It's the sound of her voice that draws him closer, the way that, through his daydream, each syllable spoken in her sing-song voice seems to double his vision and the words flicker across his eyes. He must have heard this once before as a child but only now is Robin really listening to it. Somehow being in verse softened its meaning as a child but there's danger in each rhyme, as if his feverish hysteria has held a mirror up to the original words and revealed their true meaning.

He finds himself hovering a few steps behind her, slumped against the thick, wooden banister and the mushrooms now scattered across it for support. The governess. Robin knows her in passing- he has no children of his own for her to educate- but he hesitates even so. The phosphorescent glow of the fungi illuminates her in an alien way.

"Do you think," he asks, eyes moving up to the shadowy beams overhead, "that all birdsong is secretly so macabre?"