Darkness Falls

Chapter 10: (5-29-2022)

Venessa woke up and was startled. The sun was already out and she had forgotten to check in though she knew her parents were aware that she had gone with Robbie to work on a project.

She helped Robbie take the borrowed glass coffin home which kind of irritated his parents when they saw him with it.

"I needed it. Don't worry I didn't break it." He says. "Look, it's all in one piece."

His parents kind of look over the case then they see it's fine so they talk to each other for a moment before deciding to still ground him for not asking in the first place.

"I'm 17 you can't just..." Robbie starts.

"No butts mister. You live in our house so you have to follow our rules. I don't care if you're 30 if you live with us you can still be grounded." his dad says.

"alright." he grumbles.

They turn toward Venessa. "you'll have to come back in a few days. Robbie needs to think about what he did."

Venessa realized it would be pointless to argue so she nodded and left the funeral home.

Robbie stormed up to his room to loudly play guitar which just made both his parents realize they had made a mistake in grounding him. But what else could they have done? I mean he stole something valuable without asking.

Venessa uses this as an opportunity to make friends with the Pines family. She walks over to the mystery shack and there finds that Stanley had taken the kids on a boat trip. So she hangs out with Ford in his basement lab.

"What are you working on?" Venessa asks.

"I'm studying the mothman you captured." He replies. "How on earth did you manage to get it in that case?"

Venessa shrugs. "We made a fake looking dog outta dog hair. It thought it was real and then we dropped the lid on it."

Ford nods. "Interesting." He writes this down.

She notices his hand at this time. "You have 6 fingers." She says. "Like the handprint on the journals."

Ford nods. "That's because I wrote them." He says. "At the end of last summer we threw all the journals into the bottomless pit and then the kids went home. Me and Stanley went on a sort of adventure and left Soos here to run the place."

"Did you have fun?" She asks.

Ford shrugs. "When we weren't arguing about stupid stuff sure." He pauses for a moment. "But I missed my research. I knew it wasn't complete but it really felt like this place didn't have anything else to offer me."

Venessa sits in a rolling chair.

Ford looks at the beast they had captured. "I really felt like I wanted to be done and put it all to rest, but it calls me back." He glances over at Vanessa. "That's why I was excited for Robbie. I didn't want Dipper to follow in my shoes because the life of a monster researcher is hard and dangerous."

Venessa nods. "That's an understatement." She replies.

Ford puts down his flashlight that he had been using to tease the mothman. "Can I ask you something?"

She shrugs. "I guess."

Ford picks up a book off his desk and Venessa instantly recognizes it. "My drawing book." She says.

Ford nods. "You're drawing the monsters I wrote about, and writing about them. You drew yourself in here." He says flipping to the page where she had drawn a human person with bat wings and fangs.

"That's not me." Venessa says. "It's the bat creature Robbie saw in the forest."

Ford frowns. "I'm not as dumb as I look." He says. "Besides these additional features you drew it and it has the same hair as you."