The Book of Lost Things(5)

He still kept to his routines, although not quite as rigidly as he once did. He was content merely to touch the doorknobs and taps twice, left hand first, then right hand, just to keep the numbers even. He still tried to put his left foot down first on the floor in the mornings, or on the stairs of the house, but that wasn’t so difficult. He wasn’t sure what would happen now if he didn’t adhere to his rules to some degree. He supposed that it might affect his father. Perhaps, in sticking to his routines, he had saved his father’s life, even if he hadn’t quite managed to save his mother. Now that it was just the two of them, it was important not to take too many chances.

And that was when Rose entered his life, and the attacks began.

*

The first time was in Trafalgar Square, when he and his father were walking down to feed the pigeons after Sunday lunch at the Popular Café in Piccadilly. His father said that the Popular was due to close soon, which made David sad as he thought it was very grand.

David’s mother had been dead for five months, three weeks, and four days. A woman had joined them to eat at the Popular that day. His father had introduced her to David as Rose. Rose was very thin, with long, dark hair and bright red lips. Her clothes looked expensive, and gold and diamonds glittered at her ears and throat. She claimed to eat very little, although she finished most of her chicken that afternoon and had plenty of room for pudding afterward. She looked familiar to David, and it emerged that she was the administrator of the not-quite-hospital in which his mother had died. His father told David that Rose had looked after his mother really, really well, although not, David thought, well enough to keep her from dying.

Rose tried to speak with David about school and his friends and what he liked to do with his evenings, but David could barely manage to respond. He didn’t like the way that she looked at his father or the way that she called him by his first name. He didn’t like the way that she touched his hand when he said something funny or clever. He didn’t even like the fact that his father was trying to be funny and clever with her to begin with. It wasn’t right.

Rose held on to his father’s arm as they strolled from the restaurant. David walked a little ahead of them, and they seemed content to let him go. He wasn’t sure what was happening, or that was what he told himself. Instead he silently accepted a bag of seeds from his father when they reached Trafalgar Square, and he used them to draw the pigeons to him. The pigeons bobbed obediently toward this new source of food, their feathers stained with the muck and soot of the city, their eyes vacant and stupid. His father and Rose stood nearby, talking quietly to each other. When they thought he wasn’t looking, David saw them kiss briefly.

That was when it happened. One moment David’s arm was outstretched, a thin line of seed spread along it and two rather heavy pigeons pecking away at his sleeve, and the next he was lying flat on the ground, his father’s coat beneath his head and curious onlookers—and the odd pigeon—staring down at him, fat clouds scudding behind their heads like blank thought balloons. His father told him that he had fainted, and David supposed that he must have been right, except there were now voices and whispers in his head where no voices and whispers had been before, and he had a fading memory of a wooded landscape and the howling of wolves. He heard Rose ask if she could do anything to help, and David’s father told her that it was all right, that he would take him home and put him to bed. His father hailed a cab to bring them back to their car. Before he left, he told Rose he would telephone her later.

That night, as David lay in his room, the whispers in his head were joined by the sound of the books. He had to put his pillow over his ears to drown out the noise of their chatter, as the oldest of the stories roused themselves from their night slumbers and began to look for places in which to grow.

*

Dr. Moberley’s office was in a terraced house on a tree-lined street in the center of London, and it was very quiet. There were expensive carpets on the floors, and the walls were decorated with pictures of ships at sea. An elderly secretary with very white hair sat behind a desk in the waiting room, shuffling papers, typing letters, and taking telephone calls. David sat on a big sofa nearby, his father beside him. A grandfather clock ticked in the corner. David and his father didn’t speak. Mostly it was because the room was so quiet that anything they said would have been overheard by the lady behind the desk, but David also felt that his father was angry with him.

There had been two more attacks since Trafalgar Square, each one longer than the last and each leaving David with more strange images in his mind: a castle with banners fluttering from the walls, a forest filled with trees that bled redly from their bark, and a half-glimpsed figure, hunched and wretched, who moved through the shadows of this strange world, waiting. David’s father had taken him to see their family doctor, Dr. Benson, but Dr. Benson had been unable to find anything wrong with David. He sent David to a specialist at a big hospital, who shone lights in David’s eyes and examined his skull. He asked David some questions, then asked David’s father many more, some of them concerning David’s mother and her death. David had then been told to wait outside while they talked, and when David’s father came out, he looked angry. That was how they had ended up at Dr. Moberley’s office.

Dr. Moberley was a psychiatrist.

A buzzer sounded beside the secretary’s desk, and she nodded to David and his father. “He can go in now,” she said.