AI Richmond Park had locked its gates hours before. She had climbed a fence where brambles had chewed the wire thin and dropped into damp grass that came up to her shins. London had shrunk behind her to a rash of sodium lights on the horizon. The path to the Grove lurked as a darker ribbon between oaks; even foxes kept off it at night.
"Fine. Five minutes in and I’m talking to trees."
The Heartstone lay against her collarbone and pressed a small, living warmth into her skin. The chain had snagged a hair and tugged when the pendant pulsed . It had never done that in her flat. It hadn't done it down the stairs past Silas’ bar, with the beer smell and old wood and Eva's laugh from the corner booth. Here, every step deepened the heat as if she walked toward a kettle.
"Alright. You’ve brought me this far. Do the courtesy of not frying me."
She pushed through bracken and ragwort that should have curled back by autumn. Wildflowers spilled over the verge like a riot of paint, out of season and unconcerned. Petals blinked with dew that never dripped. She traced the small scar at her wrist with her thumb and kept moving. Her trainers loved wet grass less than she did.
The oaks rose ahead, each trunk black and silver in moonlight, arranged in a ring itched into an older map than the parkman’s signage. Standing stones made of wood and years. The air changed in there. The smell of earth turned sweet, like a cut apple left in a warm room. Her breath came out in soft fog and went nowhere. The night outside flickered with wind; inside the ring, nothing moved unless it wanted to.
"In. Twenty-one oh-eight."
She held her mobile up and tapped a timer. Zeroed it. Started it. The seconds slid forward with cheerful indifference.
"Be honest," she told the Grove . "You’ve had worse company."
Something moved along the left edge of her sight, a moth the size of her palm, snow-white and blunt-headed. It halted in the air as if a hand closed around it, hung for a count of three without shiver or wingbeat, then folded space and wasn't there.
"That’s new."
She reached the line of ancient oak and stopped. Each tree showed a different shape of growth, a leaner, a scarred twin-trunk held together by a strap of bark, one that sprawled lower than the rest as if it crept. The silver chain snapped cold across her throat and bit. Heat bled back through the pendant.
"Alright. I’m here. Aurora Carter. Rory if you’re kind. Not here to make trouble."
Leaves touched leaves up in the dark with a clack and a drag, like bones in a pocket.
"No riddles, yeah? I’m on a clock. Probably more than one."
She stepped across the ring.
A weight settled on her shoulders, the sort you felt walking into court with the wrong shoes. The sky thickened overhead, milked of stars right above the Grove. Her mobile’s timer ticked to 00:12, 00:13, 00:14. She looked back through the trees and saw Richmond’s glow pull thin, then fatten, as if night breathed with a second set of lungs.
The pendant warmed harder. Little beats. She put a hand to it and felt a throb that didn't belong to her.
"Hel, then," under her breath. "Door to Hel. That’s what you are."
The word tasted clean, without brimstone. A ridge of roots crossed her path, and she caught her toe and stumbled. She braced herself against a trunk and leaned there. Bark under her palm came up slick, as if oiled, yet her hand came away dry. Lines ran under her fingers in loops that ached around meaning. She could have traced them and found letters if she had two hours and no sense.
"Rory," something liked the sound of her name or tried it on. The syllable came back to her just ahead of her, not behind her, dragged by a throat that didn’t have saliva.
"Incorrect. You can use it, you don’t own it."
She kept her feet moving. Grass went under her shoes in bunches. The wildflowers tracked her. They turned when she passed, small cups following her like eyes too close. She tugged the zip of her jacket up, shut out the breath of sweetness, and scanned for the centre.
The centre wasn’t a circle drawn on the ground. It was an absence where the air cooled and the smell cut. The pendant flirted with pain and then eased it, like a hand warning her away from a stove. She stopped at a hollow where nothing grew, a bare patch no bigger than a doormat, ringed by roots and mushrooms fleshy as ears. The skin along the inside of her forearm prickled. The timer ticked to 01:02.
"You’re not worth the petrol," she told the space.
A leaf fell without noise and righted itself before it hit the ground, then floated back to its branch, unfallen.
"Okay. That’s rude."
A far sound of cutlery carried, the jink and rest of plates in a stack. Yu-Fei’s kitchen at close, except she stood in a field and there was no oil in the air and no ginger. The muscles in her shoulders lifted and never lowered.
"Don’t nick from the past. Use your own tricks."
Her own voice, earlier, reached her from the right, no more than ten paces away.
"In. Twenty-one oh-eight."
She swung. The oaks held. Her mouth went dry. She worked her jaw.
"Echoes are lazy. Stick them to someone else."
She crouched and put an old pound coin on a root near the bare patch. Tight, bright edge, a little handwash smell from her pocket. She counted under her breath to ten, powered by habit, Catholic primary school creeping back into her bones, stood, turned a quarter circle, turned back. The coin had gone.
"That’s theft, not barter. You're not getting a good review."
She patted her pocket and pinched the coin between finger and thumb. It lay there, warm from a place that had not been her jeans.
"Okay."
She lobbed it at the stump of a fallen branch to the left. It struck once. Twice. Three times, as if there were three stumps layered into each other.
"Okay."
The pendant pushed at her skin, warmed with insistence, cooled, warmed again. She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward like she squinted at the back of Silas’ taps for the hairline crack she always felt before she found it.
"One pulse for yes," she told it. "Two for no. Helpful? Yes?"
Heat. She smiled without showing teeth.
"You’re rubbish at hospital corners, but I’ll take it. Door nearby? Yes?"
Heat.
"Within five paces? Yes?"
Heat.
"Within two?"
Heat.
"Within one?"
The metal lay indifferent. No heat. Fickle thing. She frowned and pivoted on the balls of her feet. The mushrooms didn’t watch but sat like kept mouths. The oaks leaned the way old men leaned to hear. Something padded across her left, slow and light. A cat with three legs. A dog that had learned to step with care. She didn’t turn.
"You’re not a fox."
Breath grazed her ear, warm and without moisture. She stepped away. The grass there hadn’t been pressed and didn’t spring back. She tasted iron coat-hanger at the back of her tongue.
"Do you have a name?" she asked the empty bit of air as if it wore a coat. "Because I’ve got lots."
"Malphora."
She had not told that one to anyone in three years. The back of her teeth clenched.
"Out of order," she said. "That one’s in storage."
"Malphora." Closer. Or louder. Not louder. Like someone had turned her skull into a bell and struck it from the inside.
"You like it because it sounds like ‘more’ and ‘for’ and ‘fall,’" she told whatever wore the space between trees. "Congratulations on syllables."
She shaped a grin for the dark, sharp to cut. It didn’t help her skin.
"Eva?" she said, for the ridiculous of it, for the check, for the way saying a friend's name bent a room to right shapes.
No answer. Her own breath and no breath. A train far over in Kew called like a thin animal.
She drew a line with the heel of her trainer from one root to another, small, thin scar. The line sat proud of the ground. After her toe passed, the grass on both sides knit inwards and erased it.
"Fancy."
Her mobile timer read 09:53. Her stomach didn’t accept that. She tapped the face and it showed 01:14. Tapped again. 22:06. The seconds counted up in twos for a bit, then dropped to zero and sulked.
"You’re not going to make me late for work," she told the trees as if they booked tables for two.
A new sound nestled around her, a wet click, a microscopic tongue repositioned in six hundred mouths. The mushrooms. Or the flowers. Or the oaks, sap moving in throats. Heartbeats outside of her and not in time with anything she knew.
"Keep to it, Rory. Job’s the job. Find the door."
She unwound the chain from her neck and held the pendant up between fingers. It shed a low light from inside the stone, deep as coals, not bright enough to paint bark but enough to push a shadow into her palm that didn't match her hand. It pulsed and eddied when she swept it toward the mushrooms, cooled against the roots, flared when she crossed the hollow and tilted it toward the waterfall of dark between two trunks that nearly touched.
"There you are."
The hollow deepened as she looked. Not a hole, not an opening, but a place where the night had gathered muscle. She bent her head and the warmth from the pendant rose up her wrist as if crawling .
"Walk through?"
The stone stayed still in her grip. She moved it a finger to the left. Heat. To the right. Nothing. Up. Nothing. Down. Heat, stronger. She lowered her hand and felt a sensation like a mouth under the surface of pondwater.
"All that for a door," she breathed, and knelt.
Her knee sank into good earth. The wildflowers rustled with disapproval. The oaks clicked once, together, as if they all had found their teeth at the same time. The last time she had knelt like this had been to replace a bike chain in the rain in Cardiff while her father rang to ask if she’d changed her mind about the law. Her hands moved now the same way, competent, unconcerned with the larger question.
"In," her voice from earlier piped behind her, twice, close enough that the air near her ear changed temperature. "In. Twenty-one oh-eight."
"Find another script."
She pressed the stone to the between-root place. The air there resisted her hand not like pressure or wind but like an old cat that refused a lap. The warmth built and built until her skin thought it burned but found no pain to go with it. Something cold gathered around the edges of her fingers, a nerve’s idea of inverse heat. Her mouth watered. Her guts lost and found themselves.
"You’ve got one job," she told the pendant, low. "Be a key. Don’t pull anything clever."
The light inside the gem brightened until the glow bruised the little half-moons of her thumbnails. She pressed harder and got the faintest give, the sense that the world had let her thumb into a pocket. The far cutlery sound poured into her head again, stronger, plates walking onto a shelf backwards. From the same direction, down and right, came the clink of a coin she had already thrown.
"You cheeky thing."
A branch snapped without anyone to weigh it. The crack didn’t echo the way it should in a circle of trees. It fell into the wrong shape of silence and nested there. She looked up without moving her hand. Between two oaks that had not been next to each other a moment ago, a shape held. It wore a coat length that had once meant Evan to her bones. It had no face, only the idea of eyes where the night thinned a touch more than elsewhere. It lifted one arm at the elbow and it went on lifting until the wrist kinked wrong.
"Don’t."
She bared her teeth. She didn’t spare words for it. She pushed her hand an inch deeper. The pendant stung.
The shape lowered the arm as if the elbow had been a string cut. It untied into grain and slid behind a tree that wasn't there an instant before. Leaves hissed together several feet off the ground.
"Thought so."
Something stroked along the hair at the nape of her neck without moving any of it. She didn’t flinch. The small crescent scar at her left wrist prickled like a mouth had found it through the vein and breathed. She set her other hand to the root to mark herself to here, to now, pressure and temperature and the grit under her nails.
"Brendan Carter’s kid," someone murmured behind her tongue. Tone all wrong. Like someone spoke while eating and didn't choose to swallow.
"You’ll leave family out of it."
The pendant surged a beat she had learned in a week, regular, insistent. The pocket under her palm loosened like a grudging latch.
"Good."
The mushrooms clicked and turned their fleshy sides toward her in small degrees. Footsteps matched hers, a half-step out, the way you heard your own stride in a stairwell when someone had a broom.
"Stop borrowing my weight ."
She bore down. The not-water broke with a thin sound that made her molars ache. Something passed over her knuckles. Not wind. Not heat. The old-cat resistance vanished and her hand eased forward to the heel. Her wrist crossed the boundary and went unavailable to the air, as if someone had put it into milk.
"Easy. Easy, easy."
The wildflowers craned and their necks said tiny, exasperated creaks. The oaks leaned. The timer on her mobile read 59:59 in clean numbers and reset itself, then settled on 00:03, as serene as a sleeping clock. Her chest moved. She kept it regular.
"You wanted me here," she said to the hollow. "So you open when I tell you."
"Malphora," breathed the space above her. Softer this time. An apology tried on for fit.
"Rory," she said, and let the stone pull.