Coraline

by Neil Gaiman

There was also a well. On the first day Coraline’s family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.

Of the doors that she found, thirteen opened and closed. The other—the big, carved, brown wooden door at the far corner of the drawing room—was locked. She said to her mother, “Where does that door go?” “Nowhere, dear.” “It has to go somewhere.” Her mother shook her head. “Look,” she told Coraline. She reached up and took a string of keys from the top of the kitchen doorframe. She sorted through them carefully, and selected the oldest, biggest, blackest, rustiest key. They went into the drawing room. She unlocked the door with the key. The door swung open. Her mother was right. The door didn’t go anywhere. It opened onto a brick wall. “When this place was just one house,” said Coraline’s mother, “that door went somewhere. When they turned the house into flats, they simply bricked it up. The other side is the empty flat on the other side of the house, the one that’s still for sale.” She shut the door and put the string of keys back on top of the kitchen doorframe. “You didn’t lock it,” said Coraline. Her mother shrugged. “Why should I lock it?” she asked. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

She dreamed of black shapes that slid from place to place, avoiding the light, until they were all gathered together under the moon. Little black shapes with little red eyes and sharp yellow teeth. They started to sing, We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall.

“I’ll read the leaves, if you want,” said Miss Spink to Coraline. “Sorry?” said Coraline. “The tea leaves, dear. I’ll read your future.” Coraline passed Miss Spink her cup. Miss Spink peered shortsightedly at the black tea leaves in the bottom. She pursed her lips. “You know, Caroline,” she said, after a while, “you are in terrible danger.” Miss Forcible snorted, and put down her knitting. “Don’t be silly, April. Stop scaring the girl. Your eyes are going. Pass me that cup, child.” Coraline carried the cup over to Miss Forcible. Miss Forcible looked into it carefully, shook her head, and looked into it again. “Oh dear,” she said. “You were right, April. She is in danger.” “See, Miriam,” said Miss Spink triumphantly. “My eyes are as good as they ever were….” “What am I in danger from?” asked Coraline. Misses Spink and Forcible stared at her blankly. “It didn’t say,” said Miss Spink. “Tea leaves aren’t reliable for that kind of thing. Not really. They’re good for general, but not for specifics.” “What should I do then?” asked Coraline, who was slightly alarmed by this. “Don’t wear green in your dressing room,” suggested Miss Spink. “Or mention the Scottish play,” added Miss Forcible. Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense. She sometimes wondered who they thought they were talking to. “And be very, very careful,” said Miss Spink. She got up from the armchair and went over to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was a small jar, and Miss Spink took ...

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.

Ha! Poor, silly natives. I'm so much better off. I work in an office on work of negligible value to both my employer and society! A year later, it all gets rewritten or binned! I can't relate to these people at all!

It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only… Only her skin was white as paper. Only she was taller and thinner. Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp. “Coraline?” the woman said. “Is that you?” And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.

It was the best chicken that Coraline had ever eaten. Her mother sometimes made chicken, but it was always out of packets or frozen, and was very dry, and it never tasted of anything. When Coraline’s father cooked chicken he bought real chicken, but he did strange things to it, like stewing it in wine, or stuffing it with prunes, or baking it in pastry, and Coraline would always refuse to touch it on principle.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/cooking

We have teeth and we have tails We have tails we have eyes We were here before you fell You will be here when we rise.

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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“How big are souls anyway?” asked Coraline. The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned back against the wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes. “Fine,” said Coraline. “Don’t tell me. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if you help me or not. Everyone knows that a soul is the same size as a beach ball.” She was hoping the other mother would say something like “Nonsense, they’re the size of ripe onions—or suitcases—or grandfather clocks,” but the other mother simply smiled, and the tap-tap-tapping of her fingernail against her eye was as steady and relentless as the drip of water droplets from the faucet into the sink. And then, Coraline realized, it was simply the noise of the water, and she was alone in the room.

Selick translated this scene exactly to the film. Amazing.

As she got closer to the thing on the wall, she saw that it was some kind of a sac, like a spider’s egg case. It twitched in the light beam. Inside the sac was something that looked like a person, but a person with two heads, with twice as many arms and legs as it should have. The creature in the sac seemed horribly unformed and unfinished, as if two plasticine people had been warmed and rolled together, squashed and pressed into one thing. Coraline hesitated. She did not want to approach the thing. The dog-bats dropped, one by one, from the ceiling and began to circle the room, coming close to her but never touching her. Perhaps there are no souls hidden in here, she thought. Perhaps I can just leave and go somewhere else. She took a last look through the hole in the stone: the abandoned theater was still a bleak gray, but now there was a brown glow, as rich and bright as polished cherrywood, coming from inside the sac. Whatever was glowing was being held in one of the hands of the thing on the wall.

“Thank you, Coraline,” said the other mother coldly, and her voice did not just come from her mouth. It came from the mist, and the fog, and the house, and the sky. She said, “You know that I love you.” And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.

I imagine this is how my employer feels about me.

She took a deep breath (the smells of sour wine and moldy bread filled her head) and she pulled away the damp cloth, to reveal something more or less the size and shape of a person. In that dim light, it took her several seconds to recognize it for what it was: the thing was pale and swollen like a grub, with thin, sticklike arms and feet. It had almost no features on its face, which had puffed and swollen like risen bread dough. The thing had two large black buttons where its eyes should have been.

“She’s not best pleased,” said the thing that was once the other father. “Not best pleased at all. You’ve put her quite out of sorts. And when she gets out of sorts, she takes it out on everybody else. It’s her way.” Coraline patted its hairless head. Its skin was tacky, like warm bread dough. “Poor thing,” she said. “You’re just a thing she made and then threw away.” The thing nodded vigorously; as it nodded, the left button eye fell off and clattered onto the concrete floor. The thing looked around vacantly with its one eye, as if it had lost her. Finally it saw her, and, as if making a great effort, it opened its mouth once more and said in a wet, urgent voice, “Run, child. Leave this place. She wants me to hurt you, to keep you here forever, so that you can never finish the game and she will win. She is pushing me so hard to hurt you. I cannot fight her.” “You can,” said Coraline. “Be brave.”

“Alas,” it said, “I cannot.” And it lunged across the cellar toward her then, its toothless mouth opened wide. Coraline had a single heartbeat in which to react. She could only think of two things to do. Either she could scream and try to run away, and be chased around a badly lit cellar by the huge grub thing, be chased until it caught her. Or she could do something else. So she did something else. As the thing reached her, Coraline put out her hand and closed it around the thing’s remaining button eye, and she tugged as hard as she knew how. For a moment nothing happened. Then the button came away and flew from her hand, clicking against the walls before it fell to the cellar floor. The thing froze in place. It threw its pale head back blindly, and opened its mouth horribly wide, and it roared its anger and frustration. Then, all in a rush, the thing swept toward the place where Coraline had been standing. But Coraline was not standing there any longer. She was already tiptoeing, as quietly as she could, up the steps that would take her away from the dim cellar with the crude paintings on the walls.

We have eyes and we have nerveses We have tails we have teeth You’ll all get what you deserveses When we rise from underneath. whispered a dozen or more tiny voices, in that dark flat with the roof so low where it met the walls that Coraline could almost reach up and touch it.

“Little girl,” said a rustling voice in a far room. “Yes,” said Coraline. I’m not frightened, she told herself, and as she thought it she knew that it was true. There was nothing here that frightened her. These things—even the thing in the cellar—were illusions, things made by the other mother in a ghastly parody of the real people and real things on the other end of the corridor. She could not truly make anything, decided Coraline. She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed.

She sat down on one of her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin’s-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.

“It’s a very fine thing you did for us, Miss,” said the tall girl. She now had a smear of chocolate ice cream all around her lips. “I’m just pleased it’s all over,” said Coraline. Was it her imagination, or did a shadow cross the faces of the other children at the picnic? The winged girl, the circlet in her hair glittering like a star, rested her fingers for a moment on the back of Coraline’s hand. “It is over and done with for us,” she said. “This is our staging post. From here, we three will set out for uncharted lands, and what comes after no one alive can say….” She stopped talking.

“She hates you,” blurted out the boy. “She hasn’t lost anything for so long. Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.” “But it’s not fair,” said Coraline, in her dream, angrily. “It’s just not fair. It should be over.” The boy with the dirty face stood up and hugged Coraline tightly. “Take comfort in this,” he whispered. “Th’art alive. Thou livest.”

She sat up, and lifted the pillow. The fragments of the glass marbles that she saw looked like the remains of eggshells one finds beneath trees in springtime: like empty, broken robin’s eggs, or even more delicate—wren’s eggs, perhaps. Whatever had been inside the glass spheres had gone. Coraline thought of the three children waving good-bye to her in the moonlight, waving before they crossed that silver stream. She gathered up the eggshell-thin fragments with care and placed them in a small blue box which had once held a bracelet that her grandmother had given her when she was a little girl. The bracelet was long lost, but the box remained.