Pacifica rolls her eyes. “Mom, nobody says ‘peasant’ anymore, you sound ridiculous. Plus, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like I’m dating him or whatever, we’re just going to prom together. You should be excited for me.”

“Excited? Excited that my daughter is throwing her life away to be seen with some gold digger? It’s embarrassing enough that you work at that horrid diner!”

“I highly doubt that he’s a gold digger,” she says, rolling her eyes again. Sometimes when she talks to her mom she worries she’s going to get dizzy. “Most of the people in Gravity Falls don’t want anything to do with us or our money. It’s a nice thing that this boy is willing to be seen in public with me after everything.”

“Oh, so now it’s your father’s fault?” Priscilla says sharply, and Pacifica would point out that she didn’t mention her father if she thought that would work. Her mother loves little more than to talk trash about her husband and pretend that it was Pacifica. “You are not going to prom with that boy. I forbid it.”

Pacifica just stares at her for a second. “You forbid it?” She asks, incredulous. “What are you going to do, lock me in my room?”

“Maybe I will!”

Ice runs in Pacifica’s veins. Her parents rarely threaten her anymore—mostly because it doesn’t work—but this is exactly the sort of thing that she knows Mom would do because she’d done it a million times during Pacifica’s childhood. It almost activates a sense of fight or flight, and she can’t entirely stop herself from talking back.

“I wouldn’t even be stuck going to the prom with some third rate loser if you and Dad actually cared enough to keep me out of public school in the first place! But no, maintaining his platinum membership at a country club he only plays golf at once a year was more important than my education. I’ve put up with four years of public school, and if I want to have a fun time at prom with a boy who asked, I’m going to go! And if you want to lock me in my room, just try it and see what happens.”

She and her mother stay glaring at each other for a minute before she storms off and up the stairs to her bedroom. She needs to get ready, anyway. She hadn’t bought a dress because she wasn’t planning on going, which means she’s going to have to recycle an old gown from one of the lavish parties her parents forced her to go to—and they do that much less these days.

The dress that she chooses is extremely simple—pale lavender fabric that hugs her body without any of the dramatic embroidery or expensive fabric that she would normally wear. She puts on simple makeup to go with it, and overall, it’s a softer, cleaner look than she usually goes for.

“Oh, I should have known that it would look cheap,” her mother moans from the doorway with a glass of wine in hand, and Pacifica rolls her eyes as she turns to face her. Seriously, there’s no way she won’t get dizzy after enough of this. “Don’t go. Just stay in with me.”

“Pass,” Pacifica says immediately. If the prom had sounded like a potential nightmare, spending the whole night with her mother after she’s already started drinking (well, that’s the most redundant thing she’s ever said) is even worse. “Mom, can’t you just tell me that I look nice and to have a good time?”

Her mother just stares at her, her lips pressed into a thin line, until Pacifica’s phone chimes with a notification. “He’s here,” she announces. “I’m going now.”

She brushes past her mother in the doorway, and she thinks the only reason Priscilla doesn’t spill her wine on her dress on purpose is because it’s white wine.

It turns out that Pacifica’s date is actually a really nice guy. He makes her laugh on the whole drive to the school and he doesn’t throw a fit when she demands to lead when they dance together. The best part is that when she makes snarky comments at him, he’s always locked and loaded with a quick reply. He reminds her of someone, and that thought makes her cheeks flush and she locks it away before anyone who might be listening to this story later can linger on it and draw conclusions.

She wonders what Dipper and Mabel must be doing at their own prom, or if it’s even happened yet. She thinks about texting them, but she can’t think of a justification for why she’d ask. Plus, her date is pulling her over to a table and sitting her down, and it seems rude to text another guy even if it is so not like that. “Look,” he says, holding out one of the ballots to vote for prom king and queen to her. She stares.

At the bottom of the list are their names, and she doesn’t understand how that’s possible. Don’t you have to, like, sign up for that kind of thing? She asks him such out loud, and he laughs. “I signed us up when I asked you. I figured that Pacifica Northwest of all people would want the opportunity to be prom queen.”

Well… does she? Five years ago it would have seemed like only the most natural thing in the world that she would be prom queen. She wouldn’t even have questioned it. But now? Pacifica takes pride in a lot of things. She’s a waitress at Greasy’s even though it infuriates her parents. She’s friends with Dipper and Mabel Pines. She tries as hard as she can to be a good person, even though it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done and it just keeps being hard. Does being prom queen measure up to any of that?

It turns out that the answer is yes, because she gets voted prom queen and it feels like the most magical thing in the world. It feels like she’s floating as she climbs up onto the stage, and as she stares out at the sea of students she thought hated her and has perhaps incorrectly hated back, clapping and cheering for her, for a moment all of this feels worth it. It feels like this is what all of that work she was doing was meant to culminate in. Is this what Mabel gets out of being nice to people all of the time? It’s like a special kind of high.

The moment passes as something heavy and wet hits the top of her head all at once, and a shudder rips through her entire body. She looks down to see red seeping into her dress, slicking her skin, sticking in her hair. It’s going to take forever to wash all of this out. Then it hits her—that horrible metallic smell. Pig’s blood.

Pacifica’s story is cut off with a petrified squeal from Waddles, who dives as though to hide under the couch except that he’s too huge to fit much more than his snout under it. “Oh, Pacifica, that’s awful! Who would want to dump pig’s blood all over you?” Mabel says, holding a hand over her mouth and looking more than a little queasy.

“But Pacifica,” Candy says before she can answer. “You didn’t win prom queen.”

“Well that’s what it felt like,” Pacifica snaps, rolling her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest.

“I thought that you were going to private school on a scholarship,” Dipper says, only to shrink in on himself a little when Pacifica shoots him a withering glare. He hates being on the receiving end of those things.

“The Northwest Scholarship for Northwests to Northwest Private School? Dipper, I know you’re smarter than that. It was just my parents’ obnoxious way of saying that they were paying for private tutors. They stopped when they decided they didn’t like me anymore.”

“Aww, it’s a good thing that we rescued you!” Mabel says, leaning over to wrap her arms around Pacifica.

“Mabel, you didn’t have anything to do with that,” she says, but she doesn’t try to get out of the hug.

“But I did!” Soos cuts in, and he reaches up with a hand as though to ruffle Pacifica’s hair before she shoots him a withering glare and he just brings his hand back to himself. “Is it my turn now? I have a super cool story, too.”

When Soos and Melody got engaged, she had sat him down and gently told him that she thought they should move out of the Mystery Shack. “Stan and Ford are going to be done sailing all around the world eventually, and they’re probably going to want to retire in the home that they built,” she says, and as much as this makes sense to Soos, he still doesn’t like the thought of leaving the home portion of the Mystery Shack empty.

“I don’t know… Don’t you think a home needs, like, people in it?” He says, gesturing at the empty house around them.

“Soos, we’re still going to be here every day, and Stan and Ford are still going to stop by sometimes. But once we’re married and having kids, do you really want them to grow up in a tourist trap?”

Really, that idea doesn’t sound so bad to Soos. He can only imagine how much cooler his childhood would have been if he had grown up in a place like the Mystery Shack, hearing stories from Mr. Pines about all sorts of made up spookums. Melody must see this on his face, because she adds after a second, “Abuelita is getting pretty old, too. She’ll need someone to take care of her, and you know as well as I do what she thinks about the Shack.”

He thinks about how sad Abuelita had seemed when he told her that he was going to be moving out to take on maintenance of the Mystery Shack full-time. She had been proud, of course, that Soos was achieving his dreams, but he’d lived with her his whole life and they both expected he’d be with her until she died. Plus, she really does hate this place.

“Okay…” He agrees hesitantly, already wondering if he can push off the whole moving thing at least until Dipper and Mabel are 18 and they can move into the Shack. What can he say? A home just needs people in it or it turns back into being just a house. And the Mystery Shack will always be more than just a house to Soos.

If there’s anything Soos loves about Melody (and, well, there a thousand things he loves about Melody, actually), it’s that she is not pushy.

They both seemingly forget about the whole moving thing entirely for a week, until Soos gets a letter informing him that he’s won a mansion. Did he enter a competition to win a mansion? That seems like the sort of thing that he would have remembered doing.

“Hey Melody, take a look at this,” he says, holding the letter out to her. If he entered a competition to win a mansion and forgot about it, he’s sure Melody will remember. She’s way better at remembering stuff than he is!

“Huh. It’s probably just some scam letter. I mean, I’m pretty sure the only mansion in Gravity Falls is McGucket’s Hootenanny Hutt, and he’s not looking to sell it last I checked.” Soos is sure there are other mansions in Gravity Falls, because he’s pretty sure the Northwests still have one somewhere and he sees Pacifica at the diner all of the time. She sees his hesitation and sighs. “You wanna check it out, huh?”

“Maybe this could be exactly the opportunity we were looking for. We’d have room for Abuelita in a mansion. And for seven kids.” Of course, the number of children they want to have is still something they debate back and forth, but if they had a mansion, he thinks it’d only be natural to try to fill it, right?

Melody looks at him skeptically for another minute and then finally says, “Okay. We can drive up there and check it out after we close up for the day, alright?” He grins and leans down to press a kiss against the top of her head. He seriously has the best fiancée in the entire world.

After Soos’ last tour of the day, he looks at his phone and sees that Melody has texted him to let him know that she’s heading to the address in the letter ahead of him and he should meet her there when he’s free. Somehow, it doesn’t occur to Soos that they only have one car.

His old pickup truck has been threatening to die for years, and he should take it as a sign when the engine sputters and kicks off at the big, creepy gates to the big, creepy mansion. That’s not really Soos’ vibe, though. His vibe is more go with the flow than that, and he figures he’s already come this far, so he just walks up the rest of the hill with a flashlight in hand, because spooky stories are always better with a flashlight.

The mansion doesn’t bear no resemblance to McGucket’s Hootenanny Hutt, formerly the Northwest Manor. It’s tall and imposing, with a million windows and pointy bits on the roof for seemingly no reason. The path to this mansion is even creepier, though, with trees that look totally dead and… dude, are those actual graves?

“Melody?” He finally calls out, looking around for any sign of his fiancée. There’s not exactly an abundance of places to hide outside, unless she’s behind one of those spooky-looking trees. He checks behind the spooky-looking trees, just in case, but sure enough, she’s not there. He guesses she must have gone into the mansion without him and shrugs. Well, if she got inside then they probably do have some legitimate claim to the place, right?

The interior of the mansion is just as spooky as the exterior. There’s dust and cobwebs everywhere, stairs to a small second story landing, and three doors leading to other areas of the mansion, but when he tries them, all three are locked. As he heads back down the stairs from the second floor of the room, he hears a weird noise, and he stops mid-step to listen closer.

That’s when he sees some sort of ghost or something.

It doesn’t even seem to notice him, drifting by with a key in its hand that it conveniently drops before disappearing through one of the locked sets of doors. In an incredible bout of luck, Soos happens to unlock the correct doors on the first try—the ones on the first floor.

He doesn’t have much time to examine the second room of the mansion before another ghost (or maybe the same ghost, but like, it came downstairs?) lunges at him. Oh man, he should have paid more attention when Dipper was telling him about that party at the Northwests’!

There’s a horrible, haunting sort of cackling noise echoing through the halls of the mansion, and then a sound like Abuelita vacuuming the walls. Suddenly the ghost is gone, and a familiar face stands in front of Soos instead.

“Old Man McGucket? What are you doing here?”

“I was up in my mansion when I heard what’n sounded like some sort of undead hootenanny comin’ from down over yonder! Fortunately, I just finished my latest invention: the Ghostsucker 3001! I figured this would be the best time to test it out, so I snuck into this here mansion and sure enough it was just chock fulla ghosts. I’ve been suckin’ ‘em up fer hours.”

“Woah, dude, that sounds sick,” Soos says, taking a step closer to squint at McGucket’s machine, which looks a lot like the Neutron Neutralizers from Phantom Bust-ifiers.

“Eh… would you… like to join me?” He asks, with a hopeful tinge to his voice. “Wouldn’t ya know it, I just so happen to have a second one of these things.” It seems like he pulls the second Ghostsucker 3001 out of thin air as he holds it out to Soos, who looks up at him with a grin and swings the machine onto his back.

This part of the story is kind of boring, but basically, he and McGucket go through the rest of the mansion and, like, take out all of the ghosts, including the big bad ghost at the end of the mansion who did, like, some kind of magic thing? Honestly, he doesn’t remember that part very well. There was this wicked ghost baby, though.

For a second, Dipper holds his breath like he thinks there’s going to be more to the story, but Soos just crosses his arms and nods like Grenda had after her story. “Well, what happened to Melody?” Mabel eventually asks.

“And why did McGucket have a second Ghostucker 3001 just lying around?” Dipper adds.

“What happened to the mansion?” Candy tacks on.

“Oh, dude, those are like, really good questions,” Soos says, laughing. “I guess I should have thought of that.”

“This is ridiculous!” Candy says, throwing her hands in the air in frustration. “So Soos is a Phantom Bust-ifier, Pacifica is a prom queen, Wendy is an unrepentant killer, and Grenda is completely unaffected by altitude?”

“Well, yeah, that about sums it up,” Mabel says.

“That’s it. It is Candy’s turn to tell a story,” Candy says, with a wicked sort of grin that makes Dipper nervous.

He was right to be nervous. The story that Candy tells is so dark, so grotesque, so horrifying that he doesn’t think he’ll ever completely be able to stop thinking about it. Waddles runs away to another room squealing even higher than he had after Pacifica’s story, Soos and Grenda huddle together in fear, Pacifica looks like she’s going to be sick, and Mabel retreats to Sweatertown. Even Grunkle Stan’s snoring from his recliner stops as he wakes up just to stare at Candy. The only person who seems totally unbothered is Wendy, but Dipper can’t imagine the sorts of circumstances that would really freak Wendy out.

“Did that really happen?” He asks, even though he’s not totally sure that he wants to hear the answer. What if it did?

“Well, no,” she answers. “But neither did anyone else’s!”

There’s a creak of the floorboards at the entrance to the room and everyone screams. Dipper is the first to spring to his feet and turn toward the door, only to see Grunkle Ford standing there.

For a second, he stares at all of them like they’re insane. Then, cracking open the can of Pitt Cola he must have come upstairs for, he asks, “Why are all of you sitting around in the dark? That’s very bad for your eyes, you know.”

Dipper is also the first one who manages to find his voice to answer, and he’s proud of himself for how far he’s come from the anxious preteen he was that first summer. “The power is out. You didn’t notice?”

“Ah, of course,” Ford says, like he’s drawn a conclusion that no one else has reached yet, which he does a lot. “I had a back-up generator set up for the lab in the basement after my first year in Gravity Falls. This town gets a lot of geomagnetic storms! Very interesting… I suppose I spent so much time down there that I forgot to install one upstairs. Maybe while we’re docked for the summer I can start working on that…”

Everyone looks at each other for a moment, and then Stan and Mabel grin at each other. “Sixer, we’re crashin’ your lab,” Stan says, and it’s clear from his tone that there’s no room for argument—not that Ford actually tries to argue. Mabel and Stan pick up the TV to lug it into the basement while the rest of them follow, the girls who haven’t already been to the basement lab peering around curiously.

It turns out that the premier of the new Ducketective series isn’t even playing tonight—they’re playing a marathon of all of the old series first, and they’ve only missed the first couple of episodes. They fill in Pacifica and Ford and end up staying up all night watching, and Ford is forced to admit that he was wrong and the show is amazing.

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