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sending Coraline flying. She caught herself before she went down, using her own momentum to keep moving. She knew that if she fell in that corridor she might never get up again. Whatever that corridor was was older by far than the other mother. It was deep, and slow, and it knew that she was there. . . .

Then daylight appeared, and she ran toward it, puffing and wheezing. “Almost there,” she called encouragingly, but in the light she discovered that the wraiths had gone, and she was alone. She did not have time to wonder what had happened to them. Panting for breath, she staggered through the door, and slammed it behind her with the loudest, most satisfying bang you can imagine.

Coraline locked the door with the key, and put the key back into her pocket.

The black cat was huddled in the farthest corner of the room, the pink tip of its tongue showing, its eyes wide. Coraline went over to it and crouched down beside it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I threw you at her. But it was the only way to distract her enough to get us all out. She would never have kept her word, would she?”

The cat looked up at her, then rested its head on her hand, licking her fingers with its sandpapery tongue. It began to purr.

“Then we’re friends?” said Coraline.

She sat down on one of her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin’s-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.

Coraline stared at the leaves on the trees and at the patterns of light and shadow on the cracked bark of the trunk of the beech tree outside the window. Then she looked down at her lap, at the way that the rich sunlight brushed every hair on the cat’s head, turning each white whisker to gold.

Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

And, caught up in the interestingness of the world, Coraline barely noticed that she had wriggled down and curled catlike on her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchair, nor did she notice when she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

XII.

HER MOTHER SHOOK HER gently awake.

“Coraline?” she said. “Darling, what a funny place to fall asleep. And really, this room is only for best. We looked all over the house for you.”

Coraline stretched and blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep.”

“I can see that,” said her mother. “And wherever did the cat come from? He was waiting by the front door when I came in. Shot out like a bullet as I opened it.”

“Probably had things to do,” said Coraline. Then she hugged her mother so tightly that her arms began to ache. Her mother hugged Coraline back.

“Dinner in fifteen minutes,” said her mother. “Don’t forget to wash your hands. And just look at those pajama bottoms. What did you do to your poor knee?”

“I tripped,” said Coraline. She went into the bathroom, and she washed her hands and cleaned her bloody knee. She put ointment on her cuts and scrapes.

She went into her bedroom—her real bedroom, her true bedroom. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown, and she pulled out three marbles, a stone with a hole in it, the black key, and an empty snow globe.

She shook the snow globe and watched the glittery snow swirl through the water to fill the empty world. She put it down and watched the snow fall, covering the place where the little couple had once stood.

Coraline took a piece of string from her toy box, and she strung the black key on the string. Then she knotted the string and hung it around her neck.

“There,” she said. She put on some clothes and hid the key under her T-shirt. It was cold against her skin. The stone went into her pocket.

Coraline walked down the hallway to her father’s study. He had his back to her, but she knew, just on seeing him, that his eyes, when he turned around, would be her father’s kind gray eyes, and she crept over and kissed him on the back of his balding head.

“Hullo, Coraline,” he said. Then he looked around and