Coraline

by Neil Gaiman

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that.

there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.

currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup.

She counted everything blue (153). She counted the windows (21). She counted the doors (14).

Coraline was disgusted. “Daddy,” she said, “you’ve made a recipe again.”

“You know I don’t like recipes,” she told her father, while her dinner went around and around and the little red numbers on the microwave oven counted down to zero.

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.

Coraline put on her blue coat with a hood, her red scarf, and her yellow Wellington boots.

“The mice have a message for you,” he whispered. Coraline didn’t know what to say. “The message is this. Don’t go through the door.”

Coraline tried drawing the mist. After ten minutes of drawing she still had a white sheet of paper with

“You know, Caroline,” she said, after a while, “you are in terrible danger.”

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense.

In danger? thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.

Coraline could never work out why anyone would want to paint a bowl of fruit.

A huge, golden-brown roasted chicken, fried potatoes, tiny green peas.

“After lunch I thought you might like to play in your room with the rats.”

Erm

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.

In seconds the only evidence that the rats were there at all were the restless lumps under the man’s clothes, forever sliding from place to place across him;

“I’m not the other anything. I’m me.”

“Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

“I thought chocolates weren’t very good for dogs,” she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her. “Maybe where you come from,” whispered the little dog. “Here, it’s all we eat.”

“How long does this go on for?” asked Coraline. “The theater?” “All the time,” said the dog. “For ever and always.”

Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn’t hurt it almost always did.

“I haven’t seen either of them since yesterday. I’m on my own. I think I’ve probably become a single child family.”

CORALINE’S STORY. THERE WAS A GIRL HER NAME WAS APPLE. SHE USED TO DANCE A LOT. SHE DANCED AND DANCED UNTIL HER FEET TURND INTO SOSSAJES THE END.

Sossajes

“Kidnapping. Grown-up-napping really.

The black cat began to wash its face and whiskers in a manner that indicated increasing impatience.

Coraline reached down and stroked the back of its head and neck. The cat stood up, walked several paces until it was out of her reach, then it sat down and looked up at her again.

Oof

“It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do.

“when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

“And that’s why you’re going back to her world, then?” said the cat. “Because your father once saved you from wasps?”

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

There was a tiny doubt inside her, like a maggot in an apple core.

“Calling cats,” it confided, “tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”

“She wants something to love, I think,” said the cat. “Something that isn’t her.

It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

“There isn’t anywhere but here. This is all she made: the house, the grounds, and the people in the house. She made it and she waited.”

Coraline wondered if the other mother wasn’t interested in trees, or if she just hadn’t bothered with this bit properly because nobody was expected to come out this far.

“This is just the outside, the part of the place she hasn’t bothered to create.”

The cat curled the high tip of its tail into a question mark,

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

“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 e...

“Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough t...

“but the rats in this place are all spies for her. She uses them as her eyes and hands . . .”

in tones as smooth as oiled silk,

How often does your dinner get to escape?”

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,”

the proudest spirit can be broken, with love.”