AI The pendant burned a thumbprint through my shirt the instant I stepped between the oaks.
I caught it with my palm and hissed. The chain had warmed, the small deep crimson gem throbbed against my skin like a second pulse . The warmth meant close. The note had said as much. Follow the heat. A door hates to be found.
I switched off my phone’s torch to let my eyes settle. The ring of ancient trees felt like a bated breath . Richmond Park, only not. This was the Grove Eva joked about when we were fourteen, Isolde’s secret bit that locals named in whispers but never put on a map. I had laughed then. I did not laugh now.
The pendant tugged at me, strange as a magnet on bone. I loosened the silver chain and let the stone drop to rest against my sternum. It glowed with a faint inner light, a fish heart beating in shallow water. A breath of wind did not move the grass. I swallowed the old habit of saying hello to empty places. You do not announce yourself to anything that listens.
A moth tapped my ear, brisk and soft, tick-tock, then nothing. In the stillness that followed, I registered what had unsettled me from the first step. The park’s usual noise did not filter in. No distant traffic, no late laughter, no dog walkers on phones, not even the low rumble of planes that you stop hearing until they stop. Only the oaks stood and the clearing waited, and the little pendant kept time with a heartbeat that was not mine.
I laced my fingers together to hide the small shake. The crescent scar on my wrist caught the light of the stone and for a breath it looked like a slit eye . I made myself breathe. In through the nose, out slow. Dad would have told me to turn round. Mum would have called me clever and then asked what my plan was, which made me keep walking, because I had one. Find the seam, see if the pendant could shut it, get out.
The standing oaks formed a ragged circle. Their trunks had thick scars where lightning had kissed age upon age, burn upon burn without killing anything. The ground within was not like the park I had crossed to get here. Wildflowers bloomed in messy swathes as if spring had exploded and never left. Buttercups, foxgloves, little white stars I could not name enough to impress a gardener. Their scent tangled with something older, mint and metal at once. Blood without a body.
I clicked my torch on and shaded it with my hand to keep the beam tight. The light fell on petals that closed a fraction too slow when it passed. I counted steps to keep myself from wandering. Ten to the left, check the heat. Ten across, check again. My voice would have steadied me, but sound felt like throwing bread in a lake and daring something to break the surface.
The pendant warmed when I approached a hollow in the ground near one of the larger oaks. I crouched and ran my fingertips over the dip. Not a hole, not a sink. The air was cooler there, colder as I sank my hand through it, as if I had put my arm into a stream that ran upright. My fingers prickled.
I pulled back at once.
The grass around my knee looked wrong. Blades bent as if a foot had pressed them a moment ago. The imprint matched my boot, only reversed, heel where toe should be. I stood up and flashed the torch across the ground. More bent grass, two strides back, four to the side, a path of footsteps that had not come from me and yet wore my tread. My throat tightened.
I let my mouth flood with spit to stop the dry click when I swallowed. Habit. Courtrooms, interviews, bluffs only work when you look unbothered. I stood still and listened. A drip somewhere, water where it should not be. The soft rattle of acorns in a tree without acorns. Then, somewhere behind me, the smallest laugh you can make with a closed mouth.
I turned so fast the torch beam lagged. The oak nearest me wore a streak down its side where bark had been flensed in a long, thin ribbon, as if someone had drawn a knife a century ago and the tree had been trying to grow round the scar and could not quite forget . My own left wrist itched in sympathy. I pressed my thumb into the crescent until the itch eased. The pendant warmed further.
You brought it.
The words did not come with a voice, not exactly. They came like the moment you remember you left the gas on, a knowledge rather than a noise. I swivelled the torch, let it eat the darkness inch by inch. The beam hit a stand of flowers that had twisted their faces away, all at once, like a row of schoolchildren looking left at a teacher you could not see . The flowers did not breathe. I did.
I crouched by the cool spot again. The pendant beat faster there. The glow deepened, a small crimson heartstone, thumbnail size, hum rising under my skin until it spoke in a register only my teeth could hear. Close. Here. Now.
You brought it, Laila.
Laila scraped along a place in me I had covered with duct tape and busyness. No one in London called me that. Only one boy in Cardiff had tried, and only once. I let the name pass through. If this place had plucked it, then it had rummaged somewhere it had no right to go. I kept my face blank and my movements efficient . If it wanted me to look frightened it could work for it.
I unhooked the silver chain and held the pendant up. The light inside did not brighten the grass or the bark or my own fingers. It made a circle on the air that swallowed the torch beam instead of scattering it. I thought of the note that had come tucked in with a takeaway order last week, a plain little card sticky with curry oil and written in a hand I could not pin to age or gender. The heart answers the door I cannot close. Bring it to the Grove. Do not be late.
I had not told anyone I was coming . Not Eva, not Silas, not Yu-Fei when I left the Golden Empress with a bag of dumplings I did not eat and a lie about visiting a friend in Richmond. The bus had been empty. The park had swallowed me whole. I steadied the pendant with two fingers and lowered it into the chill that ran like a vertical stream. The chain twitched like a fishline taking a tug.
I pulled it back. The chain had not caught on anything, but the links had flattened, pulled taut and thin as hair for the span of a breath. I rubbed the silver and it felt warm, then cool, then warm again, as if someone else held the other end and pulsed heat into it in a rhythm meant to coax, not yank.
No part of me wanted to put my hand through that seam. I needed to see . I picked a buttercup and dropped it into the cold. It went soft and black, the yellow collapsing like burnt sugar, then recovered, then withered again on a loop I could not stand to watch for more than two seconds. I let it fall sideways and hit my boot as a fresh flower.
Time slips in the Grove, old local saying that you joke about when you are sober and you avoid when you are drunk. Mum used to call that sort of superstition a bone that never healed straight. It hurt in the rain. I glanced at my phone. The time read 13:07, then 02:13, then 20:20, then nonsense. No signal. I put it away. The numbers were worse than no numbers.
Something moved at the far edge of the circle, beyond the last oak. I caught only its length, not its face, tall as a lamppost and thin as a man half-starved. It slid between trees without touching them. My torch beam hit bark and green and faster rustles where nothing went. Every hair on my forearms lifted.
You brought it. Clever girl.
I did not want to hear that in Dad’s tone, quiet with pride he held folded under his tongue until he could put it in a closing argument. The Grove had no right to wear my father. I rested my tongue against my teeth to stop the wince. I set my torch on the ground, beam angled at my boots, and pulled a length of white thread from my pocket, stupid and old-fashioned as a fairytale, but I prepared, and fairy tales are manuals if you tilt them.
I tied the thread to a thin root that surfaced like a knuckle beside the cold and drew a line across the grass with chalk, a clean white stripe that broke the seam in my mind as much as on the ground. I knew where I had left my exit. I might loop right back to it or find the oak had eaten it. Either way, I had a line to follow. My breathing slowed.
I lowered the pendant again. The heat brightened. The small stone thrummed. The cold spot breathed out. I heard a low moan, not human, more like the drone of a ship horn from miles off, slowed until it turned to a throat-sound. The oaks shuddered. Bark creaked. My torch rolled an inch.
A whisper tugged at the back of my sleeve.
I did not jump. I pivoted. No one stood there. Grass lay flat where a small hand might have been. The thread trembled from root to my wrist as if caught in a draught. My head filled with a strange smell, not mint-metal now, but crushed yew and the earthy stink of old coins held too long. The pendant heat sharpened. The seam between my fingers flexed wider without me moving.
Hello, said a voice at my right ear. Not a whisper . A child’s greeting on the first day of school.
I took one step sideways, slow and careful, and put my back to the oak. The open bark pressed a line of roughness through my jacket that would pattern my skin later. It grounded me. I lifted the pendant and spoke for the first time since I crossed.
Who are you.
Laughter unpeeled like paper. The sound came from three different points and none of them lined up with where the hair on my neck wanted me to look .
The one who knocks, one said.
The one who waits, said another.
The one who ate your name when you gave it to a boy you did not like, said the third, quiet as a hand over a mouth.
I kept my eyes on the seam. The cold had a depth now, a pane of black water in upright air. It was not dark like night, or dark like the inside of a cupboard. It was the rich black of planned absence, velvet pinned to a stage. The pendant responded to it like a lover. Heat bled along the chain and bit my throat.
You do not get it, I said. I am here to close you.
Silence broke into delighted chatter, like sparrows when a cat pretends to sleep. The pendant beat faster. The hum climbed to a whine that made my teeth ache, the sort of sound that drives you to slam a drawer just to stop it.
Close, they chorused. Close what should not be closed. Clever. Clever clever clever.
A pressure built under my feet, the earth swelling then settling as a living thing shifts in its sleep. The wildflowers trembled without breeze. Petals turned to watch me. The chalk line at my heel faded as if a drop of water had struck it from inside the ground and washed the mark away. My exit did not look as sure as it had a breath ago.
I took that step I had promised myself if the wrongness grew teeth. Leave. Live. Come back with someone who knew more than myths and a pendant. I pulled on the thread. It snapped.
The broken end whipped my wrist hard enough to raise a welt. My neck burned where the chain lay. The Heartstone glowed with a steady, hungry red.
You cannot close a thing that loves you, the small voice said from the grass near my left boot.
That did it. I shoved the pendant into the seam.
Heat and cold met with a noise like a cough in a cathedral. The air widened. The upright stream turned into a mouth, not a thing with lips or teeth, just a shape wrapped in intent. For a moment, all the flowers leaned and the trees tightened and my heart threw itself against my ribs as if my body had tilted toward a fall.
The oak at my back shifted a finger’s width.
The darkness swelled, then pinched. Metal sang. The chain leapt. It slipped the back of my neck with a sting and tore forward so fast I did not track it, a silver line whipping into black. The pendant hung half in, half out, struggling, beat for beat, trying to decide where it belonged.
Something long and thin pressed from the other side and flattened against the surface, as if a palm had come to feel the glass that was not glass. It left a shadow of fingers too many for a human hand. The groove of each pressed like a question mark.
A second shadow slid up beside it. Taller. Horned. It tilted its head where my face would be, no features, only a deeper kind of absence. The pendant pulsed once, crimson lantern under a night river, then began to sink.
I lunged and grabbed for the chain. My fingers closed on air. The chain went slack, then thrummed, then drew tight as it cut into the black.
The shadows pushed.
The oak behind me groaned and split. The mouth tore wider.
Something stepped through.