This was stupid.

Gideon and Mabel tore down the halls of the Northwest Manor, weaving around tight corners and plunging deeper into the maze of Gideon's home. Gideon knew he'd be able to find his way around when he needed to, but for now they had only one objective: Get away from the ghost.

This was stupid. Of course Mabel would want to talk to them! She'd probably never even dealt with a rampaging ghost bent on destroying everything. Had she ever met any ghosts at all? Just because someone was interested in something didn't mean they had any experience with it. So why would he be so stupid as to assume she could help him?

He should just send her home.

Something rattled behind them. Right. After they lost this ghost.

They skidded around a suit of armor that hung from its supports like a dejected puppet. Okay, Gideon knew where they were. There were some stairs near here, just past that big display case, maybe they could —

Mabel dug her heels in.

The sudden stop yanked on Gideon's arm, throwing him off balance. He pulled his hand away from Mabel's. "What are you doing?" he demanded, massaging his arm.

She stared back at him defiantly. "We're going to talk to it."

Stupid, stupid.

"I already told you, it wants me dead. What more do you need to ask it?!"

"Maybe we can reason with it!"

"Do you want it to kill me, Pines?"

"Do you really want to ask me that question?" she shot back.

Touché.

"Listen," Gideon tried, "some beings can't be reasoned with."

"Do you think I don't know that?" Mabel demanded. "You're not the only one who's come up against creatures like this!"

"Well, you clearly don't have the experience I thought you did if you think the best way to stop a rampaging ghost is to talk to it!"

Mabel went quiet. The color seeped away from her face.

"What?" Gideon looked around for signs of the ghost. Nothing. What was wrong?

He looked back at Mabel. She was staring intently at the floor.

"Mabel? What is it?"

She didn't say anything.

What was with her? They didn't have time for this.

"Mabel, we've got to go," he said gently.

"Maybe it's scared."

Her voice was cracked and quiet. Her eyes never left the carpet patterns on the floor.

"What do you mean?"

She wouldn't continue.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. You got yourself into this mess, Northwest.

"Listen, Mabel. We're not talking to the ghost. And if I have to levitate you with my amulet to stop you, I will."

Her head snapped up, and she stared at him with wide eyes. He flinched a little when he saw that they were wet. "You wouldn't dare," she whispered. She sounded horrified.

"I would if it meant saving your life."

"Saving your life."

"Mabel, come on; let's just go!"

The suit of armor moved.

It perked up and leaned away from its supports. Metal clanked against metal as the arms flopped against the walls and the body of the armor. An unearthly glow sprang up behind the visor.

"That's it," Gideon said. He put his hand on his amulet, and it glowed a faint blue.

That snapped Mabel out of it. "No!"

"Mabel, we have to run!"

The armor rattled.

"Don't you dare use that thing on me!"

"Mabel, it's going to attack us!"

The rattling was deafening. Gideon's hand tightened around his amulet. It flared up.

"No!" Mabel leapt forward to tackle Gideon. He willed her to freeze where she stood.

Mabel barreled into him.

One moment Gideon was on his feet. The next he was tumbling around on the carpet, light and sound cascading around him in a dizzying mess. Light flashed, sound swirled, and then he hit something hard that gave way beneath him and sent him onto the cold, hard ground.

The cold, hard. . . uncarpeted ground.

Gideon lay there discombobulated for a few moments before finally realizing he was laying on the ground with Mabel on top of him. He scrambled out from under her and got shakily to his feet, turning towards the only light source left: a faint yellow glow that filtered through what looked like a thick curtain. There was a horrendous scraping noise, and as Gideon watched, the light disappeared.

Plunging them into darkness.

"Where are we?" came Mabel's panicked voice a second later. "Gideon?"

"Right here," he said. "We. . . we fell through a tapestry, I think."

"Like. . . like a secret passage?"

"Yes." But this wasn't where the passage to the Order headquarters was located. So. . . where were they?

Gideon lit up his amulet.

It flared to life like a light blue candle. Mabel's face, a few feet away, appeared in its ghastly glow. Gideon couldn't tell if she looked pale because of the light or because she was afraid. Probably both.

"Well, at least that's still working," Gideon muttered. "Why didn't you freeze her?"

"Are you talking to your amulet?" Mabel asked tentatively.

"I tried to freeze you and it didn't work," he snapped at her.

"Well, good! You shouldn't use that on people!"

Gideon glared at her for a moment before breaking his gaze away and stomping over to the entrance. Yep, it was a tapestry, all right. He took his gloves off and ran his hands along the thick, coarse material, trying to find to the gap between the two that would take them back out to the hallway. It hardly moved under his touch. He pushed on it.

There was something hard behind it.

"Great. They trapped us." Gideon stepped back and tried to levitate the object. But he couldn't see it, so he couldn't move it. With a frustrated growl, he changed his focus to the tapestry in order to move it out of the way.

Nothing happened.

"Oh, come on!" he exclaimed.

"Wh-why isn't it working?" Mabel asked.

He threw her a scathing look over his shoulder. "Oh, now you want it to work."

She flushed and looked away.

He sighed and dropped his hand from his amulet. "My guess is the ghosts' energy is interfering with it."

"It can do that?"

"It's gone sort of haywire when I've worked with ghosts before — but nothing too serious. Nothing this powerful."

These ghosts were a lot more dangerous than Gideon had originally estimated. And he'd brought Mabel right to them.

Stupid.

He put his gloves back on and threw his shoulder against the tapestry, trying to push the block away with brute force. It didn't budge. "Come help me," he told Mabel.

She joined him, but he caught the doubtful look on her face. They both pushed, giving it their full weight, their feet sliding across the stone floor. It was to no avail.

Mabel stopped pushing. "M-maybe there's another way out," she said. "At least your amulet is still giving off light."

Gideon let out a pent-up breath. "Right. Let's look around." This could be a passage leading halfway across town, for all he knew. But it seemed their best option. "Stay close to me and in the light. We can't get separated."

"Got you there," Mabel said, giving a wary look to the darkness beyond the blue light of the amulet.

Gideon turned and started following the right wall, holding his hand out so that his fingers brushed against it as he walked. It was only a minute or two before they reached a corner and had to turn left. Then right. Then right again. Then left again.

"What's that on the ground?" Mabel asked. Her quiet voice echoed dully.

Gideon followed her gaze. Chunks of jagged rock littered the ground, which looked to be exposed dirt in the center of the room rather than the bare stone Gideon and Mabel were walking on.

"I don't know," he said, but kept walking.

They traversed two long stretches of wall, turned left twice, and walked a little ways further before the wall beneath Gideon's fingers changed. They were back at the tapestry.

"It's a room," he said with a grimace. "One exit."

"No exits," Mabel whispered.

Gideon decided not to think about that. "The question is, why didn't I know about this?"

Mabel looked at him incredulously. "No, the question is, how do we get out!"

She turned around and started banging on whatever was blocking the exit. The sound was muffled by the tapestry. "Help! Help us; we're trapped!"

Gideon winced. He'd thought Dipper was the only loud one. Must be a Pines thing.

"Help! Please, someone!"

"That's not going to help, Pines," Gideon said.

She turned on him. "Why not? Don't you have a bajillion servants running around?"

"Yes, but they're all occupied elsewhere." Getting ready for the Northwest Gala. Nobody would be coming this deep into the mansion's halls tonight, so the servants wouldn't be cleaning back here.

Mabel started taking deep, obnoxiously loud breaths, like she was trying to calm herself. "Fine. Fine. We'll just wait until the ghostly energy calms down and you can move that thing with your amulet. It's fine." She leaned against the wall next to the tapestry and slid to the floor, where she put her head back and took more deep breaths.

Gideon just stood there, keeping his amulet steady, hoping the ghostly energy wouldn't surge so much that its light would also fail.

Mabel's loud breathing stopped. She looked up at Gideon. "Wait, what do you mean, 'Why didn't I know about this'? Are there other secret passages around here?"

Gideon didn't answer. Mabel's eyes lit up.

Great. He'd have to keep an eye on her when they got out of here.

"Let's explore the middle of the room," he said to distract her. "Where those stone bits were."

She got to her feet and took one big breath. "Okay."

They made their way slowly to the center of the room, watching their step as best they could in the light of the amulet. The stone floor gave way suddenly to dirt, which luckily was caked enough that it didn't cling to Gideon's shoes. The pieces of stone were everywhere. Some were half buried in the dirt; others rose up like jagged mountains; still others were littered among the rest, lying forlornly in the dirt. Pieces of plaster and wood and the occasional brick intermingled with it all.

"It's like they just stopped construction around here," Mabel said. She craned her neck to look up at the ceiling. Gideon glanced up to see exposed pipes and infrastructure.

"And then walled it off," he finished. The walls they'd followed were very firm, deliberate brick barriers.

"Why?" Mabel asked. She knelt down and picked up a piece of stone. Gideon wrinkled his nose — did she have any idea what might be on that?

"It's jagged at the edges, but completely smooth in the center," she said, turning it over in her hands. "Like it was weathered. . . and then hit by a sledgehammer."

"Huh," Gideon said, not particularly interested. He tried to levitate the stone with his amulet. Still nothing.

They were relatively quiet for a minute, with Mabel reaching out and examining stone fragments and muttering to herself and Gideon rubbing his amulet and trying to make it work and growling to himself. Surely the ghosts were gone by now? There didn't seem to be any ghostly activity in here. So why wasn't the dumb amulet doing anything more than acting as a glorified nightlight?

"Gideon," Mabel said suddenly, sounding excited. "Gideon, there's writing on this one. Some of them have had weird markings, but I think this one is in English." She rubbed at it with her sleeve. "Let me see the light."

Gideon moved closer to her and leaned over to look.

Mabel squinted down at the larger-than-normal piece of stone cradled in her arms. Her fingers traced the faded letters. "S. . . T. . . I. . . N. . . P. . . is that a K? No, it's an E. . . and then an A. . ." She frowned. "That's it."

"Stinpea," Gideon said out loud. "Nonsense."

"Yeah, but I think there's a space in after the T and the N," Mabel said. "So. . . st in pea. Well, 'in' is a word." She set the slab down. "Here, help me look for more with writing."

"No thank you," Gideon said.

Mabel rolled her eyes at him and then grabbed the next nearby fragment. "Aha!" she said after a bit. "Here's another one. This one just has an O. . . no, a C. . . and an E. C and E. Cest in pea? No. . . St in p—"

She stopped. She put the stone down gingerly on the ground. She looked up at Gideon with wide, fearful eyes.

He stared back at her with narrow, grim ones.

They said it together: Mabel in a whisper, Gideon in a growl.

"Rest in peace."