Puppets of Fate

Chapter 4

Dipper was paralysed. Horrified.

When "Bipper" had let himself fall, Dipper had tried to reach for his body. But he wasn't quick enough. He could do nothing more than hear the demon's laughter as he escaped from the body just before impact and disappeared.

Then came the loud sound of his body's bones breaking as it hit the ground.

Dipper had been helpless. He could only stare the corpse lying in front of him, covered in bruises, covered in blood..

His own corpse.

"No, no, no, no! This isn't happening, this isn't happening!"

He kept repeating those words again and again like a broken record. He started panicking, unable to calm himself, to say anything else

He had tried to get back into his body. But it wouldn't work. He couldn't revive it.

After an hour spent desperately trying, he finally realised it was hopeless.

He was dead.

As he finally gave up, he just stood there, paralysed in front of his corpse. He didn't know what to do. He couldn't look away.

Hours passed until his body was found by Nate and Lee walking nearby. He hadn't moved. Neither when the police arrived.

He wasn't even sure he was staring his body anymore. But he really couldn't bring himself to look away.

It wasn't until his body was taken away that finally, he was able to break free of this state. He had stayed several hours without moving an inch. Severals questions struck his mind:

What am I going to do now?

What's going to happen to me?

Aren't I dead? Why am I still here now?

Am I a ghost now?

How will I explain this to the others?

He felt his heart ache as he realised: his friends...How would they react to him being dead? and what and most importantly...what about his family? His parents, his great uncle...His sister...?

Stan and Mabel must had been worried sick not to see him return home last night, and now, they were going to learn that he was dead.

The strangest thing was that he didn't feel dead. But without a body, he wasn't alive. So he felt split between the two, unable to decide which was right to describe his current state.

Was it how ghost felt? Unable to tell whether they were alive or not?

There had to be a way to fix this, and he had to find it fast. Everything had turned out for the worst, but maybe, if he felt more alive than dead, that there might still be a hope to save himself? But how was he to do that? The journal had burned.

He could still see it all. The fire, the theater, his sister's play, ruined...

The puppets! If one of them had survived, he could be able to reach Mabel, Stan or even Soos, and tell them that he wasn't gone and that he needed help. It wasn't much, but it was worth the try.

Without any other idea in mind, he left the water tower, too afraid to be haunted by the memory of Bill throwing his body and the smoke from the fire to look back...

As frustrated as he was to not have a body, Dipper had to admit it was slightly more fast that walking on foot. In just a few minutes, he had reached his destination. He entered the theater. It felt uneasy. The seats, the curtains, all the accessories they had spent the week to work on, burnt to ashes.