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 illustrated 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 “Hello” 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 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 assist 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.