It was cold and dark in at the bottom of the well where even the sun did not shine. The water would drip of the walls slowly and hiss as it hit the stone ground. The air was freezing and moist. Every now and then, tiny droplets would drip from far above and into the endless stone pit leaving the tiniest echo of a drip and the closest thing you could get the sky above. You could not have seen the water dripping off the walls for everything was cloaked in darkness. Black as a cat in a coal cellar even. But don't say that, she hates cats. And in any case it doesn't matter that it is dark down there. She doesn't have eyes.
Not with her anyway.
The cloth she grips is shrivelled and shrunken and stinking but she grips ever harder. With fingers as sharp as needles in fact. She cannot smell it, for as well as being apart from her eyes; she is far from her nose. A whole world apart in fact. But she can still…sense it. And with it, beneath the rank and odour is the gentle scent of a young girl.
Coraline.
And indeed she misses her little girl. Her little darling who locked her in her web and threw her hand down this cold well. Her sweet little specimen who ran in fear from her loving needles. Poor, precious little thing. Indeed, her hands tremble and grip the cloth harder for thought of her.
It is interesting really how part of her remains with her body while some small fragment of her mind stays with her single right hand. The hand she swore on. The needles are rusting and it is only the fabric they cling onto so tightly that stops them falling apart. The gentle feel of the cloth is all the needles need. Of course, they would prefer something more…real. Something fleshy and bloody and filled with innocent smiles…
And now a tiny shard of light, the faintest glimmer of something that is not dark gently casts itself on the bottom of the well. Despite its weakness, the hand flinches away like a scalded dog. The light, however weak, still burns against her. The fiendish light that took her beloved ghost children away and left the small room behind the mirror quite empty. She remembers slowly feeding on the tiny children all shrunken in fear beneath her black button eyes. She recalls drinking their fear and draining their souls dry of everything that made them human. And then they left in a flurry of wing beats and away from the room where she had eaten their eyes. Ungrateful things.
And then her sweet Coraline had fled her, running from her gentle embrace and locking the door behind her, locking her sweet other mother away from her. Or so she thought. She could remember swearing on her good right hand but oh dear, that seemed to have followed her daughter through the door. Couldn't be helped. It was only natural she would then look for the key. The key to the door that stood between her and her sweet Coraline. Coraline who ruined her plans and is the reason she is slowly starving to death. Why her bony figure is thinner than ever before and so undernourished from lack of the sweet innocence her ghosts gave to her stomach.
Now her body was so very alone and trapped in her web, starving and dying, while her hand lay waiting in the depths of this misbegotten place, clutching the key within the small cloth that reminded her of her doom. And with each passing hour, her body will get thinner and her hand will grip tighter.
If she had her mouth she would smile for the thought of her blue haired sweetheart. And if she had a stomach it was also growl. She could almost envision wrapping the sweet young thing in her arms once more and never letting her go. She could imagine smiling with her many teeth at the blue little child and making her the most marvellous things she could ever desire. And above all, she would give Coraline what she desired most and love more than any mother anywhere else could. All those things she imagined while she waited behind the door and under the well.
Alas, the other mother can only imagine as she sits lonely and dreaming in two very different places. In the other world where she sits silently in what remains of Coraline Jones' other house and at the bottom of the well where she taps her needle fingers on the cloth that smells of her darling girl and gripping it tighter every day.
The Beldam is still waiting, for her love for the little blue haired girl has never faded.
Nor has her hunger.