'M-my governess,' said the boy, 'used to say that nobody is ever given more to shoulder than he or she can bear.' He shrugged as he said this, as if he had not yet made his own mind up whether or not it was true.
'We wish you luck,' said the winged girl. 'Good fortune and wisdom and courage-although you have already shown that you have all three of these blessings, and in abundance.'
'She hates you,' blurted out the boy. 'She hasn't lost anything for so long. Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.'
'But it's not fair,' said Coraline, in her dream, angrily. 'It's just not fair. It should be over.'
The boy with the dirty face stood up and hugged Coraline tightly. 'Take comfort in this,' he whispered. 'Thou art alive. Thou livest.'
And in her dream Coraline saw that the sun had set and the stars were twinkling in the darkening sky.
Coraline stood in the meadow, and she watched as the three children (two of them walking, one flying) went away from her, across the grass, silver in the light of the huge moon.
The three of them came to a small wooden bridge over a stream. They stopped there, and turned and waved, and Coraline waved back.
And what came after was darkness.
Coraline woke in the early hours of the morning, convinced she had heard something moving, but unsure what it was.
She waited.
Something made a rustling noise outside her bedroom door. She wondered if it was a rat. The door rattled. Coraline clambered out of bed.
'Go away,' said Coraline, sharply. 'Go away or you'll be sorry.'
There was a pause, then the whatever-it-was scuttled away down the hall. There was something odd and irregular about its footsteps, if they were footsteps. Coraline found herself wondering if it was perhaps a rat with an extra leg…
'It isn't over, is it?' she said to herself.
Then she opened the bedroom door. The grey, pre-dawn light showed her the whole of the corridor, completely deserted.
She went towards the front door, sparing a hasty glance back at the wardrobe-door mirror hanging on the wall at the other end of the hallway, seeing nothing but her own pale face staring back at her, looking sleepy and serious. Gentle, reassuring snores came from her parents' room, but the door was closed. All the doors off the corridor were closed. Whatever the scuttling thing was, it had to be here somewhere.
Coraline opened the front door and looked at the grey sky. She wondered how long it would be until the sun came up, wondered whether her dream had been a true thing while knowing in her heart that it had been. Something she had taken to be part of the shadows under the hall couch detached itself from beneath the couch and made a mad, scrabbling rush on its long white legs, heading for the front door.
Coraline's mouth dropped open in horror and she stepped out of the way as the thing clicked and scuttled past her and out of the house, running crab-like on its too-many tapping, clicking, scurrying feet.
She knew what it was, and she knew what it was after. She had seen it too many times in the last few days, reaching and clutching and snatching and popping blackbeetles obediently into the other mother's mouth. Five-footed, crimson-nailed, the colour of bone. It was the other mother's right hand.
It wanted the black key.
Coraline's parents never seemed to remember anything about their time in the snow-globe. At least, they never said anything about it, and Coraline never mentioned it to them.
Sometimes, she wondered whether they had ever noticed that they had lost two days in the real world, and came to the eventual conclusion that they had not. Then again, there are some people who keep track of every day and every hour, and there are people who don't, and Coraline's parents were solidly in the second camp.
Coraline had placed the marbles beneath her pillow before she went to sleep that first night home in her own room once more. She went back to bed, after she saw the other mother's hand, although there was not much time left for sleeping, and she rested her head back on the pillow.
Something scrunched gently as she did do.
She sat up and lifted the pillow. The fragments of the glass marbles that she saw looked like the remains of eggshells one finds beneath trees in springtime: like empty, broken robins' eggs, or even more delicate, wrens' eggs, perhaps.
Whatever had been inside the glass spheres had gone. Coraline thought of the three children waving goodbye to her in the moonlight, waving before they crossed that silver stream.
She gathered up the eggshell-thin fragments with care and placed them in a small blue box which had once held a bracelet that her grandmother had given her when she was a little girl. The bracelet was long-lost, but the box remained.
Miss Spink and Miss Forcible came back from visiting Miss Spink's niece, and Coraline went down to their flat for tea. It was a Monday. On Wednesday Coraline would go back to school: a whole new school year would begin.
Miss Forcible insisted on reading Coraline's tea leaves.
'Well, looks like everything's mostly shipshape and Bristol fashion, lovey,' said Miss Forcible.
'Sorry?' said Coraline.
'Everything is coming up roses,' said Miss Forcible. 'Well, almost everything. I'm not sure what that is.' She pointed to a clump of tea leaves sticking to the side of the cup.
Miss Spink tutted and reached for the cup. 'Honestly, Miriam. Give it over here. Let me see…'
She blinked through her thick spectacles. 'Oh dear. No, I have no idea what that signifies. It looks almost like a hand.'
Coraline looked. The clump of leaves did look a little like a hand, reaching for something.
Hamish the Scottie dog was hiding under Miss Forcible's chair, and he wouldn't come out.
'I think he was in some sort of fight,' said Miss Spink. 'He has a deep gash in his side, poor dear. We'll take him to the vet later this afternoon. I wish I knew what could have done it.'
Something, Coraline knew, would have to be done.
That final week of the holidays, the weather was magnificent, as if the summer itself were trying to make up for the miserable weather they had been having by giving them some bright and glorious days before it ended.
The crazy old man upstairs called down to Coraline when he saw her coming out of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible's flat.
'Hey! Hi! You! Caroline!' he shouted over the railing.
'It's Coraline,' she said. 'How are the mice?'
'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?'
