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them off, because he remembers Terence saying "See what you did."
    He leafs through the journal and keeps seeing his name. Other entries record places Terence visited and mention how kind the local people were. Some pages contain stories or notes for them, many of which apparently came to Terence in the night. Quite a few seem unfamiliar; perhaps Terence never told them to Luke. The moon is peering down like a head cocked to spy in the window without much of a face. If Luke reads the entire journal he wouldn't be surprised to find himself still in the house after dark.
    He shuts the ledger on a desiccated sprig of vegetation, another souvenir of Terence's travels, which resembles an insect more than a foot long with an irregular arrangement of legs. As he carries the ledger downstairs the treads shudder underfoot; the extra weight must be shaking them, however much it feels like being followed. He lowers the book into the boot of his car and locks the house before glancing up. A pallid object that appears to be doing its best to watch him is pressed against the glass—the reflection of the moon. No matter how fast he drives on the way home, the embryonic mask in the sky stays with him.

WHERE IT BEGAN
    "So that's why Terry used to call it a Johann Christian," Freda says and tells Sophie "That was his name for a mechanical digger."
    "Did he teach you about music, Luke?"
    "We like good music too," Freda protests. "You've heard Maurice put it on when you've come for dinner."
    "I know you do," Sophie says, having been honoured by movements from Mozart and Beethoven and more than one Strauss, along with as many other highlights as the disc had space for. "I was just thinking of Terence."
    They're in the large back garden of the thatched house where Luke grew up. Other mourners occupy the wrought-iron furniture or congregate beneath the trees. Luke suspects they've brought their buffet portions outside rather than risk having Freda clear away their paper plates the instant they're put down anywhere in her house. He used to retreat out here whenever he sensed that she thought he was playing with too many toys at once—more than a couple meant he was making a mess. He might play a game that seemed to shape faces in the spiky depths of the hedge, or imagine that the murmurs of the village spoke of secrets he needed to learn, or lie on the close-cropped lawn to see what the sky would produce for him. He remembers seeing fossils, the remains of gigantic creatures that must be as old as the stars; perhaps their descendants still lived in the dark the sky hid. A spinal cord the colour of the moon is growing more enormous and losing definition overhead as Freda says above the thunder of the airliner "We're all thinking of him, Sophie, and you helped."
    Luke owes at least some of his childhood fancies to Terence. They're a way of remembering him, but Luke feels as if he's fending off the bereavement—as if he's bracing himself for a greater loss. He's nowhere near identifying it when Sophie says "I wouldn't have presumed, but you did ask."
    She played Bach fugues on her guitar while the mourners assembled and as they left the crematorium—melodies Terence used to hum, if less tunefully. Now she hesitates and says "I'm only sorry Freda or Maurice won't know him."
    Freda blinks and blinks again. "What are you saying, Sophie?"
    Sophie rests one hand on her midriff. "We've decided she'll be Freda or he'll be Maurice."
    Freda takes her hand and Luke's, calling "Maurice? Maurice? Did you hear?"
    "Hang on till I see what's up this time," he says to several workmen Terence employed. "Hear what, chuck?"
    "They're going to call their baby after one of us, whichever it turns out to be."
    "Good on you both. Give me a few minutes here, will you? I'm just in the middle of talking business."
    "He's really pleased but he can't show it when there are a lot of people," Freda murmurs. "You used to take after him, Luke."
    "Who says I don't still? Let me get