I found the door just a little afterwards. It wasn't two hard to be honest. I just followed the doll. That sounds a little strange, but in the end she led me there somehow.
Any sane person would already have thrown the doll down the nearest well, with its button eyes ripped from its head, but I am obviously very incredibly insane. It wasn't because I wanted her to show me a perfect life. I was already sure what she would show me.
We need to get something strait here. I didn't have blue hair, my hair is black. My name is not Coraline, it's Eve. I do not live in an apartment in a big American house. I live in a small Victorian house in London. I don't have a cat because my mum hated them before she died and my dad is too drunk most of the time to care for me and my baby sister Gracie, never mind a cat. He started on the drink when Mum died. That was when Gracie was born. And for my twelfth birthday my dad gave me a doll with button eyes. But what I really want to know is why it was in my mum's trunk anyways.
That was how I found the door. Where was the one place Mum never let me go? The attic.
I clambered through the piles of Mums old stuff, but it didn't really mean anything to me. Just lots of clothes and moth-eaten old toys and black and white family photos. I tried to cough quietly as the dust filled my lungs, but the urge was overwhelming and I coughed and coughed until I felt dizzy. The dust filled my eyes until they stung and tears were dripping down my cheeks, but still I stepped from rafter to rafter, using leaky water pipes that hadn't been fixed in years for balance.
'Here we go.' I thought, as I reached the back corner of the attic. I brushed away the dust on the ground. Nobody had been up here in years. Just what I thought, I gasped as I uncovered the trapdoor. I must have been standing above the bathroom then, but I knew that's not where the door went. I regretted the gasp as my throat filled with dust. I loosened the rusty latch on the door, it can't have been opened for at least twenty five years…
With my eyes closed, I dropped the doll down the hole and jumped down after it.