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his throat. You could run away from a moment like this, close your eyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real.
    Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told us you were leaving. Why are you still up there?”
    He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter. Things had changed. He would place the beginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of a woman carved in stone hundreds of years ago.
    Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway.
    There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street. If he hadn’t been so certain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, making him say and do entirely weird things.
    Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility.
    “I will now confess to being surprised.”
    The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of the cathedral. They couldn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Same voice.
    Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run.
    “Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”
    “I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”
    It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us , and meaning them.
    His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.
    The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”
    “You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.
    “I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”
    Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”
    “You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”
    Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.
    “I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.
    “Someone might have liked it to be.”
    Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who . . . who was the model for her , then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.
    Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place thefigure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.
    “I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.
    “I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”
    Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this . . . feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”
    After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do . . .” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not . . . this story is not important for you.”
    Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”
    “No,” said the voice above them,