Chris Riddell

Coraline sighed. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?’

‘Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.’

We moved into our flat in Littlemead, in the tiny Sussex town of Nutley, in the south of England, in 1987. Once upon a time it had been a manor house, built for the physician to the King of England himself, so I was told by the old man who had once owned the house (before he sold it to a pair of local builders). It had been a very grand house then, but it was now converted into flats.
Flat number 4, where we lived, was a good place, if a little odd. Above us, a Greek family. Beneath us, a little old lady, half blind, who would telephone me whenever my little children moved, and tell me that she was not certain what was happening upstairs, but she thought that there were elephants. I was never entirely sure how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.
We had a hallway running the length of the flat, as big as any room. At the end of the hall hung a wardrobe door, as a mirror.
When I started to write a book for Holly, my five-year-old daughter, I set it in the house. It seemed easy. That way I wouldn’t have to explain to her where anything was. I changed a couple of things, of course, swapped the position of Holly’s bedroom and the lounge.
Then I took a closed oak-panelled door that opened on to a brick wall, and a sense of place, from the drawing room in the house I grew up in.
That house was big and old, and it had been split in two just before we moved there.

The mist hung like blindness around the house

But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of night-time mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

‘Which,’ said Caius Pompeius, stiffly, ‘is precisely the point. What will you feed him? How can you care for him?’

Mrs Owens’ eyes burned. ‘I can look after him,’ she said. ‘As well as his own mama. She already gave him to me. Look – I’m holding him, aren’t I? I’m touching him.’

‘Now, see reason, Betsy,’ said Mother Slaughter, a tiny old thing, in the huge bonnet and cape that she had worn in life and been buried wearing. ‘Where would he live?’

‘Here,’ said Mrs Owens. ‘We could give him the Freedom of the Graveyard.’

Mother Slaughter’s mouth became a tiny ‘O’. ‘But,’ she said. Then she said, ‘But I never.’

‘Well, why not? It en’t the first time we’d’ve given the Freedom of the Graveyard to an outsider.’

‘That is true,’ said Caius Pompeius. ‘But he wasn’t alive.’

And with that, the stranger realised that he was being drawn, like it or not, into the conversation and, reluctantly, he stepped out of the shadows, detaching from them like a patch of darkness. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I am not. But I take Mrs Owens’ point.’

Josiah Worthington said, ‘You do, Silas?’

‘I do. For good or for evil – and I firmly believe that it is for good – Mrs Owens and her husband have taken this child under their protection. It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,’ said Silas, ‘take a graveyard.’

He would be there waiting at sunset, just before Silas awakened.

His guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as Bod needed in order to understand.

‘You aren’t allowed out of the graveyard – it’s aren’t, by the way, not amn’t, not these days – because it’s only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet.’

‘What’s Particle Physics?’ asked Bod.

Scarlett shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There’s atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that’s what we’re all made of. And there’s things that’s smaller than atoms, and that’s Particle Physics.’

Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett’s father was probably interested in imaginary things.

‘Um. Oh. So, who is buried down there?’

Caius shook his head. ‘I do not know, young Owens. But I felt him, back when this place was empty. I could feel something waiting even then, deep in the hill.’

‘What was he waiting for?’

‘All I could feel,’ said Caius Pompeius, ‘was the waiting.’