He approached cautiously, in case the big man was playing possum. Dead was dead, though: a hefty, big-boned sprawl, one cheek pressed to the ground, eyes wide open. Julian recognized one of the Plug-uglies, though by his best guess not one he’d seen before. Not one he’d see again, either, outside the morgue. Someone had shot the luckless man in the back of the head with something small enough not to leave an exit wound.

The body was warm, loose-joined: recent. That complicated things, because, sure, the Plug-uglies might have had a falling-out amongst themselves, but everything about this body and the forced door said aggressive intrusion rather than internecine struggle.

Julian had trained with handguns as part of his job, and for a while he’d kept up membership of a pistol shooting range. He did not, however, own a gun, a forbearance someone else nearby plainly lacked.

There was a stack of maps at the desk, and he took one, turning it about until the layout clicked in his mind. In the big front hall, Alison had said. He slipped between the Stegosaurus and the base of the elevator, cutting a path past the silent cafe and a few rooms of rocks, coming out into a long, narrow hall lined with the flattened bones of sea monsters. From ahead, he thought he heard the scuff of footsteps, and a hooked shadow reached into his peripheral vision, a monstrous claw curling for him.

He jerked back, almost falling into a plesiosaur. The looming threat behind him turned out to be just the skeleton of a ground sloth, huge and sad, motionless as it reached for a branch forever denied it. Julian cursed himself silently. For a moment then, he just saw the ranked sea monsters on the wall: the bones of ancient deep-dwelling dead with their huge, bone-ringed eyes. Then they seemed to ripple across the wall, as though testing the strength of the rock that imprisoned them, as though the long-lost currents of Jurassic seas were turning them in their graves. Julian was suddenly ten years old and terrified, just for a moment, waiting for it all to come to life—just like he’d known everything did in museums after the visitors were shooed out.

He took a step back and went ankle-deep into a puddle. With a yelp he stumbled away, seeing past—through—the wall of sea monsters to a mounded, muddy vista, stubbly with phallic fungi that grew in the shadow of enormous ragged ferns. And there were ruins: mazes of broken walls made of no substance he could name, shattered like eggshells by some unthinkable detonation. The air was abruptly sulphurous. And past where the ceiling should be, he saw a sky strung with rotten-looking clouds lit by a waning moon.