AI Richmond Park after midnight carried a different weight .
Aurora stood at the locked gate and watched her breath smear the iron in thin ghosts. The city lights behind her blurred. A sky of orange glow, sirens in the distance, the faint thump of some club across the river. Familiar, almost comforting .
The padlock on the gate lay open on the ground.
She stared at it, then at the loose chain.
“Brilliant,” she muttered. “Because that’s not a horror film set-up at all.”
No one answered. Cars hissed past behind her, tyres on wet road. A fox shrieked somewhere far off, then cut short.
She stepped through the gap, boots scraping on gravel. The change hit as she passed the fence. The usual drone of London—traffic, distant music, hum of sodium lamps—fell away as if someone shut a door. Air pressed against her ears. The park stretched ahead as a darker shape against the sky.
She checked her phone. 00:17. Signal bars vanished one by one until the top corner sat empty.
“Alright. In and out,” she told the screen . “You check the grove, not die, then you go home. Easy.”
The Heartstone Pendant rested under her jumper. She pinched it through the fabric, then dragged the silver chain free. The little crimson stone caught what little light there was, its surface smudged with thumbprints. It lay warm against her palm, warmer than skin, as if it carried its own fever.
“You’d better be worth it,” she told the gem .
It answered with a faint pulse of heat.
She swallowed and followed the path.
Richmond at night had always unnerved her a little: the size of it, the way the city fell apart at the treeline. Tonight the darkness sat heavier. The lamps along the main avenue glowed dull, their circles of light too small. Beyond them, the park turned to ink. Trees hunched in groups. The wind didn’t move their branches. Grass bent in strange patches, as if an invisible tide washed through.
Her boots crunched dead leaves. Each step landed louder than it should. The sound bounced back at her from the open space, delayed by a beat.
She stopped.
Her last footfall came again, one extra crunch behind her.
She pivoted, shoulders tight, breath stuck high in her chest.
Empty path. Fence to her left, a tangle of bramble to the right. A bin tipped over, its lid askew like an open mouth. Fast-food wrappers fluttered around it in a wind that didn’t touch the trees.
Aurora watched the bushes along the fence. A dark shape shifted there.
“Fox,” she whispered.
A pair of eyes gleamed at ankle height, too far apart for a fox, too still. The space between them held no snout, no shape. Just black.
Her hand closed around the pendant until the edges dug into her palm.
“Deer,” she corrected herself . “Big deer. Richmond has deer. They stare. That’s a thing.”
The eyes did not blink.
She backed away, turned, walked faster down the path. The eyes stayed at the edge of her vision as long as she looked straight ahead. When she risked another glance, they were gone .
Grass brushed her calves now, taller than she remembered. She left the main avenue, cutting toward the heart of the park where the Grove sat hidden. The map in her head, pieced together from Silas’ stories and one hazy visit in daylight, led her along a faint track. Bracken snagged her trousers. The air cooled as if she stepped into shadow, though the trees thinned.
“Keep going. Standing stones, big oaks, portal nonsense, then you can tell Silas it’s all in his head.”
The pendant grew hotter, weightier. It dragged at the chain. The faint inner glow woke, a dull ember against the dark.
Light shifted around her.
Moonlight washed the grass in silver. Clouds should have tracked across the sky at their slow crawl, but they stood still. Stars sharpened, wrong constellations burning between familiar ones. A new pattern hung above Richmond, a crooked ring that pulsed faintly in time with the stone in her hand.
Aurora stopped again.
Her last step crunched.
Another footstep came after. Softer. Closer.
She rounded on it with a curse on her lips.
“Who’s there?”
Silence flooded the field. Even the distant sirens had gone. Far behind, at the boundary, the city might as well have sunk under black water.
She stared into the grass. Shapes lurked there: deer antlers or twisted branches, it blurred together. Her eyes refused to settle. Every patch of shadow promised a figure hunched just out of full sight, waiting for her to blink.
The wind should have moved the grass. Her breath stirred the strands nearest her knees; the rest lay flat.
She rubbed her thumb over the crescent scar on her wrist. Old habit. Old reassurance.
“Stop this. It’s a park. You have a law degree and a bike and a landlord who serves worse things than ghosts. Grow up, Carter.”
Something answered from the field.
“Grow up, Carter.”
Same words, same rhythm, same dry edge in the vowels. Her own voice.
It came from somewhere far to her right.
She froze, hand halfway back to her side.
“Nope.”
The echo laughed out there in the dark. Her laugh, shorter, snapped off too soon.
She forced her legs into motion. Grass whispered against her jeans.
The Grove entrance loomed ahead as a deeper shadow in the field. Ancient oaks rose there, six of them, their trunks thick as cars. They formed a broken circle, their branches laced together above. In daylight, the clearing inside looked almost quaint. Tonight it crouched like a mouth behind crooked teeth.
She stepped around the first oak.
The world pinched.
Air clung to her skin, too cold, too damp. Sound changed texture. Her own breath rasped louder; her heartbeat thudded in her ears. Beyond the trees, the field still stretched under its false constellations. Inside the ring, the light turned greenish, soaked through with depth like pond water.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing, as always. Blue, white, violet. They leaned toward her boots in slow twitching arcs. Petals folded shut one by one as she passed, retreating like wary creatures.
“Full of charm , this place,” she muttered.
Her voice came out flatter, muffled, as if she spoke into thick cloth. No echo .
The standing stones sat between the oaks. Not shaped rock exactly—old trunks grown into impossible symmetry. Their bark had weathered smooth as bone, each etched with faded spirals. Someone had stuck red ribbons at the base of one months ago; they now hung black and slick, colour drained, as if soaked in ink.
Aurora stepped toward the centre.
The Heartstone flared.
Heat scalded her palm. She flinched and dropped it. The pendant swung against her ribs and sent a hot lance through her chest.
“Alright, alright, I get it—”
The crimson gem shone with a steady inner fire now. No pulse . Just a dense red light that painted the flowers blood-dark and carved harsh planes onto the oak trunks.
The wrongness in the air tightened.
No insects hummed. No owl hooted. The silence edged toward pressure, a weight that pushed against the inside of her skull. Her tongue tasted iron.
She reached for the nearest oak and laid fingers against the bark.
Cold seeped into her skin, colder than the January air. Her fingertips numbed. She yanked her hand back and squinted. The place her fingers had rested showed no mark, yet the grain in the wood seemed to have shifted. A suggestion of four pale grooves lay there if she tilted her head, like the memory of handprints pressed decades ago.
Her phone, forgotten in her pocket, buzzed.
The sudden vibration shot electric through her. She fumbled it free.
Screen: 00:17.
No missed call icon. No notification banner. Just the time, locked, refusing to change.
She watched the numbers for a full minute.
They stayed.
“Right. Time nonsense as well. Great.”
Something moved behind her.
Not a sound. Movement, felt more than seen, the way you sense someone step into a doorway at your back.
She turned in a slow arc.
The clearing stood empty. Oak pillars, stone-bark, dead ribbons twitching without wind. Wildflowers closed up tighter, their heads bowed.
“You’re not as subtle as you think,” she called into the space. “Come out, or I leave.”
Leaves on the far side rustled.
She stepped toward the noise, boots careful, each shift of weight measured . Flowers shied away in a ripple as she approached.
“What did you drag me out here for?” Her voice roughened. “You wanted me in the Grove, I’m here. Do the ominous bit and get on with it.”
Her words landed with no echo . The rustling stopped.
Then, from behind her, almost at her ear:
“Rory.”
She spun, heart jamming against her ribs.
No one.
The air where the voice had come from felt warmer. Her breath ran into a patch of mist, as if someone else exhaled into her face. It smelled faintly of damp earth and wet leaves, the way her mother’s coat had smelled on rainy school runs.
“Jen?” The name slipped out before she caught it.
Silence pressed closer.
The pendant on her chest grew hotter, heavy as a stone in a sling. She yanked it off, chain rasping against skin, and held it at arm’s length.
Its light brightened, then narrowed to a thin line, a beam that pointed past one of the oaks and into the trees beyond the ring. The beam quivered toward the left, then fixed dead straight.
“You want me to go there.” She followed its aim with a glance.
Darkness lay between the trunks like piled velvet . Shapes loomed there that could have been more trees or could have been something else. Her stomach knotted at the thought of stepping under those branches.
She lifted the stone higher.
The beam shone through her fingers, staining her skin red. In the reflection off one silver link of the chain, she caught a glimpse of a face over her shoulder.
Not quite hers.
The jaw set too narrow, the left eye a fraction lower, the hair a shade lighter and longer. The same bright blue irises, too bright, pupils pinpricks. The mouth crooked into a smile she recognised from childhood photographs.
“Rory. Love.”
Her father’s voice, soft, coaxing, close to her ear.
She swung round with a ragged breath.
Only trees. Only flowers. The empty ring of oaks.
Her skin crawled as if hundreds of tiny legs explored it.
“You’re reaching,” she whispered, heat in her throat. “Voices in your head. Old recordings.”
Something at the edge of the clearing chuckled.
Not her father. Not any human she had known. The sound carried no breath, just the dry click of humour with all the warmth stripped out.
“You drag me here and use my family’s voices,” she snarled in its direction. “That’s lazy. Pick a tone.”
The chuckle rolled again. This time it came from the opposite side. The pendant swung in her grasp, its light cutting jagged lines across the trunks.
Behind every oak, for a blink, a figure stood.
Tall as the trees. Limbs stalk-thin, jointed backward like a deer’s. Heads too narrow, too long, crowned with branch antlers or dead vines, hard to tell. Empty faces, just smooth bark where eyes and mouth should be. Each disappeared as soon as she tried to focus. They lurked only in the corners of sight, always just outside direct gaze.
Her hands trembled ; the chain rattled against her knuckles.
“You’re not there,” she told them. “You’re tricks. Light on bark.”
The flowers around her ankles shifted again.
They leaned toward one point behind her, every stem bending in unison, like iron filings drawn by a magnet.
Her body knew before she did; her shoulders bunched, the fine hairs on her arms rose.
Something stood at her back. Close enough that the air on her neck cooled. Close enough that if it had breath, it would have touched her skin.
Aurora tightened her grip on the Heartstone until the metal bit. The gem’s heat built toward pain, a deep burn digging into bone.
She didn’t turn. She fixed her gaze on the tree ahead, on a knot in its bark shaped like an eye.
“You brought me here for a reason,” her voice came out thin, scraped raw. “So use your words.”
The thing behind her moved. Not a step. A shift in weight , as if it leaned in. Its presence pressed against her spine without touch.
At the far edge of the Grove, beyond the boundary of the standing oaks, the grass lay flat in a long, narrow streak, as if something vast had slithered there moments before.
Aurora’s throat clicked as she swallowed.
“Well?”