AI The last bus would have taken her all the way back to Hammersmith, to neon and kebab shops and the warm, greasy glow of the Golden Empress, but Rory stepped off early at Richmond and watch ed the red taillights dwindle to beads. The air smelled like wet leaves and cold iron. The sky above the park was a paler black than the streets behind her, as if the city gave up its light at the boundary and left the field to the deer and the old oaks.
She pushed through the small, sprung gate and followed the gravel path into the dark. Her phone screen lit the sign that warned about deer in rutting season. The phone thought it was 11:47 p.m. The minute hand on her watch wavered , then decided to agree. She tucked both away. She’d learned in London not to rely on screens for safety, and she’d been warned —half a dare, half a joke—about how time slipped in the Grove.
The Heartstone lay against her sternum, warm as another pulse. Even under the layers of jumper and jacket, she felt it. When she pressed a thumb to it through the fabric, the chill of the silver chain bit her skin and the crimson stone answered with its steady little beat.
This was stupid, she knew. If Eva were with her, there’d be some quip about horror films and women who went into the dark alone, and they’d stand laughing at the idea until one of them said, But seriously, don’t go. But Eva wasn’t answering her messages, and the stone had started heating up behind the counter at the Golden Empress as if it had woken from a long sleep. It had throbbed when she crossed Kew Bridge. It had tugged like a magnetic needle the moment she’d stepped off the bus.
She told herself she was being rational. This was fieldwork. She had been given an object by an unknown benefactor, an envelope shoved under her door one dawn with a note in a hand she did not recognize: Wear this when you go. She hadn’t planned to go. Now the stone was making the choice feel less like a decision and more like compliance.
The path narrowed as the oaks thickened. The night drew in. Her breath hung bright for a moment and vanished. Somewhere a fox barked, a thin, tearing sound. Farther off, a stag called once, then again, lower, like a warning.
She found the low, overgrown trail by feel more than sight, the one she had memorized from a forum post a bartender had shown her one slow afternoon. Cut left at the fallen elm. Count twelve strides and veer toward the hum you couldn’t hear until you were out of the traffic’s range. It was a hum like a distant cello, felt more in the chest than hear d with the ears. She didn’t know whether the instructions had been written by someone sober. Tonight, they felt like directions to a room she’d already visited in a dream.
The first of the standing stones reared out of the bracken like the shoulder blade of some giant animal. Up close, it wasn’t stone at all but oak, old and petrified, the bark ridged into layers that shot moonlight back in an oily sheen. There were six, leaning together in an uneven ring. Wildflowers threaded between them—foxglove, bluebells, buttercups—impossible profusion for late January. Their petals glowed as if lit from within, each tiny lantern a different color, trembling on stems that did not move in any wind.
The wrongness slid over her like lake-water. Not loud. Not dramatic. The way a room felt when you were sure someone had been in it and straightened something that should be crooked. The hush sank so deep the city dissolved. Even the deer kept their counsel.
She stood outside the ring and closed her eyes. She breathed in and out to a count of four the way her mother had taught panicked Year Elevens before exams. Four in, hold, four out. Ground yourself in the present, Jen Carter’s voice would say. What can you see ? What can you hear ? Her father would have muttered something about facts, about checking your witnesses, about not making leaps.
She could see her own breath streaming pale. The frost whitening the grass. The black coins of the oak leaves. The standing stones in their ring, each one given a notch or a twist of trunk that made it easy to tell it from its brothers.
She could hear —she opened her ears, like a catching net, ready to name each sound and make it safe with a label.
Something else breathing.
Not an animal’s huff or a human’s catch. A soft, steady inhale from a long way off that reached her face as a cold brush and then drew away again. Like a tide without water.
She nearly laughed. It felt like the way you got spooked at three a.m. and thought the building’s boiler was a ghost. It could be wind through the trees creating the illusion of a breath.
Except the air on her face had come from the wrong direction. It had moved inland when the branches stirred forward.
She opened her eyes, throat gone dry.
The pendant pressed hard against her breastbone, hot enough to sting. The heat wasn’t unbearable. It wasn’t even painful. It was attentive, a hand on her chest pushing her a step further in.
“All right,” she whispered, because talking made her feel less like prey. “If this is when you start doing whatever it is you do, then do it.”
Her voice went nowhere. The grove swallowed sound the way snow ate footsteps .
She stepped between two of the oaks, careful not to brush their bark. There was an instinct to that care, like not waking someone who slept with their eyes open.
The temperature changed. That was the first thing. A cold that wasn’t outside cold. It was cellar cold, earth cold, the kind that curled its fingers around your ankles. And with it came a smell: something sweet, overripe. Not rot. More like a bowl of fruit left too near the radiator, the skins sweating.
Time adjusted around her to a speed she couldn’t name. The seconds went syrupy. The minute hand on her watch leaped forward three notches, then ticked back one, embarrassed.
The wildflowers nodded as she passed. Flicker, flicker , bow. She watch ed them with the focus she gave ornery customers or frightened witnesses. They look ed like flowers in every respect except that if she stared too long at one soft cup she saw something that wasn’t petal curling at the edge. An eye with a cataract? No, a pale see d. She blinked hard and the petals were simply petals again.
The ground dipped toward a shallow hollow ruged with moss. In its center the air trembled the way air did over a hot pavement at noon. The shimmer made the bending of space visible—the way a bead of water distorted the lines of what lay behind it.
The Heartstone pulsed and went feverish, and she stopped. Her palm came up of its own accord to cover the stone, as if she could hide it like a child hides a sweet.
She swallowed. “Hel,” she said under her breath, tasting the old word like metal. She’d read enough in that one book Silas kept under the till, enough to know the name the old Northmen had given to the colder, farther-away place. Enough to know that there were doors and there were things that could be called, but only fools called without knowing how to send them away.
There was another inhale. This one closer. The branches around the ring leaned, as if a ship had tilted under their feet.
“Anyone here?” she said, and then winced at herself.
Something—no footstep. Not that. But something made the grass ahead of her flatten in a line, pressing toward the shimmer. It could have been wind. She let it be wind.
From her left, soft as a moth brushing paper came, “Laila.”
Rory froze. No one had called her that in years. Not since her father had tried it on her to be funny when she was twelve and she had declared that she was Aurora now, or Rory if she had to be anything else, and he’d put his hands up and laughed and obliged.
“Dad?” she said, hating the shake in her voice. She swept the ring with her phone’s torch. The beam sliced the dark, glittered off the slick bark, lit petals like tiny lamps. There was no one. Of course there was no one.
“Laila,” said the voice again, soft, fond, the exact register of Brendan Carter after two whiskies, when every thing he loved made him sentimental. It spoke from the wrong direction this time, nose-close to her right ear.
She made herself not spin. She made herself look ahead where she meant to be look ing. “Not funny,” she said, and took another step.
Movement. Out of the corner of her eye, a figure moved between trunks. Human height, human shape, nothing outrageous but the wrongness of the gait—too smooth, too even, the way a marionette walked when the puppeteer had all the strings and no gravity. Her scalp prickled. She forced herself not to turn her head.
“You don’t get to have his voice,” she told the Grove with a steadiness that surprised her. “That’s cheating.”
The next voice was not her father’s. It was Eva’s, bright and full of air and speed, the way she called from across a crowded bar when she was about to do something that would get them both told off. “Rory! You have to see this!”
Her hand shook. “I’m see ing,” she said. “I’m here because I want to know, not because you’re selling me tickets, all right?” She blinked hard against the tightness building behind her eyes. She let the tear go, because she needed her hands for other things.
She reached into her rucksack and took out a length of white kitchen string she’d tied around two pencils to make an impromptu plumb line. It was an absurd little tool, but she had grabbed it on the way out as if the act of making a plan would anchor her. She tied one end to the notch in the nearest oak where a lightning strike had left a natural hook. The other end, she looped around her wrist.
“Anchor,” she told herself. “Anchor and vector.”
The hollow rippled. It wasn’t dramatic. The space pinched and then relaxed, as if a giant had flexed his hand with the palm down and the tendons had shown under the skin. A smell came with it, cold ash and snow and the sharp, iron tang of a coin in the mouth.
Not a place she wanted to go.
She licked her lips and stepped closer. The Heartstone burned. She swallowed bile and forced her fingers open. She took the pendant out on its chain and held it up. The stone’s inner glow kindled. A faint red woke at its hear t like a coal breathed on.
“You wanted this,” she said, and felt foolish addressing a hole in the air. “I didn’t come to throw it in. I came for answers.”
The air in front of the shimmer dimpled. Not inward, as if pulled. Outward, toward her, as if something inside had pressed its face up hard against a membrane.
“Malphora,” breathed something from the other side.
She had never been called that. The syllables shivered along her bones. The word dragged and chimed. It was wrong in her mouth when she tried to say it back. It had the shape of a name, the feel of frost on a window.
“Not mine,” she said, and her breath made a white flower that collapsed. “You don’t get to name me.”
Something moved at the periphery again, this time past her shoulder, this time with toe-bones in the wrong places. She risked a glance. The figure did not duck or vanish. It stood between two trunks at the very edge of the ring, a dark length in a dark coat. It had her height. Her slope of shoulder. Her straight black hair where it lay over the collar. When she lifted her phone torch, the beam cut across a face that caught no light, as if light were a fluid it absorbed and kept.
Her stomach dropped and then steadied. She refused to humiliate herself by jumping. Monsters fed on flinching, the way aggressive men did. She’d learned that the hard way.
“There are rules, aren’t there?” she said to the dark and the oak and the under-cold. “You don’t take what’s given unless it’s given. You don’t call unless you’re called. You don’t cross a threshold uninvited.” Her father’s voice had taught her rules. Her mother had taught her their cost.
The chain tightened around her wrist. The string tugged her back a fractional inch. In her peripheral vision, the double lifted her hand in the exact motion she made as if to tuck hair behind her ear. It didn’t touch its hair. Its hand hovered a moment too long, then lowered.
She thought of Silas polishing glasses behind his bar, pretending not to watch the door. She thought of the Golden Empress bell that chimed when she pushed through with her stack of orders and Chef Cheung’s shout of “Don’t let the heat out!” She wanted the banal solidity of those places so badly that for a second it made a pressure behind her ribs the way laughter did when you weren’t allowed to laugh in court.
“All right,” she said again, more softly . “I came because you called, or something did. I won’t be dragged.”
She stepped back one pace, careful, willing the move to be graceful so the Grove wouldn’t sense weakness. The shimmer stretched toward her as if it were attached to her like a film of spit between lips. The breath of the place followed. The petals flickered . The cold reached higher, up her calves, her thighs, and then let go, the way you let go of a kid’s shirt when they’ve hear d you.
Her watch ticked, tocked, then fell silent. The second hand leapt and held at twelve. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She flinched and fumbled it out with grateful clumsy hands.
No service. Of course not. But on the screen, her lock screen photo—that blurry snap of Eva trying to steal a dumpling—had changed. For a split second, it wasn’t Eva. It was Rory herself, except the eyes in the photo weren’t her bright blue; they were a flat, featureless dark. The image wavered and returned to normal before she could decide whether she’d really see n anything at all.
She tasted copper. She had bitten the inside of her cheek without noticing.
“Anchor and vector,” she said again, and took another step backward. The string tightened. She put her weight into it and it held. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was saving .
The voice used her name once more. Not Laila this time. Not Malphora. “Aurora,” it said, in a precision that held no affection. Attention only.
Her head snapped up. She let out a sound she’d hate to hear herself make again. She swallowed it. She met the place where the shimmer showed its weakest spot with the kind of stare she had used on Evan when he’d tried to make her small.
“No,” she said, and found a deep, quiet in herself that look ed like a lake with ice beginning. “You don’t get to have that either.”
She gave herself permission to move. One small step and then another. She didn’t turn her back. She didn’t hurry. She walked the way you walked past a dog you weren’t sure would bite. When she came level with the oak where she had tied the string, she put a hand on the bark and felt the tree’s steady winter hear t. It wasn’t a human hear tbeat, wasn’t anything like that, but it was firm and old and indifferent to every silly human thing. It wanted only rain and light. It did not care about mouths on the other side of the skin of the world.
Her back prickled as if someone stood behind her with a cold coin ready to drop down her collar. The double at the edge of the ring matched each of her little shifts. It raised its chin when she raised hers. It lowered its shoulders when she did. It did not blink.
She stepped over the boundary between two trunks. The cold peeled away at once, a sticky resistance unwilling to let her go that gave anyway, that parted with a soft, annoyed sound almost too small to hear . The air on the other side came in warm. She hadn’t realized it was warm outside the ring until she felt that warmth return to the bones of her hands.
She expected relief. What she got was a sudden, gutting certainty that she had made a mistake.
The hush she had stepped into did not lift. The park remained a swallowed thing. No traffic hum. No fox bark. The stars had brightened in a way stars didn’t do in London, but then the whole sky took a little breath and dulled again as if someone’s fingers had closed a dimmer switch.
She watch ed the ring out of the side of her eye. She kept walking backward until the string went slack and then fell from the tree. The kitchen twine coiled at her feet like a shed snake, its end cut cleanly as if a blade had gone through it.
“Fine,” she said, and it wasn’t to the trees. It was to herself. She bent, grabbed the string, stuffed it into her pocket. She did not look over her shoulder, but her skin told her the double had not stepped across. Rules. Thank God for rules.
She turned at last. The darkness between the trunks ahead wore a path like a mouth. The shape of the fallen elm lay black on black, right where it had been on her way in. She started to ward it.
Behind her, just as she reached the first bend in the trail, the grove breathed out once more. The exhale threaded her hair and went. In its wake, something ticked, like cooling metal. Her watch began again, a juddering sprint to catch up. 1:12. 1:09. 1:13.
She did not look again. She stepped faster. She counted quietly under her breath in the way that made numbers as comforting as beads: one, two, three, four.
At the sprung gate, the city’s hum came back all at once, a wave that made her aware of the drum of her own blood. The streetlights through the bare branches were the same indifferent sodium they had always been. A car passed. The fox darted across the road as if late for an appointment. She put her hand on the gate’s cold bar and pushed.
The Heartstone cooled. It did not go cold, but the fever broke. It settled into a warmth that felt like intent biding its time. Through her shirt, she could see the faint, private glow it kept to itself. Her fingers, when she lifted them away from the bar, had left five pale ovals in the frost.
She didn’t trust her legs to carry her farther than the bus stop. She sat on the bench with her hands shoved into her pockets and stared at the advertisement for dental implants as if it could tell her what she had almost done.
Her phone chimed. A message, Eva’s name bright on the screen. Rory’s hear t leapt the way a startled thing leaps and hits a wall. She opened it.
It was a photo. It showed Richmond gates, empty, under a sky losing its stars. In the lower right, a reflection in the iron like a trick of light. Her own face, only a fraction off her angle. The eyes in the reflected face were not flat. They were very , very blue, and they were looking not at the camera but over the photographer’s shoulder, back into the park.
She locked the phone with her thumb and told herself she didn’t have to open it again to see whether the message had really come at 1:14 or at 3:03 or at some other number time preferred tonight.
Over the park, the trees stood black and patient. The standing ring existed whether she was there to see it or not. A breath went out and was only, this time, wind.