"But I kept telling them I wanted to explore it. So one day my dad put on his big brown boots and his gloves and put my boots on me and my jeans and sweater, and we went for a walk.

"We must have walked for about twenty minutes. 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. "And why was that?" asked the cat, although it sounded barely interested.

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

The candle cast huge, strange, flickering shadows along the wall. She heard something moving in the darkness, beside her, or to one side of her, she could not tell. It seemed as if it was keeping pace with her, whatever it was.

"And that's why you're going back to her world, then?" said the cat. "Because your father once saved you from wasps?"

"Don't be silly," said Coraline. "I'm going back for them because they are my parents. And if they noticed I was gone I'm sure they would do the same for me. You know you're talking again?"

"How fortunate I am," said the cat, "in having a travelling companion of such wisdom and intelligence." Its tone remained sarcastic, but its fur was bristling, and its brush of a tail stuck up in the air.

Coraline was going to say something, like "sorry" or "wasn't it a lot shorter walk last time?" when the candle went out as suddenly as if it had been snuffed by someone's hand.

There was a scrabbling and a pattering, and Coraline could feel her heart pounding against her ribs. She put out one hand… and felt something wispy, like a spider's web, brush her hands and her face.

At the end of the corridor the electric light went on, blinding after the darkness. A woman stood, silhouetted by the light, a little ahead of Coraline.

"Coraline? Darling?" she called.

"Mum!" said Coraline, and she ran forward, eager and relieved.

"Darling," said the woman. "Why did you ever run away from me?"

Coraline was too close to stop, and she felt the other mother's cold arms enfold her. She stood there, rigid and trembling as the other mother held her tightly.

"Where are my parents?" Coraline asked.

"We're here," said her other mother, in a voice so close to her real mother's that Coraline could scarcely tell them apart. "We're here. We're ready to love you and play with you and feed you and make your life interesting."

Coraline pulled back, and the other mother let her go, with reluctance.

The other father, who had been sitting on a chair in the hallway, stood up and smiled. "Come on into the kitchen," he said. "I'll make us a midnight snack. And you'll want something to drink-hot chocolate, perhaps?"

Coraline walked down the hallway until she reached the mirror at the end. There was nothing reflected in it but a young girl in her dressing gown and slippers, who looked like she had recently been crying but whose eyes were real eyes, not black buttons, and who was holding tightly to a burned-out candle in a candlestick.

She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her.

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave. She put down the candlestick on the floor, then she turned round. The other mother and the other father were looking at her hungrily.

"I don't need a snack," she said. "I have an apple. See?" And she took an apple from her dressing-gown pocket, then bit into it with relish and an enthusiasm that she did not really feel.

The other father looked disappointed. The other mother smiled, showing a full set of teeth, and each of the teeth was a tiny bit too long. The lights in the hallway made her black-button eyes glitter and gleam.

"You don't frighten me," said Coraline, although they did frighten her, very much. "I want my parents back."

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

"Whatever would I have done with your old parents? If they have left you, Coraline, it must be because they became bored with you, or tired. Now, I will never become bored with you, and I will never abandon you. You will always be safe here with me." The other mother's wet-looking black hair drifted around her head, like the tentacles of a creature in the deep ocean.

"They weren't bored of me," said Coraline. "You're lying. You stole them."

"Silly, silly Coraline. They are fine wherever they are."

Coraline simply glared at the other mother.

"I'll prove it," said the other mother, and brushed the surface of the mirror with her long white fingers. It clouded over, as if a dragon had breathed on it, and then it cleared.

In the mirror it was daytime already. Coraline was looking at the hallway, all the way down to her front door. The door opened from the outside and Coraline's mother and father walked inside. They carried suitcases.

"That was a fine holiday," said Coraline's father.

"How nice it is, not to have Coraline any more," said her mother with a happy smile. "Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do, like go abroad, but were prevented from doing by having a little daughter."

"And," said her father, "I take great comfort in knowing that her other mother will take better care of her than we ever could."

The mirror fogged and faded and reflected the night once more.

"See?" said her other mother.

"No," said Coraline. "I don't see. And I don't believe it either."

She hoped that what she had just seen was not real, but she was not as certain as she sounded. There was a tiny doubt inside her, like a maggot in an apple core. Then she looked up and saw the expression on her other mother's face: a flash of real anger, which crossed her face like summer lightning, and Coraline was sure in her heart that what she had seen in the mirror was no more than an illusion.