She pulled the key out of the lock.
‘Leave her! Come on!’ she shouted to the cat. It hissed, and swiped its scalpel-sharp claws at the other mother’s face in one wild rake which left black ooze trickling from several gashes on her nose. Then it sprang down towards Coraline. ‘Quickly!’ she said. The cat ran towards her, and they both stepped into the dark corridor.
It was colder in the corridor, like stepping down into a cellar on a warm day. The cat hesitated for a moment, then, seeing the other mother was coming towards them, it ran to Coraline and stopped by her legs.
Coraline began to pull the door closed.
It was heavier than she imagined a door could be, and pulling it closed was like trying to close a door against a high wind. And then she felt something from the other side starting to pull against her.
Shut! she thought. Then she said, out loud, ‘Come on, please.’ And she felt the door begin to move, to pull closed, to give against the phantom wind.
Suddenly she was aware of other people in the corridor with her. She could not turn her head to look at them, but she knew them without having to look. ‘Help me, please,’ she said. ‘All of you.’
The other people in the corridor – three children, two adults – were somehow too insubstantial to touch the door. But their hands closed about hers, as she pulled on the big iron door handle, and suddenly she felt strong.
‘Never let up, miss! Hold strong! Hold strong!’ whispered a voice in her mind.
‘Pull, girl, pull!’ whispered another.
And then a voice that sounded like her mother’s – her own mother, her real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother, just said, ‘Well done, Coraline,’ and that was enough.
The door started to slip closed, easily as anything.
‘No!’ screamed a voice from beyond the door, and it no longer sounded even faintly human.
Something snatched at Coraline, reaching through the closing gap between the door and the doorpost. Coraline jerked her head out of the way, but the door began to open once more.
‘We’re going to go home,’ said Coraline. ‘We are. Help me.’ She ducked the snatching fingers.
They moved through her, then: ghost-hands lent her strength that she no longer possessed. There was a final moment of resistance, as if something were caught in the door, and then, with a crash, the wooden door banged closed.
Something dropped from Coraline’s head height to the floor. It landed with a sort of a scuttling thump.
‘Come on!’ said the cat. ‘This is not a good place to be in. Quickly.’
Coraline turned her back on the door and began to run, as fast as was practical, through the dark corridor, dragging her hand along the wall to make sure she didn’t bump into anything or get turned around in the darkness.
It was an uphill run, and it seemed to her that it went on for a longer distance than anything could possibly go. The wall she was touching seemed warm and yielding now, and, she realised, it felt as if it was covered in a fine downy fur. It moved, as if it were taking a breath. She snatched her hand away from it.
Winds howled in the dark.
She was scared she would bump into something, and she put out her hand for the wall once more. This time what she touched felt hot and wet, as if she had put her hand in somebody’s mouth, and she pulled it back with a small wail.
Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could half see, as faintly glowing patches ahead of her, two adults, three children. She could hear the cat, too, padding in the dark in front of her.
And there was something else, which suddenly scuttled between her feet, nearly sending Coraline flying. She caught herself before she went down, using her own momentum to keep moving. She knew that if she fell in that corridor she might never get up again. Whatever that corridor was was older by far than the other mother. It was deep, and slow, and it knew that she was there . . .
Then daylight appeared, and she ran towards it, puffing and wheezing. ‘Almost there,’ she called encouragingly, but in the light she discovered that the wraiths had gone, and she was alone. She did not have time to wonder what had happened to them. Panting for breath, she staggered through the door and slammed it behind her with the loudest, most satisfying bang you can imagine.
Coraline locked the door with the key, and put the key back into her pocket.
The black cat was huddled in the farthest corner of the room, the pink tip of its tongue showing, its eyes wide. Coraline went over to it, and crouched down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I threw you at her. But it was the only way to distract her enough to get us all out. She would never have kept her word, would she?’
The cat looked up at her, then it rested its head on her hand, licking her fingers with its sandpapery tongue. It began to purr.
‘Then we’re friends?’ said Coraline.
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 greys. The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.
Coraline stared at the leaves on the trees and at the patterns of light and shadow on the cracked bark of the trunk of the beech tree outside the window, then she looked down at her lap, at the way that the rich sunlight brushed every hair on the cat’s head, turning each white whisker to gold.
Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.
And, caught up in the interestingness of the world, Coraline barely noticed that she had wriggled down and curled, cat-like, in her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchair, nor did she notice when she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The pale girl fluttered a little over their heads, swooping down on butterfly wings to grab the ball . . .
Chapter 12
Her mother shook her gently awake.
‘Coraline?’ she said. ‘Darling, what a funny place to fall asleep. And really, this room is only for best. We looked all over the house for you.’
Coraline stretched and blinked. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep.’
‘I can see that,’ said her mother. ‘And wherever did the cat come from? He was waiting by the front door when I came in. Shot out like a bullet as I opened it.’
‘Probably had things to do,’ said Coraline. Then she hugged her mother, so tightly that her arms began to ache. Her mother hugged Coraline back.
‘Dinner in fifteen minutes,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t forget to wash your hands. And just look at those pyjama bottoms. What did you do to your poor knee?’
‘I tripped,’ said Coraline. She went into the bathroom, and she washed her hands and cleaned her bloody knee. She put ointment on her cuts and scrapes.
She went into her bedroom – her real bedroom, her true bedroom. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown, and she pulled out three marbles, a stone with a hole in it, the black key, and an empty snow-globe.
She shook the snow-globe and watched the glittery snow swirl through the water to fill the empty world. She put it down and watched the snow fall, covering the place where the little couple had once stood.