The smell of burning flesh accompanied them into the park, and she wondered how often this warning was replaced. And as she and Rook passed through the wide gates and onto the first of the curving footpaths, she froze in shock.
Empty, dead London was an unnatural place. Once home to endless bustle, with streets awash with life and millions of separate stories every day, and squares echoing to birdsong and the lilts of a hundred languages, the new silence of the toxic city was alien and unnatural. Before she left for good, Lucy-Anne had once remained behind in school on a dare, hiding until the caretakers locked her in, emerging into darkness, prowling the corridors and classrooms with every intention of performing small acts of rebellion and graffiti. But she had found the place so disconcerting—silence where once was life; breathlessness where echoes should live—that she'd smashed a window to escape.
London felt like that now.
But the park was worse.
They didn't have to go too far in before they heard the calls and hoots, the whistles and moans. It sounded like Lucy-Anne imagined a jungle would sound at night, except…different. There was an intelligence to some of these calls that sent a shiver down her spine. Strange smells assailed her nostrils, and when she tried breathing through her mouth she tasted something acidic and damp on the air. In the weak moonlight, shadows danced beneath trees seemingly in defiance of the motionless canopies. Wide swathes of lawn had grown into seas of long grasses. Things moved in there.
The sheer wilderness of the place was overwhelming, and Lucy-Anne kept close to Rook.
“Can't we go around?” she whispered.
“You saw what awaited us out there,” he said. “We're in the north now. The streets around here…” He shrugged but said no more.
“You've sent your rooks to see?” she asked. Rook did not reply. He seemed unsettled, tense, so she did not force the issue. Her one desire became to make it through the park and out the other side.
The path they followed soon vanished beneath a spread of tough grass, and Rook grabbed her hand and pulled her towards a wall of darkness beneath a copse of trees. Lucy-Anne did not want to go that way—she felt like a child afraid of the dark—but Rook's birds swooped in and away again, one landing on his shoulder as soon as another took off. She could only assume that they were imparting information and telling him whether it was safe. Her life was in his hands.
She had not willingly been totally dependent on another person for a very long time.
As they approached the trees Lucy-Anne saw the first shadow moving down amongst the boles. It darted from tree to tree through the shadows, seemingly merging with one trunk before skitting across to the next.
Calls and cries came from across the park, but the copse before them had fallen silent.
Rook paused, head on one side and a rook cawing on his shoulder. “You'll see strange things,” he said, then he walked on.
Lucy-Anne took a deep breath and followed. Something caressed her ear and she waved at it, expecting to find a drooping branch. But she touched nothing, and when she glanced up she saw a shadow lifting and dipping above her as it flapped its strong, silent wings. Other rooks hovered farther away. Protecting her.
The shape slinked out from behind the first of the trees, scampering through the grass and then standing upright on two legs to glare at them. It was a man, but his arms and legs were deformed and bent like a dog's. At first she thought he was black, but then she spotted the pale patches of skin across his stomach and abdomen, and realised that he was mostly covered in a heavy, dark pelt. His face protruded, nose wide, wet nostrils opening and closing as he took in their scents.
He shouted at them, and it was a bark. It sounded pained.
“Don't panic,” Rook said.
“Oh my God,” Lucy-Anne said, appealing to a deity she had forgotten since her childhood. “Oh my God, what is that, what is that?”
“A man turning into a dog,” Rook said.