‘Is that any way to talk to your mother?’ her other mother asked, with her mouth full of black beetles.
‘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 black beetle 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 black beetles 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.
‘She stole our hearts, and she stole our souls . . .’
Chapter 7
Somewhere inside her Coraline could feel a huge sob welling up. And then she stopped it, before it came out. She took a deep breath and let it go. She put out her hands to touch the space in which she was imprisoned. It was the size of a broom cupboard: tall enough to stand in or to sit in, not wide or deep enough to lie down in.
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 alive?’
‘Yes,’ whispered Coraline.
‘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.’