This was incredibly hard to write for some reason. It just didn't want to get written, which unfortunately put everything else on pause. The promised two disagreeable women - well, one's here, the other's been moved to the next stuk due to the chapter otherwise not being succinct.
Stuk 10: Around the Bush
June 24th, 2013
The collection of her great uncle's notes was a no-go. Apparently, the Observatory was now off-limits for the time being. She truly was beginning to suspect someone was out to stop her.
That morning, after getting dressed, Coraline headed down to the breakfast room where Miss Lovely awaited her with notifications that the Observatory telescope was now being renovated—though the building was routinely cleaned, the telescope was never used and thus hadn't received regular maintenance. It was now in the process of being repaired, and so the building was being emptied of people due to the scale of the job.
As the Observatory was one of the few things her mother hadn't used her Medusa impression on, Coraline wished her mother had come down to breakfast just so she could see her reaction and possibly get more information. As it was, she hadn't seen her mother for two days. Coraline supposed she was having food brought up to her by one of the maids.
It wasn't like her mother to coop herself up—she didn't like dirt or gardening, but she wasn't adverse to the outdoors, and there were plenty of other rooms in the house if she wished for alone time. But she had picked the guest bedroom with the plainest decoration and the least furniture, placed her things in there and huddled up (the room, interestingly enough, was a disused servants' room a floor apart from literally everyone else's in the manor—except for Miss Lovely's, which was across the hall).
As it was one of the rare days Mel and Miss Lovely were not leaving to discuss finances, Coraline had gone up to try to persuade her mother to come out (as well as ask her why exactly her dad couldn't have come here with them, since apparently they had the money), but she seemed insistent that she had 'work to do, Coraline—lots of work' and the door stayed shut between them.
So, since her mother was sulking and Miss Lovely was off running something or other, Coraline had spirited away a shop vac from the nearest utility closet and dragged it up the stairs to her little attic room—which definitely needed a little cleaning.
She was careful to indiscriminately vacuum the larger room at the top of the stairs, as well as the hallway and the study-like room she had found. If she wasn't supposed to have found this place (yet) and she didn't vacuum, they'd notice her footprints, and it would draw attention especially to the study-like room at the end of the hall, where most of her footprints led. At least if she vacuumed, they might conclude that someone had been up there from the lack of dust, but they wouldn't be able to find out who or what they were doing.
After vacuuming the hallway she'd gotten bored, and went downstairs to make an obnoxious amount of noise up and down the hallway her mother was staying in, hoping to provoke her out. When that didn't work, she wandered the rooms around her mother's, exclaiming loudly about stupidly insignificant details she noticed.
Getting bored of that again, Coraline shot upstairs to the office-like room and took pictures of the jars on the shelf, then ran down to the medicine room, hoping to compare and identify some of the strange things in the jars. It didn't work, but at least she now knew they weren't typical medicine jars. She sent the pictures to Wybie to see if he could figure out anything.
Loitering around the rooms near her mother's again, she began to notice how some of them were shaped strangely. The disused servants' sewing room, for instance, had a large closet protruding from the wall—as it was one of the corner rooms, there was no room for intrusive closets—but the inside of the closet was far smaller than the protrusion would suggest. Worse still, some rooms didn't seem to fit with the upper floor's rectangular shape. Though it was a corner room as well, the Birchwood Library had curving sides, with windows even in the curved corners, each wall being equally thin—which didn't make sense, as it appeared to have a 90° sharp corner from the outside.
Coraline was about to search the Sewing Room closet when she heard Miss Lovely calling for her.
"Yes?" she called back.
"It's lunch time; I thought you'd want me to come get you," Miss Lovely appeared in the sewing room's doorway, raising her eyebrows. "Exploring?"
Coraline grinned. "It's a big house, I'm not used to so much unused space. Is mom eating with us?"
Miss Lovely's jaw set, her eyes hardening. "No, I don't think she will."
Coraline nodded as if she accepted this information, walking with Miss Lovely out of the room and down the stairs.
"Have you met my mom before, Miss Lovely?" Coraline asked while walking, trying to sound casual. At the older woman's look, she added, "Before this visit, I mean."
"If you consider the brief meetings between acquaintances as 'having met,' then yes, she and I have met before," Miss Lovely answered, her eyes focused in front of her.
"Acquaintances? So it was a coincidence, you meeting before? Even though you worked for my Nana?"
The woman seemed to bit her lip, then sighed. "Your mother used to live here, when she was very young."
"I thought so," Coraline said to herself in a satisfied tone. Raising her voice for the other to hear, she added: "She seemed too familiar with this place, when we arrived."
Miss Lovely actually scoffed. "Familiar is one way to put it."
They turned from the flight of stairs they had just descended to walk down the grand staircase, Coraline trailing slightly after Miss Lovely—the woman had hit her stride, her pace controlled, perhaps overly so, and Coraline was having trouble keeping up. Running slightly, she spoke up when she finally matched speed with Miss Lovely again.
"But you weren't here when she lived here, were you?"
The woman stopped mid-stride in the hallway off the Entrance Hall, and Coraline almost slid trying to match her movements.
The woman stared at her, deep brown, shimmering, unreadable eyes boring out of her slightly green-shining face. "…no, no I wasn't."
Coraline maintained an innocently inquisitive look. "When did you meet her, then?"
Miss Lovely began to move again, more slowly, her eyes fixed on Coraline as they walked. "Your mother visited a few years ago—before you were born, of course. I had just been hired to take care of duties Mistress Theodosia, in her state, could no longer preform. Unfortunately," Miss Lovely's voice seemed to go flat, "Your mother caused quite the scene. She ruined Mistress Theo's party, crashing through the front doors and screaming to anybody who would listen about her grandmother being a witch. At first, most people thought it was a laugh, but when she didn't stop people began to grow uncomfortable with her presence and left."
Coraline blinked blankly as Miss Lovely held the door to the Great Room open for her to enter. She, honest to goodness, could not imagine her mother ever causing such a scene. Mel Jones wasn't the type to willingly stick out; she was more the type to roll her eyes at Coraline for wanting strangely-colored gloves when everyone else in school wore grey.
Walking over to the tiny alcove that had been set up for their small lunch, Coraline couldn't process exactly how all these strange pieces fit together.
It was bizarre.
Coraline asked again at lunch if the Observatory finished its maintenance yet, but her answer—as expected—was no. If she didn't get a time estimate before dinner of exactly how long she was going to have to wait to go get those notes, Coraline was just going to sneak out of the house and into the Observatory at night.
For the rest of the day, she amused herself by searching for other strangely-shaped rooms in other parts of the house. The Great Room, for instance, had an area protruding from the wall that was far too long to be the hallway on the other side. The Study (the actual one, not the unofficial one in the attic) had a similarly strange addition. Coraline wasn't even going to get started on the basement—despite what Miss Lovely had said, it looked less like the former cellar of a chapel and more like M.C. Escher's attempting to be subtle with his surrealism.
She wasn't stupid—she knew what strange architecture meant, especially in old houses.
After yet another attempt to get her mother out of her room, Coraline found a door in the supply closet.
She'd been crawling on her hands and knees when she found a crack in the wall by the floor. It was a rather small closet, after all, and no longer used for sewing materials but instead for coats, so it was difficult to stand up and easier to crawl (she'd learned that after knocking three heavy fur coats off their hangers and onto her head). It wasn't a messy, vein-like crack, but instead straight and deliberate.
Thankfully, it appeared to be a normal door—though admittedly it was covered with shelves to blend in with the wall. There were no glowing spiral tunnels, no spectacular mirror worlds, and no spider demons (well, she hoped). Still, she wasn't stupid enough to just head in there without a care in the world. For one, she didn't have a light, and it was blinding, and for another, it appeared to just be a long, empty drop—and she couldn't see a ladder. She leaned over the edge that was the closet floor, trying to see what was down there, but the bottom was an empty white, with no detail or visible end.
She tried to crawl away from the edge and turn around, but her knees slipped on those blasted fur coats, and down she went.
AN: A lot of hints in this chapter, though sadly nothing interesting yet (well, until the end). I really like old houses, and secret passages are pretty much a guarantee within them—if only to prevent the owner from getting assassinated. There are secret passages on every floor of the Louvé except the ground floor—since, after all, there are viable exits all over the ground floor, and a secret passage there could be easily found and used against the owners by a guest. Many of these passages interlock, so if you find one, you could (theoretically) find them all - therefore, putting one so near the guests is too dangerous a mistake to make.
Mel seems like kind of an ostrich-headed jerk here, but she has her reasons and truly does care. Coraline's gloves, for instance, are a good example of that.
*The stuk title, Around the Bush, is shorthand for Beating Around the Bush, and is yet another poke at me dragging my feet when it comes to excitement. Then again, the beginning of the Coraline had the same kind of thing going on, what with Coraline just wandering around and exploring, so I feel slightly justified. And this is necessary.
Next Time, an update in Act 1: we return to 1712 Blithe Hollow, after leaving it in the throes of a witch hunt.