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 nobody 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 nobody 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 grass. 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 pass by the glass, 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 snatch 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 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 knob. 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 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.