For anyone reading reading this who might be American; I'm from the other side of the Atlantic, and my information on middle schools comes from a hasty Wikipedia search. If any of it is greviously wrong, ascribe it to ignorance rather than maliciousness.


School wasn't as bad Coraline had feared. It was worse.

The uniforms, in all their splendid shades of gray, had turned out to be the most appealing thing about Derleth Middle School. The cafeteria food left a lot to be desired (such as good taste, variety, consistency etc.), everyone apart from Wybie and herself had formed themselves into comfortable, insular cliques with "No New Members" policies, and the classes and teachers, needless to say, weren't a patch on her old school.

Case in point, Miss Abra Alhazred, Coraline's teacher for English.

"Coraline! Pay attention!"

Ah, and because things weren't bad enough, her experiences over the summer had left her unable to concentrate on just about anything.

"Sorry, Miss Alhazred," said Coraline listlessly, while the rest of the class did their best to look too dutiful and absorbed in their work to notice, apart from Wybie, who gave her a sympathetic nod.

"What is it this time?" sighed Miss Alhazred, striding to Coraline's desk. She was slender and tall, with dark skin and deep brown eyes that suggested an Arabic ancestry. Her hand swept down and plucked the paper Coraline had been doodling on off the desk. "Drawing in class? Coraline, you're meant..."

Anyone who had been paying close attention to Miss Alhazred would have seen the flicker of unease and confusion pass over her face as she scanned the page. The paper held a rough drawing of a certain figure from Coraline's recent history. Button eyes, spider-esque appearance, hands like knitting needles. Rhymes with "Sheldam".

"...to be studying the text." she said with barely a wobble. "See me after class."

Coraline, for the second time in as many weeks, groaned as Miss Alhazred walked back to her desk, frowning over the paper all the while.

It just wasn't fair. Nobody else would talk to her or pay attention to her, (apart from Wybie, but for every time he made Coraline glad of his company, he also made her want to drop-kick him into a toilet) or even think about her. They just thought of her as "That out of state girl with blue hair who hangs about with Slug-Boy" and left it at that.

Coraline wished, more than ever, that she was back in Michigan. There, she had friends. There, she could talk to people without being ignored or being treated to a long, rambling conversation about whatever dorky thing had entered Wybie's head.

When the bell rang, announcing the beginning of Metal Shop, she welcomed it. There, she was teamed up with Wybie, whose demeanour concealed a savant-like ability with any piece of machinery. He was the delight of the Metal Shop teacher, Mr MacDonald, and the despair of nearly everyone else.

She was almost out the door before Miss Alhazred coughed in a meaningful manner. Coraline turned back to see Miss Alhazred brandishing the piece of paper.

"What," she began, as the last other student walked out (Wybie, who whispered "Don't worry, I'll make an early start on the welding!" as he passed Coraline.) ", is this?"

"It's … it's just something I was planning for Art, Miss Alhazred. I promise, I won't..."

"You're not telling me the truth," said Miss Alhazred, her face set and grim. "What is this a drawing of, Coraline?"

Why is she so interested?, thought Coraline. Does she know about...? No. She can't. Out loud, she said, "Miss Alhazred, I told you, it's a ..."

"Coraline," said Miss Alhazred, leaning in towards Coraline. "Please believe me when I say there could be a lot more at stake here than a detention. If I'm right in my suspicions, you're in so far over your head you can't even see the surface. I will ask you once, and once only. Where and when did you see the creature in this drawing?"


In the Red Hook neighbourhood in Brooklyn, there is a street that nobody enters.

The street is derelict, with rubbish scattered across the pavements and rack and ruin besetting most of the buildings; but that isn't why nobody comes there. The street is quite simply a blind spot on the face of New York. Police, responding to some emergency, will never take this street as a short-cut. Pedestrians won't give it a first glance, never mind a second. Most of the grim, looming buildings clustered on either side are not lived in or used or even register on the mental radar of the average New Yorker. And nobody knows why, because next to nobody knows about it in the first place.

This suits the purposes of a Mr Daniel Cain, who spends most of his time in the bookshop on this street, and by some peculiar osmosis, becomes another blind spot on the face of New York.

He is a strange old recluse, who dabbled into a few things he shouldn't have when he was younger, acquired a multitude of painful and traumatising memories, and discovered this street. He lives amongst piles of old books and goes out unseen into the city to get food every week (which, being a conscientious man and possessing more than adequate funds, he leaves money on the till for.)

The bookshop he lives in is a proper, detached, foreboding, crenelated, Gothic-style bookshop. To look at it suggests you could get a few tomes of eldritch lore there, and at a discount. (You couldn't, at least not since 1937.)

And the most salient feature of the bookshop, on this misty and oppressive afternoon, is that it is on fire.

The front door slams open, and Cain charges out, his hair and beard and coat singed and smeared. He spins on his heel and faces down something unseen behind a thick pall of smoke. He draws a pouch from his pocket and empties it into his right palm, some of the precious crystal powder caught by a breeze. He barks a few obscene phrases in a language that was dead when Babylon was young, and throws the powder at the unseen creature. There is the sound of frying bacon, an alien ululation of pain and rage, and then nothing but the crackle of leaping flames.

Cain, breathing hard and coughing his lungs out on the stone steps leading up to the front door, is unaware of footsteps behind him until it is too late to run.

"Well fought, Doctor," says a voice like an echo in a tomb.

Cain turns and sees a small, skinny man in a trim white suit. Sunglasses cover his eyes and a white fedora covers much of his face, and straggly blonde hair hangs to his shoulders. He looks up and smiles at Cain through a trimmed beard.

"I would not grow too confident, however. That shoggoth was one of many, and it will heal in time. And I..." And here the man throws his arms wide, as if to encompass the world. "I … am mightier still. Your powder will do nothing."

The Man in White, it should be pointed out, carries no weapon; no rifle, no knife, no pistol, no sword. He doesn't need them.

Cain, even as he sees his death approaching, carries himself high.

"So be it," he snaps. "Finish what you started, fiend. I shall not give you the satisfaction of my begging for my life."

"Very well," says the Man in White. "Would you prefer that I finished this quickly, or slowly?"

"Quickly,"

"Then it pleases me," says the Man in White with a smile, "To deny you your preference." With that, he takes off his sunglasses, revealing hell.

Cain breaks his word and begs before the end. He then begs for death, which is granted in due course. After he is finished, the Man in White brushes imaginary specks of dust off his suit and regards the bookshop/inferno.

"Hey-ho, another loose end goes," he croons, before he frowns and cocks his head to one side.

"Peculiar," he says after a few moments. "What could the whelp want?" He shrugs, and steps into the void, leaving fire and Cain's body in his wake.

Take note of this, if nothing else: The Man in White does not like loose ends.