The other rats watched her from the corners of the room as she ran after it.
Now, rats can run faster than people, especially over short distances. But a large black rat holding a marble in its two front paws is no match for a determined girl (even if she is small for her age) moving at a run. Smaller black rats ran back and forth across her path, trying to distract her, but she ignored them all, keeping her eyes fixed on the one with the marble, who was heading straight out of the flat, towards the front door.
They reached the steps on the outside of the building.
Coraline had time to observe that the house itself was continuing to change, becoming less distinct, and flattening out, even as she raced down the stairs. It reminded her of a photograph of a house now, not the thing itself. Then she was simply racing pell-mell down the steps in pursuit of the rat, with no room in her mind for anything else, certain she was gaining on it. She was running fast-too fast, she discovered, as she came to the bottom of one flight of steps, and her foot skidded and twisted and she went crashing on to the concrete landing.
Her left knee was scraped and skinned, and the palm of one hand she had thrown out to stop herself was a mess of scraped skin and grit. It hurt a little, and it would, she knew, soon hurt much more. She picked the grit out of the palm and climbed to her feet and, as fast as she could, knowing that she had lost and it was already too late, she went down the final set of steps to ground level.
She looked around for the rat, but it was gone, and the marble with it.
Her hand stung where the skin had been scraped, and there was blood trickling down her ripped pyjama-leg from her knee. It was as bad as the summer that her mother had taken the training wheels off Coraline's bicycle; but then, back then, in with all the cuts and scrapes (her knees had had scabs on top of scabs) she had a feeling of achievement. She was learning something, doing something she had not known how to do before. Now she felt nothing but cold loss. She had failed the ghost-children. She had failed her parents. She had failed herself, failed everything.
She closed her eyes and wished that the earth would swallow her up.
There was a cough.
She opened her eyes, and saw the rat. It was lying on the brick path at the bottom of the steps, with a surprised look on its face-which was now several centimetres away from the rest of it. Its whiskers were stiff, its eyes were wide open, its teeth visible and yellow and sharp. A collar of wet blood glistened at its neck.
Beside the decapitated rat, a smug expression on its face, was the black cat. It rested one paw on the grey glass marble.
"I think I once mentioned," said the cat, "that I don't like rats at the best of times. It looked like you needed this one, however. I hope you don't mind my getting involved."
"I think," said Coraline, trying to catch her breath, "I think you may… have said… something of the sort."
The cat lifted its paw from the marble, which rolled towards Coraline. She picked it up. In her mind, a final voice whispered to her, urgently.
"She has lied to you. She will never give you up, now she has you. She will no more give any of us up than she can change her nature." The hairs on the back of Coraline's neck prickled, and Coraline knew that the girl's voice told the truth. She put the marble in her dressing-gown pocket with the others.
She had all three marbles, now.
All she needed to do was to find her parents.
And, Coraline realised, that was easy. She knew exactly where her parents were. If she had stopped to think, she might have known where they were all along. The other mother could not create. She could only transform, and twist, and change.
And the mantelpiece in the drawing room back home was quite empty. But, knowing that, she knew something else, as well.
"The other mother. She plans to break her promise. She won't let us go," said Coraline.
"I wouldn't put it past her," admitted the cat. "Like I said, there's no guarantee she'll play fair." And then he raised his head. "Hello… did you see that?"
"What?"
"Look behind you," said the cat.
The house had flattened out even more. It no longer looked like a photograph-more like a drawing, a crude, charcoal scribble of a house drawn on grey paper.
"Whatever's happening," said Coraline, "thank you for helping with the rat. I suppose I'm almost there, aren't I? So you go off into the mist or wherever you go, and I'll, well, I hope I get to see you at home. If she lets me go home."
The cat's fur was on end, and its tail was bristling like a chimney-sweep's brush. "What's wrong?" asked Coraline.
"They've gone," said the cat. "They aren't there any more. The ways in and out of this place. They just went flat."
"Is that bad?"
The cat lowered its tail, swishing it from side to side angrily. It made a low growling noise in the back of its throat. It walked in a circle, until it was facing away from Coraline, and then it began to walk backwards, stiffly, one step at a time, until it was pushing up against Coraline's leg. She put down a hand to stroke it, and could feel how hard its heart was beating. It was trembling, like a dead leaf in a storm.
"You'll be fine," said Coraline. "Everything's going to be fine. I'll take you home."
The cat said nothing.
"Come on, cat," said Coraline. She took a step back towards the steps, but the cat stayed where it was, looking miserable and, oddly, much smaller.
"If the only way out is past her," said Coraline, "then that's the way we're going to go." She went back to the cat, bent down and picked it up. The cat did not resist. It simply trembled. She supported its bottom with one hand and rested its front legs on her shoulder. The cat was heavy, but not too heavy to carry. It licked at the palm of her hand, where the blood from the scrape was welling up.
Coraline walked up the steps one at a time, heading back to her own flat. She was aware of the marbles clicking in her pocket, aware of the stone with the hole in it, aware of the cat pressing itself against her.
She got to her front door-now just a small-child's scrawl of a door-and she pushed her hand against it, half-expecting that her hand would rip through it, revealing nothing behind it but blackness and a scattering of stars.
But the door swung open, and Coraline went through.
11
"So you're back," said the other mother. She did not sound pleased. "And you brought vermin with you."
"No," said Coraline. "I brought a friend." She could feel the cat stiffening under her hands, as if it were anxious to be away. Coraline wanted to hold on to it like a teddy bear, for reassurance, but she knew that cats hate to be squeezed, and she suspected that frightened cats were liable to bite and scratch if provoked in any way, even if they were on your side.
"You know I love you," said the other mother, flatly.
"You have a very funny way of showing it," said Coraline. She walked down the hallway, then turned into the drawing room, steady step by steady step, pretending that she could not feel the other mother's blank black eyes on her back. Her grandmother's formal furniture was still there, and the painting on the wall of the strange fruit (but now the fruit in the painting had been eaten, and all that remained in the bowl was the browning core of an apple, several plum and peach stones, and the stem of what had formerly been a bunch of grapes). The lion-pawed table raked the carpet with its clawed wooden feet, as if it were impatient for something. At the end of the room, in the corner, stood the wooden door, which had once, in another place, opened on to a plain brick wall. Coraline tried not to stare at it. The window showed nothing but mist.
This was it, Coraline knew. The moment of truth. The unravelling time.
The other mother had followed her in. Now she stood in the centre of the room, between Coraline and the mantelpiece, and looked down at Coraline with black-button eyes. It was funny, Coraline thought. The other mother did not look anything at all like her own mother. She wondered how she had ever been deceived into imagining a resemblance. The other mother was huge-her head almost brushed the ceiling of the room-and very pale, the colour of a spider's belly. Her hair writhed and twined about her head, and her teeth were sharp as knives…
"Well?" said the other mother, sharply. "Where are they?"
Coraline leaned against an armchair, adjusted the cat with her left hand, put her right hand into her pocket, and pulled out the three glass marbles. They were a frosted grey, and they clinked together in the palm of her hand. The other mother reached her white fingers out for them, but Coraline slipped them back into her pocket. She knew it was true, then. The other mother had no intention of letting her go, or of keeping her word. It had been an entertainment, and nothing more. "Hold on," she said. "We aren't finished yet, are we?"
The other mother looked daggers, but she smiled sweetly. "No," she said. "I suppose not. After all, you still need to find your parents, don't you?"
"Yes," said Coraline. I must not look at the mantelpiece, she thought. I must not even think about it.
"Well?" said the other mother. "Produce them. Would you like to look in the cellar again? I have some other interesting things hidden down there, you know."
"No," said Coraline. "I know where my parents are." The cat was heavy in her arms. She moved it forward, unhooking its claws from her shoulder as she did so.
"Where?"
"It stands to reason," said Coraline. "I've looked everywhere you'd hide them. They aren't in the house."
The other mother stood very still, giving nothing away, lips tightly closed. She might have been a wax statue. Even her hair had stopped moving.
"So," Coraline continued, both hands wrapped firmly around the black cat, "I know where they have to be. You've hidden them in the passageway between the houses, haven't you? They are behind that door." She nodded her head towards the door in the corner.
The other mother remained statue-still, but a hint of a smile crept back on to her face. "Oh, they are, are they?"
"Why don't you open it?" said Coraline. "They'll be there, all right."
It was her only way home, she knew. But it all depended on the other mother needing to gloat, needing not only to win but to show that she had won.
The other mother reached her hand slowly into her apron pocket and produced the black iron key. The cat stirred uncomfortably in Coraline's arms, as if it wanted to get down. Just stay there for a few moments longer, she thought at it, wondering if it could hear her. I'll get us both home. I said I would. I promise. She felt the cat relax ever-so-slightly in her arms.
The other mother walked over to the door and pushed the key into the lock.
She turned the key.
Coraline heard the mechanism clunk heavily. She was already starting, as quietly as she could, step by step, to back away towards the mantelpiece.
The other mother pushed down on the door handle and pulled open the door, revealing a corridor behind it, dark and empty. "There," she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see. "You're wrong! you don't know where your parents are, do you? They aren't there." She turned and looked at Coraline. "Now," she said, "You're going to stay here for ever and always."
"No," said Coraline. "I'm not." And, hard as she could, she threw the black cat towards the other mother. It yowled and landed on the other mother's head, claws flailing, teeth bared, fierce and angry. Fur on end, it looked half again as big as it was in real life.
Without waiting to see what would happen, Coraline reached up to the mantelpiece, closed her hand around the snow-globe, then pushed it deep into the pocket of her dressing gown.
The cat made a deep, ululating yowl and sank its teeth into the other mother's cheek. She was flailing at it. Blood ran from the cuts on her white face-not red blood, but a deep, tarry black stuff. Coraline ran for the door.
She pulled the key out of the lock.
"Leave her! Come on!" she shouted to the cat. It hissed, and swiped its scalpel-sharp claws at the other mother's face in one wild rake which left black ooze trickling from several gashes on her nose. Then it sprang down towards Coraline. "Quickly!" she said. The cat ran towards her, and they both stepped into the dark corridor.
It was colder in the corridor, like stepping down into a cellar on a warm day. The cat hesitated for a moment, then, seeing the other mother was coming towards them, it ran to Coraline and stopped by her legs.
Coraline began to pull the door closed.
It was heavier than she imagined a door could be, and pulling it closed was like trying to close a door against a high wind. And then she felt something from the other side starting to pull against her.
Shut! she thought. Then she said, out loud, "Come on, please." And she felt the door begin to move, to pull closed, to give against the phantom wind.
Suddenly she was aware of other people in the corridor with her. She could not turn her head to look at them, but she knew them without having to look. "Help me, please," she said. "All of you."
The other people in the corridor-three children, two adults-were somehow too insubstantial to touch the door. But their hands closed about hers, as she pulled on the big iron door handle, and suddenly she felt strong.
"Never let up, miss! Hold strong! Hold strong!" whispered a voice in her mind.
"Pull, girl, pull!" whispered another.
And then a voice that sounded like her mother's, her own mother, her real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother, just said, "Well done, Coraline," and that was enough.
The door started to slip closed, easily as anything.
"No!" screamed a voice from beyond the door, and it no longer sounded even faintly human.
Something snatched at Coraline, reaching through the closing gap between the door and the doorpost. Coraline jerked her head out of the way, but the door began to open once more.
"We're going to go home," said Coraline. "We are. Help me." She ducked the snatching fingers.
They moved through her, then: ghost-hands lent her strength that she no longer possessed. There was a final moment of resistance, as if something were caught in the door, and then, with a crash, the wooden door banged closed.
Something dropped from Coraline's head height to the floor. It landed with a sort of a scuttling thump.
"Come on!" said the cat. "This is not a good place to be in. Quickly."
Coraline turned her back on the door and began to run, as fast as was practical, through the dark corridor, dragging her hand along the wall to make sure she didn't bump into anything or get turned around in the darkness.
It was an uphill run, and it seemed to her that it went on for a longer distance than anything could possibly go. The wall she was touching seemed warm and yielding now, and, she realised, it felt as if it was covered in a fine downy fur. It moved, as if it were taking a breath. She snatched her hand away from it.
Winds howled in the dark.
She was scared she would bump into something, and she put out her hand for the wall once more. This time what she touched felt hot and wet, as if she had put her hand in somebody's mouth, and she pulled it back with a small wail.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could half-see, as faintly glowing patches ahead of her, two adults, three children. She could hear the cat, too, padding in the dark in front of her.