All alone, in the middle of the night, Coraline began to cry. There was no other sound in the empty flat.
She climbed into her parents’ bed, and, after a while, she went to sleep.
Coraline was woken by cold paws batting her face. She opened her eyes. Big green eyes stared back at her. It was the cat.
“Hullo,” said Coraline. “How did you get in?”
The cat didn’t say anything. Coraline got out of bed. She was wearing a long T-shirt and pajama bottoms. “Have you come to tell me something?”
The cat yawned, which made its eyes flash green.
“Do you know where Mummy and Daddy are?”
The cat blinked at her, slowly.
“Is that a yes?”
The cat blinked again. Coraline decided that that was indeed a yes. “Will you take me to them?”
The cat stared at her. Then it walked out into the hall. She followed it. It walked the length of the corridor and stopped down at the very end, where a full-length mirror hung. The mirror had been, a long time before, the inside of a wardrobe door. It had been hanging there on the wall when they moved in, and, although Coraline’s mother had spoken occasionally of replacing it with something newer, she never had.
Coraline turned on the light in the hall.
The mirror showed the corridor behind her; that was only to be expected. But reflected in the mirror were her parents. They stood awkwardly in the reflection of the hall. They seemed sad and alone. As Coraline watched, they waved to her, slowly, with limp hands. Coraline’s father had his arm around her mother.
In the mirror Coraline’s mother and father stared at her. Her father opened his mouth and said something, but she could hear nothing at all. Her mother breathed on the inside of the mirror glass, and quickly, before the fog faded, she wrote
with the tip of her forefinger. The fog on the inside of the mirror faded, and so did her parents, and now the mirror reflected only the corridor, and Coraline, and the cat.
“Where are they?” Coraline asked the cat. The cat made no reply, but Coraline could imagine its voice, dry as a dead fly on a windowsill in winter, saying Well, where do you think they are?
“They aren’t going to come back, are they?” said Coraline. “Not under their own steam.”
The cat blinked at her. Coraline took it as a yes.
“Right,” said Coraline. “Then I suppose there is only one thing left to do.”
She walked into her father’s study. She sat down at his desk. Then she picked up the telephone, and she opened the phone book and telephoned the local police station.
“Police,” said a gruff male voice.
“Hello,” she said. “My name is Coraline Jones.”
“You’re up a bit after your bedtime, aren’t you, young lady?” said the policeman.
“Possibly,” said Coraline, who was not going to be diverted, “but I am ringing to report a crime.”
“And what sort of crime would that be?”
“Kidnapping. Grown-up-napping really. My parents have been stolen away into a world on the other side of the mirror in our hall.”
“And do you know who stole them?” asked the police officer. Coraline could hear the smile in his voice, and she tried extra hard to sound like an adult might sound, to make him take her seriously.
“I think my other mother has them both in her clutches. She may want to keep them and sew their eyes with black buttons, or she may simply have them in order to lure me back into reach of her fingers. I’m not sure.”
“Ah. The nefarious clutches of her fiendish fingers, is it?” he said. “Mm. You know what I suggest, Miss Jones?”
“No,” said Coraline. “What?”
“You ask your mother to make you a big old mug of hot chocolate, and then give you a great big old hug. There’s nothing like hot chocolate and a hug for making the nightmares go away. And if she starts to tell you off for waking her up at this time of night, why you tell her that that’s what the policeman said.” He had a deep, reassuring voice.
Coraline was not reassured.
“When I see her,” said Coraline, “I shall tell her that.” And she put down the telephone.
The black cat, who had sat on the floor, grooming his fur, through this entire conversation now stood up and led the way into the hall.
Coraline went back into her bedroom and put on her blue dressing gown and her slippers. She looked under the sink for a flashlight, and found one, but the batteries had long since run down, and it barely glowed with the faintest straw-colored light. She put it down again and found a box of in-case-of-emergency white wax candles, and thrust one into a candlestick. She put an apple into each pocket. She picked up the ring of keys and took the old black key off the ring.
She walked into the drawing room and looked at the door. She had the feeling that the door was looking at her, which she knew was silly, and knew on a deeper level was somehow true.