CORALINE JONES CONTINUED TO GROW UP, nearly forgetting everything that happened behind the door. Every time a memory did come up, it happened while she was sleeping, and she would always excuse it as a bad dream.

And as Coraline aged, so did the house, so did the door, and so did everything behind it. And like the house when it aged, so did the door and the world that came with it. Everything in the house began to warp. The ceilings, the floors, the door.

The locks on the door began to rust over. The wood began to swell. And the smell of something rotten came from behind the door.

"Mum," yelled Coraline Jones from down the hall, "some awful smell is coming from the drawing room!"

"Well find it and get rid of it," Mel Jones yelled back at her daughter. That was their relationship. Back and forth bickering. But Coraline did not complain. For some peculiar reason, Coraline found comfort in the disagreements she had with her parents. It grounded her. It made her feel safe. Coraline questioned why she felt this way, but she could never place her finger on it.

Coraline went into the drawing room and looked for the odd smell. She checked under the uncomfortable furniture they had inherited when her grandmother had passed. She inspected the painting of the bowl of fruit that hung over the mantle piece. She even checked the windows for mold that could have grown from the constant rain. And to her dismay, Coraline Jones found nothing.

"I can't find anything!" Coraline yelled to her mother, not even realizing she had become noseblind to the smell.

"Check the door!" Mel replied.

"Which door?" screamed Coraline, as she was confused about what door to check. It was a very large arch that connected the hallway to the drawing room. So there were no doors for her to enter from.

"The door!" yelled Mel, "On the wall. The one that used to lead to the other flat."

The other flat. Not long after Coraline moved into the Pink Palace, did another family move in. A mother, a daughter, and an old grandmother they both looked after. That is the kind of people the Pink Palace usually attracted, the elderly.

In their apartment, there was no door in their drawing room that seemed to connect to hers. And Coraline would have remembered. She got paid by the neighbors to paint the room a soft shade of pink. Coraline thought it was an odd color for a drawing room, but she dismissed it from her mindset.

Coraline scanned the drawing room looking for a door and sure enough, she found one. The wood of it was really swollen and damaged than anything in the house. And to make matters worse, it was all scratched up at the bottom.

Coraline walked to the door to inspect it. The door was a complete safety hazard. There were various splinters waiting to happen, so Coraline was anxious to touch it. She looked at it carefully, inspecting every single inch of it. But she found nothing.

So she tried to open it. She tried pulling on the handle, but found it locked. So she went to the key drawer and desperately searched for the right key. She went through what seemed like dozens of keys and found nothing.

"Mum," she yelled again at Mel, "do you know where to the key the door is?"

"It went missing years ago. Just a couple of days after we moved in, actually."

"Huh." Coraline thought to herself. She could have sworn that sounded familiar. Perhaps a dream. "Yes," she said to herself, "a dream." She remembered it quite clearly now. She had an old skeleton key sitting on a blanket over the well, and a dismembered hand trying to grab it and plummeting into the hole.

But that couldn't happen in real life.

"That old door is so warped and rusted, you could probably just pull it open if you tried hard enough. And check for rat holes. There used to be rat droppings around that door when we first moved in. That's probably the smell."

Coraline pulled at the door. She pulled once, and it did not budge. She pulled twice, and nothing. She pulled a third time, with all her force, and there was a creak, but nothing more. She pulled for a fourth time, trying so hard to pull it open, and it was almost like there was an even stronger force pushing the door back in place. And for a brief moment, Coraline thought she saw hands pushing back on the door.

But Coraline was not having it. She needed to open that door and discover what in the world could be making that scent. So she pulled for a fifth time, and for some reason, something overcame her, and that door popped open, the locks on the door knocking off, and falling to the floor.

And there was nothing but bricks. No mold, no rat droppings. Just red bricks, stacked on top of each other. They were a wall. And one thing about walls is that they do not move. And any normal person would tell you that this wall was not moving. But Coraline was not a normal girl, and too her, it looked like the wall was breathing.