"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 sitting room. Coraline followed her.
The other mother sat down on the big sofa. She picked up a brown handbag from beside the sofa, and took out a white, rustling, paper bag from inside it.
She extended the hand with the paper bag in 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 watercolour 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 goodnight." 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 looked into Coraline'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 handbag, then a tiny silver-coloured 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.
The mirror 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.
7
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 cupboard, 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
"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 it 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 a 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 parlour. 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 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
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."
Her other mother smiled gently. With one hand she cracked the eggs into a bowl, with the other she whisked them and whirled them. Then she dropped a pat of butter into a frying pan, where it hissed and fizzled and spun as she sliced thin slices of cheese. She poured the melted butter and the cheese into the egg mixture, and whisked it some more.
"Now, I think you're being silly, dear," said the other mother. "I love you. I will always love you. Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway. That's because they're all such liars. Smell the lovely breakfast I'm making for you." She poured the yellow mixture into the pan. "Cheese omelette. Your favourite."
Coraline's mouth watered. "You like games," she said. "That's what I've been told."
The other mother's black eyes flashed. "Everybody likes games," was all she said.
"Yes," said Coraline. She climbed down from the counter and sat at the kitchen table.
The bacon was sizzling and spitting under the grill. It smelled wonderful.
"Wouldn't you be happier if you won me, fair and square?" asked Coraline.
"Possibly," said the other mother. She had a show of unconcernedness, but her fingers twitched and drummed and she licked her lips with her scarlet tongue. "What exactly are you offering?"
"Me," said Coraline, and she gripped her knees under the table, to stop them from shaking. "If I lose I'll stay here with you for ever and I'll let you love me. I'll be a most dutiful daughter. I'll eat your food, and play Happy Families. And I'll let you sew your buttons into my eyes."
Her other mother stared at her, black buttons unblinking. "That sounds very fine," she said. "And if you do not lose?"
"Then you let me go. You let everyone go-my real father and mother, the dead children, everyone you've trapped here."
The other mother took the bacon from under the grill and put it on a plate. Then she slipped the cheese omelette from the pan on to the plate, flipping it as she did so, letting it fold itself into a perfect omelette shape.
She placed the breakfast plate in front of Coraline, along with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a mug of frothy hot chocolate.
"Yes," she said. "I think I like this game. But what kind of game shall it be? A riddle game? A test of knowledge? Or of skill?"
"An exploring game," suggested Coraline. "A finding-things game."
"And what is it you think you should be finding in this hide-and-go-seek game, Coraline Jones?"
Coraline hesitated. Then, "My parents," said Coraline. "And the souls of the children behind the mirror."
The other mother smiled at this, triumphantly, and Coraline wondered if she had made the right choice. Still, it was too late to change her mind now.
"A deal," said the other mother. "Now eat up your breakfast, my sweet. Don't worry, it won't hurt you."
Coraline stared at the breakfast, hating herself for giving in so easily; but she was starving.
"How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline.
"I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave."
"Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline.
"Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back."
"Swear on something else. So I can trust you to keep your word."
"My right hand," said the other mother, holding it up. She waggled the long fingers slowly, displaying the claw-like nails. "I swear on that."