AI
The pendant pulsed against Rory's collarbone, and the warmth of it felt wrong.
Not the gentle throb she'd come to expect near the standing stones, that familiar heartbeat rhythm that had guided her through Richmond Park twice before. This was erratic. Stuttering. Like something trapped behind glass, hammering to get out.
She stopped at the edge of the clearing where the ancient oak stones rose from the earth in their crude circle. Thirteen of them, each the height of a child, their bark surfaces worn smooth by centuries of wind and touch and things she preferred not to name. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them, blue and white and pale gold, swaying in a breeze that didn't exist. No wind tonight. The air hung thick and still, tasting of copper and wet soil.
She'd come because of the text. Three words from an unknown number at half past midnight: *She's calling you.* Then nothing. No response when Rory rang back, just dead static and a faint sound underneath it, something that might have been breathing or might have been her own pulse in her ears.
Stupid to come alone. She knew that. Eva would have said as much, would have grabbed her arm and planted herself in the doorway of their flat. But Eva slept like the dead on weeknights, mouth open, one arm flung across the pillow, and Rory hadn't wanted to explain the pendant. Hadn't wanted to explain why a piece of jewellery she couldn't remember acquiring sometimes grew warm enough to leave a mark.
The crescent scar on her left wrist itched. Old habit. It always itched when she felt watched.
She crossed the tree line.
Inside the grove, the quality of silence changed. Not quieter, that was the thing. London at night carried its own white noise, the distant hum of the M3, foxes screaming in garden bins, the odd siren threading through Twickenham. All of that cut out the moment she passed the first standing stone, replaced by something denser. A silence with texture. The kind that pressed against her eardrums and made her jaw ache.
The flowers shouldn't have been visible in this darkness. No moon tonight, cloud cover thick as wool. But each blossom held its own faint luminescence, a bluish glow that clung to the petals like frost. She'd noticed it on her first visit, asked about it, received no answer worth remembering.
Twelve steps to the centre of the circle. She counted them, feeling the ground shift beneath her trainers from packed earth to something softer. Moss, perhaps. Or something pretending to be moss.
The pendant's stutter quickened .
"Right," she muttered. "I'm here. Whatever this is, I'm here."
Nothing answered. She hadn't expected anything to. But the silence rearranged itself around her words, absorbing them the way dark water swallows a stone, without echo , without ripple, just gone.
She turned a slow circle. The standing stones looked different from inside the ring. Taller, somehow. She could have sworn the nearest one had been chest-height when she'd passed it. Now it loomed above her, its bark-surface gleaming in the flower-light. And the gaps between the stones, those wide spaces she'd walked through without thinking, looked narrower. The darkness beyond them thicker. Not empty.
Occupied.
The thought arrived whole and unwelcome, and Rory's hand found the pendant through her jacket, pressing the crimson stone flat against her sternum. Its heat bit her palm.
Something stood between the fourth and fifth stones. Not moving. Not quite visible. Just a density in the dark, a place where the gloom thickened into shape. She stared at it with the focused calm that had earned her a reputation at university, the girl who didn't flinch during fire drills, who'd talked a stranger down from a bridge in Bute Park with nothing but steady words and eye contact.
She didn't flinch now.
The shape didn't move.
Then it did.
Not towards her. Sideways. A lateral drift, smooth and weightless, like a shadow sliding along a wall when the light source shifts. It moved from the gap between stones four and five to the gap between five and six, and it didn't walk. Nothing about it suggested legs or stride or the mechanical fact of locomotion. It relocated. One gap, then the next. Then it stopped again.
Her breathing stayed even. Her hands did not.
"I can see you."
The words landed flat in that swallowing silence , and the shape, the density, whatever it was, tilted . The suggestion of a head cocking sideways, curious or hungry, the two so close together.
Behind her, a sound. Soft and organic. Not a footstep. Closer to the noise a mouth makes when it opens after being closed for a long time, lips peeling apart, the faint wet click of a tongue unsticking from a palate.
She didn't turn. Couldn't decide if that was bravery or the recognition that turning her back on the thing between the stones would be worse.
The pendant burned.
Not warmth . Not the pleasant hum of proximity. Actual heat, the kind that meant skin damage, and she gasped and yanked her hand away from it. Through her jacket, a faint red glow seeped, the deep crimson of the Heartstone bleeding light into the grove like a wound.
The flowers responded. Their soft blue luminescence shifted, cooled, dimmed. One by one, blossom by blossom, the light in them died. Starting at the edges of the circle and working inward. Concentric rings of darkness closing like a contracting iris.
And the sound behind her came again, that mouth-opening sound, but wetter now. Closer. Close enough that she felt the displacement of air against the back of her neck, the way you feel someone leaning in before they touch you.
"Don't."
She said it with the same tone she'd used on the bridge in Bute Park. Calm. Authoritative. The voice of a woman who expected compliance.
The breathing stopped. Then started again, low and rhythmic , synced to the stutter of the pendant against her chest. Inhale on pulse . Exhale between. As though whatever crouched behind her had learned the frequency and matched it, parasitic, feeding on the same signal.
The flowers at her feet went dark.
Total night. The kind of black that doesn't exist in cities, that humans haven't lived with since they crawled out of caves and built fires specifically to banish it. No ambient glow. No phosphorescent petals. Just Rory and the two things she couldn't see and the pendant's crimson heartbeat smearing red through her jacket like blood through gauze.
She couldn't feel the ground anymore. The moss, the not-moss, whatever it had been, had gone soft beyond recognition, yielding under her weight in a way that made her stomach lurch because it felt alive. Warm and giving, like standing on flesh.
The shape between the stones moved again. She couldn't see it, but she knew. Felt the geometry of the darkness rearrange. Gap six to seven. Closer to her. Circling.
And the thing behind her exhaled against her ear with breath that smelled of turned earth and something sweet underneath, the cloying sweetness of flowers left too long in stagnant water, the smell of offerings gone to rot.
Rory's fingers found her phone. She thumbed the torch on.
The light hit the nearest standing stone and she understood why it had seemed taller . It was taller. The oak pillars had grown, or she had sunk, or both. They towered above her now, twice her height, three times, their bark surfaces split and weeping dark sap that oozed down their sides in thick rivulets. The gaps between them had sealed. No gaps anymore. A wall of ancient wood, continuous and curved, a cage of living oak that she stood inside like a specimen in a jar.
Her torch swept across the sealed circle. No exit. The beam caught the sap mid-drip, amber and viscous, and inside it, suspended like insects in resin, she saw fingernails. Human ones. Dozens of them, curled and yellowed, embedded in the oozing surface of the wood.
The torchlight flickered .
She whipped the beam behind her.
Nothing. Empty ground. Crushed flowers, their dead petals brown and curled, forming a rough circle on the ground where something had been kneeling directly behind her, close enough to touch. The impression in the flattened stems showed the shape of it. Two narrow points where knees had pressed. Two longer marks where hands, or things shaped like hands, had rested on either side. And between the knee marks, a drag line. Something trailing. A jaw, perhaps, held open and heavy, scraping the earth as it moved.
The trail led to the sealed wall of oaks. And through it.
Her phone died. The torch cut out between one heartbeat and the next, and the pendant's crimson glow surged so fiercely it shone through her jacket, through her shirt, through the skin of her chest, and for one terrible moment she looked down and saw her own ribs lit from inside, red light threading between the bones like fingers pressing through a curtain.
The silence changed again. Pressurised now. The shape between the stones, inside the stones, part of the wood itself, had stopped circling.
Rory felt the ground tilt beneath her, the fleshy moss shifting, reorganising, and she understood with the calm clarity of someone who has passed through fear into the arithmetic beyond it that the grove wasn't a clearing.
It was a mouth.
And it was closing.