Chapter 10: The Village Stalker

Katie closed the door behind them, and she and Coraline walked up the stairs.

"Danger?" Coraline said, puzzled.

"Yeah, that was weird," Katie replied as they reached the top of the stairs. The mist from before was now thick all over and reached to Coraline's waist. It was like sinking halfway into a cloud with each step, but without the feeling of getting stuck.

They had just turned left around the corner and towards the front steps when Katie stopped. She cocked her head to one side and frowned. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Coraline said, stopping also.

"Hmm." Katie thought a moment, then smirked. "Just follow my lead." She turned around and began walking back the way they had come.

"The car?" Coraline said, raising one eyebrow.

"Just come on."

Coraline shrugged and followed her sister as Katie flounced along pretending to be completely oblivious. The two girls passed the entrance to the ladies' apartment and jumped down the steps in two bounds, past a dead tree that had fallen down. After a few more paces, Katie sneaked a look behind her.

"Gotcha," she whispered, and quickly circled back behind Coraline.

Coraline turned. "What the—oh!"

"Whoa!"

"You!" Katie yelled, frowning fiercely at Wybie. One of the microscope lenses on his mask had been replaced with a long S-shaped tube that acted as a periscope. Said mask was now in Katie's hand, and Wybie looked very uncomfortable.

"How'd you know he was there?" Coraline asked curiously.

"I heard the clicky of his thingamajig when he rotated it," Katie said, smirking. "I have very good ears."

Wybie cringed.

"Great," Coraline groaned. "The village stalker." She leaned over and punched Wybie's arm. He jumped away, rubbing the spot she'd hit.

"Ow! I—I wasn't stalking you!" he protested. "We're hunting banana slugs."

"Banana slugs?" said Katie.

"Who's 'we'?" said Coraline.

"Mrrrrow." Part of Wybie's coat began to move in a lumpy fashion. The lump skittered up to his neckline and the black cat the girls had met two days earlier poked its head out. It then climbed out of the boy's jacket and curled around his shoulders.

"Ha!" Katie said, laughing. "Your cat's not wild, he's a wuss-puss!"

The cat arched its back and hissed at her.

"What?" said Wybie, annoyed. "He hates to get his feet wet. Geez." He walked around the girls, snatching his mask back from Katie and putting it on.

Katie crossed her arms and looked up and away. "Wuss-puss," she whispered in a sing-song tone.

Coraline frowned at her sister as the cat looked sharply at Katie. Wybie put his mask on and rotated it so the tube was pointed toward the ground. He then pulled a pair of tongs with concave ends out of his pocket and clicked them together. He put his head down so he could look through the mist and began to walk around hunched over. The cat sat straight up on his back.

Coraline crossed her arms. "So, those dolls. Did you make them look like us?"

Wybie was preoccupied. "Oh, no," he said somewhat absently. His voice was muffled by the mask. "I found it that way. Wait—" He straightened up abruptly and turned to face them. The cat barely managed to stay on by curling around the boy's neck.

"Did you say dolls?"

"Um, yeah?" Katie said, rolling her eyes.

Coraline pulled the doll out of her pocket and held it up. "Katie's and this one," she clarified.

"Well, I only found one. That was the one with the blue raincoat."

"It's teal," Katie muttered.

"So where'd this one come from?" Coraline wanted to know, brandishing her doll at him.

"How should I know?" Wybie said, turning back to his slug hunting.

Katie and Coraline stared at each other. Tucking the doll back in her pocket, Coraline brought the conversation back to her question. "So, did you make it look like Katie?"

"Aw, no, I found it that way. It's older than Grandma." The cat leaped off Wybie's back and onto the roof of the car. The boy turned around and stood, gesturing at the imposing pink structure behind the girls. "Old as this house, probably." He bent down again, this time slowly moving towards them. Coraline and Katie could see his head twisting back and forth as he examined the ground.

"Come on," Katie said skeptically. "Long black braids, my sneakers and rubbers, and my teal raincoat?" The cat leaped off the car and headed up the fallen tree towards the roof.

Wybie wasn't paying attention. "Dang!" He leaped up out of the mist, holding something in his tongs. He pushed back his mask, revealing a huge smile. "Check out Slugzilla!" He dramatically held his tongs up rather close to the girls' faces.

What he was holding was a long, fat, yellow-with-brown-patches-on-the-back, slimy slug. The stalks on its head were moving around.

"Eww!" Coraline yelped, jumping back. Katie reached out and pushed the slug away. Wybie's excitement seemed to vanish at their reaction.

"You're just like them," Coraline complained, crossing her arms.

Wybie and Katie looked at the slug. "Huh?" they said together.

"I mean our parents," Coraline clarified, shooting a glare at her sister. "They never listen to us either."

"Uh-huh," said Wybie, not paying attention. "Do you mind?" He thrust a camera at Katie. She reluctantly took it and put it up to her eye.

Wybie then commenced to do a series of silly things with "Slugzilla." First, he held it up with the tongs and pretended to take a bite, chewing and making satisfied noises as though he were actually eating it. Next, he held it up to his nose with his fingers and stretched it out as though he really needed to blow his nose. After that, he held the slug close to the camera, making it look like "Slugzilla" really was Slugzilla—in other words, a slug version of Godzilla—and was terrorizing the town, and pretended to be frightened, even to the point of yelling. Finally, he held one arm up to his face and shiftily looked back and forth. He then dropped his arm and leaned in towards the camera, showing that he now sported a slimy, yellow, moving mustache.

"Eww!" Katie said, laughing. Coraline giggled. Wybie removed the slug from his face and tossed it back behind him. There was a quiet plop as it landed and a small billow of mist sprang up.

Wybie retrieved his camera from Katie and tucked it inside his coat. Then he wrung his hands nervously. "You know, I've never been inside the Pink Palace." He took his mask off and tucked it under his right arm.

"You're kidding," Coraline said, shocked.

"Grandma'd kill me," Wybie responded, turning towards them. "Thinks it's...dangerous or something."

Katie looked back at the house. "Dangerous?" she asked. The cat watched the three children from the roof.

"Well—" Wybie headed toward the front steps, and the girls followed him. They left trails in the mist which were quickly filled in. "She had a twin sister."

"So?" Katie asked as they walked back up the steps, taking them one by one this time.

"When they were kids, Grandma's sister disappeared," the boy continued.

The cat narrowed its eyes as it tracked them.

"She says she was stolen," Wybie finished.

The cat's eyes grew wide and it whisked around to hiss at the window to the girls' room—

Katie's doll was sitting on the window seat and leaning against the window—definitely not where she had left it.

"Stolen?" Coraline said skeptically.

"What do you think?" Katie asked Wybie as the three reached the front steps where he'd left his motorbike.

"Uh, I—I don't know," he stammered uncomfortably. "Maybe she just...ran away." He pulled his bike upright and mounted it. The cat jumped down off the porch roof to land on the boy's back.

"You can't honestly expect us to think you believe that," Katie started to say, when someone else interrupted her.

"Wyborne!" The distant shout was accompanied by the sound of a bell being beaten furiously. Wybie and the cat both looked off into the distance, the boy with a nervous look on his face. He quickly put his mask on.

"Look, I—I gotta go."

"Wait a minute!" Coraline cried, but he was already off. His mask flipped down as he jumped the steps and disappeared in a billow of mist along with the cat.

"Huh," said Katie, as she and Coraline shared a confused look.