The key was in the lock.
"Because that doesn't have 'TRAP' written all over it in foot-high letters, or anything," Coraline sighed. "You'd think that getting beaten at her own game might teach her to be at least a little bit subtle."
"Which is why you're making me open it?" Danny grumbled.
"Oh, shush. You're the only one who can fly, so of course you're the one who's going to get stuck with opening the door. Now quit whining."
Tucker glanced over at Coraline. "Harsh."
"Yeah, I guess it was." Coraline sighed. "Sorry."
"No, you're right." Danny squared his shoulders, and dropped through the floor of the Specter Speeder. Coraline decided that she really wasn't ever going to get used to that. "But if something comes out and eats me, you get to explain it to my parents," he called back, the thick windshield muffling his words as he floated over to the door.
The key turned, with a click that Coraline could hear even from inside the Specter Speeder, and the door swung open with a slow and ominous creaking noise. There was a faint rustling, and a few cobwebs blew out, tangling in Danny's unruly hair.
Coraline released a breath she hadn't noticed she was holding. "Well, I guess we're going in."
...
The streets of the pseudo-Amity Park were quiet and eerily empty. Sam was used to there being few people around, but usually there were at least signs of life (or death; when there were no people around in Amity Park, you could almost guarantee you'd run into a ghost). But the streets were too quiet, too still. No curtains twitched, no flickering blue glows came from television sets, no cars honked in the distance. Everything was as still as the grave.
Sam shivered and wished she'd brought a jacket. It was cold, here, and getting colder the farther she walked away from the house. In fact, she'd noticed white patches in people's front lawns. It was only when she saw that the greyish, overcast sky was starting to swallow the tops of buildings that she realised the white patches weren't snow. They were simply…nothing. Nothing had been put there, nothing was there. Blank canvas.
"Creepy," she muttered to herself, rubbing her bare arms. "And I don't mean that as a compliment," she added, just for the sake of clarification. She didn't think anyone was listening, but you could never be too sure. Not here, anyway.
Ahead of her, the street tapered off into featureless blankness. Sam looked around, but there was still no one else about. She walked up to the edge of the street, where the asphalt turned into simple flat black under her feet and the buildings thinned into two-dimensional impressionist cutouts like cardboard backdrops for a play, and looked out, a little floored by the sheer size of the blankness. It seemed to just go on and on, without bottom or top or end, or any sign of anything that wasn't blankness. She couldn't tell if there was a surface there that she could walk on, or if, should she walk off the flat black thing that used to be a road, she would just fall forever through unending nothingness.
"Okay," Sam admitted, "that's pretty dark." A poem about this place would probably get a round of deep, tormented sighs at the weekly Skulk and Lurk poetry reading, which was the closest that crowd came to a standing ovation. Still, it wasn't exactly her idea of a fun place to visit. She'd leave going into that weird blankness as the last resort.
There had to be some other way out.
…
There wasn't.
Every street Sam went down petered out and disappeared into a rough sketch of a street and then, eventually, into nothingness. It didn't take long to figure out that this world was only a few streets wide, with her house at the centre. In fact, everywhere she went, she could still see her house. Or the other house, to be precise.
She was not going back there. Just because the way in had been under the stairs didn't mean that it was the only way in or out. And she was going to find her way out, or –
There was someone standing at the end of the street.
Sam ducked hurriedly into an alley before the figure silhouetted against the mouth of the alley noticed her. She hadn't gotten a good look, but it was a pretty safe bet that whoever it was, they would be only too happy to report back to that woman who called herself Sam's other mother. And Sam didn't feel like getting caught now.
She heard footsteps from the street outside, and tried very hard to breathe quietly. Looking around for an escape route, any escape route, Sam spotted a door in the wall beside her, and reached out for the handle.
It didn't turn. And no matter how much she pulled, the door didn't budge. She looked closer, and realised that it wasn't really a door at all, but a piece of the wall, molded and painted to look like a door but incapable of opening. It must have been the easiest way to build a world that was mostly buildings: make the outsides, but with nothing on the inside and no way in.
The footsteps stopped at the mouth of the alley, and Sam flattened herself against the wall, hoping vainly that she wouldn't be seen. If whoever it was was looking for her, then that meant the other mother knew she was out, and was looking for her. And if the other mother was looking for her, then Sam really didn't want to be found. She wondered, fleetingly, if there were ghosts here. She hadn't seen any so far, but then again, this was a near-perfect replica of a slightly spookier Amity Park.
And then a voice she knew almost as well as her own said, "Sam?"
"Danny?" Sam took a half-step away from the wall, and then hurried towards her friend. "Danny! What, did you guys -" And then she stopped.
Her best friend smiled at her, button eyes flashing. "Hey, Sam."