Coraline - Neil Gaiman

"Something has frightened them," said the old man, scratching his moustache. "I think maybe there is a weasel in the house. Something is about. I heard it in the night. In my country we would have put down a trap for it, maybe put down a little meat or hamburger, and when the creature comes to feast, then-bam!-it would be caught and never bother us more. The mice are so scared they will not even pick up their little musical instruments."

"I don't think it wants meat," said Coraline. She put her hand up and touched the black key that hung about her neck. Then she went inside.

She bathed herself, and kept the key round her neck the whole time she was in the bath. She never took it off any more.

Something scratched at her bedroom window after she went to bed. Coraline was almost asleep, but she slipped out of bed and pulled open the curtains. A white hand with crimson fingernails leapt from the window-ledge on to a drainpipe and was immediately out of sight. There were deep gouges in the glass on the other side of the window.

Coraline slept uneasily that night, waking from time to time to plot and plan and ponder, then falling back into sleep, never quite certain where her pondering ended and the dream began, one ear always open for the sound of something scratching at her window-pane or at her bedroom door.

In the morning Coraline said to her mother, "I'm going to have a picnic with my dolls today. Can I borrow a sheet-an old one, one you don't need any longer-as a tablecloth?"

"I don't think we have one of those," said her mother. She opened the kitchen drawer that held the napkins and the tablecloths, and she prodded about in it. "Hold on. Will this do?"

It was a folded-up disposable paper tablecloth covered with red flowers, left over from some picnic they had been on several years before.

"That's perfect," said Coraline.

"I didn't think you played with your dolls any more," said Mrs Jones.

"I don't," admitted Coraline. "They're protective coloration."

"Well, be back in time for lunch," said her mother. "Have a good time."

Coraline filled a cardboard box with dolls and several plastic dolls' tea-cups. She filled a jug with water.

Then she went outside. She walked down to the road, just as if she were going to the shops. Before she reached the supermarket she cut over a fence into some wasteland, and along an old drive, then she crawled under a hedge. She had to go under the hedge in two journeys in order not to spill the water from the jug.

It was a long, roundabout looping journey, but at the end of it Coraline was satisfied that she had not been followed.

She came out behind the dilapidated old tennis court. She crossed over it to the meadow where the long grass swayed. She found the planks on the edge of the meadow. They were astonishingly heavy-almost too heavy for a girl to lift, even using all her strength, but she managed. She didn't have any choice. She pulled the planks out of the way, one by one, grunting and sweating with the effort, revealing a deep, round, brick-lined hole in the ground. It smelled of damp and the dark. The bricks were greenish and slippery.

She spread out the tablecloth and laid it carefully over the top of the well. She put a plastic dolls' cup every twenty centimetres or so, at the edge of the well, and she weighed each cup down with water from the jug.

She put a doll in the grass beside each cup, making it look as much like a dolls' tea party as she could. Then she retraced her steps, back under the hedge, along the dusty yellow drive, around the back of the shops, back to her house.

She reached up and took the key from around her neck. She dangled it from the string, as if the key were just something she liked to play with. Then she knocked on the door of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible's flat.

Miss Spink opened the door.

"Hello, dear," she said.

"I don't want to come in," said Coraline. "I just wanted to find out how Hamish was doing."

Miss Spink sighed. "The vet says that Hamish is a brave little soldier," she said. "Luckily, the cut doesn't seem to be infected. We cannot imagine what could have done it. The vet says some animal, he thinks, but has no idea what. Mister Bobo says he thinks it might have been a weasel."

"Mister Bobo?"

"The man in the top flat. Mister Bobo. Fine old circus family I believe. Romanian or Slovenian or Livonian, or one of those countries. Bless me, I can never remember them any more."

It had never occurred to Coraline that the crazy old man upstairs actually had a name, she realised. If she'd known his name was Mr Bobo she would have said it every chance she got. How often do you get to say a name like "Mister Bobo" aloud?

"Oh," said Coraline to Miss Spink. "Mister Bobo. Right. Well," she said, a little louder, "I'm going to go and play with my dolls now, over by the old tennis court, round the back."

"That's nice, dear," said Miss Spink. Then she added, confidentially, "Make sure you keep an eye out for the old well. Mister Lovat, who was here before your time, said that he thought it might go down for half a mile or more."

Coraline hoped that the hand had not heard this last remark, and she changed the subject. "This key?" said Coraline, loudly. "Oh, it's just some old key from our house. It's part of my game. That's why I'm carrying it around with me on this piece of string. Well, goodbye now."

"What an extraordinary child," said Miss Spink to herself as she closed the door.

Coraline ambled across the meadow towards the old tennis court, dangling and swinging the black key on its piece of string as she walked.

Several times she thought she saw something the colour of bone in the undergrowth. It was keeping pace with her, about ten metres away.

She tried to whistle, but nothing happened, so she sang out loud instead, a song her father had made up for her when she was a little baby and which had always made her laugh. It went:

Oh… My twitchy witchy girl I think you are so nice, I give you bowls of porridge And I give you bowls of ice-cream.

I give you lots of kisses, And I give you lots of hugs, But I never give you sandwiches with bugs in.

That was what she sang as she sauntered through the woods, and her voice hardly trembled at all.

The dolls' tea party was where she had left it. She was relieved that it was not a windy day, for everything was still in its place, every water-filled plastic cup weighed down the paper tablecloth as it was meant to. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Now was the hardest part.

"Hello, dolls," she said brightly. "It's teatime!"

She walked close to the paper tablecloth. "I brought the lucky key," she told the dolls. "To make sure we have a good picnic."

And then, as carefully as she could, she leaned over and gently placed the key on the tablecloth. She was still holding on to the string. She held her breath, hoping that the cups of water at the edges of the well would weigh the cloth down, letting it take the weight of the key without collapsing into the well.

The key sat in the middle of the paper picnic cloth. Coraline let go of the string and took a step back. Now it was all up to the hand.

She turned to her dolls.

"Who would like a piece of cherry cake?" she asked. "Jemima? Pinky? Primrose?" and she served each doll a slice of invisible cake on an invisible plate, chattering happily as she did so.

From the corner of her eye she saw something bone white scamper from one tree trunk to another, closer and closer. She forced herself not to look at it.

"Jemima!" said Coraline. "What a bad girl you are! You've dropped your cake! Now I'll have to go over and get you a whole new slice!" And she walked around the tea party until she was on the other side of it to the hand. She pretended to clean up spilled cake and then to get Jemima another piece.