Coraline

clicked down, and a naked bulb hanging from a wire from the low ceiling came on. It did not give out enough light even for Coraline to make out the things that had been painted on to the flaking cellar walls. The paintings seemed crude. There were eyes, she could see that, and things that might have been grapes. And other things, below them. Coraline could not be sure that they were paintings of people.
    There was a pile of rubbish in one corner of the room: cardboard boxes filled with mildewed papers, and decaying curtains in a heap beside them.
    Coraline’s slippers crunched across the cement floor. The bad smell was worse now. She was ready to turn and leave, when she saw the foot sticking out from beneath the pile of curtains.
    She took a deep breath (the smells of sour wine and mouldy bread filled her head) and pulled away the damp cloth to reveal something more or less the size and shape of a person.
    In that dim light, it took her several seconds to recognise it for what it was: the thing was pale and swollen, like a grub, with thin, stick-like arms and feet. It had almost no features on its face, which had puffed and swollen like risen bread dough.
    The thing had two large black buttons where its eyes should have been.
    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. Coraline stood there, frozen. The thing turned its head until both its black-button eyes were pointed straight at her. A mouth opened in the mouthless face, strands of pale stuff sticking to the lips, and a voice that no longer even faintly resembled her father’s whispered, ‘Coraline.’
    ‘Well,’ said Coraline to the thing that had once been her other father, ‘at least you didn’t jump out at me.’
    The creature’s twig-like hands moved to its face and pushed the pale clay about, making something like a nose. It said nothing.
    ‘I’m looking for my parents,’ said Coraline. ‘Or a stolen soul, from one of the other children. Are they down here?’
    ‘There is nothing down here,’ said the pale thing, indistinctly. ‘Nothing but dust and damp and forgetting.’ The thing was white, and huge, and swollen. Monstrous, thought Coraline, but also miserable. She raised the stone with the hole in it to her eye, and looked through it. Nothing. The pale thing was telling her the truth.
    ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘I bet she made you come down here as a punishment for telling me too much.’
    The thing hesitated, then it nodded. Coraline wondered how she could ever have imagined that this grub-like thing resembled her father.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
    ‘She’s not best pleased,’ said the thing that was once the other father. ‘Not best pleased at all. You’ve put her quite out of sorts. And when she gets out of sorts, she takes it out on everybody else. It’s her way.’
    Coraline patted its hairless head. Its skin was tacky, like warm bread dough. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘You’re just a thing she made and then threw away.’
    The thing nodded vigorously; as it nodded, the left button-eye fell off and clattered on to the concrete floor. The thing looked around vacantly with its one eye, as if it had lost her. Finally it saw her, and, as if making a great effort, it opened its mouth once more and said in a wet, urgent voice, ‘Run, child. Leave this place. She wants me to hurt you, to keep you here for ever, so that you can never finish the game, and she will win. She is pushing me so hard to hurt you. I cannot fight her.’
    ‘You can ,’ said Coraline. ‘Be brave.’
    She looked around: the thing that had once been the other father was between her and the steps up and out of the cellar. She started edging along the wall, heading towards the steps. The thing twisted bonelessly until its one eye was again facing her. It seemed to be getting bigger now, and more awake. ‘Alas,’ it said. ‘I cannot.’
    And it lunged across the cellar towards her then, its toothless mouth opened wide.
    Coraline had a single heartbeat in which to react. She could only think of two things to do. Either she could scream, and try to run away, and be chased around a badly lit cellar by the huge grub-thing – be chased until it caught her. Or she could do something else.
    So she did something else.
    As the thing reached her, Coraline put out her hand and closed it around the thing’s remaining button-eye, and she tugged, as hard as she knew how.
    For a