Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones

like.”
    â€œEr—raven,” said David. “Hallo.” Cautiously he stretched a finger out to the bird’s large shiny back and gently touched its warm, stiff feathers. “Will you talk to me too?”
    The raven turned one eye on him. David could not help thinking it looked rather an evil creature. It put him in mind of a vulture. “Yes, I’ll talk to you if you want,” it said, and David could not stop himself grinning with pride. He could see that Mr. Wedding was really surprised. The bird hunched up to scratch the top of its head with its big gray foot, and looked at David from under its leg. “I saw Luke just now,” it remarked. “He was trying to find you.”
    â€œDon’t tell me where he was, then,” David said.
    â€œIt won’t matter. He saw me and went away,” said the raven. “We’ve lost him for the moment.”
    â€œGood,” said David.
    â€œHm,” said Mr. Wedding. “I think that will do. Off you go.”
    â€œGoing,” said the bird and took off with its legs trailing, in another great black sweep of feathers. Looking up, David saw it circling with its wing-pinions spread like fingers while it came round into the wind and tucked up its gray feet like an airplane retracting its undercarriage. “I’ll see you,” it called. Then it was away across the lake with large leisurely flaps of its wings.
    â€œBrilliant!” said David, watching it get slowly smaller against the hills.
    â€œThey don’t often talk to anyone but me,” Mr. Wedding said. “You were lucky—I suppose lucky is the word for it. May I speak to you seriously, David?”
    â€œYes,” said David, a little apprehensively. “What?”
    â€œYou don’t know much about me, do you?” said Mr. Wedding.
    David looked up at him to agree, and to protest a little. And he saw Mr. Wedding had only one eye. David stared. For a moment, he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. He could not understand it. Up till then, there had been nothing strange about Mr. Wedding’s face at all, and it had been perfectly ordinary. David had not noticed a change. Yet one of Mr. Wedding’s eyes was simply not there. The place where the second eye should have been had an eyelid and eyelashes, so that it looked almost as if Mr. Wedding had shut one eye—but not quite. It did not look at all horrible. There was no reason to be frightened. But David was. Mr. Wedding’s remaining eye had something to do with it. It made up for the other by gazing so piercingly blue, so deep and difficult, that it was as wild and strange in its way as Mr. Chew’s face. As David looked from eye to empty eyelid and back, he had suddenly no doubt that what he was seeing was Mr. Wedding’s true face, and his real nature. The hair on David’s spine stood up, slowly and nastily, as he looked.
    â€œAnd I suspect you don’t know much about Luke,” Mr. Wedding went on. “He was not shut up without very good reason, you know. Would it surprise you to hear that he did something very terrible indeed?”
    David, thankful to think of something beside Mr. Wedding’s one eye, thought of Luke making the fire, and the hair on his back uncomfortably laid itself down again while he did so. “No, it wouldn’t surprise me,” he said. He knew Luke well enough now to see the way he would have done the terrible thing—with a strange, absentminded smile, because whatever it was had been a clever idea and rather difficult to do. “Luke doesn’t work by the usual rules,” he explained. “And I don’t think you do, either,” he said, struck by a strange similarity between Mr. Wedding and Luke which he could not quite pin down.
    Mr. Wedding smiled a little. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t. But there are rules for everyone all the same, and Luke broke