Chapter 5 Part V Intruders, some changes

Finally, when September entered, the twisted man entered David's world from the dream forest. This summer has been long and intense.Dad spent more time at work than at home, sometimes staying up two or three nights in a row.Going home after dark was difficult for him even once.All the road signs have been moved to prevent the German army from invading. David's father never got lost when driving home during the day, but if he didn't turn on the lights at night, who knows he would drive where to go Rose was experiencing the difficulties of being a mother.David wondered if his mother would have found it difficult if he had been as headstrong as George.The seriousness of the situation made Ross very tolerant of David, which made his mood lower and lower.They speak to each other now.David could see that Dad's patience with him and Rose was almost suppressed.Dad had finally exploded at dinner the previous night when Ross had taken David's innocuous comment as an offense and the two had started bickering.

"Can't you two find a way to get along peacefully, just know how to make a big noise!" Dad said loudly. "I don't go home to see this, I can enjoy pressure and brawling matches at work if I like!" George, sitting in the high chair, began to cry. "Okay, look at what you've done," Rose said, throwing the napkin on the table and walking over to George. Dad covered his face with his hands. "Well, it's all my fault," he said. "It's not my fault anyway," Ross responded. The eyes of the two looked at David at the same time.

"What?" said David. "You're blaming me? Good!" He stomped away from the table, throwing down the half-eaten meal.He's still hungry, but the stew is all vegetarian, with only a layer of disgusting cheap sausage slices on top, and he knows the rest will be for him tomorrow, but he doesn't care, and it doesn't matter if it's reheated anyway. It will be even worse than it is now.As he was walking towards the room, he hoped to hear his father's voice ordering him to go back and finish the meal, but no one told him to go back.He sat down on the bed with difficulty.I can't wait any longer, let's end the summer vacation soon!He had found a place at the school near the house, and it was better to be there than to be with Rose and George every day.

Davy didn't go to Dr. Mobery's very often, mainly because no one was free to send him to London.In short, his sudden syncope did not recur, probably the illness has disappeared.He didn't fall to the ground again, and he didn't suddenly lose consciousness again, but something stranger and more disturbing appeared, even stranger than books talking, and David was almost used to books. Waking up dreaming—that was the only way David could describe the oddity.It feels like sometime in the evening, you're reading, listening to the radio, and for a moment you start to feel sleepy, and you fall asleep, and you start dreaming; there are times when it's obvious you don't realize you're asleep, and the world suddenly becomes very strange .When David is playing in the room, reading a book, or taking a walk in the garden, everything glows with a dim light.The walls would disappear, the books would fall from his hands, the garden would change into mountains and tall gray trees, and he would find himself in a land he had never been before, a dim and vague place of shadows and cold winds, where, sometimes, Can smell a strong beast smell.Sometimes, he could even hear voices, and when they called to him, they felt a little familiar, but as soon as he tried to concentrate, the hallucination ended immediately, and he would return to his own world.

The strangest thing was that there was a voice that sounded like my mother, the one who spoke the loudest and clearest of them all.She calls to him from beyond the darkness.She called to him and told him she was alive. The strange thing of waking dreaming always happened most strongly near Shenyuan, and David found it annoying, so he kept as far away from the rare thing as possible.In fact, David was so upset that he wanted to see Dr. Mobley, if Dad had time to make an appointment for him.Maybe, David thought, he'd have to tell him about hearing the book, the two things might be connected.But then David remembered Dr. Mobley's questions about his mother, and at one point the threat to "send him in."Every time David told him he missed his mother, Dr. Mobery would go on to say that loss and grief are natural things and you have to work your way through them.But it was one thing to feel sorry for her mother's death, and quite another to hear her voice say from outside Shen Yuan's shadow behind a crumbling brick wall that she was not dead.David wasn't sure how Dr. Mobley would react.He didn't want to be "processed," but those dreams were horrible.He wants to stop them.

It's the last day before school starts.Tired of the house, David went for a walk in the woods behind the house.He picked up a long stick and swiped through the tall grass, and found a spider web in the bush, so he took a small stick to lure the spider out.He threw a twig near the center of the web, but there was no movement, David thought, because the stick wouldn't move.What alarmed the spider was the struggle of the insect on the web, which made David think that perhaps the spider was much smarter than other such small things. He looked back at the house and saw his bedroom window.Ivy creeping up the walls almost encloses the window frames, making his room look like it's part of the natural world outside.From a distance now he saw that only his window had the thickest ivy, and it hardly came close to the other windows on this wall.Nor did it creep up from under the wall as usual, but followed a thin path directly and precisely to Davy's window.Like the beanstalk that led Jack to the giant in the fairy tale, the ivy seemed to know exactly where it was going.

Then, a figure began to shake in David's room.He saw a figure pass by the glass window, dressed in clothes as green as the forest.For a moment he was sure it was Rose, or perhaps Mr. Briggs, and then he remembered that Mr. Briggs had gone to the country, and that Rose seldom went into his room, and if he did, he asked in advance. he agrees.It wasn't Dad either, the figure in the room was different from Dad's.Actually, David thought, that figure is nobody's, that's all, period.The figure was a little hunched, as if it was used to sneaking, so the body became twisted, the back was raised, the arms were like long twisted branches, and the fingers kept grabbing, always ready to grab what they saw.It has a narrow and curly nose and wears a deformed hat on its head.It disappeared from David's sight for a moment, and reappeared with a copy of David's book in his hand.It flipped through the book, and then found something it was interested in, so it stopped, as if it was about to start reading.

Suddenly, David heard George crying from the nursery.The figure dropped the book and listened.Davy saw its fingers open in the air, as if George were hanging in front of it like an apple waiting to be picked.It seemed to be arguing with itself what to do next, as David saw it stroke with its left hand on its pointed chin.It considered, scanning its shoulders, and descended into the woods below.It saw David, froze for a moment, and fell to the ground.But just for a moment, David saw its eyes, black as coal, set in a pale face so long and thin that it seemed stretched out on rock.Its mouth was very open and its lips were very, very dark, like old sour wine.

David ran to the house.He rushed into the kitchen, where Dad was reading the newspaper. "Dad, someone is in my room!" he said. Dad looked up at him in surprise. "What's the meaning?" "There's a man up there," insisted Davey. "I was walking in the woods and he was there when I looked up my window. He had a hat on and he had a really long face. Then he heard the baby Crying and he stops what he's doing and doesn't listen. He sees me looking at him and wants to hide. Please, Dad, please trust me!" Dad frowned and put down the newspaper.

"David, if you're joking..." "No, it's true!" He followed his father upstairs, still clutching a wooden stick.The door to the room was closed, and Dad paused before opening it.Then he came closer and turned the doorknob.The door opened. "Look," Dad said, "there's nothing—" Something hit him in the face and he let out a cry.There was a throb of panic, a loud bang of something hitting the wall.As soon as the first noise had passed, David glanced over to his father's side and saw that the intruder was a magpie, with black and white feathers, trying to escape the room.

"Get out and close the door," said Pa, "it's a pest bird." As soon as David heard this, he went out immediately, but he was still very scared.He heard his father open the window and yell at the magpie, forcing it to fly to the window until the sound of the magpie ceased to be heard.Dad opened the door, sweating a little. "Well, it scared us both," he said. David looked around the room.A few feathers remained on the floor, but nothing else.There was no sign of any bird, nor the small stranger he had seen.He goes to the window.The magpie perched on the broken stones in the sunken garden, staring as if responding to David's gaze. "It's just a magpie," said Pa, "that's what you see." David wanted to argue, but he knew that if he insisted that something else had been here, much bigger and fiercer than a magpie, Dad would definitely call him stupid.Que'er didn't wear a crooked hat, nor did he run away because of the baby's cry.David had seen its eyes, its hunched body, and its long, grasping fingers. He looked back at Shen Yuan again, but the magpie was gone. Dad sighed dramatically. "You still don't believe it's just a magpie, do you?" he said. He got down on his knees and checked under the bed, opened the closet, went into the adjoining bathroom to check, even peeked behind the bookshelf, where there was a gap big enough for David's hand. "See?" Pa said, "It's just a bird." But he found that David still didn't believe it, so they checked all the rooms on the top floor together, and went to the downstairs room until they were sure that the only people staying in the house were David, Dad, Rose and the baby.Then Dad left David and went back to reading the paper.Back in the bedroom, David picked up a book on the floor by the window.It was one of those Jonathan Talvey storybooks, and it was Little Red Riding Hood that opened.The illustration in the book is a wolf standing in front of Little Red Riding Hood, with grandmother's blood stuck to its paws, its fangs bared, and it is about to eat the little granddaughter.Someone, presumably Jonathan, had scribbled on the image of the wolf with a black crayon, as if taken aback by its menace.David closed the book and put it back on the shelf.As he did these things, he noticed the silence in the room.There are no whispers, and all the books are quiet. Suppose a magpie could get a book off a shelf, David thought, but it couldn't get into a room through a locked window.Someone else had been here, he was sure.In the old stories, people always transformed themselves, or were transformed into animals and birds.Could it be that the twisted person turned himself into a magpie so as to escape inspection? But he didn't go far, no.He only flew as far as Shen Yuan before disappearing. When David was lying in bed half asleep that night, his mother's voice came from Shen Yuan in the night, calling his name and telling him not to forget her. And David understood that the time would soon come when he would enter that place and finally face what was inside.