Coraline by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online Page B

overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.’
    ‘What if it was dinnertime?’ asked Coraline. ‘Wouldn’t you want to be called then?’
    ‘Of course,’ said the cat. ‘But a simple cry of ‘Dinner!’ would do nicely. See? No need for names.’
    ‘Why does she want me?’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Why does she want me to stay here with her?’
    ‘She wants something to love, I think,’ said the cat. ‘Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with creatures like that.’
    ‘Do you have any advice?’ asked Coraline.
    The cat looked as if it were about to say something else sarcastic. Then it flicked its whiskers, and said, ‘Challenge her. There’s no guarantee she’ll play fair, but her kind of thing loves games and challenges.’
    ‘What kind of thing is that?’ asked Coraline.
    But the cat made no answer, simply stretched, luxuriantly, and walked away. Then it stopped, and turned, and said, ‘I’d go inside if I were you. Get some sleep. You have a long day ahead of you.’
    And then the cat was gone. Still, Coraline realised, it had a point. She crept back into the silent house, past the closed bedroom door beyond which the other mother and the other father  . . . what? she wondered. Slept? Waited? And then it came to her that, should she open the bedroom door, she would find it empty, or, more precisely, that it was an empty room and it would remain empty until the exact moment that she opened the door.
    Somehow, that made it easier. Coraline walked into the green and pink parody of her own bedroom. She closed the door and hauled the toybox in front of it – it would not keep anyone out, but the noise somebody would make trying to dislodge it would wake her, she hoped.
    The toys in the toybox were still mostly asleep, and they stirred and muttered as she moved their box, and then they went back to sleep. Coraline checked under her bed, looking for rats, but there was nothing there. She took off her dressing gown and slippers and climbed into bed and fell asleep with barely enough time to reflect, as she did so, on what the cat could have meant by a challenge .

 
    There was no ground beneath her feet, just a misty,  milky whiteness.

Chapter 6
    Coraline was woken by the mid-morning sun, full on her face.
    For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.
    Sometimes Coraline would forget who she was while she was daydreaming that she was exploring the Arctic, or the Amazon rainforest, or darkest Africa, and it was not until someone tapped her on the shoulder or said her name that Coraline would come back from a million miles away with a start, and all in a fraction of a second have to remember who she was, and what her name was, and that she was even there at all.
    Now there was sun on her face, and she was Coraline Jones. Yes. And then the green and pinkness of the room she was in, and the rustling of a large painted paper butterfly as it fluttered and beat its way about the ceiling, told her where she had woken up.
    She climbed out of the bed. She could not wear her pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers during the day, she decided, even if it meant wearing the other Coraline’s clothes. (Was there an other Coraline? No, she decided, there wasn’t. There was just her.) There were no proper clothes in the cupboard, though. They were more like dressing-up clothes or (she thought) the kind of clothes she would love to have hanging in her own wardrobe at home: there was a raggedy witch costume; a patched scarecrow costume; a future-warrior costume with little digital lights on it that glittered and blinked; a slinky evening dress all covered in feathers and mirrors. Finally, in a drawer, she found a pair of black jeans that seemed to be