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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
“Is that your official uniform?” a smiling Pacifica asked Dipper when he came downstairs ready for their expedition. She was sharp in tight jeans, brown boots, and a snug pale-blue top. She held a sizable slung bag over her shoulder. As he looked her over, she grinned at his appreciative glance. “You look like a car mechanic, Official Ghost Buster.”
He was wearing a pair of khaki coveralls, medium weight, with eight pockets: Two zipper chest pockets, two jeans-style side pockets, two cargo pockets on the legs, and two hip pockets. “Official? No. Still, it’s handy to hold a lot of stuff,” he said. “Got my basic paranormality meter in the right leg pocket, a small vial of anointed water and a little can of spray chalk for drawing an emergency magic circle on the grass in the left. Got my phone up here in the left chest pocket, my wallet in the right, zippered.”
“Wallet? I don’t think anyone will charge admission,” she said, laughing.
“The wallet’s got my identification in it,” he explained. “In case somebody finds my body and needs to identify it.”
Pacifica looked as if he had yelled at her. “Oh. That—that’s awful.”
“Just being cautious.” He clapped on his flat-topped military style radar cap. It was an undecorated light brown twill and nearly matched the coveralls. “What?” he asked when she giggled again. “We’re gonna be in the sun and I need some protection, that’s all.”
The day was clear, the sun bright. Donning a pair of sunglasses, Pacifica said, “Yeah, but what happened to that white and blue trucker’s hat you wore? It was so cute on you.”
“That was years ago. I gave it away.”
“Who to?”
“Some girl,” he said. He stubbornly didn’t want to say the name. Anyway, in the few years that her family had remained in Gravity Falls, Pacifica must have seen Wendy sporting the pine-tree hat.
She dropped the subject. “Well, now you look all military. You know what? You need a logo on your cap and coveralls. Get the company name out there. PPS and some kind of ghost logo, maybe.”
Dipper grabbed a couple of water bottles from the fridge. “Did Mabel tell you I call myself Pines Paranormal Services?”
“No, I checked your website. And I told my lawyers to call the number listed there. I didn’t want to go into detail with Mabel about my problem. You know how she talks.”
“Yes,” he said. “Technically the business is Pines Paranormal Services, LLC. That means—”
“Oh, give me those bottles and I’ll stick them in my bag. There. Come on,” she said, and led him around the house and into the back yard. On the way, she reminded him, “I have a degree in business, Dipper. I know what ‘limited liability corporation’ means. Who are your partners?”
“Don’t really have any,” Dipper said. “My great-uncles put up a couple of thousand dollars for my start-up. They’re silent partners, I guess you could say, but they don’t expect a return on their investment. And Soos lets me live in my old attic room at the Mystery Shack. That’s the mailing address for PPS. I guess I ought to ask Mabel to design a logo.”
“That would be cool. The uniform looks sort of like an auto mechanic’s now, but a little tweaking would glitz it up and if you got one made of stretchy material it would make you look hot. That long zipper down the front,” Pacifica said, raising an eyebrow. “How far does it go?”
“All the way down.” He didn’t add ‘past my balls,’ but that was true. Further, even. Probably so somebody in one could take an emergency dump where the bears do it, but that was too embarrassing to mention.
Pacifica didn’t want to leave it alone. “Must be handy. You’ll have to show me. “
“Maybe I will someday,” he said. “Are those good hiking shoes?”
“Supposed to be, they’re Trend Peaks. I’ve actually never worn them hiking. I’ve ridden horses while wearing them, though. Are yours Army boots?”
He thought that she must know the difference, but he answered as if she didn’t: “No, Columbia Gorge hikers. These are the most expensive piece of clothing I own. The cap and the jumpsuit are like Walmart products. Here’s the woods. Now what?”
They had reached the border where the lawn ended in a clutter of tree stumps, where a crew had recently removed dozens of young pine trees. Ahead of them lay a zone of thick, tangled brush.
“I’m not sure,” Pacifica said. “How do we get through this mess?”
“I think this way.” He took the lead. They left the house and yard behind and came to a gray rock outcrop shaped like the keel of a capsized wooden man o’ war. It ran above the undergrowth and pretty far beneath the trees, a hundred feet or so. Only straggling dry weeds clung to it, and it wound up under the shade of the forest canopy, where the leaves kept everything dim and only a spongy layer of leaf mold and pine needles lay underfoot.
“How’d you know this was even here? I didn’t,” Pacifica said.
“When I got the call about the job, I looked up satellite images on AllGlobePix.com.. It’s always good to reconnoiter the territory.” Dipper paused and took out his phone.
“Who are you calling, Ghostbusters?” Pacifica asked, hopping off the low end of the outcrop.
“No, not calling anybody. Just geo-marking this location on my GPS so we can find our way back.”
“Oh.” After a few moments of standing and gazing at the thousands of tree trunks, Pacifica asked, “Do you have a compass?”
“Right here.” Another phone app. “Which way do we need to go?”
Concentrating, Pacifica said, “I think there used to be a path worn through here. It went pretty straight. It’s like, if you left from the west side of the house and came this far, from here you’d go, um, south-west, roughly.”
“Got it,” Dipper said. “That way. Let’s go.”
“You really prepare, Dipper. I’m not making fun of you.”
“Thanks.” Now that they were passing through a forest of super-tall pines and hardwoods, he noticed how strangely quiet these woods were. Then again, it was almost autumn and most of the birds had probably migrated. Not the woodpeckers, though. He could hear them hammering away, but they were permanent residents of the valley.
“It seems a long way,” Pacifica complained after several minutes of walking.
“We’ve just gone about half a mile,” Dipper said. “Want to rest?”
“I’m in better shape than that, Nerd Boy,” Pacifica said.
“Right you are, Valley Girl.”
She giggled, and then they both laughed.
They hiked, sometimes scrambling over fallen tree trunks, sometimes finding a way around them. The land had trended downhill to a dry, stony streambed—probably a small creek in wet weather—and then rose again. The forest gradually thinned as the second ridge began to shelve away, sloping downward to the southwest. Finally they stepped out of the woods and into knee-high ryegrass, an acre or more of it. Ahead Dipper saw a line of trees, and he thought he heard the gurgle of water. “This may be the place,” he said. “Is that a creek down there past the willows? I can’t see.”
“Wait.” Pacifica stood still and closed her eyes. “This might be it. It’s changed, I think. The deer used to keep the grass short. If we swerve a little bit right, we should come to the swimming hole. The pond.”
The grass seemed to want to hang onto their ankles, but they waded through it. The slope led gently downward, and ahead they saw a small, kidney-shaped pond across a ten-yard-wide arc of mud a slightly darker brown than café au lait. Scattered over this lay mostly dark-gray river-rounded pebbles.
“What do you think?” Dipper asked. “Is this right?”
Pacifica looked around. “I think this is the clearing, but that pond is really small.”
They crunched out onto the broad muddy flat. “This is sediment,” Dipper said. “It’s been like a hundred years and more since the ghost came here as a live person. Streams change courses. They flood and when the water recedes, it leaves sand and pebbles and junk. Ponds fill in and turn into marshes.”
“I think,” Pacifica said as she looked around, “there used to be a great big fallen tree somewhere over that way.”
They didn’t find it, but they did discover a long rounded mound that might be its remains. “This sort of matches the picture in my mind,” she said. “Help me stamp down some of the grass.”
They went in a circle. If they’d been in a wheat field, what they produced could have been mistaken for a freshman alien’s first crop circle. Not as intricate, but at least round. Pacifica unzipped her big shoulder bag and hauled out a thick picnic blanket patterned in a red, white, and black plaid. He helped her spread it.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I think now we just sit and let me sort of meditate.”
The thick grass gave a satisfying cushion. They sat side by side. Dipper checked the area with one of his meters. Just normal small blips of paranormality. A gnome might have chased a rabbit through here, or some of the colorful red and white mushrooms they could see sprouting beneath the trees might change your height or make you sprout antlers or something. “Nothing worth worrying about,” Dipper told Pacifica. “Want some water? We should stay hydrated.”
“Here.” She had packed two sodas, and she handed one to him.
“Pitt’s Cola,” He said. “I haven’t had one of these in a long time.”
“Yeah, don’t forget there’s a peach pit in every can.”
They popped the tops and sipped, using their teeth to filter out any pits. After a while she said, “You know, that uniform—I was kidding you a little, but really it kinda looks good on you.”
“More practical than handsome,” Dipper said.
“Still. The right girl could take that long zipper pull in her teeth and—shit, I can’t think of stuff like that right now. Sorry. Seriously now. Do I have to, like, say that incantation or whatever to get in touch with the ghost?”
“I don’t think so. Just concentrate. If you want to talk out loud, I won’t say anything to distract you.”
Sitting almost in a lotus position, Pacifica leaned forward, her forearms resting on her thighs. “Here goes. If the ghost that lives in that horrible old room once came here, you can let me know about it. Dipper and I won’t hurt you. If we can help you in any way, let us know how and I promise we’ll try. I get a feeling this place was special to you. If you still have ties to this clearing and the creek and the pond, we’re here. We’re waiting for a sign that you’re with us and you want our help.”
Dipper quietly picked up the soda cans, shook them dry, and then put them back in the bag. Then he sat watching the blonde girl. For minutes Pacifica sat absolutely still, chin down, eyes closed. Dipper stayed a couple of feet from her, one eye on the paranormality meter.
The bar scale began to show a line of green. It pulsed up, down a little, up, down not quite as much. The green line indicated on a scale the amount of paranormal energy in the environment. For Gravity Falls, a reading of 1.0 to 5.5 was normal. The green line had already hit 20 and was still rising.
If it touched 50 it would turn orange—current active paranormality, medium threat. At 65 the orange became a bright red—highly active paranormality, a conscious supernatural entity nearby, heightened danger level. 80 was getting into Bill Cipher territory, and the bar flashed and the device buzzed, fight or flight, banish the threat or get the hell out of there. At 90, which had happened only once when the sky ripped open and monsters came tumbling out, the red pulsed fast, a siren sounded, the danger was at its highest, and the best advice was “kiss your ass goodbye.”
The rising green line hit forty, hovered a hair above that—and stabilized
At that level, he should be able to see something. Dipper’s head swiveled like a radar antenna. He finally noticed a localized disturbance out on the water—a circular ripple pattern, like a whirlpool ripple, and above it a wavering mist in the air.
Whirlwind.
“I think that’s our ghost,” he whispered.
Pacifica didn’t reply.
“I know it’s the ghost,” Dipper said a moment later. “It’s taking shape. I see her. The ghost is a girl.”
At the moment, the girl was a phantom made of mist. The whirlwind had sucked up moisture and had taken form as a naked girl, her body shaped beautifully, narrow waist, wider hips, abundant breasts, all made of vapor. Her features were hard to make out, pale and translucent, but she walked across the surface of the water and onto the land. She moved slowly and with seeming difficulty, as if she had never learned how to do walk, or had lost motor skills. Dipper rose and took out the little vial of consecrated water.
Pacifica reached up to grab his wrist. “She’s not going to harm us,” she said. “I think she wants to talk to me. Back away a little, Dipper.”
He did, but not so far that he couldn’t hit any ghostly threat with a splash of water.
The naked fog-girl came right to Pacifica, stood over her, and then knelt facing her. Though he strained his ears, Dipper could not hear any sound from her. She leaned forward and Pacifica raised her head. The real girl and the phantom one were nose to nose.
Dipper thought they were going to exchange a kiss.
Instead, the mist collapsed, flowing into Pacifica’s body—or it looked like that.
He called out, “Are you okay?”
Pacifica opened her eyes, frowned slightly, and then stood up. “Yes, I’m all right,” she said calmly. “Let’s go back to the house. Ugh, that left my clothes damp. That was kind of a projection of her. She’s not really here. We’ll see her tonight at midnight. We’ll have to try not to be scared of her.”
He helped her fold and replace the towel in the bag. As they started back to the woods, he reached to hold her hand. She did not protest. “What happened?” he asked.
“You’re the expert,” she said. “I don’t really know. She sort of—gave me information? It’s not very clear, except a few things. Her name is Lina. I guess she was Lina Findlestone, not sure. She’s haunting that room because she died there. She died . . . a virgin, I think. Sort of, you know, experienced, but a virgin where boys were concerned. She was about to give her virginity to—some local boy—maybe that was the Eddie I dreamed about. I’m not sure she was in love with him, but she liked him and they had a strong attraction to each other. She was really aching to, you know, do it with him. She says, or at least I think she means, that she can’t leave the house because of . . . unfinished business.”
“That’s the reason a lot of ghosts stick around the Earthly plane,” Dipper said. “Um, we need to bear to the left here. That big rock’s gonna be our landmark. A lot of ghosts start something and never live finish it, and after they pass away, their spirits are restless until someone living can complete what they began. Then they can go on to the afterlife. Am I hearing you right? What’s holding Lina? What did she want to do that she left undone?”
In a flat, trance-like voice, Pacifica said, “She wanted to fuck.”

2
Once a human passes over the invisible threshold, time ceases to have any certain meaning. There is duration and repetition. The ghost may perceive the normal world, not quite as we the living do, but they sort of see it. In most cases the real things and people are to them as ghosts are to us: Walls become translucent, no barrier at all, and the ghost can pass through them. People are pale pastel versions of their physical bodies. Except ghosts also see us as sort of phantoms of heat, usually warmer than our surroundings. Like moths, they are attracted to the life-lights they see still shining.
Sadly, under normal conditions 98% of humans can’t see or sense ghosts. Everyone could if they tried to learn, but learning to see ghosts is difficult. Concentrating enough to see them for any meaningful span of time is ten times as hard. That is why most ghost sightings are fleeting and without purpose. They can’t see us clearly and we can’t see them at all mostly, and people fear the unusual, so we almost never learn from them. It’s also why people regard most people who claim to see ghosts as whackos and nut jobs.
The ghost of Lina remembered her life on Earth. She remembered her grandfather as a terror. She did not worry about him, though. The morning he had his heart attack in his own bedroom in the big house, her spirit was aware of what was happening to him.
She saw the midnight creepers, the knee-high demonic forms, come boiling out of the floor and climbing up onto the bed as old Jeremiah tried to breathe, tried to sit up and call for help, tried to force the invisible enormous weight off his chest.
His body fell back. Something emerged from it, pale, looking like a miniature version of him, nearly white, and naked as he had forced her to remain naked. The swarming dark things seized it, it flailed and screamed in a thin voice, the voice a hornet would have if it could talk—Damn you, get away from me! Let go of me! What are you doing?
The mass of creatures did not seem to even notice Lina hovering above them, witnessing her grandfather’s death. She saw the demonic imps leaping, dancing, and gibbering as they dragged old Jeremiah’s ghost through the wall, down the hallway, to the room of her prison.
Now Jeremiah’s phantom was shrieking, begging for mercy, calling on a God who did not seem interested in hearing him. Lina hesitated only a moment when the infernal creatures dragged their prey through the nailed-up door. She did not want to go back in there. Only yesterday she had escaped by giving in to Death.
Or so it seemed to her. She had died more than a decade earlier, but in the afterlife that was hardly the blink of an eye.
But . . . for her the door opened of its own accord, even though she did not hear the long rusty nails screeching as it did. Unwillingly she drifted in. The door closed behind her.
She could see even in total darkness. She saw her grandfather’s ghost forced against to the far wall, the little demons holding him down. He saw her. “Lina!” he screamed. “Don’t let them drag me to hell! Be a good girl and tell them—”
Good girl? You want someone else, Grandfather. I am a whore.
The last four words she spoke, or thought, struck him visibly, like four black poisoned darts. The demons cheered. Splotches of darkness poured from the dart points and flowed outward from them, staining his white immaterial body, darkening it to claim him for Darkness.
He could not tear loose. He screeched “Godgodgodgod no! Damn you all! Not this, no!”
The voice sank until the last drawn-out word died away. The ghost now sprawled like a nailed-up animal hide on the wooden wall—unless the wailing, raving, conscious part of it really did sink down beneath the pile of demons, down, eternally down, as whatever was the source of the agonized voice seeped to the infernal realm.
In moments the black splotch of Jeremiah’s damned soul grew and spread over the walls, and then claimed the floor and ceiling, of Lina’s former prison. It covered everything like a sheen of corpse-mold.
And it . . . bubbled a little. It was not Jeremiah, exactly, but it contained something of him. It held his taint, his hate, his evil, and his perversion.
And that bit of him, though mindless, still meant to hold Lina in the room, prisoner until the end of time.
Lina’s ghost realized she could no longer pass through these walls. The layer of her grandfather’s madness prevented it, created an imprisoning force stronger than brick or stone of even steel.
As she had been doomed in life so now she was doomed in eternity, she thought, his wickedness had enclosed her and cursed her.
Except—
She was conscious of one tiny spark of light, no larger than a hovering beetle, which floated in that room of damned darkness.
“What is that?” she asked, in thought because she no longer had mouth or tongue or breath to speak.
“Lina.”
She heard with her heart, not her ears.
“Lina, where are you?”
“Eddie?” she asked. “Eddie, have you come for me? Are you truly here?”
“Lina. Lina, where are you?”
“Can’t you hear me?”
“Lina. Lina, where are you?”
This, this, was to be her torment. Always to ache, to yearn for her Eddie. Always to hear his voice. Never to be able to touch him, or see him, or make amends to him, or—
Or make him hear her.
“I am in hell,” she said.
Now, her grandfather, elsewhere and otherwise occupied, would have disagreed. He might have informed her that what she suffered was a kind of Purgatory. It was not like his.
He knew—now he knew—now he was certain, and forever would he be certain, of exactly what hell was.
And that infernal room he had fitted for his granddaughter? He had made it terrible on purpose.
Where he was now, and where he would eternally be—that was a million times worse.
- 8
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