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from the houses opposite. Perhaps Terence has been keeping secrets in a battered ledger, which is as thick as Luke's forearm and occupies most of the top of the desk. Suppose it means that he was falsifying the accounts for his firm and wanted Luke to hide this from the authorities? Luke would rather not deal with anything like that just yet, and he surveys the rest of the room.
    It's full of souvenirs. A broken plaque depicts a rearing horse with its rider missing from the waist up. Beside it on the dusty carpet a jagged section of a stone frieze represents a parade or a dance. Some of the participants are not just leggy but hirsute, and erosion has robbed them all of faces. A fragment of ironwork, perhaps from a gate, contains a rusty smiling moonlike face that's flanked by open hands Luke initially mistakes for wings. An irregular piece of stained glass represents a dark blue sky in which stars form a constellation he doesn't recognise, while below them is either a halo or a ring filched from a planet such as Saturn. A marble hand too incomplete for its gesture to be clear lies next to a portion of a marble face—most of the smooth white brow, which is overlaid by a pallid wisp of hair, and enough beneath the forehead to include a single eye that, despite the absence of a pupil, looks unwaveringly watchful. None of these items means much to Luke , but he draws a sharp breath that tastes of dust and aged paper as he notices an object in a corner where the sunlight doesn't reach. It's a skull.
    Or rather it must be a carving of one. The irregular remains of the features suggest that the face looked none too human, and it's crowned with an intricate tangle of branches of its own substance, as if the brain has grown uncontrollably luxuriant and sprouted forth, unless the cranium is burgeoning like coral. The sight revives a memory that feels like starting awake. "Flowers grow up to the sun," Terence told him once, "but some bones grow up to the moon."
    If that was part of a story, Luke can't recall the rest. No doubt the sculpture suggested Terence's fantasy. As Luke stoops to examine the item the contents of the hollow sockets swell to meet him—nothing like eyes, just his own shadow. He cradles the skull and is carrying it to the window when he seems to feel movement between his hands, as if he has wakened something inside his burden. Surely it's just a loose fragment, and he takes a firmer grip. He mustn't know his own strength, or the carving is more fragile than it looks. He hasn't reached the window when the skull implodes in his hands without a sound and crumbles into bony shards. As they strike the floor they disintegrate further, and in a moment nothing but pale dust is left—not even the memory of how the object felt for Luke to hold.
    He feels like a child who has caused damage somewhere he was trusted to be careful. How could he have been so clumsy with such a delicate item? Rather than risk doing any more harm he turns to the ledger. Above the river beyond the road bridge a bloated moon has crept into view, and as he opens the massive volume he could fancy that a hint of daytime moonlight has settled on the page. The ledger is a journal written entirely in capitals, and it doesn't appear to relate to Terence's firm. The first word Luke sees is his own name.
    GRACES FIELD. LUKE SHOWED ANIMALS. The large sprawling letters look no less childish than the grammar, as if they've betrayed the writer's secret self. The entry is dated almost a quarter of a century ago, but Luke thinks he recalls the day when Terence took him walking outside Ormskirk. They'd stood in the middle of a field for so long that Luke had lost all sense of his own body, and at last wild animals had begun to emerge from a wood—squirrels, rabbits, a hare, a fox. Didn't Terence tell him they were putting on a show for him? Presumably they'd acted as wild creatures do when they're unaware of being watched. Luke must have moved eventually and scared