London Eye: 1 (Toxic City)(29)

“Those plants…” Lucy-Anne began, wondering whether talking about them would reveal why they looked so disturbing. I've seen them before, she thought, and a memory promised itself to her…but not yet.

“They look almost meaty,” Sparky said, and yes, that was it, and when Lucy-Anne closed her eyes and breathed in deeply she could almost smell the rawness of them.

“Fertile ground,” Jack said. Lucy-Anne knew what he meant, and it was dreadful.

“We have to cross that?” Jenna asked.

Rosemary nodded. “I've done it many times before. But never in the dark.”

“Because it's haunted?” Emily's voice was small and lost.

“There's no such things as ghosts,” Jack said, squeezing his sister's shoulder.

“You don't need ghosts for a place to feel haunted,” Rosemary said. “Please, come on. The light's fading.”

They went, and as they passed from the neat, paved areas of a dead London street and onto the heaved ground of the Barrens, Lucy-Anne wondered if everyone was thinking thoughts similar to hers: My family could be beneath my feet right now.

When she closed her eyes, she saw their death-masks grinning up at her from mass graves. She ground her teeth together to shove away the image. A nightmare? She thought not. Just her imagination going overdrive, and she determined to walk on.

The ground was uneven. Smooth here, ridged and cracked there, sunken elsewhere, it promised broken bones for the unwary. Lucy-Anne looked all around, searching for the glint of bones, or the messy trail of hair still attached to shrunken scalps. But whoever had done the burying had been thorough.

“We're walking on them,” Jenna said, something like fascination in her voice. Nobody replied.

They passed the first spread of lush plants, and Lucy-Anne could not identify them. The shrubs’ flowers looked like roses, but from the stems below the flowers hung catkins, and the thorns were long and thin like hawthorn. Lower down, a bright red heather hugged the ground, spread through the cracks and crevasses like something spilled. She thought of asking whether anyone recognised the species, but decided against it. She was afraid that they were new. Now that Sparky had used the term meaty, Lucy-Anne could not shake that impression from her mind when she breathed in. And the flowers themselves were heavy, damp, brightly coloured. Fertile ground, Jack had said, and Lucy-Anne tried in vain to not visualise what lay beneath.

“A marker,” Rosemary said as they approached a low structure. “There are lots of them. Sometimes you'll even find fresh flowers here.” The structure was surprisingly well-made, constructed from red London bricks and painted around its circular base with a thick black coating. Its round top was slightly sloped to allow water to run off, but embedded in the surface was a glass-enclosed picture, still sharp and clear even though moisture had penetrated through a crack in one corner. The man stared up at them as they passed, smiling happy thoughts from a vanished time.

“How do they know exactly where he was buried?” Jenna asked. “It must have been…”

“They used army wagons mostly,” Rosemary said. “Sometimes removal lorries. Brought them here by the hundreds. I never saw it myself, but I've heard accounts, and it doesn't take much to imagine. So you're right, dear. No one can know for sure where any particular body is buried. I think those that come here treat it like one grave.”

One grave, Lucy-Anne thought, and a flash of memory stabbed at her again. Again, she drove it away.

“Dead London,” Sparky said. “Bloody freaking me out, I know that for sure.”

“There are some rough paths to follow. We'll be across in a few minutes.” Rosemary looked nervously back the way they had come, where the sun was just disappearing below a line of rooftops.

Her nervousness unsettled Lucy-Anne even more. She can't really mean it's haunted? She looked around at the grotesque, strange surroundings, and the silence that enclosed them felt like a held breath. What sounds the Barrens would utter once darkness fell, she had no wish to discover.

They passed more memorials of all shapes, sizes, and designs. One was constructed in cast concrete, eight feet tall and six wide, and three names were carved lovingly into its surface. Another was a brick-built square thirty feet across, the ground within flattened and planted as a perfect lawn, a small wooden cross at its centre. Whoever had built it obviously maintained it, as the grass was trimmed and the cuttings strewn beyond the wall. There were countless wooden markers; many crosses, and others simply stakes driven into the ground. Pictures were pinned to some of them, the majority faded and leached of colour by the sun, but some obviously replaced frequently. Others had names carved into them. As well as the brick or stone markers, there were other elaborate sculptures of twisted and shaped metal that would not have looked out of place in an art gallery.