Коралина / Coraline

We went down this hill, to the bottom of a gully where a stream was, when my dad suddenly said to me, “Coraline—run away. Up the hill. Now!” He said it in a tight sort of way, urgently, so I did. I ran away up the hill. Something hurt me on the back of my arm as I ran, but I kept running.

“As I got to the top of the hill I heard somebody thundering up the hill behind me. It was my dad, charging like a rhino. When he reached me he picked me up in his arms and swept me over the edge of the hill.

“And then we stopped and we puffed and we panted, and we looked back down the gully.

“The air was alive with yellow wasps. We must have stepped on a wasps' nest in a rotten branch as we walked. And while I was running up the hill, my dad stayed and got stung, to give me time to run away. His glasses had fallen off when he ran.

“I only had the one sting on the back of my arm. He had thirty-nine stings, all over him. We counted later, in the bath.”

The black cat began to wash its face and whiskers in a manner that indicated increasing impatience.

Coraline reached down and stroked the back of its head and neck. The cat stood up, walked several paces until it was out of her reach, then it sat down and looked up at her again.

“So,” said Coraline, “later that afternoon my dad went back again to the wasteland, to get his glasses back. He said if he left it another day he wouldn't be able to remember where they'd fallen.

“And soon he got home, wearing his glasses.

He said that he wasn't scared when he was standing there and the wasps were stinging him and hurting him and he was watching me run away. Because he knew he had to give me enough time to run, or the wasps would have come after both of us.”

Coraline turned the key in the door. It turned with a loud clunk.

The door swung open.

There was no brick wall on the other side of the door: only darkness. A cold wind blew through the passageway.

Coraline made no move to walk through the door.

“And he said that wasn't brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,” said Coraline to the cat. “It wasn't brave because he wasn't scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.”

She took her first step down the dark corridor.

She could smell dust and damp and mustiness.

The cat padded along beside her.