Truly desperate men were easy to convince of anything, even the truth. Mr Elachi, once he had been told who the trio were and what they were after, practically fell over himself to give them what they needed.
"Did the police get in touch with you?" he asked nervously, as he led them through the ground floor. "I reported her missing only yesterday."
"We weren't told by the police, Mr Elachi. We have our own resources." Coraline kept pace with the man, her shotgun case swinging from one hand. "And we can get your daughter back, I swear." Wybie and Maria were only a few steps behind, unobtrusively checking their pistols.
"She is all I have left of her mother," said the man, his voice breaking. "If you can, I will forever be in your debt."
They came to an open door leading into a cramped storage room. Between stacked plastic crates and fluttering shadows, Coraline squinted past at the walls. Elachi moved past her and pulled aside one stack, revealing a waist-high door set into the wall, the painted edges broken and flaking.
"This is what you want?" asked Elachi, puzzled.
"It's a perfect candidate," said Coraline, kneeling down to brush the surface. "Have you ever checked it before?"
"Once, when I first bought the hotel. The way was bricked shut."
"Does it have a key?"
Still puzzled, his eyes betraying reluctant scepticism, Elachi drew out a ring of keys from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, picking out a particularly large and rusty one. Coraline took it and tested it in the door.
With a creak, it swung upon, spilling open a long, dark stretch of tunnel. The walls and floor were rough, hewn from dark, pitted stone, and spider-web patterns of what looked like luminescent moss ran along them. From within, there came the faint scent of honeysuckle.
Elachi's jaw dropped.
It dropped further when Coraline opened her shotgun case and drew out the weapon, a sleek, pump-action gun of blued steel. Wybie and Maria had their own respective pistols ready, a heavy Colt Automatic and a matte-dark Smith & Wesson.
"What is tha … how did it … who …?" Articulation was hard upon first encountering the Sur-real. Coraline could sympathise with Elachi.
"Stay here, sir. We'll be back soon." She got down on her hands and knees and began to crawl through, keeping the shotgun close to her body.
Elachi backed away to give them room, his face taut and unsettled. "God go with you."
"If he likes," commented Wybie, getting down on his hands and knees to follow Coraline. Maria shot a remonstrating look at his back and followed.
There was a room through the door at the end of the tunnel.
It was an echo of the apartment building lobby, similar in shape and layout. A long wooden desk faced a much-diminished front door. To the right in the wall behind the desk, a door led to the rest of the ground floor. To the left, a wide staircase rose, and made a right turn at a large landing. Striped carpets ran through the centre of the linoleum floor, and plants sat atop battered coffee tables.
But when Coraline unlocked the door at the end of the tunnel, releasing her into this Sur-real realm, there the similarities ended. The atmosphere was dark and cold, and dust and fingers of lichen spread over many of the surfaces. The wooden desk was splintered and choked over with cobwebs, its wood blue with age and peeling paint. The door to the right was barricaded shut with lengths of two-by-four. The carpets on the floor were mere rags loosely connected by fraying strands. Some plants had fallen from their shattered tables and were spilled in a pool of dirt on the floor, the few that remained in their pots were shrivelled and pale, their leaves rustling slightly in some unfelt wind. The great staircase was narrower and cast into shadow, its angles askew. The walls were made from the same cracked, dull, dark blue wood as the desk, made into thin planks between which ragged rents ran. Between those gaps, a cold light spilled in from the outer night sky.
And when Coraline stood up and glimpsed the figure behind the desk, she swore and almost jumped backwards.
"What? What is it …shit!" exclaimed Wybie, scrabbling faster out of the tunnel and grabbing for his pistol, catching sight of the same figure. Maria was close on his heels, and her face shot through with alarm when she saw it.
It was a human-sized doll, its skin made from delicate, pale porcelain, clad in a lacy dress speckled with mould. Its hands were by its sides, palms facing in. Golden lengths of hair fell over its head, over fake red cheeks and over a mouth painted into a glassy smile.
It was hung from a noose, the end of which was tied around the stair banister. The red shoes of the doll swung two feet above the ground.
"It's … oh, thank heavens, it's just a doll," said Maria, clearly rattled, her hand on her gun. The doll smiled at them in silence. Coraline cocked her shotgun.
"Look at its eyes," she said.
Maria and Wybie did so.
Over one eye, there was sewn a large silver button, threaded through with dark tarnish. The other eye was an empty space, a hollow socket which let in no light.
"There's definitely a horla," said Wybie. "That's their calling card."
Coraline pulled her eyes away from the swinging doll, and to the staircase.
There was no sound from upstairs, the only noise in the entire hotel the sound of the rustling plants and the creak of floorboards.
"I take point," said Coraline quietly. "Advance and cover me. Room by room search, until something tries to take us on."
There was then a sudden rattle from the doll, the sound of air passing through a corpse' lungs, and Coraline span on her heel faster than thought to face it, her gun ready. The doll twisted on its rope, swinging until it faced her. Its expression was blank and glassy, its painted teeth shining.
"Stormcrow…" it hissed, a whisper of breath between lips that twitched in a facsimile of movement. "…Futile. Hopeless. Run away. Run far away. You will die. The child is ours."
Coraline regarded it, her eyes like chips of ice. She stepped closer, the shotgun still levelled. Wybie and Maria kept their own pistols on the doll, the mouthpiece of the psychephages.
"We're taking her back," said Coraline, her voice an even cadence. "Make this easy on yourselves and hand her over."
"You will have her bones." The doll twitched on its rope, jerking above the floor, and emitted a short series of dusty barks that approximated laughter. Painted porcelain lips peeled back over red gums. "Bones and dust. We rule here. Turn back or you will die alone. Your friends will die one by one, before your eyes. Your souls will…"
It had no time to speak anything else, as Coraline stepped briskly forward, her shotgun stock blurring in the air and smashing through its head in a cloud of spinning fragments and white dust. Its body flopped to the ground, freed of its noose, and settled in a pile of broken limbs and rags.
"It occurs to me," she said quietly, as the last fragments of the doll clattered on the floor, "That letting something like that try to get to us when there's a despair-eater in the area would be a really bad idea."
"'Don't let it get to us', she says just after she smashes its head off," said Maria.
"Less smart remarks, more covering me while I go up the stairs," said Coraline, motioning towards the staircase.
They made their way slowly up the uneven stairs, the old boards creaking under their steps. Coraline was at the head of their arrowhead formation, her eyes tracking across the landing and walls and sloping ceiling. Wybie and Maria were just behind her, their own pistols ready, their eyes alert.
They turned at the landing, and after the shortest of stretches, found another staircase peeling off to their right, leading up to the next floor. There was still no sound, not a squeak, not a breath, not a susurration. Coraline motioned for them to move up, and they did, as quietly and cautiously as they could.
The stairs led up to a wide, gloomy room, spotted with debris, barely lit by the cold light filtered past thin, ragged curtains stretched across the gash in the wall that ran the far length of the room. The room was a mad clothier's junkyard, a graveyard of skeletal frames hung with ancient, muted fabric, piles of rags, racks and splintered hangers, and parts of battered mannequins, coated with fluttering scraps of shadow. The air was shrouded with pale mist, tendrils of it lapping around edges and obstacles and fettering vision.
Dotted here and there on the floor, there were more of the same dolls that they had seen in the ground floor, this time normal-sized. Some of them were unclothed, their porcelain bodies gleaming as pale as milk in the cold light. Most were clothed, in massively frilled dresses or little sailor outfits, all of them looking blankly at nothing at all with hollow eyes.
There was no sound. Coraline slowly took one cautious step forward, her shotgun ready, her pulse all that was audible. She took one more step.
Looking quickly to her left and right, she saw that the stairway had emerged from the centre of a wall running the room's length. There was a door on either side, evenly spaced. She looked again at the room.
"Check the door on the left," she instructed. "One on point, the other two on cover."
Wybie immediately moved to the door, and Maria and Coraline stepped after him, their gazes flitting from his back to the still room.
Wybie squinted through the dusty gloom, his hand shaking slightly on the handle of his pistol as he reached for the door set into the wall, the same dark and drab tone as the wooden boards around it.
He hesitated. No light came through the keyhole or the gaps at the top or bottom, and no sound came from within.
Reaching out a hand, he gently turned the rusty handle and pushed the door open inwards. Stepping through, he took stock of the room, the gloom inside seeming to subside even as he peered.
The room was a wide convex, each wall curving outwards and ending abruptly some twenty feet away at a flat section of wall facing Wybie, on which was hung a tall gilt-edged mirror. Each wall was layered with shelves, low and long and running the length of each wall. Dozens, hundreds, of the same porcelain dolls in old-fashioned outfits were sat along them, their heads lolling dumbly, their empty eye sockets staring straight ahead at nothing.
But as Wybie looked at them, the dolls' heads rose, and each and every one of them slowly rotated to face Wybie, their hollow eyes drinking him in.
A somewhat uncomfortable silence passed. He was aware of Coraline and Maria waiting outside.
"Aaaaand we're getting out of the freaky room," said Wybie out loud, stepping back and grabbing for the door handle. But the door didn't come to his grasp, and when he looked, he saw that it had gone.
A sigh, like the sound of wind over dry paper, sounded to the front of him, and he immediately looked up. He didn't see anything which had moved, except ...
...except for the mirror?
He looked at the mirror and realised with a start that it had never been an exact reflection. The Wybie that looked out from the mirror was waxy-skinned and hunched, his mouth permanently locked in a twisted smile that showed too many teeth. His hollow eye sockets were cast in shadow.
And as Wybie stared at his reflection, the reflection stared at him. It twitched, ever so slightly.
And then it moved suddenly, its expression fixed and empty and smiling, lurching towards the mirror's frame and seizing at it. One leg was hefted over, and the reflected Wybie started to heave itself over the frame.
"Jesus flying Christ!" said Wybie, his eyes wide, his hand flying to raise his gun. "Coraline? Maria? There's something here!" He fired at the oncoming Mirror-Wybie, his first shot going wild, his next shot punching through its left shoulder, and the third smashing through a section of wooden wall. The reflected Wybie spun with the force of the hit, but kept on coming in an uncontrolled hurtle, its hands low against its body, its face still fixed.
Behind it, Wybie caught another glimpse of the mirror. And inside it, another reflection twitched.
Maria and Coraline had turned instantly at Wybie's first shout, and were rushing to help him when the beldam struck.
She tore herself out from the piles of rags and wooden detritus in the middle of the room, a skeletal figure with dark, knotted skin, as if hewn from lengths of aged wood. Silver buttons gleamed on her thin face, obscured by flying strands of pitch-coloured hair. A tatterdemalion outfit fluttered around her, rags of multi-coloured cloth rudely stitched into a chaotic patchwork shroud. She shrieked with mad triumph as she charged, her foot-tips clacking against the ground, her fingers like wooden needles made fire-hardened and sharp.
"You could have run!" she screeched, her eyes on Coraline as she scuttled. "You could have run! You…"
The shotgun barked and the beldam barely ducked in time to avoid the shell that whistled overhead and punched through the veil at the opposite length, sending it flapping wildly. She was too slow to avoid the follow-shot from Maria, however, and the shot clipped the edge of her chest and sent her spinning and screaming into the debris.
Maria stepped quickly towards the beldam, picking her way briskly over the debris to get in one clear shot. But the beldam, spitting brackish blood where she lay, reached up with furious energy and stroked both her hands along random parts of the chaos around her.
Two humanoid shapes suddenly formed from it, haphazard things with thin wood and wire twisting swiftly together to form their torsos, spiderish limbs, embedded with needles, silvery buttons spooling out of seemingly nothing to make their eyes. The closest one, a tall, thin thing with a mannequin's blank face as its right foot, tore up at Maria with a hooked hand, sending her stumbling back in a hasty effort to avoid it. Her pistol twisted towards it and thundered in the room's close confines, blasting a small, ragged hole through the centre of its chest. It reeled, briefly stunned, then pressed on; the other by its side, a squatter creature with only one silver button-eye.
Maria kept on hopping back from where she'd came, her pistol barking and blasting at the constructs, smashing off scraps of cloth, chunks of torsos, an arm. They slowed, but kept coming.
The shotgun suddenly roared from Maria's side, a sound which nearly blew out her eardrums and sent a streak of flying metal to tear apart the one-eyed construct, sending it flying apart into its individual components across the floor.
Coraline pumped the shotgun, and would have dealt with the other one had the door to the room's right not opened at that moment.
It swung open, with the softest of creaks, and a shadow fell across her mind.
It whispered,
Lie down and die, you worthless waste of space.
She shrugged off the thought, and turned quickly to see what had come through the door.
The door was only half-open, admitting only a small part of the form of the horla. It was human-shaped and hunched, covered utterly in a great dark grey cloak, its long face partially hidden by a falling hood. What little showed was almost lupine, a smoke-black muzzle set with mottled dagger-like teeth.
It looked up, and the minute she saw what lay beneath the hood, the minute she made contact with the nothingness of the eye sockets, the shadow redoubled.
Kill yourself and save others the trouble.
The pandaemonium at her back dulled as the horla pressed its mental attack. She sank slightly, the gun falling limp as the creature sidled out from the door and moved closer to her, its curious upright gait carrying it over the floor like smoke.
You don't deserve to live. You never did. You've failed in all eyes; all despise you when they think of you at all.
It came closer as the gun wavered. One decaying hand drew out from the cloak, tipped with dark, broken claws. A sadistic hiss came from the cloak's depths.
There was a scream from behind Coraline; whether it was from Wybie or Maria, she couldn't guess. But it echoed past the shadow, and knocked her back to what she had to do.
The grasping claw was suddenly smashed to one side with the shotgun's iron-shod stock. The horla yelped with pain, and the stock blurred back before it could react, hammering across its head and sending it down to the floor. It struggled to right itself on the ground, the hood falling back from its face to reveal a long lupine head, black-furred, hollow-eyed, the muzzle slick with slaver and full of bristling teeth.
You're nothing … it started, but Coraline was ready for that and irritably brushed away the shadow, and was ready for the horla's physical attack too. It snapped up at her, but Coraline jumped back, and while the horla was off-balance, shot down at it. Now it was the psychephage's turn to stumble back as the shot tore open the floor at its feet. There was another click as the shotgun was cocked in less than an instant, and the horla retreated as the shotgun tore another fragment from the floor.
The creature rolled and came to its feet by the wall just past the door in the room, leading to the outside. It clenched its claws, and tensed to jump.
But before it could do so, the shotgun spat iron and fire, and crashed into the horla, knocking it backwards with concussive force and smashing it through the thin wall. It teetered on the edge, desperately yowling as its front ran with sickly pale blood from where the shell had torn right through. It grabbed desperately for a purchase on the outside wall, and seized a holding tight with its claws. It pulled itself free from the shattered wall and precarious edge, and began to scrabble up the building's side, backed by the endless empty night without.
Coraline cursed as it escaped, and turned to help the others. Maria, she saw, had dispatched the remaining construct and had opened fire upon the beldam, who scurried between piles of teetering waste to avoid the echoing shots, her earlier bloodlust turned to terror of the iron. Seeing her ally flee, she tensed and sprang straight up, flipping as she did so that she grasped the ceiling with her claws.
A shot tore wood less than an inch from her head, but she ignored it as her leg-points fixed into the wooden ceiling and abruptly expanded outwards, tearing open an aperture from the planks. She dived through, shots smacking into the ceiling after her back.
But before the ceiling sealed shut, Coraline heard a scream from the opening. The scream of a frightened child.
"Come on!" she shouted at the others. "We've got to…" She stopped when she turned to face Wybie, and boggled for a brief moment.
Wybie held his ground in the room and, as best as she could tell, was being mobbed by seven near-exact replicas of himself. Two already lay with bullet holes in them, and were already crumbling into mould and rot. The doubles, reflected as many times as they were, had been made ineffectual; they were capable of little more than flailing awkwardly at him with flopping limbs.
From a certain perspective, it was a hilarious tableau. Coraline, however, was in all-business mode, and she guessed what had happened based on a previous encounter with a horla.
"WYBIE, STOP LOOKING AT THE GODDAM MIRROR!"
"Gah!" he replied, as one of the Mirror-Wybies landed a light smack across his face with a gloved hand, its empty eyes showing no emotion at all for the act. There came two shots from within the melee, and the Mirror-Wybie pitched forward, opened and spilling mould. The others pressed their attack with a little more energy than before.
"When I drop, open fire!" yelled Wybie when he saw Coraline and Maria had lost their own opponents, and suddenly fell to his front.
There was a great deal of noise for a very short while.
When the echoes died away, Wybie crawled out from under the pile of mouldering forms and pulled himself to his feet, brushing himself off. "Well. That was mildly traumatic."
"You were in the thick of it," said Coraline. "You had plenty of opportunities for point-blank shots. Why didn't you take them?"
"Oh, no, I'm quite alright. Don't worry about me. And forgive me if billions of years of evolution have ingrained the notion that 'shooting yourself' isn't a good idea. Or 'yourselves' even."
Coraline walked over, closed her eyes, turned into the room, and fired once to the satisfying retort of shattering glass. She turned and reloaded her shotgun. Her heart raced, her mind still ached from the horla's mental attack, her cheek was cut from a flying splinter, she just noticed. She felt alive. And angry.
"Come on," she said, and started at a run for the door from which the horla had emerged. Wybie and Maria ran after her, leaving the room still ringing with echoes and thick with dust and wreckage.
The last door on the top floor was locked, which is such a relative term when you have a bludgeoning implement at hand. One hard blow from the stock smashed the rusted hinges clean off.
Coraline stood in the doorway, her face glowing with sweat, her gun at the ready. She saw the horla, cringing and bleeding and huddled in a corner. It hissed with hatred when it saw her. Next to it, she saw the beldam, exhausted and hungry. It stepped back when it saw her.
Next to both of them, a man-sized porcelain doll in a navy officer's dress uniform, their face fixed in a blank, reassuring smile, held a little girl tight with one hand clenched around her shoulder. Their other hand held a curved sabre aloft, the blade made of gleaming bronze, ready to be brought down.
"Make one move," snarled the beldam, "Draw one breath, and she dies…"
The shotgun was raised and fired in a heartbeat, and the thunderous shot turned the doll's arm to flying powder. The sword fell to the floor, and the doll mindlessly released the child as it bent to retrieve the sword. The girl, who couldn't have been older than eight, ran for it, streaking past Coraline and out into the corridor, where Wybie and Maria waited.
"You know," said Coraline mildly, her tone once more perfectly measured and emotionless, "Out of all the things you could have done, threatening the kid was the most stupid." She turned briefly to give Wybie and Maria a significant nod and then stepped right through, her weapon blazing.
"Um," said Wybie, mildly surprised to suddenly find himself the largest and most reassuring presence in the corridor and hence the first to be seized tight by the girl. "Er. Hi. I'm Wybie. I'm from the government." This didn't seem to reassure the girl, who merely clutched him closer. He awkwardly patted her on the shoulder.
From the room, there came the repeated thunder of the shotgun, and screams and hisses and general clamour.
"Shouldn't we…" said Maria, motioning at the room.
"No. No no no. She sometimes gets a bit … um…" Wybie tried to express it. "Look, best to just stay out of her way. Trust me."
There came the hollow sound of metal ringing on metal, and then a ripping, organic sort of noise, which, coupled with an inhuman screaming, suggested nothing good. Then more shots.
"I want my daddy," said the little girl, who had Elachi's dark hair and eyes.
"We'll get you to him. I promise," said Wybie. The girl looked marginally more reassured.
There came one final shot, a protracted "Nonononononononoooo…" finished with a terrifying gurgle, and the sound of a boot stamping into something. After that came an almost blissful silence.
A few moments later, Coraline stepped through from the room. She held the dripping curved sword in her left hand, her shotgun held tight under the same arm. Her coat's front was drenched with dark blood, her hat was askew, and in her other hand, four grey marbles glinted.
"All done," she said simply. And then "Found these in a jewellery box," holding the souls aloft. "If you want to get samples, now's the time, Wybie."
"Will do," he said hurriedly, passing the rapt child onto Maria and drawing out several glass jars from his pocket, and vanishing into the room.
"You don't do things by half-measures, do you?" said Maria, running her eyes up and down Coraline. Maria did her best to refrain from cursing, but she found herself challenged to not do so from shock when viewing the blood down Coraline's front.
"They threatened a kid," said Coraline simply. "We gave them an easy way out at the start, you heard that. Is the kid…?"
"She's alright," said Maria. "Nothing that time can't fix."
After a moment, Wybie emerged, his pockets jangling.
"Shall we go?" he said, trying to wipe his hands off discreetly on the wall.
"Nothing else here," said Coraline. "And the whole thing'll fall apart sooner rather than later. We're done here." Her face betrayed satisfaction and pride. "We're done."