Coraline nodded. "I've been told bits. I know this is a school for magic, and about Sorting, a little."

She took a deep breath. "The other mother's world was behind the door in our drawing room that was supposed to be bricked up. I opened it one day, because I was bored, and there was a corridor. And I thought it would go to the empty flat next door, but it didn't. It went to somewhere that looked like my own home. Only not exactly. And she looked like my mother, but not exactly. She was tall and pale and her fingers were too long, and when she turned round there were big black buttons where her eyes should be."

Coraline shivered a little, remembering, and then went on. "Everyone had button eyes there. The other father, and the other Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, and the other Mister Bobo who lives upstairs. None of them were real though, in the end, she made them all. But I didn't know that then, and apart from the buttons everything there seemed okay. Much more interesting than at home. But then..." She swallowed slightly. "They said they wanted me to stay. For ever and always. And first they'd have to put buttons into my eyes too."

She paused there, taking another breath. It was a very long story, and she'd never told it all the way through before.