Her mother was so furious that she barely tipped the moving men at all.
"They shouldn't have parked on the wrong side of the street," she said, when Coraline's father looked like he might ask. "And they didn't even bother to take any of these boxes upstairs! We're living in a warehouse!"
Coraline, looking around at the jumble of furniture and cardboard containers surrounding her like a maze, had to admit that her mother was at least half-right.
"Of all the incompetent, blundering nincompoops we could have hired to move halfway across the country…" Coraline's mother's voice faded as she climbed the stairs to the second story.
Coraline's father dug about in the piles of boxes until he found the one containing his computer and supplies, and left the main hall with it, whistling softly as he did. Coraline knew that as soon as he found an outlet, he'd plug it all in and start working on the ever-present gardening book, completely forgetting about the cardboard pyramids inhabiting the main room and the hall until he had to go out for something else, at which point he'd trip over a box and bring it all down with a crash.
She sighed, and sat down on a sofa that was half-in, half-out of the living room. She wouldn't be exploring this house until they'd packed at least a few of their things away, and she could actually move. So, instead, she fished through the drifts of household detritus until she found her suitcase and the smallish box holding her personal things. Picking both up, she made her way through the hall and up the stairs.
The upstairs was absolutely bare, in the way houses are when no one lives in them. There was no furniture or decoration, but beyond that, something else was missing, some soul or personality or something. All the rooms seemed slightly larger than they would when filled with stuff, larger and emptier and slightly creepy, like they were waiting hungrily for something to fill them.
After two moves, Coraline was getting used to the feeling. She gave each of the rooms nothing more than a cursory glance, stopping at the smallest room on the end of the hall. Standing in the doorway, she noticed that the room had a wide window-seat that looked out onto the alley behind the house and the mysterious building next door.
"This looks nice," she said aloud, to no one in particular, and, walking in, plonked her box and suitcase down on the window-seat. Sitting down beside it, she crossed her legs and opened the box.
Out came the photo of her friends from Michigan, followed by a snapshot of Wybie holding a slug up to the camera, and a few pictures of the girls she'd known from school. This was followed by the stone with a hole in it, and a handful of interesting pebbles for camouflage, just in case. She took out a snow globe without the standard little plastic snowman in the bottom, a preying mantis-shaped photo stand, and a stuffed octopus, leaving the box empty.
Coraline frowned. Where had she left her flashlight? She checked her satchel, but it wasn't there. She must have left it in the backseat of the car. It wasn't hugely important in the middle of the afternoon, but she liked to know where all of her explorer's gear was at any given time.
Coraline took a moment to consider things. She'd be starting the ninth grade this year, and carrying around an explorer's gear at all times might be considered just a little unusual. Maybe she was, as her mother had said, getting too old for this exploring nonsense. Then again, it never hurt to have bandaids and a flashlight and things around. You never knew when you might need them. And it never hurt to know where you were, and where everything was around you. In fact, if you really thought about it, her exploring habits were more mature than they were immature.
Satisfied with her logic, Coraline set off back down the stairs. She wanted to get to know her new neighbourhood.
…
After what felt like an eternity of carrying boxes and furniture from one room to another, Coraline's mother threw both hands in the air and exclaimed that they might as well not have done any unpacking at all, because there was no way they could get the furniture into the rooms it belonged in without moving all the boxes stacked on top first, and there was nowhere to put the boxes except right where the furniture had to go. Coraline managed to sneak out the door while her parents were bickering about whether they should attempt to get the house set up tonight, or whether they should take a break and make dinner instead.
The sun was starting to dip towards the horizon by the time Coraline found her way back to the new house. The whole neighbourhood was a maze of cul-de-sacs and awkwardly laid-out streets, full of identical houses. She'd have gotten lost for sure if it hadn't been for the tangle of satellite dishes peeking over the rooves. As it was, she'd panicked a few times before realizing that her new neighbours were as good as, if not better than, a compass.
The door creaked ominously as Coraline swung it open. The boxes stacked in pyramids that crowded the entryway made it seem dim and stuffy inside, and she concluded that her parents had decided dinner was a higher priority than unpacking. The single light fixture in the middle of the ceiling seemed all but overwhelmed, its glow merely casting weird and frightening shadows up the walls.
"Anybody home?" Coraline called down the hall. "Mom? Dad? I'm back."
"Oh, good. I'm in the kitchen; dinner's here." Coraline's mother's voice wafted in from the kitchen, and Coraline smiled. It was nice to have something familiar in the middle of this spooky unfamiliar atmosphere. And here in the dark hallway, it was somehow a lot easier to believe in ghosts than it had been under the bright noon sun.
She squeezed past a pile of boxes labeled Clothes, shoes, and assorted articles: Master bedroom and into the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table, surrounded by more boxes and pieces of furniture, including a dresser Coraline recognized as her own. A large pepperoni pizza sat steaming gently on the table in front of her. Coraline's mother gestured towards it. "Have as much as you like, because this is dinner. Your father wanted to make something, but I got him to order pizza instead."
Just in case, Coraline looked carefully to make sure her mother had eyes and not buttons. She knew she was being silly, but it never hurt to make sure. "How did you manage to convince him? I thought he'd banned all mention of fast food under his roof," she said, as she grabbed a piece of pizza and took a bite, savouring it in all of its hot, greasy, cheesy goodness.
"Well, we haven't got many groceries with us, and all of our cooking supplies and food preparation things are somewhere under a bed and several years' worth of cookbooks. I just put my foot down and refused to unpack one more thing tonight. We'll use the sleeping bags if we have to, I am not moving one more blessed box." Coraline's mother grimaced.
Coraline winced in sympathy. She didn't really want to move any more stuff tonight either. Just for today, they could take a break, and tackle the heavy stuff in the morning, when they were all feeling fresher and less frazzled. When the foyer didn't seem quite so…haunted.
Coraline forced her thoughts back into line. This was a nice, normal house in the middle of a nice, fairly normal neighbourhood. There was no good reason for it to have any restless spirits kicking around. Unless, of course, someone had thought it was a good idea to build on an ancient Indian burial ground, or one of the construction workers had suffered a fatal workplace accident, or –
"Uh, mom?" Coraline asked tentatively. "Why do they think Amity Park is the most haunted town in the country?"
Her mother shrugged, and reached for another piece of pizza. "I'm sure I don't know." She looked up at Coraline, and cracked a grin. "Maybe it's a pleasant place for ghosts to raise their kids."
Coraline laughed. "Maybe it's handy for the buses."
Her mother snorted. "But seriously, Coraline, I doubt that there's anything really unusual about this town. There's a rational explanation for just about everything, if you only take the time to look for it."
Coraline nodded in agreement, but couldn't help thinking that sometimes that rational explanation didn't quite mesh with 'normal' reality. She thought of the snow globe in her new room upstairs, empty except for water and the swirling snow, and wondered again if her parents had any recollection of what had actually happened in their old apartment. Somehow, she doubted it.
She finished off the last few bites of her pizza, leaving the crust in the lid of the pizza box, and smiled at her mother. "I'll go tell Dad that dinner's ready, and then I think I'll get my sleeping bag set up in my room."
Her mother nodded. "I believe he's in the living room, typing away on that old beast of a computer. If you can get him away from it, I'll be very impressed."
Coraline smiled to herself as she squeezed out into the foyer. Stepping around the pile of boxes blocking the doorway was like stepping into a refrigerator, and Coraline shivered as the cold air hit her bare arms, instantly covering them with goose pimples. She peered around the drifts of neglected belongings, and saw that the door was standing wide open.
"Did I forget to close it?" she asked the house in general, and began to pick her way between boxes and bags and large pieces of furniture. Halfway to the door, she noticed the box labelled Camping Supplies in her mother's untidy scrawl, sitting on top of a heavy, dark side-table that they'd inherited from Coraline's great-grandmother. If the sleeping bags were anywhere, they'd be there.
Coraline wound her way to the door, shut it tightly, and considered locking it. Finally, she decided against it, and made her way toward the living room, being careful not to disturb anything too much. She grabbed the cardboard container of camping supplies from the end table as she passed by, and gave a small, stifled scream when it was yanked unceremoniously out from under her arm.
She stood stock-still in the middle of the foyer, trying to convince herself that when she turned around the box would have caught on part of the end table and would have spilled camping supplies all over the floor. She repeated it to herself over and over again, but somehow still didn't want to turn around.
Finally, she decided that if she didn't do something she'd be standing in the middle of the foyer until the next morning, and, clenching her hands into fists, she turned around.
The box of camping supplies was sitting on the table, caught by a protruding tent-peg on a deep score in the table's surface.
Coraline breathed out, feeling both relieved and oddly disappointed. She reached out to grab the box, and fell forward onto the table as her arms swept through empty space.
Winded, Coraline leaned against the end table, glaring at the camping supplies box. It hadn't been her imagination – the box had moved, jumped forward out of her grasp all on its own.
"All right," Coraline muttered, "I don't know what's going on, but I'm not going to take this kind of nonsense from a cardboard box!" She dove for it again, only to see it leap off the table and land with a crash on the floor, spilling out a tent and a set of pegs, a storm lantern, and a jumble of sleeping bags and rope.
Coraline groaned, and kneeled down, picking up the fallen camping supplies. "This is not a good start to a new town and a new school year," she grumbled, as she packed everything back into its box.
From somewhere behind her, just on the edge of her hearing, she could swear she heard faint, decidedly ghostly laughter.