David didn’t reply. He swallowed hard. He had always wanted a brother or sister, but not like this. He wanted it to be with his mum and dad. This wasn’t right. This wouldn’t really be his brother or sister. It would come out of Rose. It wouldn’t be the same.
His father placed his arm around David’s shoulder. “Well, do you have anything to say?” he asked.
“I’d like to go home now,” said David.
His father kept his arm around David for a second or two more, then let it drop. He seemed to sag slightly, as though someone had just let a little air out of him.
“Fine,” he said sadly. “Let’s go home then.”
Six months later, Rose gave birth to a little boy, and David and his father left the house in which David had grown up and went to live with Rose and David’s new half brother, Georgie. Rose lived in a great big old house northwest of London, three stories high with large gardens at front and back and forest surrounding it. The house had been in her family for generations, according to David’s father, and was at least three times as big as their own house. David had not wanted to move at first, but his father had gently explained the reasons to him. It was closer to his new place of work, and because of the war he was going to have to spend more and more time there. If they lived closer to it, then he would be able to see David more often, and perhaps even come home for his lunch sometimes. His father also told David that the city was going to become more dangerous, and that out here they would all be a little safer. The German planes were coming, and while David’s father was sure that Hitler would be beaten in the end, things were going to get much worse before they got better.
David was not entirely sure what his father now did for a living. He knew that his dad was very good at math, and that he had been a teacher at a big university until recently. Then he had left the university and gone to work for the government in an old country house outside the city. There were army barracks nearby, and soldiers manned the gates that led to the house and patrolled its grounds. Usually when David asked his father about his work, he would just tell him that it involved checking figures for the government. But on the day that they finally moved from their house to Rose’s, his father seemed to feel that David was owed something more.
“I know that you like stories and books,” his father said, as they followed the moving van out of the city. “I suppose you wonder why I don’t like them as much as you do. Well, I do like stories, in a way, and that’s part of my job. You know how sometimes a story seems to be about one thing, but in fact it’s about another thing entirely? There’s a meaning hidden in it, and that meaning has to be teased out?”
“Like Bible stories,” said David. On Sundays, the priest would often explain the Bible story that had just been read out loud. David didn’t always listen because the priest was very dull indeed, but it was surprising what the priest could see in stories that seemed quite simple to David. In fact, the priest appeared to like making them more complicated than they were, probably because it meant that he could talk for longer. David didn’t care much for church. He was still angry at God for what had happened to his mother, and for bringing Rose and Georgie into his life.
“But some stories aren’t meant to have their meaning understood by just anyone,” David’s father continued. “They’re meant for only a handful of people, and so the meaning is very carefully hidden. It can be done using words, or numbers, or sometimes both together, but the purpose is the same. It’s to prevent anyone else who sees it from interpreting it. Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.
“Well, the Germans use codes to send messages. So do we. Some of them are very complicated, and some of them appear very simple, although often those are the most complicated of all. Someone has to try to figure them out, and that’s what I do. I try to understand the secret meanings of stories written by people who don’t want me to understand them.”
He turned to David and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m trusting you with this,” he said. “You must never tell anyone else what it is that I do.”
He raised a finger to his lips. “Top secret, old chap.”
David imitated the gesture.
“Top secret,” he echoed.
And they drove on.
David’s bedroom was at the very top of the house, in a little, low room that Rose had chosen for him because it was filled with books and bookshelves. David’s own books found themselves sharing the shelves with other books that were older or stranger than they were. He made space for his books as best he could, eventually settling on ordering the books on the shelves according to size and color, because they looked better that way. It meant his books kept getting mixed up with those that were already there, so one book of fairy tales ended up squeezed between a history of communism and an examination of the last battles of the First World War. David had tried to read a little of the book on communism, mainly because he wasn’t entirely sure what communism was (apart from the fact that his father seemed to think it was something very bad indeed). He managed to get about three pages into it before he lost interest, its talk of “workers’ ownership of the means of production” and “the predation of capitalists” almost putting him to sleep. The history of the First World War was a little better, if only for the many drawings of old tanks that had been cut out of an illustrated magazine and stuck between various pages. There was also a dull textbook of French vocabulary, and a book about the Roman Empire that had some very interesting drawings in it and seemed to take a lot of pleasure in describing the cruel things that the Romans did to people and that other people did to the Romans in return.
David’s book of Greek myths, meanwhile, was the same size and color as a collection of poetry nearby, and he would sometimes pull out the poems instead of the myths. Some of the poems weren’t too bad, once he gave them a chance. One was about a kind of knight—except in the poem he was called a “Childe”—and his search for a dark tower and whatever secret it contained. The poem didn’t really seem to end properly, though. The knight reached the tower and, well, that was it. David wanted to know what was in the tower, and what happened to the knight now that he’d reached it, but the poet obviously didn’t think that was important. It made David wonder about the kinds of people who wrote poems. Anyone could see that the poem was really only getting interesting when the knight reached the tower, but that was the point at which the poet decided to go off and write something else instead. Perhaps he had meant to come back to it and had simply forgotten, or maybe he couldn’t come up with a monster for the tower that was impressive enough. David had a vision of the poet, surrounded by bits of paper with lots of ideas for creatures crossed out or scribbled over.
Werewolf.
Dragon.
Really big dragon.
Witch.
Really big witch.
Small witch.
David tried to give a form to the beast at the heart of the poem but found that he could not. It was more difficult than it appeared, for nothing quite seemed to fit. Instead, he could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness.
David was aware of a change in the room as soon as he began to fill the empty spaces on the shelves, the newer books looking and sounding uneasy beside these other works from the past. Their appearance was intimidating, and they spoke to David in dusty, rumbling tones. The older books were bound in calfskin and leather, and some of them contained knowledge that had long been forgotten, or that was found to be incorrect as science and the process of discovery uncovered new truths. The books that held this old knowledge had never come to terms with this relegation of their worth. They were now lower than stories, for stories were intended, at some level, to be made up and untrue, but these other books had been born for greater things. Men and women had worked hard on their creation, filling them with the sum total of all that they knew and all that they believed about the world. That they were misguided, and the assumptions they made were now largely worthless, was almost impossible for the books to bear.
A great book that claimed that the end of the world, based on a close examination of the Bible, would occur in 1783, had largely retreated into madness, refusing to believe that the present date was any later than 1782, for to do so would be to admit that its contents were wrong and that its existence therefore had no purpose beyond that of a mere curiosity. A slim work on the current civilizations of Mars, written by a man with a large telescope
