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Strictly Business	By : Nastyzak Category: +G through L > Gravity Falls Views: 4073 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Fandom is Gravity Falls. I don't own it or the characters and don't get any money for my writing.

Chapter List
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Strictly Business

1
In the pitch blackness, Dipper could hear Pacifica: “Where are we? Are you still here?”
He started to answer: “I’m with you, but I don’t—”
“Oh! Do you see them?”
Blinking, Dipper said, “I think so!”
At first he wasn’t sure. Two small lights, golden-white, orbiting each other. They trailed an afterglow, like that fairy that flew over the castle and waved her wand at the start of all those movies—but they were just lights, not humanoids. It was hard to tell their size. They could have been marble-sized and a few feet away, or garage-sized and miles off.
“What are they?” Pacifica asked.
“I—I think one’s Lina, and the other’s Eddie.”
“What are they doing?”
“I think,” Dipper said, “they’re both getting ready to go—into the light.” He stretched out his hand but couldn’t find Pacifica, who sounded as if she were right next to him.
A moment later, the two glowing spheres flew diametrically apart from each other, reversed course instantly, and then sped together on a collision course. When they met, a silent burst of pure light filled the whole world. It was—the opposite of pitch-darkness. It hid everything, Pacifica, her room, even Dipper’s hand in front of his face.
He closed his eyes and still saw it.
And then—he gasped as the world returned to normal. Lights still on, Pacifica in bed, her eyes wide and blue. “What just happened?” she asked in a week voice. “I feel so . . . sleepy.”
Dipper staggered from the bed and to the hall. “Come and see this,” he called.
Something was dragging the darkness away. The jet-black layer clung to walls and ceiling, but it something stronger than it was sucking it from its grip. Dipper followed it, step by step, keeping his distance. It went into the far hall. The haunted-room door stood open again, choked with clouds of the nasty black gunk. The oily substance tried to cling to things—doorknobs, even the light switches—but an overwhelming force pulled it back.
He finally stood just on the threshold of the haunted room. On the floor, the black ooze had split and had left the magic circle clear. He stepped into it. “Jeremiah Findlestone!” Dipper called out. “Go back to hell!”
Now a whirling pool of darkness—revolving counterclockwise, Dipper noted in his mind, have to write that down later for his gruncle Ford—swept like water into a drain. The inhuman, insane roar sounded again, but this time Dipper didn’t flinch. It faded, sounding like the voice of some terrified thing that had been dropped from an airplane at fifty thousand feet, dopplering away to a terrified whine. “Wow,” Dipper said. He forced himself to lurch back to the guest room, put on the coverall, and picked up the lantern. His eyes wanted to close, he ached for sleep, but he had to see it through. He pulled on sneakers without socks and without bothering to tie them. Back in the haunted room—
It was all different. Or at least the color was. All the inky stain had vanished from floor, walls, and ceiling. Now smooth wood, with a few patches of paint still clinging to it, showed everywhere. Across the floor, the old mattress lay in tatters. Holding the lantern, Dipper walked over to it and knelt beside it. The dirty cover had been shredded to ribbons, and wads of surprisingly white cotton batting lay scattered.
Dipper stirred it with a hand and found something. He picked it up. It was a thin book with cardboard covers. The front had a tan rectangle featuring a pen-and- ink sketch of a horse in blue, and around it a mottled background of white and blue-black. Under the horse was the ornate title U*S*A* Composition Book.
He took it back to the guest room. He could not close the door to the haunted room firmly—the deadbolt was still thrown.
He sat on the bed and opened the book. Oh, he wanted to stretch out and sleep, but he forced his attention on the slim volume. It was made up of bound, lined leaves. A notebook. The first page bore writing in an old-fashioned script and faded blue ink. It said,
…
January 1^st, 1897.
A new year has begun. I am no longer a schoolgirl, but now a Young Lady. I came home from school for the last time before Christmas. I shall miss the many close friends I made there. Now I am home in my grandfather’s enormous house in Gravity Falls, Oregon. My parents, my brother, and I, have come to live here, where all have seperate rooms. Grandfather has servants to attend us, and we are to live like proper ladies and gentlemen. It is grand lonely. Anyway, I have this book left over from school, and here I will write my Thoughts and secret Hopes.
…
Just below that, in pencil, was a later, only partially dated paragraph:
…
July 1897, I think I shall die. My grandfather Jeremiah Findlestone has locked me up in this room and forbids me even to wear clothes. I did something wrong with a boy and grandfather is angry. I have been locked here for four days and nights. Just now I remembered when I hid my notebook inside the mattress. This pencil was inside it. I write now to say my grandfather has done a very wicked thing in making me a Prisonor. God help me.
…
The entries were short, and gradually over two dozen pages the handwriting and spelling became scrawling, erratic, and difficult to read. All dates disappeared. The paragraphs were painful:
…
Where is Eddie, where are you? I am sick and need you. It is always is dark here I am so thin my ribs stick out always and hungry, but I love you Eddie come and get me please Eddie please come like a knight in armor for me, your Lina
I think the year is 1898? Winter time and just one bad blanket cold fingers numb have no strength
I have to chew the pencil for a point I do not think I will life very long He starves me and it is so cold here with out close
I am dying Who ever find this know my Grandfather Jeremiah Findlestone kill me, Lina Jane Findlestone
…
And on the last page with anything written on it, nearly slashed into the paper, printed in oversized, childlike letters:
…
Eddie eddie eddie Eddie eddie dursnfrot dunsly durford cant rember my mind is going eddie I am brokken
…
The whole page became eddieddieddie, over and over, whole lines of the repeated name until the last few were just disconnected jagged lines.
Dipper had been holding his breath. “Pacifica,” he said.
He hurried back to her room. The door stood open, and a naked Pacifica lay on the bed, limp as a rag doll, deep in sleep. He tried to wake her, but she only mumbled. Her pulse was steady, though, and he thought, Not a coma. She’s sleeping, recovering.
With patience and some difficulty he got her beneath the covers. He returned to the guest room one final time for his paranormality meter. He swept that end of the hall, the haunted room, and all the way back to Pacifica’s bedroom.
The ghostly disturbances were gone. Everything now was as normal as the Mystery Shack, a background paranormality score of 4.8, which was weirder than his home town of Piedmont, but still something that people could handle.
Dipper, still in the coveralls, kicked off his sneakers and slipped into bed next to Pacifica. She stirred a little, snuggled against him, and went on sleeping , a smile on her face. Eventually he drifted off, too, wondering what had happened to Jeremiah . . ..

2
Hell is a condition, not a place. It exists in an eternal now. A moment can seem like a thousand years, or a hundred years quick as a sledgehammer blow between the eyes. The soul, the conscious essence, of Jeremiah had been tormented for more than a hundred years. Its pain was not physical, but metaphysical.
He felt he was immobilized, like a raccoon skin nailed to a barn wall, denied movement and freedom, and the angrier he got the more helpless he felt.
But then—how long since he had arrived he could not tell, no time there—all the hatred and rage he had left behind drained away from the Earth and into him.
It engulfed him and turned inward, on himself.
No need for demons with pitchforks, ore sulfurous flames. No red-hot coals or the screams of the damned. Hell is a very private thing. Pain can leave no wound when it sears the soul.
Hell, unbearable, had just become a million times worse for Jeremiah.
Every second that Lina had spent being locked inside his cage of hatred gripped him instead. And every second lasted an eternity. The dark sealed his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth.
He couldn’t even scream.
But he felt all the pain and knew that would all he would feel forever.
An Existentialist once wrote “Hell is other people.”
Not for Jeremiah.
For him, hell was himself.

3
Waking up beside a good-looking person that you really would enjoy sleeping with is one thing.
Waking up with Pacifica not yelling, but certainly asking loudly, “Why am I naked? What did we do? What’s this? Dipper, was I drunk last night? What the hell happened?”
Dipper pushed himself up on his elbow, still a little woozy. Pacifica had sort of wrapped her side of the sheet around her. “Pacifica? Don’t you—”
She fumbled around and pulled something out from beneath the cover. For a second she stared down at the curved dildo, and then she gave him a look of pure shock. “Did you—did we—Dipper! What happened?”
He put a hand on her arm. “Calm down. What do you remember?” he asked. “About the ghost and all?”
She jammed the vibrator back beneath the cover, blushing furiously. “We tried to banish it, but—wait, no. That wasn’t last night, was it? We . . . yesterday . . . I took you out to a clearing near a stream and . . . we had a picnic? Something? Wait, did we go clothes shopping?”
“Shower and get dressed,” he suggested. “I’ll go do the same. It’s a long story, so let’s go through it at breakfast. I’ll cook up something and brew coffee. I know where everything is. But don’t worry. The ghost is gone.”
“You did it?” Pacifica asked.
“We did it,” Dipper said. “See you in a few.”
Twenty minutes later she crept into the kitchen, wearing a pink tee and laddered jeans. He had changed back to cargo jeans and a yellow Mystery Shack tee shirt. As she slipped in, he smiled at her. “Pancakes and bacon. Want an egg?”
She returned his smile, uncertainly, and then said, “No, thanks. Coffee?”
“One sugar, about a tablespoon of cream,” he said. He got out a mug and filled it for her. “Here you to, Pacifica.”
“Thank you.” She put her hands around the cup. “This is so weird. Stuff that happened yesterday seems like just dream. Oh, maple syrup is in the pantry there to your right.”
“Got it.” He put her plate and silverware on the table, then got one for himself. His coffee mug was already at his place. “It happens that way when a ghost possesses you,” he said. “Remember, I told you Mabel blanked it all out?”
“Coffee’s just right.” She stared down into the cup instead of looking at him. “I saw my, um, personal drawer was open and some, uh, toys were scattered. Did you and I, you know?”
“That’s hard to answer,” Dipper said. “Yes, we did. Several times. But in another way, no, we didn’t, because last night Lina Findlestone was in your head and, uh, steering.”
“Oh, my God,” Pacifica said. She frowned. “That’s not fair! I wanted to take you to bed, and now—I can’t remember any of it!”
“I can tell you about it,” Dipper said. “Unless you don’t want, you know, details.”
“Let’s have breakfast first.”
They did—she said, “You make terrible pancakes, Pines. I’ll have to show you how some day”—but she ate every bite. After Dipper had cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the gargantuan dishwasher, he said, “Come upstairs with me.”
When they went into Lina’s room, Pacifica said, “It’s clean! Except for that mess on the floor. What is it?”
“What’s left of the old mattress,” Dipper said. “I think Lina’s grandfather locked her in this room for a year or longer. He kept her naked and the only thing he let her have in the room was that horrible old mattress. It had a slit in the stitching where she could hide just one thing. He never learned that she had this.” He held up the school composition book. “The room’s really clean now—I mean psychically. No more ghost. Your decorators can finish it now.”
“What’s the book?”
“Let’s go where we can sit down. You read it and then I’ll fill you in.”
They went down to the parlor. It took Pacifica only a few minutes to read the twenty-four or so pages. Her expression turned sick. “The old pervert,” she said. “Did he—was he violating her?”
“I don’t think he was,” Dipper said. “Maybe. I don’t really know. Did you see the few lines about Eddie?”
“And that whole horrible last page.”
“I think,” Dipper said slowly, “that Lina and Eddie maybe were in love. What was the word she would use? They were courting on the sly. Jeremiah caught them, chased Eddie off, and locked Lina up in that room. He may have killed her, or she may have committed suicide, or maybe she died of natural causes.”
“Unnatural causes,” Pacifica countered. “My dad’s bad enough, but—did Lina have a father?”
“No idea,” Dipper said. “I mean, I know she must have had one, but he may have already died, or maybe her grandfather was her legal guardian or something. One thing I’m sure of, though. The darkness in that room, the stains on every surface, all that was old Jeremiah. That’s what still held Lina’s ghost prisoner, and what would have killed you and me if it could.”
“How did you banish the ghost?” Pacifica asked.
“Lina was here because she had unfinished business,” Dipper said. “She loved Eddie, but—she was a virgin when she died. She didn’t want to be.”
“So she used my body—”
“You were there, too,” Dipper said. “A few times, I knew I was making love to you, not her.”
“I just—I don’t—I’m going to need time to think through all this,” she said.
Dipper squeezed her hand. “I understand. I’ll pack up and leave. Call me when—”
“Dipper Pines,” she said, gripping his fingers so hard it hurt, “you are not going to leave me alone! I’m paying you to make sure this house is ghost-free. Stay at least tonight. Tomorrow check again to be certain she’s gone. Don’t argue. This is—”
“Strictly business,” he said. “I know. Are you, uh, telling me that you want to—you want us to sleep in the same—”
She took a long time to reply. “No. Sorry, no. I—I have to process all this. But maybe later. You said when we were sure it’s over—so maybe--?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“You’ll stay.”
It wasn’t a question, but he said, “I’ll stay in the guest room tonight. Today I’ll do a ritual cleansing of the room. I’ve got the equipment in my kit. I’ll need your permission to burn some herbs—I have a special censer for that, no chance of fire damage. And tonight I’ll keep a monitor going that will wake me up if there’s any activity.”
She nodded. “I’m awfully tired,” she said. “I slept so hard, but I’m dragging now.”
“That’s a natural reaction. Go to your room and rest. Nap if you want to. I’ll take care of the haunted room.”
“You’re sure you won’t need me?”
“I think I need you a whole lot,” he said. “But not for what I’m going to do.”
“All right. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. I may come down for a late lunch, but I have some thinking to do.” She paused in the doorway. “Dipper? The girl you gave your pine-tree cap to. It was Wendy Corduroy, wasn’t it?”
He had brought his coffee cup with him. He took a sip. Nearly cold now. “Yeah, it was Wendy,” he said. “I haven’t seen her since I was sixteen, though.”
“Are you in love with her?”
Now he was the one who had to think through his answer. “She was my first crush. She turned me down, though, but made me promise we’d always be friends. I’m sorry, Pacifica, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any feelings for Wendy. I can’t turn my heart off just like that, and some things stick with me. I was in love with her, but too young for her. Anyway . . . like I say, she let me down, gently. We said we’d always be friends. And I guess after something like that you have to move on.”
“She’s a good woman,” Pacifica said. “I knew her before my father uprooted us when I finished high school. And of course back during the Weirdmageddon thing. The next years, she and I got to be, I guess, sort of friends. She helped me through a lot of adolescent crap and all. Uh. If she offered to, you know, be with you, would you--?”
“She’d be real hard for me to say no to,” he told Pacifica. “She’s moved away, though. And like I’ve told you a bunch of times now, I do like you.”
“Not going to ask me about my love life?” Pacifica said with a sort of sad smile.
“Nope. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“Life is complicated,” she said softly, and she left him with that.

4
Properly cleansing a room of supernatural contamination takes hours. And it is not simply a matter of lighting herbs and pronouncing rituals. Dipper took a big yard-waste bag upstairs and removed the remnants of the mattress, taking a little time to look through them. He found Lina’s tiny stub of a lead pencil, only about two inches long. Just enough of the trademark remained for him to see half of an eagle. The pencil had no eraser, and he could see the tooth marks where Lina had chewed bits of wood off to reveal the lead.
He decided to keep the pencil as a memento of the case.
He went out to his car—the windshield was almost covered in pine needles—and opened the trunk to get to his tool kit. He smiled when he opened it. He’d had the tools for nearly four years, and most of them looked brand-new. Soos was a handyman, Dipper not so much. He did have a small pry bar, a screwdriver set, and a hammer, and he took those up to the haunted room.
Getting the iron bars out of the wall required effort. The screws that held them—four to a bar—had been driven into solid wood with a vengeance. The slots for a flat-head screwdriver were deep, though, and after some initial straining, they all came out and the bars clattered to the floor one after the other. Then he attacked the boards, which had been nailed on.
Old Jeremiah had pounded the long nails in so hard that his hammer had left owl eyes around each one. It took some work with the pry bar to get the nail heads far enough out for him to hook the hammer claw and then heave the old rusty nails free. The window he revealed had the original glass in it, and it made the outside world look dust-dim and wavy. The windowsill, protected all these years, still had paint on it.
Dipper peered out through the dirty glass—dirty on both sides, with layers of dust on this side, layers of grime on the outside—and could see the well house. It creeped him out to think that this was where Lina had what might have been her last glimpse of the normal world.
It took him a long time to make it out, but there was a message on one pane. Dipper realized that the window must have had condensation on it one morning, and Lina had used her finger to draw a picture. The dew had long since dried, but dust had filled in the marks, so he saw a ghost of her artwork. It was a crude Valentine heart, and inside it the letters L+E. Lina and Eddie.
Well—somehow they were together now, at last.
He stacked the iron bars and the wood up in a corner and nearly jumped out of his skin when behind him Pacifica said, “Dipper? Late lunch, early dinner?”
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“Awake, anyhow.” She came into the room and took a long, deep breath. “It does feel clean,” she said. “Dipper, I—”
She ran to him and hugged him, resting her face on his shoulder. He put his arms around her.
“I don’t want to let you go,” she sobbed. “Listen, I won’t boss you around or buy things for you, I won’t tell you what you can and can’t do, none of that. Please. I know I can be an awful bitch, and I know I’ve got a rotten temper, but please, please, give us a chance.”
“Sure,” he said.
She nodded. Downstairs at the table she dried her tears with a paper towel. “I don’t know if I can say I love you yet,” she told him.
“I understand.”
“But I want you. You’re not my first, you know. I’ve had a few guys. Few girls, too, come to that. Does that bother you?”
“No,” he said. “You’ve got to be you.”
“Everything’s so crazy. I’m starting to get little flashes of—you know, last night. Yesterday. And it wasn’t me that yelled at you for saying the word whore. That was Lina. Somehow it really—she couldn’t stand to hear it.”
“All right,” he said.
“And, um, I still have some shit to go through. So no sex tonight, is that okay?”
“Sure. Do you still want me to stay over?”
“Oh, God, yes!” She took a deep breath. “Give me a few days, though. Is that all right? I mean, I’ll write you the check and all today. I won’t owe you and you don’t owe me for—for the clothes, whatever. And if your business is still getting off the ground, well—” she gave him a teary smile—“I can be a cheap date.”
That night they popped popcorn and watched movies on TV until midnight. They checked out the room. All was quiet on the ghostly front. They slept in separate rooms. The next morning they had breakfast together, and afterward Pacifica wrote a check for three thousand dollars. “Send me an expense account for anything else, all right?” she asked.
“No expenses,” he said, grinning.
“Yeah, well—okay, you know where I live now. You’ve got my number.”
“I think,” he said, “I’d better wait until you call me.”
“That’s fair enough. I will call you,” she said.
Before he went to his car, she grabbed his shirt and pulled him in for a deep kiss. “I will call,” she whispered. “Give me a few days, and I promise. We’ll get together, one way or another.”
He stepped back and took both of her hands in his. “I’ll wait as long as you ask me to,” he said. “I think—somehow—we can make it work.”
She nodded, finally let go of his hands, and said for the third time, “I’m gonna call you.”
Outside he brushed the pine needles off his car, started it without a problem, and drove back to the Mystery Shack, where he supposed he’d write up an account of the case, changing all the names. The Case Book of Dipper Pines. Otherwise known as his journals. Like Pacifica, he’d have to do that later, process it first.
Soos greeted him as he came in—“’Sup, Dip?”
“Been out on a case,” Dipper told him.
Soos gave him his buck-toothed grin. “Oh, man, ghosts and all?”
“Ghosts and all.”
“Dog, you gotta tell me all about it.”
“I will, but later,” he said.
He went upstairs, unpacked his gear, and circled the date on his wall calendar. He put a note on it: P. will call in a week. After a moment, he crowded in, “or two.”
He had about six voice messages on his personal line, all from Mabel. And she knew about Pacifica’s ghost problem. He’d have to call Mabel sooner or later. She’d want to know every detail. A blow-by-blow account.
For now Dipper put off calling her.
He stretched out on his bed in the attic and thought of Pacifica. He personality, her snarky humor, and, face it, her body. Which he now knew intimately. Such a beautiful body. So warm, so eager, so uninhibited.
With a grunt of annoyance, he looked to make sure he’d locked the door, unfastened his pants, and, recalling every inch of Pacifica, started to jack off.
But, like Dipper, more was yet to come.
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Strictly Business