Neil Gaiman

"Flee!" said the very first of the voices-another girl, Coraline fancied-"Flee, while there's still air in your lungs and blood in your veins and warmth in your heart. Flee while you still have your mind and your soul."

"I'm not running away," said Coraline. "She has my parents. I came to get them back."

"Ah, but she'll keep you here while the days turn to dust and the leaves fall and the years pass one after the next like the tick-tick-ticking of a clock."

"No," said Coraline. "She won't."

There was silence then in the room behind the mirror.

"Peradventure," said a voice in the darkness, "if you could win your mama and your papa back from the beldam, you could also win free our souls."

"Has she taken them?" asked Coraline, shocked.

"Aye. And hidden them."

"That is why we could not leave here, when we died. She kept us, and she fed on us, until now we're nothing left of ourselves, only snakeskins and spider-husks. Find our secret hearts, young mistress."

"And what will happen to you if I do?" asked Coraline.

The voices said nothing.

"And what is she going to do to me?" she said.

The pale figures pulsed faintly; she could imagine that they were nothing more than afterimages, like the glow left by a bright light in your eyes, after the lights go out.

"It doth not hurt," whispered one faint voice.

"She will take your life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten."

"Hollow," whispered the third voice. "Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow."

"You must flee," sighed a voice, faintly.

"I don't think so," said Coraline. "I tried running away, and it didn't work. She just took my parents. Can you tell me how to get out of this room?"

"If we knew then we would tell you."

"Poor things," said Coraline to herself. She sat down. She took off her sweater and rolled it up and put it behind her head, as a pillow. "She won't keep me in the dark for ever," said Coraline. "She brought me here to play games. 'Games and challenges,' the cat said. I'm not much of a challenge here in the dark." She tried to get comfortable, twisting and bending herself to fit the cramped space behind the mirror. Her stomach rumbled. She ate her last apple, taking the tiniest bites, making it last as long as she could. When she had finished she was still hungry. Then an idea struck her, and she whispered, "When she comes to let me out, why don't you three come with me?"

"We wish that we could," they sighed to her, in their barely-there voices. "But she has our hearts in her keeping. Now we belong to the dark and to the empty places. The light would shrivel us, and burn."

"Oh," said Coraline.

She closed her eyes, which made the darkness darker, and she rested her head on the rolled-up sweater, and she went to sleep. And as she fell asleep she thought she felt a ghost kiss her cheek, tenderly, and a small voice whisper into her ear, a voice so faint it was barely there at all, a gentle wispy nothing of a voice so hushed that Coraline could almost believe she was imagining it.

"Look through the stone," it said to her. And then she slept.

8

The other mother looked healthier than before: there was a little blush to her cheeks, and her hair was wriggling like lazy snakes on a warm day. Her black-button eyes seemed as if they had been freshly polished.

She had pushed through the mirror as if she were walking through nothing more solid than water and had stared down at Coraline. Then she had opened the door with the little silver key. She picked Coraline up, just as Coraline's real mother had when Coraline was much younger, cradling the half-sleeping child as if she were a baby.

The other mother carried Coraline into the kitchen and put her down, very gently, upon the counter-top.

Coraline struggled to wake herself up, conscious only for the moment of having been cuddled and loved, and wanting more of it; then realising where she was, and who she was with.

"There, my sweet Coraline," said her other mother. "I came and fetched you out of the cupboard. You needed to be taught a lesson, but we temper our justice with mercy here, we love the sinner and we hate the sin. Now, if you will be a good child who loves her mother, be compliant and fair-spoken, you and I shall understand each other perfectly and we shall love each other perfectly as well."

Coraline scratched the sleep-grit from her eyes.

"There were other children in there," she said. "Old ones, from a long time ago."

"Were there?" said the other mother. She was bustling between the pans and the fridge, bringing out eggs and cheeses, butter and a slab of sliced pink bacon.

"Yes," said Coraline. "There were. I think you're planning to turn me into one of them. A dead shell."