Coraline

‘What’s it for?’ asked Coraline. The hole went all the way through the middle of the stone. She held it up to the window and looked through it.

‘It might help,’ said Miss Spink. ‘They’re good for bad things, sometimes.’

Coraline put on her coat, said goodbye to Misses Spink and Forcible, and to the dogs, and went outside.

The mist hung like blindness around the house. She walked slowly to the steps up to her family’s flat, and then stopped and looked around.

In the mist, it was a ghost-world. In danger? thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.

Coraline went back up the steps, her fist closed tightly around her new stone.

3

The next day the sun shone, and Coraline’s mother took her into the nearest large town to buy clothes for school. They dropped her father off at the railway station. He was going into London for the day to see some people.

Coraline waved him goodbye.

They went to the department store to buy the school clothes.

Coraline saw some Day-glo green gloves she liked a lot. Her mother refused to get them for her, preferring instead to buy white socks, navy-blue school underpants, four grey blouses, and a dark grey skirt.

‘But Mum, everybody at school’s got grey blouses and everything. Nobody’s got green gloves. I could be the only one.’

Her mother ignored her; she was talking to the shop assistant. They were talking about which kind of pullover to get for Coraline, and were agreeing that the best thing to do would be to get one that was embarrassingly large and baggy, in the hope that one day she might grow into it.

Coraline wandered off, and looked at a display of wellington boots shaped like frogs and ducks and rabbits.

Then she wandered back.

‘Coraline? Oh, there you are. Where on earth were you?’

‘I was kidnapped by aliens,’ said Coraline. ‘They came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.’

‘Yes, dear. Now, I think you could do with some more hairclips, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Well, let’s say half a dozen, to be on the safe side,’ said her mother.

Coraline didn’t say anything.

In the car on the way back home, Coraline said, ‘What’s in the empty flat?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing, I expect. It probably looks like our flat before we moved in. Empty rooms.’

‘Do you think you could get into it from our flat?’

‘Not unless you can walk through bricks, dear.’

‘Oh.’

They got home around lunchtime. The sun was shining, although the day was cold. Coraline’s mother looked in the fridge, and found a sad little tomato and a piece of cheese with green stuff growing on it. There was only a crust in the bread bin.

‘I’d better dash down to the shops and get some fishfingers or something,’ said her mother. ‘Do you want to come?’

‘No,’ said Coraline.

‘Suit yourself,’ said her mother, and left. Then she came back and got her purse and car keys and went out again.

Coraline was bored.

She flipped through a book her mother was reading about native people in a distant country; how every day they would take pieces of white silk and draw on them in wax, then dip the silks in dye, then draw on them more in wax and dye them some more, then boil the wax out in hot water, and then, finally, throw the now-beautiful cloths on a fire and burn them to ashes.

It seemed particularly pointless to Coraline, but she hoped that the people enjoyed it.

She was still bored, and her mother wasn’t yet home.

Coraline got a chair and pushed it over to the kitchen door. She climbed on to the chair, and reached up. She clambered down, and got a broom from the broom cupboard. She climbed back on the chair again, and reached up with the broom.

Chink.

She climbed down from the chair and picked up the keys. She smiled triumphantly. Then she leaned the broom against the wall and went into the drawing room.

The family did not use the drawing room. They had inherited the furniture from Coraline’s grandmother, along with a wooden coffee table, a side table, a heavy glass ashtray and the oil painting of a bowl of fruit. Coraline could never work out why anyone would want to paint a bowl of fruit. Other than that, the room was empty: there were no knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, no statues or clocks; nothing that made it feel comfortable or lived-in.

The old black key felt colder than any of the others. She pushed it into the keyhole. It turned smoothly, with a satisfying clunk.

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone, as if they’d never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

She wondered what the empty flat would be like – if that was where the corridor led.