The Book Of Lost Things

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.