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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
- 6
- 7
- 8
Strictly Business

1
Before they left the guest room, Dipper paused to remove a two-inch-tall candle from his briefcase and light it. It was already in an aluminum holder. “You take the big flashlight,” he told Pacifica. “I’ll go in first. Stick close to me, and if things start looking weird—turning upside down or spinning or stuff like that—back out into the hallway. Close your eyes, put your hand against a wall, and follow it to the door into the other wing. Don’t wait for me.”
“Close my eyes? Would that work?” she asked him.
“Usually if a ghost causes hallucinations, the main sense attacked will be vision. We’re sort of playing the odds. Ready?”
Pacifica drew a deep, shaky breath. “It can’t be worse than the giant lumberjack and the bleeding animals.”
“Let’s hope not. Here we go.” He opened the door and they edged into the hall.
“See?” Pacifica whispered. “It’s always like that in the morning.”
Both locks on the door to the haunted room had been opened. Dipper looked more closely. Correction: the deadbolt was still protruding from the door frame, yet the latch plate was still in place on the jamb, not warped, and the wood was not splintered. “Slowly,” Dipper said, edging forward.
“Wait.”
Pacifica started to pass him, but he held out an arm to block her. “What?” he asked her.
“There’s a doorstop on the floor,” she said. “I was going to wedge it underneath so the door won’t close behind us.”
“Good idea. But let me do it.” Without taking his eyes off the doorway into the dark room, he squatted until he could feel the heavy doorstop, turned it, and slipped the wedge under the open door. Then he stood and kicked it with his toe, jamming it firmly into place. “There.”
Stepping from the hall into the disused bedroom felt like strolling into a meat locker. “It’s even colder now,” Pacifica said.
“Yeah. Look at the candle.”
“Why’s the flame so blue?”
“Classic sign of a ghost,” he told her. He blew the candle out, set it on the floor beside the doorjamb, and took a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket. He turned it on and sent the blue-white circle of light over the remains of the mattress, then around the whole bare room. The open doorway into the closet seemed to show a momentary movement, but when he steadied the beam, he saw nothing. “I’m going to try to make contact,” he told Pacifica. “You stay near the door and if I yell ‘run,’ you do it.”
“Don’t you need, like, a communicator or something?” Something in the room moaned. The sound came from everywhere, as if from all four walls. Pacifica swung her flashlight all the way around. “What’s doing that?”
“If it can make a sound, maybe we can talk to it. Hold the light on the floor.” Dipper put his small flashlight away and took a flat piece of tailor’s chalk from his pocket and on the floorboards he quickly sketched in a remarkably accurate circle about five feet across. Then around the edge of the circle, moving counter-clockwise, he drew thirteen sigils, mystical signs that in theory protected anyone inside the chalk ring from paranormal influences. “Okay, quickly step over the line and into the circle with me,” he said, pocketing the chalk.
She did. “I don’t mind telling you—I’m scared.”
The room was far too cold. Dipper could see the mist of her breath. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m going to try an incantation. If it works, the ghost should be able to speak to us. If we can only find out what it wants—”
“Do it and let’s get out of here,” Pacifica said. “You’re the expert.”
He took a deep breath. He had tried this a dozen times, and eight times it had produced a result. He chanted, “Virtutes lucis custodite eos qui in hoc circulo magico stant. Loquor spiritui qui hunc locum inhabitat. Te ipsum revela, et loquere nobis. Dic quid mali sint. Ostende nobis quomodo te adiuvet. Si loqui potes, adiuro te nunc loqui. Per omnes bonas potestates, nullum malum tibi significamus. Nunc nobis vide.”
“Are you Catholic?” Pacifica whispered.
“Shh. No. It’s an incantation, not a prayer—something’s happening.”
All around them the eerie, high-pitched voice wailed. Perhaps it was a voice. Perhaps they heard words, though they were difficult to make out: “He is evil,” maybe—if it was a voice, if they were words.
Pacifica grasped his hand in hers. Her fingers felt icy. Dipper swallowed hard and said in a normal voice, or as normal as he could muster, “Please tell us your name.”
That long, wavering moan rose again. When it sank to silence, Dipper spoke again: “We will help you if we can, but you have to help us. What is your name?” Ten seconds went by. Then very low gibbering sounds, like a recording played at 500% speed, burst out and died. Dipper said softly to Pacifica, “If anything weird happens, get out of here.” She squeezed his hand. In a louder voice, Dipper said, “In life, was your name Findlestone?”
This time the wail became a frenzied, lunatic screech.
“Go!” Dipper said.
Pacifica stumbled into the hallway. Dipper leaped over the edge of the circle without touching the chalk line and kicked the doorstopper out of place. Then he tried to slam the door.
It was like trying to push an oak tree over.
Pacifica shone her flashlight into the dark room. Fear rattled her voice: “Dipper . . ..”
“I see it.”
A flickering blue light, like lightning filtering through a small window, filled the darkened room, like a series of flash photos of the dark walls, the boarded and sealed window, the chalk marks on the floor. Dipper could see no shape. They backed down the hall, past the guest-room door. The flickers intensified. The overhead hall lights dimmed, as if losing power. Something as dark gray as a thundercloud came crawling on hands and knees from the haunted room. It looked as if it oozed while creeping.
“Okay,” Dipper said. “Run!”
But Pacifica seemed frozen. He grabbed her wrist and dragged her stumbling down the hall. As they neared the door that led to the other wing, the ceiling lights brightened again. Dipper threw open the door and pushed Pacifica through.
He risked one look back. The creeping thing, now even darker, the color of midnight, was almost close enough to reach out and grab him. It had a definite human shape, now wet as a seal, but unformed.
As Dipper stared, shadows flowed from the haunted room like a tide coming in, and they connected with the figure, and as it thrashed its head and screamed, the darkness dragged it away, through the door. A final flash of blue light, and then everything was quiet again. The door to the haunted room was a jet-black rectangle.
Dipper closed and locked the door. “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Pacifica said. “Here’s your flashlight.”
He took it from her. For a moment they stood, breathing hard, looking each other in the eye. Then Pacifica put her hands on his shoulders and leaned toward him as they both laughed for too long and too nearly hysterically. They laughed until Pacifica cried, and then she hugged him and begged, “Dipper, please. Don’t go back down that hall tonight. Don’t leave me alone.”
He put his arms around her. “I won’t.” He didn’t add, but thought, I wouldn’t go back even if you weren’t here. I’m scared shitless!
“Come to my room,” Pacifica said. She led him to the far end of the wing.
Her bedroom was girly, in a way, but not frilly: white and grays, with white-accented pale gray walls, another queen sized bed, this one with two nightstands with lamps on either sides of the head, a headboard covered with quilted darker-gray linen, upholstery buttons in the crevices between the diamond-shaped tufts. Covering the bed was a fleur-de-lis patterned satin comforter. Matching curtains lined the two windows. A flat-screened TV was mounted to the wall opposite the foot of the bed, over an entertainment console.
Two doors opened in the wall to the left of the bed. One, slightly ajar, revealed a glimpse of what was probably a roomy walk-in closet. Dipper guessed the other was a bathroom. Pacifica closed and locked the door, then stood with her back against it. “Stay the night here with me,” she said. She took a long breath. “This is not an invitation to have sex with me.”
“It’s business, I know,” Dipper said. “Well—right now I’m not too keen on going back to the bedroom next door to the trouble spot.”
“Listen,” Pacifica said.
Even down there they could hear it. Occasional screams cut through a long, low, despairing moan. Pacifica shivered. “Guard the door,” she said, and when he reached to unlock it, she added sharply, “No! From the inside.”
He stood with his back against it. She opened one of the two other doors, and he’d been right: a walk-in closet. She pulled a hot pink fleece robe from a hanger and put it on, tying the sash at her waist. “I’m so cold,” she said defensively. Then she went further into the closet and came back with a heavy gray blanket. “You can take off all but your underwear if you want. I’ll be on the far side, beneath the cover, and you’ll sleep on this side, on top of the cover.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I may take a pill after half an hour or so. Sometimes I need them to sleep, after—”
The howl began again, full of drawn-out anguish, and Pacifica covered her ears—“after that.” She went into the bathroom, spent some time, and Dipper heard a flush and then water running. She came back with her head down, wearing short pink pajamas. “Don’t look at me. I don’t have make-up on.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re still gorgeous.”
She blushed and, still wearing the robe, swung her shapely legs up and slipped beneath the covers. She reached to turn on the lamp on her side. “Switch off the light and then you can lie down.”
He flicked the switch, took off his shoes and socks, kept on shirt and pants, and lay down, tugging the blanket over him.
Pacifica asked, “Dipper? Was that awful crawling thing on the floor a ghost?
“I think so. Didn’t have time to check it with the meter. What do you think it looked like?”
“A thin, bald, naked girl who’d been dipped in hot tar. Her body was . . . squooshy, like she was nearly melting. Skin all black, shiny. I didn’t see eyes or ears, but I did see teeth. A mouth, I mean.”
“Pretty much what I saw,” he said.
Pacifica turned toward him. “You smell different,” she muttered.
“I do?” he asked.
She inhaled. “Like—like beer. And sweat. And, uh—lavender?”
“I don’t drink beer, I’m not sweaty, and I haven’t touched lavender,” he said. “I can go shower if I’m stinky—”
“No, no it’s all right, I don’t mind." She sniffed again. "I think, yeah, the scent’s going away now. Now you smell like Axe deodorant. What made it change?”
“The ghost, maybe,” Dipper said.
“It is a ghost. I mean, you’re sure.”
“Positive. The way it behaves is off the charts, though.” He let the silence drag on for a few seconds. “I’ll have to go back into the room tomorrow,” he said gently. “There are things I can try that might help. I can go alone.”
“No, I'll go with you. Dipper? What was that Latin?” Pacifica asked, sounding a little unfocused, as if she were on the edge of sleep.
“An incantation. A request for protection from any evil, and an invitation for the ghost to talk to us.”
“I didn’t know anyone took Latin any longer.”
“I haven’t studied it in school,” Dipper said. “My great uncle Stanford says it’s not even good Latin, it’s Medieval or something. But I memorized that and a few other incantations. Sometimes that one helps a ghost show up. It also invites the ghost to talk. A lot of times if you find out what’s holding the ghost to Earth, you can find a way to send it on.”
“Will that work? With this one, I mean?”
“This one, I’m not sure about,” he admitted.
After half an hour, Pacifica switched off the lamp. In the darkness, she said in a slow, drowsy voice, “I want to go to this . . . place.”
“Where?” he asked. “What place?”
Her voice had become soft and draggy, and he guessed she had taken her sleeping pill. “It’s, you know. A green patch of grass. A clearing beside a pond. In the, uh, the woods, about a mile away. Take the blanket. Swimming hole. Pretty. I’d just like . . . to see it again.”
“When did you see it last?” he asked.
This time the pause went on and on until he thought she was asleep. But then she said, very quietly, “Dipper . . . I’ve never seen it. But somehow I know . . . it’s there.”

2
Jeremiah Findlestone hurled Lina across the bedroom. She struck the bed and rebounded back to the floor on hands and knees. The old man, clutching the whip, strode over and furiously ripped the light blanket and sheets off the bed, then threw them into the hallway. He pointed with the whip toward the corner. “Go stand there! Face the wall!”
“I haven’t done anything,” she wailed, kneeling on the hard floor.
“Liar! Whore and liar!"
Despite her fear, Lina clenched her hands. "How can you call me that?" Tears half-blinded her, but she stared into his face. "You call me whore, but where do you go on Friday nights? I know. You go to Miss Dolly's, where the lumberjacks go to fuck the whores!"
He loomed over her. "Shut your filthy mouth. Stand up and go to the wall, whore! Do as I say, now!” Terrified, Lina got to her feet and, hunching over, went to the corner. She heard him rustling among her clothes. Risking a peek over her shoulder, she saw him throwing them by the armloads into the hall. He tore down her curtains and tossed them out, too. She felt him grab the neck of her shift, and she screamed as he savagely ripped it from neckline to hem and snatched it off her, spinning her as the sleeves tore from her arms.
Under his fiery gaze, she stooped, one forearm across breasts, other hand spread like a fig leaf over her privates. “Grandfather!”
“You’ll not rig yourself a rope and escape out the window!” he said. He went into the hall and slammed the door behind him. After a few moments, not hearing him, she tired to push it open.
She couldn’t budge it. Jeremiah had braced a tilted chair beneath the handle.
With her head reeling, Lina ran to the closet, but no garment hung there, only a scatter of shoes and her old riding boots on the floor, only a straw sunbonnet up on the shelf. She jerked open the drawers in her armoire and her bureau. He had left nothing, not a coat, not a pair of gloves, not even her corsets, stockings, and underthings. Lina, frantic, rushed to the open window.
But it was a sheer twenty-four foot drop, and she stood naked. She could not escape that way.
She sank to her knees, sobbing, “Eddie, Eddie, you have to run.”
In fact, Eddie had slipped into the cellar and stood there waiting in a kind of small, square anteroom. In the light of his dark lantern, he could glimpse a coal bin to his right, not a quarter full at this time of the summer. Another door that must lead into the cellar itself stood ahead of him, closed and locked.
Eddie waited for Lina to open it. When he heard the lock thrown, he took a step back, smiling.
He was not prepared for Jeremiah’s furious assault. The old man struck him hard across the face with the butt of his whip, and Eddie dropped his lantern. He spat blood and teeth and tried to scramble away.
Lina’s grandfather followed him up the short steps and into the side yard, and Eddie felt the red-hot sting of a whip across his back. “Please,” he tried to beg, but from his injured mouth it came out more like “pree” and ended in a gurgle of blood.
He did not even try to defend himself. His father had taught him that when he needed a whipping, he’d take a whipping. The tavern drunks had taught him that hitting an older man was always wrong, even if he struck a blow in self-defense. He knew the man fighting him was Lina’s grandpa. The old man’s assault frightened him, but the thought of losing Lina by striking back at her grandfather terrified him much more.
Eddie struggled to explain, but this wild man, older than his father—he had a short white beard and wild white hair—wouldn’t give him a moment to speak. He drew back his arm, and the whip whistled and bit into Eddie’s chest, cutting a howl of agony from his lungs. The boy turned away and felt more lashes on his back and shoulders, slicing through the homespun shirt, drawing blood.
Staggering in the darkness and trying to avoid the whip, Eddie ran smack into the brick wellhouse. The old man, stronger than Eddie, seized his hair and pulled his head back and slammed his face into the brick, harder and harder, time and again. Eddie felt his nose break. Blood streamed from his forehead and into his eyes, blinding him even to the moonlight. A final hard blow mercifully knocked the wits from him, and he fell unconscious.
Jeremiah kicked him until he was sure the boy had passed out. Then the old man strode to the barn and came back with his horse, a black gelding with a white blaze on his forehead. He lashed Eddie’s hands and ankles and then slung the boy across his horse’s rump like a sack of wheat. Beneath the horse’s belly, he tied the rawhide around the boy’s hands to that around his feet. Next he looped another rope around his waist. Then Jeremiah swung into the saddle, secured the last rope to the pommel, and rode off at a gallop, turning not toward town, but taking an old path up into the rising hills.
After two or three miles of being jostled along the steep rise of a ridge, Eddie began to come around. He tried to call for Lina, but he couldn’t form words. His jaw had been broken in two places, his front teeth knocked out, and blood from his smashed nose choked him. Both eyes had swelled to slits, and in the dark he could see nothing. He felt the horse stop and then the old man loosed the bonds that held him on the horse’s back. Jeremiah roughly shoved him so he fell from the horse onto hard ground.
Jeremiah used a buck knife to slash through the rawhide thongs binding Eddie’s hands and feet. He cut the rope looped around the boy’s waist and then forced Eddie to rise to his feet, though to Eddie it felt as if he stood on ship at sea tossing in a terrible chopping storm.
Grunting, the old man jerked him up, half-wrestled him. Then, in his ear, with whisky-scented breath hot on his face, Eddie heard Jeremiah’s harsh snarl: “Fornicator! Whoremaster!” The old man shoved him.
For a second, Eddie thought he was fainting again. He wasn’t. He was spinning, tumbling.
From the crag to the rocky river gorge he fell for nearly sixty feet. That gave him not quite two seconds of life. He thought yearningly of Lina and then of nothing.
He landed headfirst in the water, but the shallow flow gave no cushion. Eddie did not drown. He died of striking the stony bed at sixty miles per hour.
There is no legend of the cliff’s being haunted. Presumably, his ghost went on.
Up on the ridge, Jeremiah cruelly spurred his horse on the way back. He rousted Ebenezer from his bunk in the room behind the barn and ordered him, “Rub down Diamond and put him in his stall. Remember this: nothing happened tonight.”
“Nossir,” the man said, not liking the fury he saw in his boss’ face. “Nothin’ a-tall.”
Jeremiah rammed the bolt back into the cellar door hasps, unlocked and entered the house through the kitchen door, and walked up the side stair. He did not hurry. On the second floor, he took the chair away and yanked the door open so hard it banged against the hallway wall.
The wretched girl crouched beneath the window. In a voice full of tears, she asked, “What did you do to Eddie?”
Her grandfather laughed, an ugly sound like a wolf’s snarl. “Eddie? Who do you mean? There’s nobody of that name.”
She sprang up and tried to climb through the open window. He hooked an arm around her belly and jerked her back. “You would, would you? Whore!”
He slammed her to the floor. She begged incoherently.
“Get up!” he ordered. She did, and he made her face him. She tried to cover her breasts and her privates, but he snarled, “Drop those hands! Stand before me like the naked whore you are! Look at me!”
She stared at him through tears. He towered a head taller than her.
Very deliberately, he slapped her face, hard, but not as hard as he had struck Eddie Dunsford. She seemed to see a flash of yellow in her head when he struck. She realized she had fallen.
He barked, “Stand up!” Then he slapped her again. “Stand, I tell you!” Another slap. “Damn you, stand up or I’ll start kicking you!”
She stood somehow and took the slaps. When her face was swollen and blubbered with tears and snot, he forced her into the closet and locked it from the outside. “Pound on that door even once,” he threatened, “and I’ll take my whip to you and strip the flesh from your backbone!”
She sat on the floor, nursing her bruises, for some quiet minutes, and then she heard banging. It sounded as if he were hammering, building something. That racket went on for ten minutes or more. A pause and then more sounds as if of a carpenter at work.
Finally he unlocked the door. “You will stay in this room,” he said, “until I see fit to let you out. I will bring you one meal a day sufficient to your needs. You will have a chamber pot to be emptied every second day. But not a stitch of clothing will you wear and not a minute of sunshine shall you see until I have broken your spirit and made you repent.”
He had nailed boards over the window. He had affixed two strong sliding bolts to the outside of the door.
Lina gripped her hair with both hands. “Mama,” she pleaded in a broken voice, hardly knowing what she was saying. “Papa.”
“They’ll be no help to you, whore,” he said coldly. “I’m sending them far away tomorrow. I’ll tell them how you’ve disobeyed me and how I’ll punish you for that disobedience. Your parents won’t save you. Your—what did you call him? Eddie? He won’t save you. From this night on, your life is in my hands.”
The worst part was his voice, not raging but icy, calm but so wrathful.
The night passed without sleep for Lina. The next morning she screamed until she was hoarse, but no one came. Perhaps the servants were afraid, or perhaps no one heard her.
Jeremiah himself brought the enamel chamber pot and a tin plate with meat and bread and a tin pint cup of water to her at noon. He brought no knife, fork or spoon. From now on she would have to eat with her fingers.
While he was in the room, Lina cowered inside the closet door, hugging her knees, until he said, “I will be back tomorrow noon. Unless you scream and kick the walls. Then it will be the next day before you have food and water again.”
Jeremiah had tamed wild horses in his time.
He would be damned if he didn’t tame this wild granddaughter.

3
In mid-October a man panning for gold stumbled upon the body. What remained of it had been torn, scattered, and mauled by scavengers. It was mostly bones in tatters of clothing.
At that time the valley had two constables, both volunteers. Not until later would the inhabitants elect a sheriff.
Buck Coffer was the constable on duty when word of the discovery came in. He organized some men and they rode on horseback to the spot where the body was found. They packed the remains in two canvas bags and brought back to town. The town doctor, a man named Hythe, looked at the remains and gave his opinion that the body had been a man (judging mostly by the clothes) and had fallen from the cliff above the river, perhaps fleeing from a bear. One femur had tooth marks that matched a bear’s dentition.
Word went out, and the next day Rudy Dunsford, the bartender at the tavern, said it sounded like the body might be his son’s. The boy, he said, had disappeared back in the summer. It was impossible for him, or anyone, to identify the body from the remains. Half the skull was missing, including most of the face, and the few clumps of matted hair that clung to what was left had been caked by mud and bleached by sun.
The clothes were Eddie’s, though, and the one boot they found Dunsford recognized as from an old pair of his own that he had given to his son. He didn’t know why Eddie would have gone off in the woods like that, but told the constable and the judge that the boy was always a little crazy. Two other patrons of the tavern corroborated that. Crazy as a shit-house rat, one said in sworn testimony.
Dunsford claimed his son’s only property, or the only part of it that had been recovered. There was no wallet, only rags of the shirt and about half of his jeans. However, the front pocket of the pants held one thing: a gold ring with a small blue stone in it, a woman’s ring.
“Yeah,” Dunsford lied, “I recognize that. He must of stole it from me. That ring belonged to his dead Ma.”
The judge ruled that the death was accidental, a result of the victim’s feeble-mindedness. He awarded the ring to Dunsford.
Two weeks later, in another town, Dunsford flew into a brief rage when he learned that the ring was only gold-plated brass and glass. The second pawnbroker confirmed what the first told him and gave him a dollar fifty for it.
Dunsford kept meaning to bury the bones, but never got around to it. The bags started to stink, so he hauled them up into the attic and shut them in a trunk until he felt up to digging.
But over the years, he forgot. He himself had been dead for three years in February 1911 when the tavern caught fire and burned to the ground. They discovered part of the skull and one long leg bone when clearing the ashes and decided they probably belonged to some drunk who’d crawled under the place to sleep.
Wasn’t enough for a proper burial, so they just pulverized the bones with a sledge and tossed them into some concrete mix. That’s how Eddie’s skull eventually became a small part of the base of the statue commemorating Nathaniel Northwest.
The statue was unveiled on Pioneer Day, 1911.
Jeremiah Findlestone had contributed five hundred dollars toward the erection of the statue. He never saw it.
He died two days before the monumental tribute to Nathaniel Northwest was unveiled. The obituary noted that he had been preceded in death by his son Abner and Abner’s wife, both victims of the scarlet fever outbreak in St. Louis of 1905. Jeremiah’s widow, now blind and senile, survived him, as did a grandson, who inherited the estate.
The obit made no mention of his granddaughter.
By the time of Jeremiah's death, from a massive heart attack, no one in town really recalled Lina. Or even that old Jeremiah had even had a granddaughter. There were vague rumors of some girl who’d run off and become a whore, maybe a relative, maybe a servant. No one recollected her name.
The Findlestone house remained. And something else remained in that second-floor bedroom, long since nailed shut. Something that made noise in the nights.
Some thought it was a ghost.
Nobody knew whose ghost it might be.
Nobody remembered.
Nobody cared.
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