Coraline: Chapters 6–9

“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?”

Dust motes hung in a beam of sunlight.

Perhaps this afternoon we could do a little embroidery together, or some watercolor painting.

Now, if you will be a good child who loves her mother, be compliant and fair-spoken, you and I shall understand each other perfectly and we shall love each other perfectly as well.

“If I lose I’ll stay here with you forever and I’ll let you love me. I’ll be a most dutiful daughter. I’ll eat your food and play Happy Families. And I’ll let you sew your buttons into my eyes.”

She was hoping the other mother would say something like “Nonsense, they’re the size of ripe onions — or suitcases — or grandfather clocks,” but the other mother simply smiled, and the tap-tap-tapping of her fingernail against her eye was as steady and relentless as the drip of water droplets from the faucet into the sink.

For a moment it clouded over, and it seemed to her that faces swam in the glass, indistinct and shapeless, and then the faces were gone, and there was nothing in the mirror but a girl who was small for her age holding something that glowed gently, like a green coal.

Coraline looked down at her hand, surprised: it was just a stone with a hole in it, a nondescript brown pebble.

The sand stings got worse, and it got harder and harder to walk, as if she were pushing into the wind on a particularly blustery day.

The theater was derelict and abandoned.

Coraline raised the stone to her eye and she scanned the room through it, looking for something that glowed or glinted, a telltale sign that somewhere in this room was another hidden soul.

Up through the hole came the smell of damp clay, and something else, an acrid tang like sour vinegar.

Coraline made a noise, a sound of revulsion and horror, and, as if it had heard her and awakened, the thing began to sit up.

Its skin was tacky, like warm bread dough.

The thing nodded vigorously; as it nodded, the left button eye fell off and clattered onto the concrete floor.