AI Rory had always told herself she wasn't the sort who went walking into parks after midnight. The lamplight behind her thinned along the path and fell away completely when she slipped off into the bracken, through a gap in the fence she'd found earlier that afternoon. Richmond Park was a dark sea around her, quiet except for the scuff of her trainers and the faint click of the Heartstone pendant tapping against her sternum.
The pendant had warmed in her palm when she'd taken it out at the bar after closing, a measured pulse she felt more than felt through the silver chain. It had seemed absurd, a trinket from an unknow n benefactor answering to some internal clock. And yet she'd found herself on the night bus, then walking under ancient oaks that made the street lamps behind her feel like a different century.
She picked her way past ferns beaded with dew and the ruins of a fallen log where a fox had left prints. The smell of wet earth and something green and sharp filled her mouth. The cold air bit the tips of her ears. It was a place people came to for quiet, when they did at all, a glossy day with stags in the distance and buses on the perimeter roads. Nothing about the darkness itself should have unsettled her.
But there was the way the sound dropped away as she moved deeper, how the city thinned into nothing. No rumble of traffic. No sirens. The park swallowed her footsteps after a few paces, even her breathing seemed trapped close to her face. It was quiet in the way of a held breath—every thing waiting for a noise to crack it.
"Stupid," she murmured, not sure who she meant. Silas for telling her ghost stories between pouring pints, Eva for texting her the map to the grove with a shrug and a sword emoji, or herself for seeing a pulse in a gem and thinking it a sign. Her voice sounded wrong out loud. Too close.
The grove was not on any official map. One day last spring, Eva had taken her to the edge of it at midday, pointing out the ring of ancient oaks that didn't seem to match any of the park's forestry schedules, how the trunks bent inwards at their shoulders as if listening. The stone-colored bark of the oaks had been smooth and warm under Rory's palm even though the air had been cool. "Do not go alone," Eva had warned, and then grinned because she knew how Rory bristled at proverbs delivered like commandments. "Time cheats in there."
Tonight, Rory couldn't see the ring until she stepped between two trunks that leaned together like a doorway. The grove opened around her all at once, like a mouth. Moonlight slicked the clearing. The ground was soft, stitched with wildflowers that had no business blooming in October; their white and indigo heads were small and stubborn, lifting in the night air. The oaks circled the space like sentinels , some as thick around as three of her, their roots humped up like sleeping beasts.
The pendant warmed another fraction, the heat of it a coin pressed against frostbitten fingers. It had a way of finding her skin no matter how she tucked it under jumpers. It thudded against her as if to say, Now.
Rory stopped just inside the circle and listened.
Something moved far to the left, a soft skitter of leaves that should have been a squirrel. The expectation of it made her eyes flick toward the sound. Nothing. Then, twenty degrees to the right, the identical skitter.
"Okay," she said under her breath. She took out her phone and glanced at it, and then blinked. 00:11. Battery at ninety-two percent. No bars. The home screen wallpaper—a photo Eva had snapped of the Golden Empress's neon sign reflected in a puddle—seemed overly bright here, like it was lit from inside the glass rather than from above. She tucked the phone back into her jacket.
She chose a mark. A certain oak, with a spurlike scar rising from a knot halfway up. She picked a bit of chalk out of her back pocket—habit from a childhood of hopscotch and later from school, and then from a job delivering where occasionally you needed to mark an address not visible in the rain—and drew an X low on the trunk where she wouldn't see it from the path. The chalk was pale and obvious on the gray bark. Good. She could keep that on her left shoulder while she explored the ring. She would not get lost in a circle a dozen trees around, even if those dozen trees looked interchangeable by starlight. She would not be the idiot in a cautionary tale.
The wildflowers shivered. No wind touched her face.
She walked the inner edge of the ring, brushing fingertips along the roughness of bark and counting under her breath. Twelve. No, thirteen. She stepped back to recount and realized she was two trees past her chalk mark already. She looked at the place she'd marked, then blinked. The X had blurred, smeared as if someone had drawn a wet thumb across it. Sap? She touched the line. Her finger came away dry, a faint chalk dust on it, but the X looked older, embedded, like lichen.
Her breath moved too slow. That thought surprised her—what did slow breath feel like, except a sensation, uselessly descriptive? But there it was again: an awareness, clipped and factual, that her inhale took longer than it ought. She tried to pull in a fast one and couldn't. It was as if the air was viscous here, as if the grove asked her to match its tempo.
There were no insects buzzing. No owls. Once, far away, something laughed, a brittle, bright sound that might have been a fox and might not have been anything she wanted to name.
She took the pendant out from under her jumper and let it hang in the open air. The deep crimson gem held a light that didn't seem to answer to moon or shadow. It pulsed faintly, a dull ember glow, and with each pulse she felt heat skip across the skin below her collarbone.
"All right," she said, and the sound of her voice reassured her because it was her own, steady and clipped in the way she used when she wanted to sound like a person who had a plan. "Lead on, then."
She walked towards where the center would be if a circle were a mathematical circle and not a thing made by oaks with unknow n ages. The ground there had a slight hollow to it, a place the roots bowed around. The pendant's warmth climbed. She stopped a meter from the hollow. The clearing's edges felt further away. The chalked tree could have been in another street.
The light in the pendant pooled and breathed. It was like holding a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
She crouched and put her hand to the soil. Cold. Damp. Not sinking. No trick there. She held her palm over the hollow and then lowered it in cautious increments until her skin prickled, as if she'd hovered her hand over the back of an old TV. Static hummed along her wrist and then up the thin inside of her arm. The crescent scar on her left wrist ached as if someone had pressed a coin into it.
"Hel," she said. The word tasted like an apple that had gone mealy. She was not a believer, not in any pantheon, but the word was in the note that came with the pendant months ago in a bland serif on good paper: Useful when near Hel's thresholds. As if that were an ordinary category of door one encountered in London along with "Staff Only" and "Mind the Step."
The hollow didn't look like anything. Not a pool, not a hole, not an absence. Just earth. And yet her skin told her something was there, some subtle warping of what air should do.
When the whisper came, she knew it was not her imagination because the hairs along her forearms stood up, quick and unanimous. Her name, or something very close to her name: Rory, said soft as a thumb running along a jawline. She stood, fast enough that her knee cracked. She spun. The grove was itself again: oaks, flowers, dark.
She almost said Eva's name. She bit it back. "Who's there?" was what people said in films and books before they got what they deserved. She didn't say it. She let the pendant dangle and kept her hands out of her pockets. She liked to know where her fingers were when adrenaline started to slick the insides.
The whisper changed direction. Laila, it said. No one had called her that since a summer when she was twelve and convinced her name needed altering to be interesting. She'd told her mother to try it; Jennifer had lasted a week, corrected herself with a laugh, and then that had been that. Laila came from the trees now like a trick, like a phone call that had been redirected .
"You can do better than old nicknames," she said. She told herself it was good to speak—to make the sound exist in the air, a stake planted. "I'm not flattered."
There was a pause. The pulse of the pendant filled it, small and patient.
Then, very soft and rich with someone's else idea of meaning: Malphora.
Her mouth dried. No one she knew called her that. No one had ever said it to her as an endearment or as a shaved version of anything. It felt put together from syllables that were hers and weren't, a word that was too big for the space inside her ribs. It did not feel like a guess.
"Where did you hear that?" she asked, and was angry at the edge in it. Names had power if you let them; that was fairy-tale nonsense and yet it had teeth in certain corners of the world.
The rustle to her left was not leaves. It was cloth, maybe, brushing bark. She turned. Something moved in the negative space between two trunks, a smear of darker dark. She waited. It did not move again.
She counted backwards from ten in Welsh, the way her mother taught her for calming. Deg, naw, wyth. The numbers steadied her because they were not the numbers she used in courtrooms or in sums; they were hers, a line back to the kitchen table with tea steam on the window and a radio crooning static. Saith, chwech, pump.
The wrongness built in layers so slow she kept thinking she had a handle on it, and then it would have a further depth. The wildflowers had turned their faces. They had been open to the sky. Now they tilted, all at once in the span of one of her too-slow breaths, inward toward the hollow, like mouths wanted to drink.
The pendant warmed against her breath. She looped the chain twice around her wrist without thinking, the silver biting briefly until it found a spot. The thought that her mother had warned her about silver snagging hair at the nape of her neck popped into her head, stupid and ordinary and good. She forced her shoulders down.
She thought about leaving. Her feet didn't move. The gap between two oaks that had been where she'd entered looked like it had not been a gap at all. A log lay where there had been no log. Or perhaps she hadn't noticed it before. Time cheated in there. She had always hated bad rules that came with a smile.
She pulled her phone back out to anchor herself to the real in a small way. 00:11 again. The seconds changed and then blurred and then slid backward to 00:10 and held there as if reconsidering what came next. She shut it off. She could live without it.
Another whisper, nearer. The voice wasn't directional so much as it was an idea pressed against the stretch behind her ears. Rory. Not a question. Not a plea. More like a note taken down in a neat hand.
"I didn't come to make any bargains," she said. "I came to check a theory and then go home."
The oaks creaked. It was a sound like old ships, not wind but age speaking slow. Wood settling into itself. The sound came from three different trees, one after the other, so that it almost became a rhythm, a syllable, an answer.
"You don't get to pick the terms," she added, because she knew what people said when they wanted to goad you into reacting: she had learnt that in arguments with Evan when he wanted to show her how small he could make her in their flat in Cardiff. The trick then had been simple and the hardest thing: do not give back what he offered. Give him a shape you chose instead. Walk out the door while he was naming what you were. Keep walking. She had done it.
She took a step toward the hollow. The air hummed higher. The pendant pulsed harder, as if grateful. The warmth soaked into her skin and seemed to flow up into her throat. It wasn't a pleasant heat. It had the feel of bathwater gone just too hot, the line between comfort and scald. Her scar ached deep, a headache inside a tiny crescent.
She picked up a twig. It was absurd, but there was a degree of science that comforted her, the kind you'd perform at a kitchen table with whatever was to hand. She tossed the twig gently toward the center of the hollow. It fell, like things do. It struck the earth and bounced once, and then—this was wrong—it made no sound until a half a second after she'd watched it land. When the noise came, it did so dull and far away, as if the twig had dropped into the next clearing over and not at her toes.
She laughed once. The sound of her laugh made her want to stop, because it sounded like it belonged to a person in a room alone, trying to catch herself.
Her hand went to the pendant again and then stopped. The gem's light showed a shape reflected that was not behind her. A flare in the corner of the red, a height, a distance. She looked up. The opposite side of the ring, in a place where there had been only tree and night, there was a person.
He—or it—stood too still. Rory knew what a person at rest looked like in the body without thinking about it: the subtle shift of balance from foot to foot, the drop of the chest with breath. This one had neither. Tall as the lower branches would allow. Its head was tilted as if listening. She could not see a face. There was a suggestion of coat, or cloak, or perhaps it was only shadow agreed upon by branches. Her eyes watered and she could not tell if it was from the effort of trying to find edges where there were none or from the suddenness of being seen .
Her heart made a small, dry impact and then remembered to go on. She did not step back. She did not move toward it. It was watching . She found herself thinking about deer, how in twilight they made themselves into statues by wanting to be nothing but the thing that blended, how sudden and enormous they were when they chose to run.
"Laila," the voice said, closer now, as if the figure had crossed the clearing in a way that did not require feet. She had the sweating, cold thought that if it moved when she did not look, then looking was the thing keeping the space between them.
"Not my name," she said. It was, in some corner of her life, but she chose the shape she wore. "Try again."
"Malphora."
She set her teeth. "No."
"Rory," the third time. A copy of how Eva said it when exasperated, affectionate and dry. The mimicry chilled her more than any other.
"Are you going to tell me what you want?" she asked. "Or do we stand here until your flowers fall asleep?"
The whisper smiled. It felt like that in her head, a curve, not a sound. Want is not the word we use, it said, but it said it without speaking, the meaning arriving without any vehicle she could trace.
"Fine," she said. "I'm using it."
The oaks breathed. She could have sworn to it. The ring of them pulled that air in, together, and let it out more cold than it went in. Her breath fogged. She sent her mind at the problem the way she did at difficult routes on a wet day with the scooter: what do I know , what do I owe, what can I bear to lose?
She would not step into the hollow. The simplest rule of all: do not go through doors you have not named. But she could touch the edge. She could map it. She reached out again with the back of her hand, because sometimes the back of a hand knew more than the palm, and found the line where cold shifted to colder and then to that strange hum. She thought, with an intensity that felt like prayer, of Yu-Fei's kitchen: hot oil sucking at dumplings, the shouts in all the languages of the line, the way you had to put your body in the right place or you would get burned , the way you learned by circles on your skin. She held that in herself while the grove pressed its wrong music at her.
"You can't have me," she said to the hollow, to the figure, to the oaks. "Not tonight."
The figure regarded her without moving. She could feel the weight of it, as if the night itself had found a heavier patch. The pendant pulsed and then went briefly hot enough that she hissed and almost let the chain slip, the heat biting before it dulled back to the ember noise it had held all along.
"Is there a portal here?" she asked. "Is that what you're guarding? Is that what you are?"
No answers. The figure did a thing the eye did not like: it tilted its head a fraction and the angle made it felt as if you'd come upon someone from the back and then they had turned their face too far to the side, more than was possible, to look at you. She wanted, with ridiculous force, to say her full name out loud, the old nursery story trick where you nailed yourself to yourself. She did not. She kept it in her bones.
"You can come back in the morning," the voice said, and it wasn't any voice she knew. It was a voice speaking English the way water spoke it when poured over stones: the shape of it could be understood if you watched long enough. The promise in it was not kindness. It was a geometry. The morning here could be next week out there. Or it could be an hour ago.
"That's not how mornings work," she said. "Not for me."
She took a slow step backward. The figure didn't fill the distance. The wildflowers had turned all their faces back to the hollow; she was aware of them at knee height like a congregation in prayer. She put one foot behind the other, the way you did on wet stairs. She found the chalk tree without looking: it was there under her palm, the X aged past chalk and into history. She drew a new line beside the old one, a vertical that made the old strokes into a rough star. It felt stupid and then necessary. To change the mark, to make the world remap to her doing.
Her back found the gap between the two leaning trunks. It opened only when she touched it, like a door that needed skin to consent. She did not turn away from the figure because she wasn't certain what would happen when she did. She took one more step and then another, the bracken beginning to brush her calves, the grove's breath easing out of her lungs a fraction at a time. The pendant cooled, sickened by the absence of heat.
She could still hear the whisper as she went, though it got thinner, not quieter, stretched like toffee. It said her name each way it knew how, as if taste-testing variations. She did not answer.
She turned when the dark changed quality. It was still night. The park was still a great, cold animal asleep under the stars. But her breath no longer came slow. The insects came back as a faint crest on the air. A fox barked, startling and ordinary. Far away, a plane's red eye moved. Time had resumed its cheap trick.
She did not run. She felt as if running would summon something with long legs to give chase. She walked until the fence appeared again, the gap not where she left it but no more difficult to find if you stopped thinking in straight lines. She slipped through, and then the street lamps were there, shining as if they'd been shining exactly as they should all along, and cars passed and did not notice a woman standing with her hand clenched on a bit of warmed silver, face upturned, breathing hard as if she’d been laughing.
The pendant lay cold against her sternum, inert as a good lie. She thought of the hollow with its sound arriving late, of the figure that wore shadow the way other people wore coats, of the word it had put into the air for her like a hook. She thought of mornings and of what a thing like that did with time.
At the bus stop, she checked her phone again. 00:11. She laughed for real this time, and it sounded like her in a room with people, not alone. She turned the phone off. Above the rooftops the moon went about its business, normal and blank. She tasted green in the back of her throat, damp and mineral, a stubborn aftertaste she couldn't shake.
On the ride back toward the bar, the lights of the city smeared and arranged themselves and redrew. She closed her eyes. She didn't sleep. The grove rode home with her for a while, a pressure at the back of her head, the sense of a door she had not opened but might have brushed with her knuckles.
She would not go back alone. That thought arrived quiet and absolute. She did not yet know what to do with the pendant that throbbed against Hel's thresholds as if it were proud of itself. She did not yet know what the figure knew when it said her name like it had built it.
What she did know : she had not given anything she could not get back. She would keep it that way. And there were things in Richmond that were not mapped, that wanted her at night, that listened when she made marks on bark and breathed in time with ancient wood.
She touched her wrist where the silver had pressed. The crescent scar there was hot again as if it remembered the shape of something's gaze. She rubbed at it. It did not go away. The city slid around her, and she told herself the wrongness would not follow her up the stairs to her small flat, where the smell of frying oil clung to her coat and the sink dripped at predictable intervals and the names on her letters were the ones she had chosen. She told herself that and did not look out the window as the bus passed a stand of trees where the night pooled thick and old, in case something inside pooled back.