Chapter Text
TMA Music
Click of tape recorder
“Damn it. Stupid tape recorder. Just had to give out mid statement, huh?”
Sound of knocking
“Oh, uh, hello. Who are you?”
“Coraline. Coraline Jones. Are you Jonathan Sims?”
“No, but I can leave a message for him if you want. Would you like to sit down?”
“Sure.”
“What is it you wanted to tell him, exactly?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be to him.” sigh “I wanted to make a statement.”
“Great! A statement regarding...?”
“An event that happened when I was little, and another around a year ago.”
“Any specifics?”
“A tiny door and a kidnapping spider-woman that called itself my mother.”
“Er, alright then. Statement of Caroline Jones-“
“Coraline.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s Coraline. Not Caroline.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“It’s alright. Everyone gets it wrong the first time. I never got your name, though.”
“Martin. Martin Blackwood.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Martin.”
“Thank you! Uh, right, well, statement of Coraline Jones- did I get it right that time?”
“Yes.”
“Great! Statement regarding a tiny door and a kidnapping spider, taken directly from subject, April 5, 2018. Statement begins.”
“It happened the summer of 2009. I was 11 at the time, and we had just moved to the Pink Palace Apartments, in Oregon. It wasn’t much of a palace. It was old - maybe 200 years? - and really worn down. The interior was nice enough, though. Except for that door. That damn door. It was on one of the walls in the living room, covered with wallpaper. Child sized, although I didn’t realize it at the time. When I asked my mother to unlock it, there was nothing behind it but brick.
I came back again later that night, though, and it was open. Behind it was a glowing portal, almost like a cocoon, that glowed blue and purple. Being the curious kid I was, I crawled through. Looking back, it was the worst mistake of my life. I don’t know what I expected when I came out of the other side, but it wasn’t that. The other side was exactly what I came through, except better. There was a painting of a little boy - he was sad, and he had dropped his ice cream cone. Here, though, he was grinning, cone intact. Everything else was the same way - brighter, happier, better. At least, for a while.
I gravitated towards the smell of food in the kitchen. The sight that met me was my mother - with buttons for eyes. As I’d later discover, everyone there had buttons. It wasn’t my mother, of course. To this day, I still don’t know what it was. A monster, I guess. She controlled everything there - the people, the landscape. On my side, she exercised control through a doll. She made it look like whatever child she was after. In my case, it looked just like me. She spied on us through it- all of us. She called herself the Other Mother. Said everyone had one. I believe her.
The first time there, we ate dinner together - me, her, and the Other Father. I woke up in my room, strangely enough, although I fell asleep in that Other Bed. I told my parents, but they didn’t believe me, of course. My mom recommended I visited the actresses in the flat below us. She thought they were nuts. They might have been a little odd, but they weren’t wrong. Not about that place.
When I went outside, I discovered packages at our doorstep. They were all addressed to Bobinsky - the old man that lived upstairs. My mom thought he was a drunk. He might’ve been, but like with Spink and Forcible, he was right about the evil that lurked on the other side of our apartment. I went up to deliver them. They smelled awful. Apparently they were strong cheeses, for his jumping mouse circus. He was amusing, to say the least, and I was just leaving before he came with a warning. He told me the mice had said - ‘do not go through the little door’. I should’ve listened.
Afterwards, I went to go visit my neighbors in the flat below - Spink and Forcible. They argued like the old married couple they were. Retired burlesque dancers with an affinity for Scottish Terriers, who they stuffed and put in angel costumes when they passed. Like I said, strange, but not wrong. Spink said she would read my fortune in my tea leaves. She said I was in terrible danger. I should’ve listened then, too.
Of course, I went back. The second time, the Other Mother brought me a friend. It was her version of Wybie, a kid I had met on my first day there. The real Wybie was a little weird, but funny. He’s the one that gave me the doll in the first place. He had nothing to do with it, though. It looked just like me. I guess he assumed it was like, one of those weird dolls parents get that look exactly like their kids. I was way too old for dolls, of course, but he didn’t know.
This Wybie was wrong, though. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. The Other Mother took away his ability to. Said she ‘fixed him’. I’d give anything to hear the real Wybie’s voice again.
That night, we went to the jumping mouse circus the Other Mr. B had. This time, it was real. It was amazing, and it was all a trap.
The third time was the last. The Other Mother gave me another meal and a change of clothes. She told me she had something special for me, that me and Wybie were going to Spink and Forcible’s show after dinner. I didn’t see him, so I assumed he would have been there already.
On my way, I encountered a cat. It was the same cat Wybie had back home, but this time it could talk. It really was the same cat - no buttons or anything. I don’t know how it could speak, but it did. It warned me- said Wybie had told it how dangerous this world was. I didn’t believe him. God, how many signs did I have at that point?
We went to see the show. In the grand scheme of things, it was unremarkable. When we left, the Other Parents took me in. Told me I could stay there forever, if I wanted. She just needed one thing - presented it to me like some sick present. It was a box, with two button eyes, a needle nose and a thread mouth inside. She needed my eyes.
I pushed it away and ran off to sleep after giving her some bullshit excuse, barricading my door and throwing all those weirdly alive, Other Dolls into a chest before locking it and throwing myself under my covers. I’d always woken up in my room after. Guess that was just because she wanted me to, though, because that night, I woke up in there.
I ended up confronting the Other Father and taking a walk before I came back to her. He said something along the lines of her doing something to the Other Wybie, and implied that she controlled everything and everyone there. The cat verified it. When I tried to walk away from the place, all I saw was white. He said that bit was empty, that she had only created what she knew would impress me.
When I came back, everything in the house was twisted. I realized for the first time that the furniture was bugs, and that they twitched and moved. In one of the chairs, there she sat, eating the most disgusting ‘chocolates’ I had ever seen. I demanded to leave, and she didn’t like that. She transformed into an iteration of her former self. It still looked like my mother, but longer, and thinner. More severe. Evil, I’d say. It was then that she threw me behind a mirror, locking me there with three ghosts.
They were the spirits of kids she had killed and trapped there. Their eyes were the key. They begged me to find them and set them free. It was then that Other Wybie pulled me through the mirror and back into the Other Hallway. She had done something awful to him - sewed his face into a permanent smile. I took out the thread, but he hushed me as he lead me to the living room, where we pushed the wardrobe guarding the door aside. The crash let the Other Mother know we were there. I begged him to come with me, but he just shook his head and pulled off his glove. It was sand - all of him. His hand just... blew away.
He shoved me through the door before I could protest. I never knew what happened to him. I hope he’s dead. At least, as close as something like that can get. What she would’ve done to him otherwise... at any rate, I made my way through the portal to the other side, the real side, locking the door behind me. The house I came back to was empty in a way that I knew meant that something was horribly wrong.
Later that night, I discovered that she had stolen my parents. I had to go back for them, so I did. The cat told me she liked games. It was right. I challenged her to high stakes hide and seek. I had to find my parents and the eyes of the ghost children. In exchange, she’d let everyone go - me, my parents, and all the kids. If I lost, she could have me forever.
I found each eye in a different place. The first eye was part of a handle for this grasshopper machine the Other Father used to garden. He... he gave it to me. I don’t know why, but he and the Other Wybie helped me. Why they could resist her but nothing else could - or would - I don’t know.
The second eye was in the form of a ring. It was trapped in this... this sick piece of candy. It was in the theater of the flat below us, and on stage was a single wrapped piece of taffy. Inside was the ring, on the fingers of one of the two figures that lay entangled inside - the melted and intertwined forms of what used to be the Other Spink and Forcible. When I reached for the ring, it grabbed me. I was lucky to get out alive. I think the dogs helped. They attacked the melted mess for me, and I went on to find the last one in the flat above us.
Hanging outside was what was left of the Other Wybie - his clothes, swaying in the wind. God, I hope she just blew him away. The thought of him being used as another one of her sick creations - anyways. The last ring was a ball from the mouse circus. Mr. B was wrong, too. Distorted, and odd looking. His skin, it shifted. It was rats, all rats, sneaking around in his suit and making up the twisted copy of what used to be my upstairs neighbor. I don’t think anything in that world was willing. They were all forced into it. I think the creatures were kind, but she twisted them or killed them, like with the Other Father, or Wybie, or Spink and Forcible, or Mr. B, or the dogs.
The only thing that was evil were the rats. They ran away with the ball. It was then that the button slid over the moon, and the rest of the world turned grey. Every place I had left, it turned gray and began to peel as the shadow of a button slid over more and more of the moon. Whether it was timing me or responding to me, I never knew. What I knew was that the game was over. I lost everything.
At least, I thought I did. It was the cat that did it. He caught and ate the final rat, where sand poured out. I grabbed the ball and the cat and ran inside, just in time for the rest of the world to unravel. We walked through the peeling hallway, and I finally noticed how awful that place really was.
The living room was more of a dying room at that point. Everything there was a desiccated husk of its former self, including the Other Mother. She was in her full form, only barely looking like my mother. It was a spider, with a pale, cracked face, long, spindly legs, and needles for hands. Those awful hands tried to snatch the eyes away, but I still needed my parents. I lied, told her that they were behind that door. When she turned back to me, I grabbed the snow globe she kept them in and threw the cat at her. It managed to claw off her buttons before the world changed once more.
She stomped, and the floor of the dying room turned into a web. Below, there was nothing - just vast, white space. All that was left of the world was this web and the walls surrounding it. I managed to escape, but not without the ghosts helping me. When I escaped, the snow globe was broken. My parents were back, and I slept that night with the eyes under my pillow.
The ghosts visited me that night, golden and decorated with wings and halos. They thanked me, but warned me - she would never stop looking for the key.
It wasn’t until later, when she crawled out, that I realized how stupid I was to drop it in the well. When I first met Wybie, I almost fell into it (said with a laugh). He said that it was so deep that if you fell to the bottom, you’d see a sky full of stars in the middle of the day. It was always night in the Other World, even if it was day when I came through, and the well was as round as the portal behind my door.
At the time, though, it was a great idea. As I was about to drop it, her severed hand lunged at me, ready to drag me back to her domain and leave me there forever. That was when Wybie saved me. He damn near fell into the well himself, but we managed to shatter the hand with a stone. We tied the remains of the hand and the stone up in a blanket wrapped shut with the key and tossed it in the well.
Stupid.”
“Wow. Is that it for the first event, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Tape recorder’s almost done. We’ll start a new one.”
Click of tape recorder
TMA Music