Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense. She sometimes wondered who they thought they were talking to.

"And be very, very careful," said Miss Spink. She got up from her armchair and went over to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was a small jar, and Miss Spink took off the top of the jar and began to pull things out of it. There was a tiny china duck, a thimble, a strange little brass coin, two paperclips, and a stone with a hole in it.

She passed Coraline the stone with a hole in it.

"What's it for?" asked Coraline. The hole went all the way through the middle of the stone. She held it up to the window and looked through it.

"It might help," said Miss Spink. "They're good for bad things, sometimes."

Coraline put on her coat, said goodbye to Misses Spink and Forcible, and to the dogs, and went outside.

The mist hung like blindness around the house. She walked slowly to the steps up to her family's flat, and then stopped and looked around.

In the mist, it was a ghost-world. In danger? thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn't sound like a bad thing. Not really.

Coraline went back up the steps, her fist closed tightly around her new stone.

3

The next day the sun shone, and Coraline's mother took her into the nearest large town to buy clothes for school. They dropped her father off at the railway station. He was going into London for the day to see some people.

Coraline waved him goodbye.

They went to the department store to buy the school clothes.

Coraline saw some Day-glo green gloves she liked a lot. Her mother refused to get them for her, preferring instead to buy white socks, navy-blue school underpants, four grey blouses, and a dark grey skirt.

"But Mum, everybody at school's got grey blouses and everything. Nobody’s got green gloves. I could be the only one."