by Neil Gaiman
She kept walking.
And then the mist began.
It was not damp, like a normal fog or mist. It was not cold and it was not warm. It felt to Coraline like she was walking into nothing.
I’m an explorer, thought Coraline to herself. And I need all the ways out of here that I can get. So I shall keep walking.
The world she was walking through was a pale nothingness, like a blank sheet of paper or an enormous, empty white room. It had no temperature, no smell, no texture, and no taste.
It certainly isn’t mist, thought Coraline, although she did not know what it was. For a moment she wondered if she might not have gone blind. But no, she could see herself, plain as day. But there was no ground beneath her feet, just a misty, milky whiteness.
“And what do you think you’re doing?” said a shape to one side of her.
It took a few moments for her eyes to focus on it properly: she thought it might be some kind of lion, at first, some distance away from her; and then she thought it might be a mouse, close beside her. And then she knew what it was.
“I’m exploring,” Coraline told the cat.
Its fur stood straight out from its body and its eyes were wide, while its tail was down and between its legs. It did not look a happy cat.
“Bad place,” said the cat. “If you want to call it a place, which I don’t. What are you doing here?”
“I’m exploring.”
“Nothing to find here,” said the cat. “This is just the outside, the part of the place she hasn’t bothered to create.”
“She?”
“The one who says she’s your other mother,” said the cat.
“What is she?” asked Coraline.
The cat did not answer, just padded through the pale mist beside Coraline.
A shape began to appear in front of them, something high and towering and dark.
“You were wrong!” she told the cat. “There is something there!”
And then it took shape in the mist: a dark house, which loomed at them out of the formless whiteness.
“But that’s—” said Coraline.
“The house you just left,” agreed the cat. “Precisely.”
“Maybe I just got turned around in the mist,” said Coraline.
The cat curled the high tip of its tail into a question mark, and tipped its head to one side. “You might have done,” it said. “I certainly would not. Wrong, indeed.”
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”
“Easy,” said the cat. “Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it.”
“Small world,” said Coraline.
“It’s big enough for her,” said the cat. “Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.”
Coraline shivered.
“He said that she’s fixing all the gates and the doors,” she told the cat, “to keep you out.”
“She may try,” said the cat, unimpressed. “Oh yes. She may try.” They were standing under a clump of trees now, beside the house. These trees looked much more likely. “There’s ways in and ways out of places like this that even she doesn’t know about.”
“Did she make this place, then?” asked Coraline.
“Made it, found it—what’s the difference?” asked the cat. “Either way, she’s had it a very long time. Hang on—” And it gave a shiver and a leap and before Coraline could blink the cat was sitting with its paw holding down a big black rat. “It’s not that I like rats at the best of times,” said the cat, conversationally, as if nothing had happened, “but the rats in this place are all spies for her. She uses them as her eyes and hands…” And with that the cat let the rat go.
It ran several feet and then the cat, with one bound, was upon it, batting it hard with one sharp-clawed paw, while with the other paw it held the rat down. “I love this bit,” said the cat, happily. “Want to see me do that again?”
“No,” said Coraline. “Why do you do it? You’re torturing it.”
“Mm,” said the cat. It let the rat go.
The rat stumbled, dazed, for a few steps, then it began to run. With a blow of its paw, the cat knocked the rat into the air, and caught it in its mouth.
“Stop it!” said Coraline.
The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one—after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?”
And then it picked the rat up in its mouth and carried it off into the woods, behind a tree.
Coraline walked back into the house.
All was quiet and empty and deserted. Even her footsteps on the carpeted floor seemed loud. Dust motes hung in a beam of sunlight.
At the far end of the hall was the mirror. She could see herself walking toward the mirror, looking, reflected, a little braver than she actually felt. There was nothing else there in the mirror. Just her, in the corridor.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she looked up. The other mother stared down at Coraline with big black button eyes.
“Coraline, my darling,” she said. “I thought we could play some games together this morning, now you’re back from your walk. Hopscotch? Happy Families? Monopoly?”
“You weren’t in the mirror,” said Coraline.
The other mother smiled. “Mirrors,” she said, “are never to be trusted. Now, what game shall we play?”
Coraline shook her head. “I don’t want to play with you,” she said. “I want to go home and be with my real parents. I want you to let them go. To let us all go.”
The other mother shook her head, very slowly. “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” she said, “is a daughter’s ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirit can be broken, with love.” And her long white fingers waggled and caressed the air.
“I have no plans to love you,” said Coraline. “No matter what. You can’t make me love you.”
“Let’s talk about it,” said the other mother, and she turned and walked into the lounge. Coraline followed her.
The other mother sat down on the big sofa. She picked up a shopping bag from beside the sofa and took out a white, rustling, paper bag from inside it.
She extended the hand with it to Coraline. “Would you like one?” she asked politely.
Expecting it to be a toffee or a butterscotch ball, Coraline looked down. The bag was half filled with large shiny blackbeetles, crawling over each other in their efforts to get out of the bag.
“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t want one.”
“Suit yourself,” said her other mother. She carefully picked out a particularly large and black beetle, pulled off its legs (which she dropped, neatly, into a big glass ashtray on the small table beside the sofa), and popped the beetle into her mouth. She crunched it happily.
“Yum,” she said, and took another.
“You’re sick,” said Coraline. “Sick and evil and weird.”
“Is that any way to talk to your mother?” her other mother asked, with her mouth full of blackbeetles.
“You aren’t my mother,” said Coraline.
Her other mother ignored this. “Now, I think you are a little overexcited, Coraline. Perhaps this afternoon we could do a little embroidery together, or some watercolor painting. Then dinner, and then, if you have been good, you may play with the rats a little before bed. And I shall read you a story and tuck you in, and kiss you good night.” Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly, and Coraline shivered.
“No,” said Coraline.
The other mother sat on the sofa. Her mouth was set in a line; her lips were pursed. She popped another blackbeetle into her mouth and then another, like someone with a bag of chocolate-covered raisins. Her big black button eyes stared into Coral
ine’s hazel eyes. Her shiny black hair twined and twisted about her neck and shoulders, as if it were blowing in some wind that Coraline could not touch or feel.
They stared at each other for over a minute. Then the other mother said, “Manners!” She folded the white paper bag carefully so no blackbeetles could escape, and she placed it back in the shopping bag. Then she stood up, and up, and up: she seemed taller than Coraline remembered. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out, first the black door key, which she frowned at and tossed into her shopping bag, then a tiny silver-colored key. She held it up triumphantly. “There we are,” she said. “This is for you, Coraline. For your own good. Because I love you. To teach you manners. Manners makyth man, after all.”
She pulled Coraline back into the hallway and advanced upon the mirror at the end of the hall. Then she pushed the tiny key into the fabric of the mirror, and she twisted it.
It opened like a door, revealing a dark space behind it. “You may come out when you’ve learned some manners,” said the other mother. “And when you’re ready to be a loving daughter.”
She picked Coraline up and pushed her into the dim space behind the mirror. A fragment of beetle was sticking to her lower lip, and there was no expression at all in her black button eyes.
Then she swung the mirror door closed, and left Coraline in darkness.
VII.
SOMEWHERE INSIDE HER Coraline could feel a huge sob welling up. And then she stopped it, before it came out. She took a deep breath and let it go. She put out her hands to touch the space in which she was imprisoned. It was the size of a broom closet: tall enough to stand in or to sit in, not wide or deep enough to lie down in.
One wall was glass, and it felt cold to the touch.
She went around the tiny room a second time, running her hands over every surface that she could reach, feeling for doorknobs or switches or concealed catches—some kind of way out—and found nothing.
A spider scuttled over the back of her hand and she choked back a shriek. But apart from the spider she was alone in the closet in the pitch dark.
And then her hand touched something that felt for all the world like somebody’s cheek and lips, small and cold; and a voice whispered in her ear, “Hush! And shush! Say nothing, for the beldam might be listening!”
Coraline said nothing.
She felt a cold hand touch her face, fingers running over it like the gentle beat of a moth’s wings.
Another voice, hesitant and so faint Coraline wondered if she were imagining it, said, “Art thou—art thou alive?”
“Yes,” whispered Coraline.
“Poor child,” said the first voice.
“Who are you?” whispered Coraline.
“Names, names, names,” said another voice, all faraway and lost. “The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names. I still keep pictures in my mind of my governess on some May morning, carrying my hoop and stick, and the morning sun behind her, and all the tulips bobbing in the breeze. But I have forgotten the name of my governess, and of the tulips too.”
“I don’t think tulips have names,” said Coraline. “They’re just tulips.”
“Perhaps,” said the voice, sadly. “But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the embers in the nursery fire of a winter’s evening. I remember them.”
The voice sounded so sad that Coraline put out a hand to the place where the voice was coming from, and she found a cold hand, and she squeezed it tightly.
Her eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness. Now Coraline saw, or imagined she saw, three shapes, each as faint and pale as the moon in the daytime sky. They were the shapes of children about her own size. The cold hand squeezed her hand back. “Thank you,” said the voice.
“Are you a girl?” asked Coraline. “Or a boy?”
There was a pause. “When I was small I wore skirts and my hair was long and curled,” it said, doubtfully. “But now that you ask, it does seem to me that one day they took my skirts and gave me britches and cut my hair.”
“’Tain’t something we give a mind to,” said the first of the voices.
“A boy, perhaps, then,” continued the one whose hand she was holding. “I believe I was once a boy.” And it glowed a little more brightly in the darkness of the room behind the mirror.
“What happened to you all?” asked Coraline. “How did you come here?”
“She left us here,” said one of the voices. “She stole our hearts, and she stole our souls, and she took our lives away, and she left us here, and she forgot about us in the dark.”
“You poor things,” said Coraline. “How long have you been here?”
“So very long a time,” said a voice.
“Aye. Time beyond reckoning,” said another voice.
“I walked through the scullery door,” said the voice of the one that thought it might be a boy, “and I found myself back in the parlor. But she was waiting for me. She told me she was my other mamma, but I never saw my true mamma again.”
“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 mamma 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’ve 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 forever,” 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.
VIII.
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 countertop.
Coraline struggled to wake herself up, conscious only for the moment of having been cuddled and loved, and wanting more of it, then realizing 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.”