Microsoft Word Neil Gaiman Coraline doc

“I think he was in some sort of fight,” said Miss Spink. “He has a deep gash in his side, poor 
dear. We’ll take him to the vet later this afternoon. I wish I knew what could have done it.” 
Something, Coraline knew, would have to be done. 
That final week of the holidays, the weather was magnificent, as if the summer itself were trying 
to make up for the miserable weather they had been having by giving them some bright and 
glorious days before it ended. 
The crazy old man upstairs called down to Coraline when he saw her coming out of Miss Spink 
and Miss Forcible’s flat. 
“Hey! Hi! You! Caroline!” he shouted over the railing. 
“It’s Coraline,” she said. “How are the mice?” 
“Something has frightened them,” said the old man, scratching his mustache. “I think maybe 
there is a weasel in the house. Something is about. I heard it in the night. In my country we 
would have put down a trap for it, maybe put down a little meat or hamburger, and when the 
creature comes to feast, then—bam!—it would be caught and never bother us more. The mice 
are so scared they will not even pick up their little musical instruments.” 
“I don’t think it wants meat,” said Coraline. She put her hand up and touched the black key that 
hung about her neck. Then she went inside. 
She bathed herself, and kept the key around her neck the whole time she was in the bath. She 
never took it off anymore. 
Something scratched at her bedroom window after she went to bed. Coraline was almost asleep, 
but she slipped out of her bed and pulled open the curtains. A white hand with crimson 
fingernails leapt from the window ledge onto a drainpipe and was immediately out of sight. 
There were deep gouges in the glass on the other side of the window. 
Coraline slept uneasily that night, waking from time to time to plot and plan and ponder, then 
falling back into sleep, never quite certain where her pondering ended and the dream began, one 
ear always open for the sound of something scratching at her windowpane or at her bedroom 
door. 
In the morning Coraline said to her mother, “I’m going to have a picnic with my dolls today. Can 
I borrow a sheet—an old one, one you don’t need any longer—as a tablecloth?” 
“I don’t think we have one of those,” said her mother. She opened the kitchen drawer that held 
the napkins and the tablecloths, and she prodded about in it. “Hold on. Will this do?” 
It was a folded-up disposable paper tablecloth covered with red flowers, left over from some 
picnic they had been on several years before. 
“That’s perfect,” said Coraline. 
“I didn’t think you played with your dolls anymore,” said Mrs. Jones. 
“I don’t,” admitted Coraline. “They’re protective color-ation.” 

“Well, be back in time for lunch,” said her mother. “Have a good time.” 
Coraline filled a cardboard box with dolls and with several plastic doll’s teacups. She filled a jug 
with water. 
Then she went outside. She walked down to the road, just as if she were going to the shops. 
Before she reached the supermarket she cut across a fence into some wasteland and along an old 
drive, then crawled under a hedge. She had to go under the hedge in two journeys in order not to 
spill the water from the jug. 
It was a long, roundabout looping journey, but at the end of it Coraline was satisfied that she had 
not been followed. 
She came out behind the dilapidated old tennis court. She crossed over it, to the meadow where 
the long grass swayed. She found the planks on the edge of the meadow. They were 
astonishingly heavy—almost too heavy for a girl to lift, even using all her strength, but she 
managed. She didn’t have any choice. She pulled the planks out of the way, one by one, grunting 
and sweating with the effort, revealing a deep, round, brick-lined hole in the ground. It smelled 
of damp and the dark. The bricks were greenish, and slippery. 
She spread out the tablecloth and laid it, carefully, over the top of the well. She put a plastic 
doll’s cup every foot or so, at the edge of the well, and she weighed each cup down with water 
from the jug. 
She put a doll in the grass beside each cup, making it look as much like a doll’s tea party as she 
could. Then she retraced her steps, back under the hedge, along the dusty yellow drive, around 
the back of the shops, back to her house. 
She reached up and took the key from around her neck. She dangled it from the string, as if the 
key were just something she liked to play with. Then she knocked on the door of Miss Spink and 
Miss Forcible’s flat. 
Miss Spink opened the door. 
“Hello dear,” she said. 
“I don’t want to come in,” said Coraline. “I just wanted to find out how Hamish was doing.” 
Miss Spink sighed. “The vet says that Hamish is a brave little soldier,” she said. “Luckily, the cut 
doesn’t seem to be infected. We cannot imagine what could have done it. The vet says some 
animal, he thinks, but has no idea what. Mister Bobo says he thinks it might have been a 
weasel.” 
“Mister Bobo?” 
“The man in the top flat. Mister Bobo. Fine old circus family, I believe. Romanian or Slovenian 
or Livonian, or one of those countries. Bless me, I can never remember them anymore.” 
It had never occurred to Coraline that the crazy old man upstairs actually had a name, she 
realized. If she’d known his name was Mr. Bobo she would have said it every chance she got. 
How often do you get to say a name like “Mr. Bobo” aloud? 

“Oh,” said Coraline to Miss Spink. “Mister Bobo. Right. Well,” she said, a little louder, “I’m 
going to go and play with my dolls now, over by the old tennis court, round the back.” 
“That’s nice, dear,” said Miss Spink. Then she added confidentially, “Make sure you keep an eye 
out for the old well. Mister Lovat, who was here before your time, said that he thought it might 
go down for half a mile or more.” 
Coraline hoped that the hand had not heard this last, and she changed the subject. “This key?” 
said Coraline loudly. “Oh, it’s just some old key from our house. It’s part of my game. That’s 
why I’m carrying it around with me on this piece of string. Well, good-bye now.” 
“What an extraordinary child,” said Miss Spink to herself as she closed the door. 
Coraline ambled across the meadow toward the old tennis court, dangling and swinging the black 
key on its piece of string as she walked. 
Several times she thought she saw something the color of bone in the undergrowth. It was 
keeping pace with her, about thirty feet away. 
She tried to whistle, but nothing happened, so she sang out loud instead, a song her father had 
made up for her when she was a little baby and which had always made her laugh. It went, 

Baixar 1.52 Mb.

Compartilhe com seus amigos: