Chapter One

It was February 1, 1946, and the sun was just beginning to rise over the city of London. It was hard to tell there was a sun at all; the air was so filled with pollution and despair. The war was over but food rationing was still in effect. Even the birds were so thin it was a wonder they had enough weight to land after taking flight.

It was so cold outside that it seemed the River Thames might freeze over. He knew better. Despite all the years that had passed, he could still remember the feeling of how cold it had been on this day in 1814, the last time the River Thames froze over. He had been a young boy then. His father, William, had taken him to the Frost Fair and they had watched together as someone led an elephant across the ice under Blackfriars Bridge. He remembered trembling, thinking that the elephant would fall through the ice at any moment, and he remembered his father telling him it would be alright, and he remembered the feeling he had when his father had grabbed his little hands and peeled them off of his face so that he could watch as the elephant made it safely to the other side. This was one of the few happy memories he held onto from before his descent from humanity. That night after putting his son to bed, William walked into the kitchen and sat down to have a drink before bed. The next morning, he was found dead on the floor.

He had learned to block out the second part of that memory and just focus on his father’s loving touch and how they had laughed together at the sight of the elephant slipping on the ice. He sat now, once again below Blackfriars Bridge. He liked to sit here as the sun came up after his long nights awake wandering through the streets. London was a good place for him, the sun rarely breaking through the layers of fog to reach his skin.

He tricked himself into believing that time held some meaning when he saw the sun rise. “There,” he would say to himself, “A new day has begun”. He sat crouched on a rock as he said this to himself today, the tails of his navy pea coat flayed behind him, when a sound reached his ears. It sounded like the slap of a seal’s fin on ice, but he knew the polluted river had not seen a seal in at least a hundred years. He leaned over the edge of the rock and saw the body of a young woman lapping back and forth between the edge of the river and the base of the bridge. With the agility of a cat, he leapt down to investigate. It was her dress that gave her away as a young woman, but her dead skin, strangely swollen considering the temperature of the water, aged her many years. She couldn’t have been dead for more than a day. Her blood is surely frozen, he thought to himself. Despite his certainty, he reached down and brought her icy wrist to his mouth. More like a dog than a leech this time, he bit through her frozen skin and down to her veins. A few icy chunks of blood found their way into his mouth. It reminded him of the cherry popsicles he saw people enjoy in the summer months years ago before the war. Spitting out the frozen blood, he laughed at his own pathetic state and then slowly placed her arm back at her side in the water. He sat down and looked back up towards the sky, strangely consumed with emotion.

“Yes, a new day has begun.”