4 last things pdf download

By Author Jay E Adams. James E Adams. Eric Alexander. Archibald Alexander. Joseph Alleine. Thabiti Anyabwile. Bill Ascol. Tom Ascol. Aurelius Augustine. St Augustine. Greg Bahnsen. Robert Baillie. Nicholas T Batzig. Voddie Baucham. S M Baugh. Herman Bavinck. Richard Baxter. G K Beale. Greg Beale. Joel R Beeke. Alistair Begg. E Calvin Beisner. Richard Bennett. Louis Berkhof. Theodore Beza. Hugh Binning. John Blanchard. Loraine Boettner. James Montgomery Boice.

Brian Borgman. Thomas Boston. James P Boyce. Wilhelmus a Brakel. Jerry Bridges. Thomas Brooks. John Brown. Lydia Brownback. F F Bruce. James Buchanan. Heinrich Bullinger. John Bunyan. Jeremiah Burroughs. Rosaria Butterfield. John Calvin. D A Carson. Anthony Carter. Thomas Case. Tim Challies. Thomas Chalmers. Matt Chandler. Walter Chantry. Tom Chantry. Bryan Chapell.

Stephen Charnock. John Cheeseman. Gordon H Clark. R Scott Clark. Edmund P Clowney. John Colquhoun. John Currid.

Authur C Custance. R L Dabney. Curt Daniel. Guy Davies. Bob Dewaay. James Dennison. Mark Dever. Kevin DeYoung. David Dickson. Edward Donnelly. Daniel M Doriani. Iain Duguid. John Eadie. Alfred Edersheim. William Edgar. Jonathan Edwards. Jim Elliff. Dr Sinclair B Ferguson. J V Fesko. John V Fesko. John Flavel. John Frame. Lee Gatiss. Dr Kenneth L Gentry Jr.

John Gerstner. R W Glenn. W Robert Godfrey. Graeme Goldsworthy. Liam Goligher. Ian Goligher. Thomas Goodwin. Wayne Grudem. Grover Gunn. Nancy Guthrie. John D Hannah. D G Hart. Robert Hawker. Michael Haykin. Steve Hays. Paul Helm. John Hendryx. Matthew Henry. Charles Hodge. A A Hodge. Anthony Hoekema. Andrew Hoffecker. Dr Michael S Horton. Lee Irons. David Jackman. John Angell James. Terry Johnson. Phil Johnson. Dennis E Johnson.

S Lewis Johnson. Hywel Jones. Dr Peter Jones. Zach Keele. Tim Keller. Meredith G Kline. John Knox. Andreas Kostenberger. Greg Koukl. R B Kuiper. Rev D H Kuiper. Abraham Kuyper. Steven J Lawson. Charles Leiter. David H Linden. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

Dick Lucas. Martin Luther. John MacArthur. J Gresham Machen. Donald Macleod. Bryn MacPhail. Henry Mahan. Fred A Malone. Thomas Manton. Walter Marshall. Albert Martin. Hugh Martin. Keith Mathison. Colin Maxwell. Conrad Mbewe. John McDuff. Alister McGrath Ph. Dr Michael Milton. Albert Mohler. Russell D Moore. Leon Morris. Alec Moyter. Iain H Murray. Rev David P Murray. John Murray. Dr Nick Needham.

Tom Nettles. Asahel Nettleton. John Newton. Phil Newton. Greg Nichols. Roger Nicole. K Scott Oliphint. Stuart Olyott. John Owen. J I Packer. The Germans were bad. Everybody knew that. They had started it. 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. If they blow up airplane factories or shipyards along the way, then so much the better. He softens you up before going in for the killer blow. Moberley, during which David was asked again if he missed his mother. Of course he missed her. It was a stupid question. He missed her, and he was sad because of it. He had trouble understanding what Dr. The sounds made by books had become clearer and clearer to David.

He understood that Dr. Sometimes, when Dr. If he said something of which they disapproved, they would mutter insults at him. Moberley looked quite surprised when it fell. Moberley know that he heard books talking.

It was only when he was upset or angry. David tried to stay calm, to think about good things as much as he could, but it was hard sometimes, especially when he was with Dr. Moberley, or Rose. Now he was sitting by the river, and his whole world was about to change again. They tasted wrong. He felt pressure building in his head, and for a moment he thought he might topple from the bench and suffer another of his attacks, but somehow he made himself stay upright.

David had heard Rose and his father discussing the subject the previous week, when Rose had come to visit and David was supposed to be in bed. Instead, he had sat on the stairs and listened to them talking. He did that, sometimes, although he always went to bed when the talking ceased and he heard the smack of a kiss, or Rose laughing in a low, throaty way.

He thought his father might have suspected something because he came upstairs to check on David moments later. He kept his eyes closed and pretended to be asleep, which seemed to satisfy his father, but David was too nervous to go back to the stairs again. She likes you. 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. It would come out of Rose.

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. 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. 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.

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. On Sundays, the priest would often explain the Bible story that had just been read out loud. In fact, the priest appeared to like making them more complicated than they were, probably because it meant that he could talk for longer. He was still angry at God for what had happened to his mother, and for bringing Rose and Georgie into his life.

It can be done using words, or numbers, or sometimes both together, but the purpose is the same. Unless you know the code, it has no meaning. 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. And they drove on.

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.

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.

The knight reached the tower and, well, that was it. 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.

David had a vision of the poet, surrounded by bits of paper with lots of ideas for creatures crossed out or scribbled over. Really big dragon. 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 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 , had largely retreated into madness, refusing to believe that the present date was any later than , 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 and an eye that discerned the paths of canals where no canals had ever flowed, gabbled constantly about how the Martians had retreated below the surface and were now building great engines in secret.

It currently occupied a position among a number of books on sign language for the deaf, which, fortunately, could not hear anything that was being said to them. But David also discovered books that were similar to his own. David could find no name upon the books to identify the author of the additions, and some of the tales were unfamiliar to him while still retaining echoes of the tales he knew almost by heart.

In one story, a princess was forced to dance all night and sleep all day by the actions of a sorcerer, but instead of being rescued by the intervention of a prince or a clever servant, the princess died, only for her ghost to return and torment the sorcerer to such a degree that he threw himself into a chasm in the earth and was burned to death in its fires. A little girl was threatened by a wolf while walking through the forest, and as she fled from him she met a woodsman with an ax, but in this story the woodsman did not merely kill the wolf and restore the girl to her family, oh no.

They were told to kill the men and take what was valuable from their pockets, but to bring the women to him. The wind found its way in through cracks in the window frames and the ill-fitting doors, rustling the pages of open books as though seeking within some piece of knowledge that it desperately required for its own purposes. At first, David had tried to cut them with his scissors, discarding the remnants, but after a few days the ivy would return, seemingly thicker and longer than before, clinging ever more tenaciously to the wood and the plaster.

Insects exploited the holes too, so that the boundary between the natural world and the world of the house became blurred and unclear. He found beetles congregating in the closet, and earwigs exploring his sock drawer. At night, he heard mice scurrying behind the boards. He would speak to David in his dreams. His smile was mocking, and his words made no sense to David.

All hail the new king! There was a wooden toy box in one corner, and a large wardrobe in the other. Between them stood a chest of drawers with a mirror on top.

The room was painted light blue so that on a bright day it seemed like part of the world outside, especially with the ivy poking through the walls and the occasional insect providing food for the spiders. The single small window overlooked the lawn and the woods. If he stood on his window seat, David could also see the spire of a church and the roofs of the houses in the nearby village.

London lay to the south, but it might as well have been in Antarctica, so completely did the trees and the forest hide the house from the outside world. The books still whispered and spoke among themselves, but he was now able to hush them with a single word if his mood was right, and anyway they tended to remain quiet while he was reading.

It was as if they were happy once he was consuming stories. It was summer once again, so David had plenty of time to read. His father had tried to encourage him to make friends with the children who lived nearby, some of them evacuees from the city, but David did not want to mix with them, and they in turn saw something sad and distant in him that kept them away.

Instead, the books took their place. They still reminded him of his mother, but in a good way, and whatever reminded him of his mother equally helped to keep Rose and her son, Georgie, at a distance. It looked a little like an empty swimming pool, with a set of four stone steps leading down to a rectangle of green, bordered by a flagstoned pathway. While the grass was regularly mown by Mr. Briggs the gardener, who came every Thursday to tend the plants and lend nature a helping hand where necessary, the stone parts of the sunken garden had fallen into disrepair.

There were large cracks in the walls, and in one corner the stonework had crumbled away entirely, leaving a gap big enough for David to squeeze through, if he had chosen to do so. David had never gone further than poking his head in, though. The space beyond was dark and musty, and filled with all kinds of hidden, scurrying things. Briggs, who now had to navigate his way around them every time he wanted to reach his tools.

While he tried always to be polite, as his father had asked him to be, he did not like her, and he resented the fact that she was now part of his world. It was not merely that she had taken, or was trying to take, the place of his mother, although that was bad enough.

Her attempts to cook meals that he liked for dinner, despite the pressures of rationing, irritated him. She wanted David to like her, and that made him dislike her even more. He was forgetting about her already, so tied up was he with Rose and their new baby. Little Georgie was a demanding child. He cried a lot and always seemed to be ailing, so that the local doctor was a regular visitor to the house.

His father and Rose doted on him, even as he deprived them of sleep almost every night, leaving them both short-tempered and weary. The result was that David was increasingly left to his own devices, which made him both grateful for the freedom offered by Georgie and resentful of the lack of attention to his own needs. In any case, it gave him more time to read, and that was no bad thing.

He had at last found a name, Jonathan Tulvey, written inside the covers of two of the books, and he was curious to learn something about him. So it was that one day David swallowed his dislike of Rose and went down to the kitchen, where she was working.

Briggs, the housekeeper and wife of Mr. Briggs, the gardener, was visiting her sister in Eastbourne, so Rose was taking care of the chores for the day. From outside came the clucking of hens in the chicken run. David had helped Mr.

Briggs to feed them earlier, and to check the vegetable garden for damage from rabbits and the run for any holes that might allow a fox to enter. The week before, Mr. Briggs had trapped and killed a fox near the house using a snare. The fox had almost been decapitated by the trap, and David had said something about feeling sorry for it. Briggs had scolded him, pointing out that one fox would kill every hen they had if he managed to get into the run, but David had still been troubled by the sight of the dead animal, its tongue caught between its small, sharp teeth, its fur torn from where it had tried to bite itself free from the snare.

Rose stopped washing the dishes and turned around to speak with him, her face bright with pleasure and surprise. She dried her hands on a dishcloth and took a seat beside him. This house is too big for one person, but my parents wanted to keep it in the family. It was…important to them. He tried to keep himself from sounding too interested. My grandparents built it, and lived in it with their children. They hoped that it would stay in the family, and that there would always be children living in it.

She looked sad. Where did you learn his name? I was wondering who he was. Your room was once his bedroom, and a lot of those books were his. I thought it would be such a nice room for you. I should have been more thoughtful. I do like it, and I like the books too. He was only fourteen. It was a long time ago, and my grandparents kept his room exactly as it had always been, because they hoped that he would come back to them.

He never did. Another child disappeared with him, a little girl. He and his wife died in a fire, and my grandfather took Anna to live with his family instead. Anna was seven. My grandfather thought it would be good for Jonathan to have a little sister and for Anna to have a big brother to take care of her. They searched for them for so long. They looked in the woods and the river, and they asked after them in all of the nearby towns. They even went to London and placed drawings and descriptions of them anywhere that they could, but nobody ever came forward to say that they had seen them.

My grandfather in particular never recovered from their loss. He seemed to blame himself for what had happened. I suppose he thought he should have protected them.

I think he died young because of it. When my grandmother was dying, she asked my father not to disturb the room, but to leave the books in their place just in case Jonathan should ever return.

She never lost hope. I always wanted a family of my own, and I suppose I just felt that Jonathan so loved his books that he would have liked to think there might be another little boy or girl in there someday who would appreciate them, instead of them being left to decay, unread.

Did your grandfather ever tell you about him? I made quite a study of him, I suppose. My grandfather said that he was very quiet. He liked to read, as you can tell, just like you. He was afraid of wolves. I remember my grandfather telling me that, once. Jonathan would have nightmares in which wolves were chasing him, and not just ordinary wolves: because they came from the stories that he read, they could speak.

They were clever, the wolves of his dreams, and dangerous. My grandfather tried to take his books away, his nightmares were so bad, but Jonathan hated being without them, so my grandfather would always relent in the end and return them to him. Some of the books were very old. They were old when Jonathan owned them. I suppose a few of them might even have been valuable, except someone else had written in them once upon a time.

My grandfather thought that it might have been the work of the man who sold them to him. He was a bookseller in London, a strange man. I think he just liked scaring them. I suppose he thought that people who had children of their own would come to buy books there, and that either they or their children might have heard something about the missing pair.

But when he got to the street in question, he found that the bookshop was gone. It was boarded up. Nobody lived or worked there anymore, and no one could tell him what had happened to the little man who owned it.

Perhaps he died. He was very old, my grandfather said. Very old, and very odd. It was the postman, and Rose went to greet him. When she returned, she asked David if he would like something to eat, but David said no. Already, he was feeling angry with himself for lowering his defenses against Rose, even if he had learned something as a result.

Instead, he left her alone in the kitchen and headed back to his bedroom. On the way, he looked in on Georgie. The baby was fast asleep in his crib, his big gas helmet and the bellows for pumping air into it lying close by. He was like a symbol of all that was wrong, of all that had changed. After his mother had died, it had been just David and his father, and they had become closer as a result because they had only each other to rely upon.

Now his father had Rose too, and a new son. It was just himself. He sat in the window seat and thought that Jonathan had sat in this seat, once upon a time. He had walked the same hallways, had eaten in the same kitchen, played in the same living room, had even slept in the same bed as David. The thought made David shiver, but it also gave him pleasure to think that two boys who were so much alike might somehow share such a connection.

He wondered what could have happened to Jonathan and to the little girl Anna. Perhaps they had run away, although David was old enough to understand that there was a great deal of difference between the kind of running away that happened in storybooks and the reality of what would face a boy of fourteen with a girl of seven in tow.

He was always to ask a lady, or a man and woman together, preferably ones with a child of their own. Was that what happened to Jonathan and Anna? Why would someone do that? As he lay on his bed, David knew there was an answer to that question. Before his mother had finally left for the not-quite-hospital, he had heard her discussing with his father the death of a local boy named Billy Golding, who had disappeared on his way home from school one day.

People said that a man from Arsenal had spoken to Mr. Then Billy went missing and the police came to the park two Saturdays in a row to talk to anyone who might know something about him.

That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found.

David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house. She hugged him very tightly and warned him again about talking to strange men. She told him that he must always come straight home from school, and that if a stranger ever approached him and offered him sweets or promised to give him a pigeon for a pet if he would just go with him, then David was to keep on walking as fast as he could, and if the man tried to follow him, then David was to go up to the first house he came to and tell them what was happening.

Whatever else he did, he must never, ever go with a stranger, no matter what the stranger said. David told her he would never do that. A question came to him as he made the promise to his mother, but he did not ask it. But the question stayed in his mind, even after she turned out the light and he was left in the darkness of his room. The question was: But what if he made me go with him? Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railway tracks.

And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way. That evening at dinner, his father was talking about the war again. All of the fighting was happening far away, even if they did get to see some of it on newsreels when they went to the pictures. It was a lot duller than David had expected. War sounded quite exciting, but the reality, so far, had been very different. True, squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes often passed over the house, and there were always dogfights over the Channel.

German bombers had been carrying out repeated raids on airfields to the south, even dropping bombs on St. Giles, Cripplegate in the East End which Mr. Nevertheless, David felt removed from it all. In London, people were taking items from crashed German planes as souvenirs, even though nobody was supposed to approach the wrecks, and Nazi pilots who bailed out provided regular excitement for the citizenry. Here, even though they were barely fifty miles from London, it was all very sedate.

His father folded the Daily Express beside his plate. The newspaper was thinner than it used to be, down to six pages. His father smiled at him. It still gave David a thrill to think that his father might be a spy, or at least know about spies.

So far, it was the only interesting part of the war. That night, David lay in his bed and watched the moonlight streaming through the window.

The skies were clear, and the moon was very bright. After a time, his eyes closed, and he dreamed of wolves and little girls and an old king in a ruined castle, fast asleep on his throne. There was a boy and a girl, and the Crooked Man.

They disappeared beneath the earth, and David smelled gumdrops and peppermints, and he heard a little girl crying before her voice was drowned out by the sound of an approaching train. 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.

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. I can get all the tension and shouting matches I want at work.

She threw her napkin down on the table and went to Georgie. Simultaneously, their eyes turned toward David. 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 sat down hard on his bed. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Moberley would respond to that. 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 dropped one close to the center of the web, but nothing happened. 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. Like the beanstalk in the fairy tale that led Jack to the giant, the ivy seemed to know precisely where it was going.

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. 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.

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. 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. His father looked up at him curiously. 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. Then he reached down and twisted the knob. The door opened. For a second, nothing happened. 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.

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. 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.

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. He went down on his knees and checked under the bed. He opened the wardrobe and looked in the bathroom next door. Back in his room, David picked up a book from the floor by his window. 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. 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. He had flown only as far as the sunken garden, and then he had disappeared. 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.

It had been coming for a long time. Rose was breast-feeding Georgie, which meant that she was forced to rise during the night in order to take care of his needs. This sometimes led to arguments with Rose. Fill your empty jug from the keg o' beer, then go outside and drink it. Repeat this 3 times Alcoholism.

Head to the right and pick up the mallet and chisel from the barrels. Go along the alley and give them to the blacksmith, then offer to do a sexy dance as payment and he will sharpen your chisel.

Leave the alley and continue right through the archway, then continue until you find a blind portrait painter. Ask him to paint your portrait and say that you have already paid. Describe yourself with options 1, 1, 1 and 1.

After receiving the portrait, return to the courtyard. Use your portrait on the statue. Use your mallet and chisel on the statue to craft an expression of your inner turmoil Master Sculptor , then use it again to craft a statue of yourself Pride.

Return to the alley off the main courtyard and enter the first door on the right. Talk to the creepy lawyer, then offer to help and he will ask you to retrieve some documents for him. Leave and enter the second door on the right to find the Chief Clerk's office. Talk to the suspicious-looking gentleman by the door. Try talking to everyone else, then talk to him again and ask him for the documents - he will pose you a riddle.

Leave the alley and head right. Continue to the far right and enter the building in the background to find an Art Gallery. Look at 40 paintings in here Art Critic. Make sure you have look at all the ones on the left pillar. Now return to the suspicious-looking gentleman and answer his riddle with 'Jacob van Utrecht' Riddle Me This.

Return next door and give the documents to the creepy lawyer Greed. Still in the alley, look through the window behind the sinister-looking lutist and pick up the lute. Use this on the lutist Jam Session. Return to the pub and fill your jug with beer once more. Go outside and give this to the unhealthy-looking drunkard, then follow him to the alley and use your jug on his stream of urine.