The dryad who lives inside the oak tree has been terrorizing the condo building dwellers for generations. She throws acorns and pours sap and drops pollen on their cars, and causes severe allergies
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The door was evidently smaller than I remembered.
Kneeling in Coraline Jones's body, I turned the black key in my hand and stared blankly into the blue tunnel which I had seen countless of times through a TV screen. I knew what waited for me at the other end of the abyss - endless buffet dinners, ghost children and a woman with buttons where her eyes should have been.
I knew how the story went. The difference was that this time, I was the one choosing what happened next.
The Other Mother welcomed me exactly how I remembered, with arms wide and the black buttons over her eyes doing little to hide her warmth. Yet while she tried to enchant me, I watched the enchantment itself. The fire seemed to burn brighter whenever I was pleased. In the garden, I wondered what a pink flower might look like in rainbow and watched the color slowly seep across its petals.
The Other Mother hadn't moved.
Perhaps this world did not belong to her as completely as Coraline had believed. At the back of my mind, I knew exactly how Coraline had spent her story trying to escape the Other World. But as for me, I decided to stay.
Beyond the garden, where the color thinned into grey and white, I discovered the remains of forgotten paradises. A carousel turning for an audience long gone, a button-eyed family seated around a dinner that had rotted untouched, and an ocean imprisoned beneath an eternal sunset. The Other Mother's fear when she found me there confirmed my suspicion.
She had not created this place.
The Other World had existed long before her, but somehow it could not create anything new on its own. I knew it needed people. Every child who entered brought memories, fears and even wishes with them. Somehow, this world used those pieces to build itself.
What surprised me even more was that the Other Mother did not seem to know where she came from either. She could not remember what she had been before this place or if there had even been a 'before'. Maybe she had once entered through the little door just like I had, or maybe a lonely child had wished for another mother so badly that the world created one.
I never found out, or maybe I didn't need to.
Somewhere during our experiments, she stopped treating me entirely as prey and I stopped seeing her entirely as a monster.
The buttons never appeared and eventually, I understood why.
The other children had needed much persuading to stay but instead, I kept returning voluntarily to this world. That should have frightened me but soon, it became even harder to resist.
After one exhausting day, I wished only for somewhere that demanded nothing from me. On my next visit, a new room waited upstairs. Rain whispered against enormous windows. The air was cool and the blankets were warm. No clocks, messages or expectations. Eight peaceful hours inside the Other World cost only eight minutes in reality.
Soon every discomfort acquired the same remedy. Exhaustion became a visit, then loneliness, then boredom. Reality began to feel badly designed.
Why spend eight hours sleeping when eight minutes would do? Why put up with bad days when there was a world where I could change almost anything I disliked? Before long, going back became easier than staying away. The Other Mother never encouraged me. She didn't need to.
They say a cage works best when its occupant decorates it.
Then the world began responding to me without her. One evening, I wished the rain outside my sanctuary would turn to snow, and seconds later, white flakes drifted past the window. I thought of summer, and sunlight filled the room. I was thrilled. Maybe I had finally figured this place out. Maybe I didn't need the Other Mother anymore. But she saw it differently. She wasn't afraid I was becoming even more powerful than her. She was afraid I was becoming more like her.
I only understood what she meant when I found one of my own memories inside the wall. I saw myself as a child beside someone I knew must have mattered to me. I could see their face and hear their laughter, but I couldn't remember who they were. The Other World remembered a part of my life that I no longer did.
The Other World had never copied my memories. It had spent them.
Every place I had created had taken something from me in return. Suddenly, the abandoned worlds made sense. The children had not simply vanished. They had kept giving the Other World pieces of themselves until there was no longer enough of them left to go home.
I stayed away for fifteen days.
On the sixteenth, I went back. That was when I realised something far more frightening than the memories I had lost. I had started thinking of the Other World as home.
The Other Mother was waiting for me. Beside her sat a small black box containing two buttons, a needle and thread. For the first time, they did not look like instruments of imprisonment. They looked like an invitation. I finally understood what they meant.
Behind one door lay a universe beginning to obey me. Behind the other, a reality stubbornly beyond my control.
The buttons simply made the choice permanent. Perhaps the creature I believed ruled this world had once entered this world just as I had. Maybe she had simply stayed too long. Now I understood what she had really been teaching me. Not how to control the Other World, but how to inherit it.
I closed the box. "Not tonight, Mother". That was not the same as never. I still return, though I'm no longer sure which world feels like home.
Recently, another child crawled through the tunnel, and the Other World stirred around them. The walls warmed, colours brightened, and their favourite meal appeared in the kitchen.
For a moment, I understood the Other Mother. I could give this child everything they wanted. Loving parents, loyal friends and ultimately a life without grief. I could give them every reason to stay. And at that moment, I finally understood the Other Mother completely.
Perhaps the most dangerous monsters were not those that wished to hurt us, but those so certain they knew what would make us happy that they could no longer let us choose for ourselves.
When the child asked to go home, I opened the door.
A door, I had finally learned, was only a door if it opened both ways.
That evening, the Other Mother and I sat together listening to the rain. Neither of us had summoned it. Then came three slow knocks from beneath the house.
We found a door where no door had existed before.
For the first time since I had known her, the Other Mother looked afraid. I had entered her world because I thought I knew exactly what waited on the other side of the door. Now there was a new door and neither of us knew what was behind it.
I reached for the handle.
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