Coraline: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Coraline is awakened by her mother gently shaking her and chiding her for sitting on the nice furniture in the drawing room. Coraline apologizes. Her mother tells her that dinner is in fifteen minutes—she seems to have no recollection of being trapped in the other mother’s world. Coraline goes to the bathroom to wash her scrapes and change out of her pajamas. In the pocket of her robe, she finds three marbles, the stone with the hole in it, the black key, and the snow globe, now empty. Coraline strings the key around her neck using some twine from her toy box, then goes to the kitchen and enjoys dinner with her parents. She is grateful to have them back and eats her father’s entire home-cooked meal.

That night, as she gets into bed, Coraline keeps the key around her neck. As she falls asleep, she has a dream in which she is at a picnic with the three lost children. She can see each of them clearly now. The smallest is a boy with red velvet breeches and a fine white shirt. The second is a tall girl in brown, shapeless peasant’s clothes. The third is a pale girl dressed in shimmering clothes—she appears to have wings, but Coraline can’t tell if they’re part of a costume or not. The three children eat hungrily and thank Coraline for saving them. After the meal, the four of them play in the meadow together, and then sit down to bowls of ice cream as dark falls.

The lost children thank Coraline again for saving them and offer to do anything they can for her. Coraline says there’s nothing she needs from them—“it’s all over.” All three children’s faces darken with sadness for a moment, and then the winged girl says that Coraline’s trials aren’t yet finished. The tall girl states that even though the other mother swore to let Coraline go, she lied. The children can’t tell Coraline what’s coming for her but they assure her she’ll be able to handle it. Coraline watches as the three children stand from the picnic and depart into the moonlight.

Coraline wakes in the middle of the night, aroused from sleep by the sound of something scuttling outside her door. Coraline tells whatever it is to leave her alone—she thinks it sounds like “a rat with an extra leg” as it hustles away. Coraline gets out of bed and opens the door, tiptoeing through the house in search of the thing. When she can’t find it, she goes to the front door and opens it, standing alone in the gray light of dawn. Soon, the thing scuttles past Coraline—it is, to her horror, the other mother’s right hand, severed when Coraline slammed the door on it on her way back to her own world. Coraline realizes that the hand is after her key.