"No, I shouldn"t think so," his father replied. "I"m more use to the war effort where I am."
"Top secret," said David.
His father smiled at him.
"Yes, top secret," he said.
It still gave David a thrill to think that his father might be a spy, or at least know about spies. So far, it was the only interesting part of the war.
That night, David lay in his bed and watched the moonlight streaming through the window. The skies were clear, and the moon was very bright. After a time, his eyes closed, and he dreamed of wolves and little girls and an old king in a ruined castle, fast asleep on his throne. Railway tracks ran alongside the castle, and figures moved through the long gra.s.s that grew beside them. There was a boy and a girl, and the Crooked Man. They disappeared beneath the earth, and David smelled gumdrops and peppermints, and he heard a little girl crying before her voice was drowned out by the sound of an approaching train.
V.
Of Intruders and Transformations
THE CROOKED MAN finally crossed over into David"s world at the start of September.
It had been a long, tense summer. His father spent more time at his place of work than he did at home, sometimes not sleeping in his own bed for two or three nights in a row. It was often too difficult for him to return to the house anyway once night fell. All of the road signs had been removed to thwart the Germans if they invaded, and on more than one occasion David"s father had managed to get lost while driving home in daylight. If he tried driving at night with his headlights off, who knew where he might end up?
Rose was finding motherhood difficult. David wondered if his own mother had found it as hard, if David had been as demanding as Georgie seemed to be. He hoped not. The stress of the situation had caused Rose"s tolerance for David and his moods to sink lower and lower. They barely talked to each other now, and David could tell that his father"s patience with both of them was almost extinguished. At dinner the night before, he had exploded when Rose had taken an innocuous remark of David"s as an insult and the two of them had begun to bicker.
"Why can"t you two just find a way to get along, for crying out loud!" his father had shouted. "I don"t come home for this. I can get all the tension and shouting matches I want at work."
Georgie, seated in his high chair, started to cry.
"Now look what you"ve done," said Rose. She threw her napkin down on the table and went to Georgie.
David"s father buried his head in his hands.
"So it"s all my fault," he said.
"Well it"s not mine," replied Rose.
Simultaneously, their eyes turned toward David.
"What?" he said. "You"re blaming me. Fine!"
He stomped away from the table, leaving his dinner unfinished. He was still hungry, but the stew was mainly vegetables with some nasty pieces of cheap sausage spread through it to break the monotony. He knew that he"d have to eat the rest of it tomorrow, but he didn"t care. It wasn"t going to taste any worse reheated than it did already. As he headed for his room, he expected to hear his father"s voice demanding that he return and finish his food, but n.o.body called him back. He sat down hard on his bed. He couldn"t wait for the summer holidays to be over. A place had been found for David in a school not far from the house, which would at least be better than spending every day with Rose and Georgie.
David was not seeing Dr. Moberley quite as often, mainly because n.o.body had time to take him into London. Anyway, the attacks had stopped, or so it appeared. He no longer fell to the ground or experienced blackouts, but something far stranger and more unsettling was now occurring, stranger even than the whisperings of the books, to which David had grown almost accustomed.
David was experiencing waking dreams. That was the only way he could find to describe them to himself. It felt like those moments late in the evening when you were reading or listening to the radio and you grew so tired that for an instant you fell asleep and started dreaming, except obviously you didn"t realize you"d fallen asleep so that the world suddenly seemed to become very strange. David would be playing in his room, or reading, or walking in the garden, and everything would shimmer. The walls would disappear, the book would fall from his hands, the garden would be replaced by hills and tall, gray trees. He would find himself in a new land, a twilight place of shadows and cold winds, heavy with the smell of wild animals. Sometimes, he would even hear voices. They were somehow familiar as they called to him, but as soon as he tried to concentrate on them, the vision would end and he would be back in his own world.
The strangest thing of all was that one of the voices sounded like his mother"s. It was the one that spoke loudest and clearest. She called to him from out of the darkness. She called to him, and she told him that she was alive.
The waking dreams were always strongest near the sunken garden, but David found them so disturbing that he tried to stay away from that part of the property as much as possible. In fact, so troubled was David by them that he was tempted to tell Dr. Moberley about them, if his father could make time for an appointment. Perhaps he would finally tell him about the whispering of the books too, David thought. The two might be linked, but then he thought of Dr. Moberley"s questions about David"s mother and remembered once again the threat of being "put away." When David talked to him about missing his mother, Dr. Moberley would talk in turn about grief and loss, about how it was natural yet you had to try to get over it. But being sad about your mother dying was one thing; hearing her voice crying out from the shadows of a sunken garden, claiming to be alive behind the decaying brickwork, was quite another. David wasn"t sure how Dr. Moberley would respond to that. He didn"t want to be put away, but the dreams were frightening. He wanted them to stop.
It was one of his last days at home before school recommenced. Tiring of the house, David went for a walk in the woods at the back of the property. He picked up a big stick and scythed at the long gra.s.s. He found a spider"s web in a bush and tried to tempt the spider out with fragments of small sticks. He dropped one close to the center of the web, but nothing happened. David realized it was because the stick wasn"t moving. It was the struggles of the insect that alerted the spider, which made David think that perhaps spiders were a lot cleverer than anything so small had a right to be.
He looked back at the house and saw the window of his bedroom. The ivy growing on the walls almost surrounded the frame, making his room look more than ever like a part of the natural world. Now that he saw it from a distance, he noticed the ivy was thickest at his window and had barely touched any of the other windows on this side of the house. It had not spread across the lower parts of the wall either, the way ivy usually did, but had climbed straight and true along a narrow path to David"s window. Like the beanstalk in the fairy tale that led Jack to the giant, the ivy seemed to know precisely where it was going.
And then a figure moved inside David"s room. He saw a shape pa.s.s by the gla.s.s, dressed in forest green. For a moment, he was certain that it must be Rose, or perhaps Mrs. Briggs. But then David remembered that Mrs. Briggs had gone down to the village, while Rose rarely entered his room, and if she did she always asked his permission first. It wasn"t his father either. The person in the room was the wrong shape for him. In fact, David thought, whoever was in his room was the wrong shape, period. The figure was slightly hunched, as though it had become so used to sneaking about that its body had contorted, the spine curving, the arms like twisted branches, the fingers clutching, ready to s.n.a.t.c.h at whatever it saw. Its nose was narrow and hooked, and it wore a crooked hat upon its head. It disappeared from sight for a moment before it reappeared holding one of David"s books. The figure flicked through the pages before it found something that interested it, whereupon it paused and seemed to start reading.
Then, suddenly, David heard Georgie crying in his nursery. The figure dropped the book and listened. David saw its fingers extend into the air, as if Georgie were hanging before it like an apple ready to be plucked from the tree. It seemed to be debating with itself as to what to do next, for David saw its left hand move to its pointed chin and stroke it softly. While it was thinking, it glanced over its shoulder and down toward the woods below. It saw David and froze for an instant before dropping to the floor, but in that moment David saw coal black eyes set in a pale face so long and thin that it seemed to have been stretched on a rack. Its mouth was very wide, and its lips were very, very dark, like old, sour wine.
David ran for the house. He burst into the kitchen, where his father was reading the newspaper. "Dad, there"s someone in my room!" he said.
His father looked up at him curiously. "What do you mean?"
"There"s a man man up there," insisted David. "I was walking in the woods, and I looked up at my window and he was there. He wore a hat, and his face was really long. Then he heard the baby crying and he stopped whatever he was doing and listened. He saw me looking at him, and he tried to hide. Please, Dad, you"ve got to believe me!" up there," insisted David. "I was walking in the woods, and I looked up at my window and he was there. He wore a hat, and his face was really long. Then he heard the baby crying and he stopped whatever he was doing and listened. He saw me looking at him, and he tried to hide. Please, Dad, you"ve got to believe me!"
His father"s brow furrowed, and he put the paper down. "David, if you"re joking..."
"I"m not, honestly!"
He followed his father up the stairs, the stick still clutched in his hand. The door to his room was closed, and David"s father paused before opening it. Then he reached down and twisted the k.n.o.b. The door opened.
For a second, nothing happened.
"See," said David"s father. "There"s nothing-"
Something struck his father in the face, and he shouted loudly. There was a panicked fluttering, and a banging as whatever it was bounced against the walls and the window. Once the initial shock had gone away, David peered around his father and saw that the intruder was a magpie, its feathers a blur of black and white as it tried to escape from the room.
"Stay outside and keep the door closed," said his father. "They"re vicious birds."
David did as he was told, although he was still frightened. He heard his father open the window and shout at the magpie, forcing it toward the gap, until finally he could hear the bird no longer and his father opened the door, sweating slightly.
"Well, that gave both of us a fright," he said.
David looked into the room. There were some feathers on the floor, but that was all. There was no sign of the bird, or of the strange little man he had seen. He went to the window. The magpie was perched on the crumbling stonework of the sunken garden. It seemed to be staring back at him.
"It was only a magpie," said his father. "That"s what you saw."
David was tempted to argue, but he knew his father would just tell him that he was being silly if he insisted that something else had been in here, something far bigger and far nastier than a magpie. Magpies didn"t wear crooked hats, or reach out for crying babies. David had seen its eyes, and its hunched body, and its long, grasping fingers.
He looked back at the sunken garden. The magpie was gone.
His father sighed theatrically. "You still don"t believe that it was only a magpie, do you?" he said.
He went down on his knees and checked under the bed. He opened the wardrobe and looked in the bathroom next door. He even peered behind the bookcases, where there was a gap barely large enough to accommodate David"s hand.
"See?" said his father. "It was just a bird."
But he could see that David remained unconvinced so, together, they searched all of the rooms on the top floor and then the floors below, until it became clear that the only people in the house were David, his father, Rose, and the baby. Then David"s father left him and returned to his newspaper. Back in his room, David picked up a book from the floor by his window. It was one of Jonathan Tulvey"s storybooks, and it lay open at the tale of Red Riding Hood. The story was ill.u.s.trated by a picture of the wolf towering over the little girl, Grandma"s blood on its claws, and its teeth bared to consume her granddaughter. Someone, presumably Jonathan, had scribbled over the figure of the wolf with a black crayon, as though disturbed by the threat it represented. David closed the book and returned it to its shelf. As he did so, he noticed the silence in his room. There was no whispering. All the books were quiet.
I suppose a magpie could have dislodged that book, thought David, but a magpie couldn"t enter a room through a locked window. Someone else had been there, of that he was sure. In the old stories, people were always transforming themselves, or being transformed, into animals and birds. Couldn"t the Crooked Man have changed himself into a magpie in order to escape discovery?
He hadn"t gone far, though, oh no. He had flown only as far as the sunken garden, and then he had disappeared.
As David lay in bed that night, caught between sleeping and waking, his mother"s voice carried to him from the darkness of the sunken garden, calling his name, demanding that she not be forgotten.
And David knew then that the time was quickly approaching when he would have to enter that place and face at last what lay within.
VI.
Of the War, and the Way Between Worlds
DAVID AND ROSE had their worst fight the next day.
It had been coming for a long time. Rose was breast-feeding Georgie, which meant that she was forced to rise during the night in order to take care of his needs. But even after he was fed, Georgie would toss and turn and cry, and there was little that David"s father could do to help even when he was around. This sometimes led to arguments with Rose. They usually began with a little thing-a dish that his father forgot to put away, or dirt tracked through the kitchen on the soles of his shoes-and quickly developed into shouting matches that would end with Rose in tears and Georgie echoing his mother"s cries.
David thought that his father looked older and more tired than before. He worried about him. He missed his father"s presence. That morning, the morning of the big fight, David stood at the bathroom door and watched his father shave.
"You work really hard," he said.
"I suppose so."
"You"re tired all the time."
"I"m tired of you and Rose not getting along."
"Sorry," said David.
"Hmmmph," said his father.
He finished shaving, wiped the lather from his face with water from the sink, then dried himself with a pink towel.
"I don"t see you that much anymore," said David, "that"s all. I miss having you around."
His father smiled at him, then cuffed him gently on the ear. "I know," he said. "But we all have to make sacrifices, and there are men and women out there who are making much greater sacrifices than we are. They"re putting their lives at risk, and I have a duty to do all I can to help them. It"s important that we find out what the Germans are planning and what they suspect about our people. That"s my job. And don"t forget that we"re lucky here. They"re having a much harder time of it in London."
The Germans had struck hard at London the day before. At one point, according to David"s father, there had been a thousand aircraft battling over the Isle of Sheppey. David wondered what London looked like now. Was it filled with burned-out buildings, with rubble where streets used to be? Were the pigeons still in Trafalgar Square? He supposed that they were. The pigeons weren"t clever enough to move somewhere else. Perhaps his father was right, and they were lucky to be away from it, but a part of David thought again that it must be quite exciting to live in London now. Scary, sometimes, but exciting.
"In time, it will come to an end, and then we can all go back to living normal lives," said his father.
"When?" asked David.
His father looked troubled. "I don"t know. Not for a while."
"Months?"
"Longer, I think."
"Are we winning, Dad?"
"We"re holding on, David. At the moment, that"s the best we can do."
David left his father to get dressed. They all ate breakfast together before his father left, but Rose and his dad said little to each other. David knew that they had been fighting again, so when his father left for work he decided to stay out of Rose"s way even more than usual. He went to his room for a while and played with his soldiers, then later lay in the shade at the back of the house to read his book.
It was there that Rose found him. Although his book was open upon his chest, David"s attention was focused elsewhere. He was staring at the far end of the lawn, where the sunken garden lay, his eyes fixed on the hole in the brickwork as though expecting to see movement within.
"So there you are," said Rose.
David looked up at her. The sun was in his eyes, so he was forced to squint. "What do you want?" he asked.
He hadn"t meant it to come out the way it did. It sounded as if he was being disrespectful and rude, but he wasn"t, or no more than he ever was. He supposed that he could have asked "What can I do for you?" or even have prefixed "Yes" or "Certainly" or just "h.e.l.lo" to what he had said, but by the time he thought of this it was too late.
Rose had red marks under her eyes. Her skin was pale, and it looked like there were more lines on her forehead and face than there had previously been. She was heavier too, but David supposed that this was to do with having the baby. He had asked his father about it, and his father had told him never, ever to mention it to Rose, no matter what. He had been very serious about it. In fact, he"d used the words "more than our lives are worth" to stress how important it was that David keep such opinions to himself.
Now Rose, fatter and paler and more tired, was standing beside David, and even with the sun in his eyes he could see the anger rising in her.
"How dare dare you speak to me like that!" she said. "You sit around all day with your head buried in your books and you contribute nothing to life in this house. You can"t even keep a civil tongue in your head. Who do you think you are?" you speak to me like that!" she said. "You sit around all day with your head buried in your books and you contribute nothing to life in this house. You can"t even keep a civil tongue in your head. Who do you think you are?"
David was about to apologize, but he didn"t. What she was saying wasn"t fair. He had offered to help with things, but Rose nearly always turned him down, mostly because he seemed to catch her when Georgie was acting up, or when she had her hands full with something else. Mr. Briggs took care of the garden, and David always tried to a.s.sist him with the sweeping and raking, but that was out-of-doors, where Rose couldn"t see what he was doing. Mrs. Briggs did all of the cleaning and most of the cooking, but whenever David tried to lend her a hand, she shooed him out of the room, claiming that he was just one more thing for her to trip over. It had simply seemed to him that the best option was to stay out of everyone"s way as much as possible. And anyway, these were the last days of his summer holidays. The village school had postponed opening for a couple of days because of a shortage of teachers, but his father seemed certain that David would be behind his new desk by the start of the following week at the very latest. From then until half-term he would be in school during the day and doing homework in the evenings. His working day would be nearly as long as his father"s. Why shouldn"t he take it easy while he could? Now his anger was growing to match Rose"s. He stood up and saw that he was now just as tall as she was. The words poured from his mouth almost before he knew that he was speaking them, a mixture of half-truths and insults and all of the rage that he had suppressed since the birth of Georgie.
"No, who do you you think you are?" he said. "You"re not my mother, and you can"t talk to me like that. I didn"t want to come here to live. I wanted to be with my dad. We were doing just fine by ourselves, and then you came along. Now there"s Georgie too, and you think I"m just someone who"s in your way. Well, you"re in think you are?" he said. "You"re not my mother, and you can"t talk to me like that. I didn"t want to come here to live. I wanted to be with my dad. We were doing just fine by ourselves, and then you came along. Now there"s Georgie too, and you think I"m just someone who"s in your way. Well, you"re in my my way, and you"re in my dad"s way. He still loves my mum, just like I do. He still thinks of her, and he"s never going to love you the way he loved her, not ever. It doesn"t matter what you do or what you say. He still loves her. He. Still. Loves. way, and you"re in my dad"s way. He still loves my mum, just like I do. He still thinks of her, and he"s never going to love you the way he loved her, not ever. It doesn"t matter what you do or what you say. He still loves her. He. Still. Loves. Her." Her."
Rose hit him. She struck him on the cheek with the palm of her hand. It wasn"t a hard slap, and she pulled the blow as soon as she realized what she was doing, but the impact was still enough to rock David on his heels. His cheek smarted, and his eyes watered. He stood, openmouthed with shock, then brushed past Rose and ran to his room. He didn"t look back, not even when she called after him and said that she was sorry. He locked the door behind him and refused to open it to her when she knocked on it. After a while, she went away and did not return.
David stayed in his room until his father came home. He heard Rose speak to him in the hallway. His father"s voice grew louder. Rose tried to calm him down. There were footsteps on the stairs. David knew what was coming.
The door to his room was almost blown off its hinges by the force of his father"s fists upon it.
"David, open this door. Open it now."
David did as he was told, turning the key once in the lock, then stepped back hurriedly as his father entered. His father"s face was almost purple with fury. He raised his hand as if to hit David, then seemed to think better of it. He swallowed once, took a deep breath, then shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was strangely calm, which worried David more than the previous show of anger.
"You have no right to speak to Rose in that way," said his father. "You will show respect to her, just as you show respect to me. Things have been hard for all of us, but that does not excuse your behavior today. I haven"t decided yet what I"m going to do with you, or how you"re to be punished. If it wasn"t already too late, I"d pack you off to boarding school and then you"d realize just how fortunate you are to be here."
David tried to speak. "But Rose hi-"
His father raised his hand. "I don"t want to hear about it. If you open your mouth again, it will go hard with you. For now you will stay in your room. You will not go outside tomorrow. You will not read and you will not play with your toys. Your door will remain open and if I catch you reading or playing then, so help me, I will take a belt to you. You will sit there on your bed and you will think about what you said and about how you"re going to make it up to Rose when you"re eventually allowed to return to life with civilized people. I"m disappointed in you, David. I brought you up to behave better than that. We both did, your mum and I."
With that, he left. David sank back on his bed. He didn"t want to cry, but he couldn"t stop himself. It wasn"t fair. He had been wrong to talk to Rose that way, but she had been wrong to hit him. As his tears fell, he became aware of the murmuring of the books on the shelves. He had grown so used to it that he had almost ceased to notice it, like birdsong or the wind in the trees, but now it was growing louder and louder. A burning smell came to him, like matches igniting and tram wires sparking. He clenched his teeth as the first spasm came, but there was n.o.body to witness it. A great fissure appeared in his room, ripping apart the fabric of this world, and he saw another realm beyond. There was a castle, with banners waving from its battlements and soldiers marching in columns through its gates. Then that castle was gone and another took its place, this one surrounded by fallen trees. It was darker than the first, its shape unclear, and it was dominated by a single great tower that pointed like a finger toward the sky. Its topmost window was lit, and David felt a presence there. It was at once both strange and familiar. It called to him in his mother"s voice. It said: David, I am not dead. Come to me, and save me.
David did not know how long he had been unconscious, or if sleep had at some point taken over, but his room was dark when he opened his eyes. There was a foul taste in his mouth, and he realized that he had been sick on his pillow. He wanted to go to his father and tell him of the attack, but he felt certain there would be little sympathy for him from that quarter. There was not a sound to be heard in the house, so he a.s.sumed everyone was in bed. The waiting moon shone upon the rows of books, but they were now quiet again, apart from the occasional snore that arose from the duller, more boring volumes. There was a history of the coal board, abandoned and unloved upon a high shelf, that was particularly uninteresting and had the nasty habit of snoring very loudly and then coughing thunderously, at which point small clouds of black dust would appear to rise from its pages. David heard it cough now, but he was aware of a certain wakefulness among some of the older books, the ones that contained the strange, dark fairy stories he loved so much. He sensed that they were waiting for an event to occur, although he could not tell what it might be.
David was certain that he had been dreaming, although he could not quite recall the substance of the dream. Of one thing he was sure: the dream had not been a pleasant one, but all that remained was a lingering feeling of unease and a tingling on the palm of his right hand, as though it had been stroked with poison ivy. There was the same sensation on the side of his face, and he could not shake off the feeling that something unpleasant had touched him while he was lost to the world.
He was still wearing his day clothes. He climbed out of bed and undressed in the dark, changing into clean pajamas. He returned to his bed and wrestled with his pillow, turning this way and that in an effort to find a comfortable position in which to go to sleep, but no rest came. As he lay with his eyes closed, he noticed that his window was open. He didn"t like it to be open. It was hard enough to keep the insects out even when it was closed, and the last thing he wanted was for the magpie to return while he was sleeping.