“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Dr. Moberley. You must be David.”

David nodded. Dr. Moberley asked David to sit down, then flicked through the pages of a notebook on his desk, tugging on his beard while he read whatever was written on them. When he had finished, he looked up and asked David how he was. David said he was fine. Dr. Moberley asked him if he was sure. David said that he was reasonably sure. Dr. Moberley said David’s dad was worried about him. He asked David if he missed his mum. David didn’t answer. Dr. Moberley told David that he was worried about David’s attacks, and they were going to try to find out together what was behind them.

Dr. Moberley gave David a box of pencils and asked him to draw a picture of a house. David took a lead pencil and carefully drew the walls and the chimney, then put in some windows and a door before he set to work adding little curved slates to the roof. He was quite lost in the act of drawing slates when Dr. Moberley told him that was quite enough. Dr. Moberley looked at the picture, then looked at David. He asked David if he hadn’t thought of using colored pencils. David told him that the drawing wasn’t finished, and that once the tiles were added to the roof he planned to color them red. Dr. Moberley asked David, in the v-e-r-y s-l-o-w way that some of his books spoke, why the slates were so important.

David wondered if Dr. Moberley was a real doctor. Doctors were supposed to be very clever. Dr. Moberley didn’t seem terribly clever. V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-ly, David explained that without slates on the roof, the rain would get in. In their way, they were just as important as walls. Dr. Moberley asked David if he was afraid of the rain getting in. David told him that he didn’t like getting wet. It wasn’t so bad outside, especially if you were dressed for it, but most people didn’t dress for rain indoors.

Dr. Moberley looked a bit confused.

Next, he asked David to draw a tree. Again, David took the pencil, painstakingly drew the branches, then proceeded to add little leaves to each one. He was on only the third branch when Dr. Moberley asked him to stop again. This time, Dr. Moberley had the kind of expression on his face that David’s father sometimes had when he managed to finish the crossword in the Sunday paper. Short of standing up and shouting “Aha!” with his finger pointing in the air, the way mad scientists did in cartoons, he couldn’t have looked more pleased with himself.

Dr. Moberley then asked David a lot of questions about his home, his mum, and his dad. He asked again about the blackouts, and if David could remember anything about them. How did he feel before they happened? Did he smell anything strange before he lost consciousness? Did his head hurt afterward? Did his head hurt before? Did his head hurt now?

But he did not ask the most important question of all, in David’s view, because Dr. Moberley chose to believe that the attacks caused David to black out entirely and that the boy could remember nothing of them before he regained consciousness. That wasn’t true. David thought about telling Dr. Moberley of the strange landscapes that he saw when the attacks came, but Dr. Moberley had already begun asking about his mother again and David didn’t want to talk about his mother, not any more and certainly not with a stranger. Dr. Moberley asked about Rose too, and how David felt about her. David didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t like Rose, and he didn’t like his father being with her, but he didn’t want to tell Dr. Moberley that in case he told David’s father about it.

By the end of the session, David was crying and he didn’t even know why. In fact, he was crying so hard that his nose began to bleed, and the sight of the blood frightened him. He started to scream and shout. He fell on the floor, and a white light flashed in his head as he began to tremble. He beat his fists on the carpet and heard the books tut-tutting their disapproval as Dr. Moberley called for help and David’s dad came rushing in and then everything went dark for what seemed like only seconds but was in fact a very long time indeed.

And David heard a woman’s voice in the darkness, and he thought it sounded like his mother. A figure approached, but it was not a woman. It was a man, a crooked man with a long face, emerging at last from the shadows of his world.

And he was smiling.

THIS IS how things came to pass.

Rose was pregnant. His father told David as they ate chips by the Thames, boats bustling by and the smell of oil and seaweed mixing in the air. It was November 1939. There were more policemen on the streets than before, and men in uniform were everywhere. Sandbags were piled against windows, and great lengths of barbed wire lay coiled around like vicious springs. Humpbacked Anderson shelters dotted gardens, and trenches had been dug in parks. There seemed to be white posters on every available space: reminders of lighting restrictions, proclamations from the king, all of the instructions for a country at war.

Most of the children David knew had by now left the city, thronging train stations with little brown luggage labels tied to their coats on their way to farms and strange towns. Their absence made the city appear emptier and increased the sense of nervous expectancy that seemed to govern the lives of all who remained. Soon, the bombers would come, and the city was shrouded in darkness at night to make their task harder. The blackout made the city so dark that it was possible to pick out the craters of the moon, and the heavens were crowded with stars.

On their way to the river, they saw more barrage balloons being inflated in Hyde Park. When these were fully inflated, they would hang in the air, anchored by heavy steel cables. The cables would prevent the German bombers from flying low, which meant that they would have to drop their payloads from a greater height. That way, the bombers would not be as certain of hitting their targets.

The balloons were shaped like enormous bombs. David’s father said it was ironic, and David asked him what he meant. His father said it was just funny that something that was supposed to protect the city from bombs and bombers should look like a bomb itself. David nodded. He supposed that it was strange. He thought of the men in the German bombers, the pilots trying to avoid the anti-aircraft fire from below, one man crouched over the bombsight while the city passed beneath him. He wondered if he ever thought of the people in the houses and the factories before he released the bombs. From high in the air, London would look just like a model, with toy houses and miniature trees on tiny streets. Maybe that was the only way you could drop the bombs: by pretending that it wasn’t real, that nobody would burn and die when they exploded below.

David tried to imagine himself in a bomber-a British one, perhaps a Wellington or a Whitley-flying over a German city, bombs at the ready. Would he be able to release the load? It was a war after all. The Germans were bad. Everybody knew that. They had started it. It was like a playground fight: if you started it, then you were to blame, and you couldn’t really complain about what happened afterward. David thought that he would release the bombs, but he wouldn’t think about the possibility that there might be people below. There would just be factories and shipyards, shapes in the darkness, and everyone employed in them would be safely tucked up in bed when the bombs fell and blew apart their places of work.

A thought struck him.

“Dad? If the Germans can’t aim properly because of the balloons, then their bombs could drop just anywhere, right? I mean, they’ll be trying to hit factories, won’t they, but they won’t be able to, so they’ll just let them go and hope for the best. They’re not going to go home and come back another night just because of the balloons.”