“You're serious?” She thought of the gargoyle people, the snake folk, and other mutations she had been imagining.
“If not, we might be looking forever,” he said. “The Heath is almost a thousand acres, and wilder now than ever before. You can feel that?”
Lucy-Anne nodded.
“There must be people among the monsters,” Rook said, glancing away from her. “There have to be.”
A rush of hopelessness flushed through her, threatening to corrode her determination. But she pressed her lips tight together and clenched her hands into fists.
“I don't care how long it takes,” she said. “Come on.” She walked uphill, towards a line of trees that marked the end of this open area of Hampstead Heath.
Rook followed, and it was Lucy-Anne who entered the forest first.
They walked for a few minutes, going deeper into the woods and higher up the hillside. Paths crissed and crossed, and she was aware of frequent movement away from them through the trees. They were surrounded by a bubble of stillness and silence. Lucy-Anne had no wish to see what dwelled beyond.
An urge came to start shouting Andrew's name. He could be close! she thought, and she walked tall to make herself seen. But she did not shout. She was too cautious for that.
Twenty minutes after entering the woodland, an intense feeling of déjà vu assailed her. She swayed, struggling against the compulsion to slump to the floor and let events wash over her. Not every dream comes true! she thought, and she searched among the trees for familiar scenes. There was nothing she recognised.
No bench, no man swinging in the trees, so—
She turned around and Rook was no longer with her.
Lucy-Anne felt her stomach sink, and her heart thumped painfully. Her vision blurred and then settled again, a newfound clarity making everything around her clear, sharp, and deadly.
“Rook!” she called. He won't answer, he's gone, he's fallen already into the pit just like my dream and—
“Over here,” he said. Lucy-Anne almost collapsed with relief. She took three steps and looked past a big tree, and there he was. He'd run along a shallow gully towards what looked like an old bandstand, and he was now climbing the gully's sides to walk back to her.
There was a bench on the left, halfway between them. Alongside the bench, a coil of green wire, the sort sometimes used in parks to define the edges of a path. On the air, a memory of blackberries.
“No,” she breathed. “Rook…” But she could not shout.
She tried to close her eyes so that she could not see the man swinging down from one of the trees, but Rook called her name—a shouted warning—and she looked. The man swung between her and Rook, naked and coated with dye, unnaturally long arms heavily muscled…directly from her dreams.
“Rook, stop!” she shouted, but he was running. And now the dog-woman, she thought, and there she was down the slope, urinating on a tree and sniffing at the ground. “Rook! Don't come any closer!”
“I don't think they mean any—” he began, and then the ground beneath him opened as he ran, swallowing him up as if he was never meant to be there at all. His rooks fluttered and flitted in confusion.
Lucy-Anne's vision began to fade, her world receded, and she bit her lip to try to see away the faint washing over her.
The ape man swung away, the dog-woman scampered into shadows. And from the pit she heard Rook's awful, blood-filled cry.
She staggered to the edge of the pit and looked down. There was Rook. At first she thought her vision was deceiving her, and that it was not a huge, wormlike thing chewing at his throat. A worm-thing with the remnants of humans limbs and long auburn hair.
Noooo, she tried to scream, but it was not even a whisper. The last thing she saw as she hit the ground, rolled, and vision fled was the rooks, hundreds of them spiralling up into the sky and away. She heard their cries, and one more from Rook.
And then nothing.