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 have gone blind. But no, she could see herself, plain as day. 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.
Something 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 on 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 for almost a metre and then the cat, with one bound, was upon it, batting it hard with one sharp-clawed paw while holding it down with the other. ‘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 towards 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? Monopoly? Happy Families?’
‘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 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 black beetles, 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.’