Welcome to Act 3 of Prenderghast Puzzle—which, strangely enough, is being uploaded before Act 2! While the Acts all share a crossover world, this one is where all the hints from the other Acts bear fruit, and the characters from different stories really take effect. Along with the characters from ParaNorman, individuals and aspects from both the book and movie versions of Coraline will feature heavily in this act (Coraline's personality, in particular, is a combination of her movie and book persona). There are also a bunch of Easter egg references to other series if you can find them—one in particular, a favorite series of mine, will be reoccurring in the background quite a lot (though it's not necessary to have knowledge of it to enjoy the story). In fact, there's already enough information in this prologue to name the series.
An early warning: this story will be jumping between people and times almost every chapter. The chapters will be categorized by who the chapter is about, so readers can either choose to read in a linear fashion and follow one person's story at a time, or read the chapters as they are presented and solve the non-chronologic mystery piece-wise (once again, "puzzle.")
Prenderghast Puzzle, Act 3: Filling in the Holes
By Emori Loul
There is a house down on Court Street. It has been there since the middle of the second World War. Up until a year ago, adolescents went there to smoke, paint graffiti, and do other less-than-reputable activities.
The address of this house is peculiar. It doesn't have a number. It doesn't need one.
There is only one house down on Court Street.
If you were to ask around, the adults would supplement any questions with the following story: a rich old widowed woman, wishing to help her daughter escape the horrors of the war in Europe, bought the land in the Fall of 1942, and a house was completed the following Spring. For some reason or another, however, the daughter never moved in, and the deed instead went to another family who lived there until the mid-eighties, and then the house was left abandoned.
If the adults in question were in the spirit of tourism, they may have also told you that the reason for this abandonment was because of a curse of vague specification and origin. It really depends on who you asked.
But ask the children and the teens—it is they who know the house best.
The house has been part of childhood lore in its neighborhood for other reasons than just less-than-reputable activities. The local tourist industry calls it the Witch's Keep to keep with the theme of the town—but every child in the neighborhood knows it as Creeper Castle.
If, instead of an adult, you were to ask an adolescent about the house, you may be lucky enough to watch said adolescent pale and show genuine discomfort that briefly overrides a cool facade. Their voice may grow softer, their body language more subdued, and you may be lucky enough to hear one of the very few true legends about the town—one of the ones the adults like to pretend don't exist.
At first the story seems random. Out of place. This is a town known for witch trials; it is not a town of modern tragedies. The idea of such horrors inhabiting a relatively young house is ridiculous. The idea of any family allowing this is equally so.
But there is a reason why—despite being empty of people, having no security system and being filled with expensive antiques—the house has never been robbed.
If you manage to corner this adolescent, and get lucky—if he or she is one of those adolescents, one of the rare ones that actually know more about the house than just what local legend claims dwells inside—then you may hear tales beyond just the structure.
It is only then that you may here about the Conways down on Court Street.
Prologue: Present Piece
December 23rd, 2013
The Conway House was not nearly as well-kept as she expected it to be.
There were shudders falling off their ledges, browning ivy protruding in and out of broken windows, and splotches of faded and new graffiti covering the once-smooth stone of the southern wall. The roof was a multicolored patch of missing or mossy shingles and the grounds were unkempt, grass either totally dead or taken over by what looked like a single, half-frozen pumpkin plant that had slowly diffused over the lawn from its original epicenter near the broken, rusting gate. It was, in short, ramshackle and visibly falling apart.
Though she had only ever realistically knew her great-grandmother through the eyes of a couple books and aging friends, she had a feeling the old woman would be horrified at the idea of one of their family's proud foreign properties in such a state.
No one could live inside the Conway house right now, at least. No wonder Miss Lovely had insisted on getting a hotel room.
But the girl standing on the broken brick path supposed every person had to start a task somewhere. It was now her duty to maintain the family estate, after all, and with her grandmother's passing, that once again included one unspeakably neglected manor that people with names like 'Avlin' and 'Pug'* had apparently once considered their own stomping ground, if their lovely paintings along the side of the house were anything to go by.
It wasn't even easy to get into the place, let alone attempt to fix it up. This was her first time inside the grounds, as the gate had rusted shut long ago and she'd had to hire a man to cut through it before she could enter—and then, of course, there were the pumpkins, which for some reason were still present long after the first frost. She had nearly broken her ankles trying to weave in and out of the bulbous vegetables and uneven bricks that now made up the once-elegant pathway.
She briefly considered hunting down this 'Avlin' and 'Pug.' Surely they knew an easier way in.
The man who'd cut through the gate was still behind her, and she turned to see him gazing, alarmed, probably wondering how he was supposed to safely traverse the makeshift pumpkin patch while clutching something that could cut through iron and most certainly through bone. It didn't help that he was rather top-heavy.
"Just cut them, too, then."
He looked at her. She shrugged, then turned around again, and the sound of a buzzing saw met her ears once more as she did so.
She noticed, as one does when they're suffering from a combination of impatience and boredom, that the sky was a shade paler here than she'd ever seen anywhere else. The pinnacle of the cloudless blue was not so much blue as opal-like infinite emptiness, and the rims of the world around her were the ashen, bitter color of the sky before the snow.
Hearing the buzz grow louder and closer and not wishing to get in the way, the girl took a few steps more towards the ruin, and her view of the sky was blocked by gaping, glassless windows and nimble plant limbs, cone spires and lightning rods. Miss Lovely had said that houses had personalities, but this house certainly didn't appear to, unless 'near death' could be considered a personality trait.
Such a pity. From the outside, the house appeared to be deceased before ever acquiring a chance at life. But the girl suspected differently of the inside.
That was why she was there, after all.
The buzzing stopped, and the man pulled himself up and stood next to her, dwarfing her, but only in stature. He cleared his throat.
She looked at him. "Yes?"
"Uh," he said, rather abashedly, "this… I mean, kid… this' really your house?"
She blinked, looking for all the world as though the question was strange. "Yes, of course it is. Why?"
He again looked wordless, but nevertheless he tried. "It's jus'… well, it didn' seem like the kinda house to have an owner."
She smiled at him, but the eyes seemed to come from a great distance away, and the smile looked as if made of stone. "I assure you, Mr. Downe, that despite how empty it appears or how very little you can see of it, every house has an owner. And when I am eighteen, I will own this. Right now the deed is being held by my guardian, but she has given me her permission to be here, so no worries."
"But… it's…"
"Yes?"
The man was silent once more.
The girl, however, continued to smile. "Please open the door, Mr. Downe. And as I will probably be distracted, I thank you early for the trouble you've gone through. The money has already been given to your landscaping company."
The man said no more to her, but walked up to the stone porch, up to the thick, colossal set of doors, and cut through the rusted metal bolt.
Behind him, the smile turned sad.
"I must say, it's so much easier to walk the path with without those Jack faces. Never much liked them."
So said Miss Lovely as she approached the child, barely a teenager, sitting on the front steps and cradling a small pumpkin in her hands.
"Are you sure that's not because they remind you of someone?" responded the girl in her quick and cheeky way, lifting her own member of the offending 'they' from her lap and presenting it teasingly.
"I'm sure it is because they remind me of someone," replied the older woman, scowling at the pumpkin. "And if that idiotic someone would stop throwing his head at party guests, I probably wouldn't mind them much at all."
"No, you'd find some other vegetable to hate."
"Too right."
The girl placed her pumpkin down before standing from her spot on the stairs and brushing herself off. "Mr. Downe finished up at ten this morning," she said, reaching down and picking up her possession again. "I've been waiting for you all day."
"Your mother wanted to introduce me to a Missus Sandra Babcock—a college friend of hers, I think she said." The woman glanced down at the handle on the door. It was hideously rusted, she noted, but the mechanism bolting the two doors was cut clean through. "In all honestly, I think she was just trying to keep me away from here."
"Mom did say she had some friends around here." The girl said quietly. Miss Lovely watched as she unconsciously began cleaving holes in her pumpkin's skin with her nails, before the girl looked up and said, in her more common, nosy manner, "So? Why'd a simple meet-and-greet take so long? You only went to get breakfast."
"I discovered something I thought you would want to take note of, though I didn't dare point it out in front of your mother."
Miss Lovely pushed on the front doors with both hands, and they creaked, groaned, and even cracked under the pressure, but eventually they did open. Ducking under her spread arms, Miss Lovely's charge unceremoniously skipped her way around a loose floorboard and into the foyer.
"Too strange?" the girl called behind her.
The elder of the two shook her head, though the girl wasn't looking behind at her.
"Too Throckmorton."
The girl paused from her debris hopping, finally turning to face her guardian.
"They're related?"
"Not directly—but circumstantially, at least."
"And they never came here?"
"I'm not sure they knew it themselves, anymore. That's howthese things work, after all."
The girl seemed to think about this, then, as if abandoning the current conversation, began pacing the hall. Agate columns shot up from a filthy blackened floor all the way down the hall like soldiers standing in salute to the new lady of the house, and suddenly Miss Lovely felt as if she were back in the temple at Thebes with the late Lady Theo. Lost in her mental memoirs, she barely took note as her charge walked over to the nearest double-doors and opened one, cradling her pumpkin in her unused arm.
The girl shrieked as a torrent of water gushed out past her legs, and Miss Lovely herself, still further up the hall, had to step upon the base of a nearby marbled pillar to avoid the previously-stagnant filth. Meanwhile, the girl fell, sputtering, as the water slowed.
"What is this!?"
Deciding her charge was more important than her shoes, Miss Lovely stepped off the pillar base and walked over to the girl, helping her up. "I would say they had a Conservatory built, but it seems something went wrong. It certainly needs a lot of fixing."
Sitting up in the water and glaring, the girl looked down at the muddy possession in her hands before throwing it as far as she could down the rest of the darkened hallway.
"Like a lot of things lately, then."
*Kudos to you if you noticed the joke. Also, for the record, Pug is one of Alvin's accomplices mentioned in the articles of the Blithe Hollow Bugle, which were posted on the film's promotional website while it was running in theaters. If you'd like to read them yourself, I'm sure there are some copies floating around Tumblr still.
And no, the girl in this prologue is not an original character. You'll figure it out eventually. Miss Lovely is an original, though she's not really that important, just a sassy assistant.