Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WYX6B03PD9CZQDT9YD6XJ

The last dog walker had disappeared over Isabella Plantation's ridge twenty minutes ago, and the park had folded into itself the way only London green spaces could — swallowing every trace of the city beyond the tree line until the world shrank to grass and shadow and the ancient oaks standing black against a moonless sky. Rory killed the torch on her phone. Waited for her eyes to adjust. Richmond Park after hours was technically trespassing, though she doubted the Royal Parks Police would materialise at half eleven on a Tuesday in November. The real concern was the deer. Red stags in rut season could gut a person, and she'd read enough local news to take that seriously. She listened. Wind through bare branches. The distant hum of the A307, thin as a wire. Nothing with hooves. She walked. The Heartstone pendant sat against her sternum beneath two layers of clothing, its usual faint warmth so constant she'd stopped noticing weeks ago. But as she picked her way through the gap between two fallen birches and the ground softened underfoot, the warmth sharpened. Not painful. Specific. Like a fingertip pressing into the notch of her collarbone. This was the right direction. Eva had texted her coordinates earlier that evening — no context, no explanation, just a dropped pin somewhere in the southwest corner of the park and a single message that read: *The grove. Midnight. Come alone.* Which was dramatic even for Eva, but Rory had learned to swallow her skepticism about three supernatural encounters ago. She'd texted back twice. Called once. Eva's phone went straight to voicemail, that automated voice that meant the device was dead or deliberately shut off. So here she was. The oaks appeared gradually, as if they'd been walking toward her while she wasn't looking. Old ones. Massive. Their trunks had a quality she hadn't expected from the descriptions she'd read — they didn't look like trees so much as columns of compressed darkness, their bark so deeply furrowed it seemed to breathe. She counted them as she passed between the first pair. One. Two. Another pair, narrower, and then a third, and the air changed. Temperature dropped. Not dramatically, not the theatrical cold snap of a ghost story, but a few degrees. Enough that her next exhale came out visible, a thin wisp she hadn't produced thirty seconds ago. The Heartstone pulsed. Rory stopped walking. The grove opened before her — a rough circle of cleared ground maybe forty feet across, ringed by those impossible oaks. Wildflowers grew here despite the season, pale things she couldn't name in the dark, their petals catching some ambient light that had no obvious source. No moon tonight. She'd checked. Overcast, new moon, the kind of sky that should have been a uniform black. But the flowers glowed faintly, and the ground between them held a luminous quality, as though frost had fallen in patterns just complex enough to suggest intention. "Eva?" Her voice didn't carry. That was the first wrong thing. Not an echo, not even the flat deadness of an enclosed space — her voice simply stopped, as if the air three feet from her mouth had a different density. A wall she couldn't see. She said it again. Louder. Same result. The word left her lips and went nowhere. The pendant's warmth spiked, then settled. Rory pressed her palm flat against it through her jacket and felt it thrum against her hand like a second heartbeat, faster than her own. She stepped into the grove. The flowers moved. Not from wind — there was no wind now, she realised. The branches above had gone still. Every branch. The oaks that had seemed to sway minutes earlier stood rigid, their canopy a lattice of black capillaries frozen against the grey nothing of the sky. But the flowers turned. Slowly. Dozens of pale heads rotating on their stems to face her, the way sunflowers track the sun except there was no sun and they were tracking her as she walked and each small white face turned with a precision that made her stomach clench. Rory stopped in the centre of the grove. Looked down. Looked around. No Eva. No sign anyone had been here — no footprints in the soft earth, no crushed flowers, no rubbish, nothing. Just the ring of oak and the ring of flowers and the silence that wasn't silence because now she could hear something. Low. Beneath the threshold of proper hearing. A vibration in her molars, in the small bones of her inner ear, the kind of sound that didn't travel through air but through ground, up through the soles of her boots and into the architecture of her skeleton. She pulled out her phone. No signal. Expected that much. But the clock read 23:47, which meant she'd been walking for — she did the maths — far longer than the distance warranted. She'd entered the park at 23:20. The coordinates were a ten-minute walk from the Sheen Gate. Not twenty-seven. The clock ticked to 23:48. Then back to 23:47. She watched it. 23:47. 23:47. 23:47. The colon between the numbers blinked its steady cadence, seconds passing, the minute refusing to advance. Rory pocketed the phone and turned slowly, scanning the perimeter. The oaks stood like sentinels, and between them the darkness had thickened into something almost physical. She could see the flowers, could see the ground, could see the bark of the nearest trunks. Beyond that, nothing. The park had been swallowed. London had been swallowed. Everything beyond the ring of trees had become a blackness so total it seemed painted on, a matte void that started precisely where the grove ended. "Okay," she whispered. A sound answered her. Not words. Not an echo. A creak — deep, structural, the sound a ship's hull makes under pressure. It came from the oak directly behind her. She turned. The trunk was wider than she remembered. Much wider. Its bark rippled, just once, the furrows deepening and resettling like the flex of a knuckle. The creak came again, from a different tree. Then another. Then all of them simultaneously, a chorus of deep wooden groans that rose and fell in a rhythm that sounded deliberate. Rhythmic. Communicative. Rory backed toward the centre of the grove. Her heel caught a root that hadn't been there before. She stumbled, caught herself, looked down. Roots had broken the surface of the clearing — pale tendrils the width of fingers, lacing across the ground in patterns that mirrored the frost she'd noticed earlier. They grew as she watched. Not fast. But perceptibly. Inching across the dark soil like slow worms, splitting and branching, weaving between the flower stems without disturbing them. The flowers still faced her. Every one. She pulled the pendant out from under her jacket. The crimson gemstone cast its own light now, a deep red glow that turned her fingers the colour of raw meat. It was hot. Not warm. Hot. The silver chain stung the back of her neck. She held the stone between thumb and forefinger and felt it vibrate — a frantic, arrhythmic pulse, nothing like its usual gentle warmth near Hel portals. This was alarm. This was the stone equivalent of a scream. "I hear you," she told it. Ridiculous. Talking to jewellery. But the alternative was silence, and the silence here had weight. It pressed against her eardrums. Movement at the edge of the grove. Her head snapped left. Between the two largest oaks, where the darkness hung like a curtain, something pale shifted. Not a deer. Not a person. A shape that suggested height — seven feet, eight — narrow, the proportions wrong in a way she couldn't immediately articulate. It stood just inside the boundary of the black, visible only as an absence of absence, a slightly lighter void against the total dark. It didn't move. Rory didn't breathe. Seconds passed. Her lungs burned. She inhaled, a shallow sip of air that tasted like iron and sap, and in the space between that breath and the next, the shape was gone. She turned. Found it again — different gap between different trees, closer. Same height. Same wrongness. Standing with its arms at its sides except the arms were too long, the elbows too low, the hands dangling at a height that suggested they would brush the ground if it walked. She could see no face. The head was a smooth oval of that pale non-colour, featureless, angled toward her the way the flowers angled toward her. Watching. Without eyes, watching. The roots beneath her feet pulsed. A single contraction, like a heartbeat transmitted through the earth. The flowers bobbed on their stems. Rory stepped backward. The pendant burned against her fingers. She dropped it and it swung on its chain, casting that red glow in a slow pendulum arc across the ground, and everywhere the light touched, the roots recoiled. Drew back. Just slightly. Just enough to notice. She grabbed the pendant again. Held it out like a lantern. The figure between the trees did not recoil. It tilted its head — a slow, mechanical inclination, as though it had seen something do this gesture once and was reproducing it from imperfect memory. Then it took a step into the grove. No sound. No footfall. It simply occupied space one foot closer than before, the pale contour of its form gaining no further detail in the flower-light. It had no features to resolve. The smoothness of its face was not a trick of darkness. It was its face. An expanse of skin — if it was skin — unbroken by any opening, any ridge, any mark. A second step. The roots near it surged upward, clustering around where it stood, reaching for it with blind vegetable yearning. Rory's phone buzzed in her pocket. She almost screamed. Bit the sound back, tasted copper. She fumbled it free with her left hand, the right still holding the Heartstone forward. The screen showed 23:47. Still 23:47. But a notification sat below the frozen clock. One new message. From Eva. *Don't look at its hands.* Rory's gaze had already started to drift downward before the meaning of the words registered, and she wrenched her eyes to the canopy above, to the locked branches, to the grey nothing of the sky. Her breath came fast and shallow. The sound of the roots growing filled the silence now — a wet, fibrous crackling, soil shifting, wildflowers bobbing as their stems were jostled by the spreading network below. The figure took a third step. She felt it more than saw it — a displacement of air, a change in the pressure against her skin, as if the grove had compressed by a fraction. She held the Heartstone higher. Its light spilled across the clearing in a wash of deep red. The figure stopped. From somewhere beyond the trees — far away: kilometres, maybe; or inches, maybe — came a sound she recognised. Church bells. The heavy iron clang of midnight ringing, distorted by distance or by whatever membrane separated this place from the London she knew. One toll. Two. She counted, and as she counted, the figure remained frozen in the red light, its head still tilted, its long arms hanging, the roots at its feet climbing its legs with silent devotion. Seven. Eight. Nine. The pendant's heat was unbearable. Her palm blistered. She held on. Ten. Eleven. The shape began to thin. To lose coherence. Its edges softened, bled into the dark behind it, as though something was erasing it stroke by stroke from the bottom up. The roots clutched at nothing. The flowers turned away one by one, returning to their neutral, skyward posture, and the sound beneath the ground — that deep subterranean vibration — faded to a murmur, then to memory. Twelve. The grove was empty. The darkness beyond the oaks had thinned to ordinary nighttime shadow, and through the gaps between the trunks she could see the dim orange stain of London's light pollution smeared across low clouds. Wind returned. Her hair moved. An oak branch creaked the way oak branches creak. Rory opened her hand. The pendant's glow had dimmed to its usual faint ember. A raw, wet blister covered the centre of her palm, perfect and circular, the size of a thumbnail. The shape of the Heartstone pressed into her skin like a brand. Her phone read 00:01. Time moved again. She looked at Eva's message. Read it once more. Then scrolled up and found nothing — no earlier texts, no coordinates, no dropped pin. The entire conversation history was blank except for those five words, and when she tapped the message to reply, the thread vanished. Eva's contact remained, but the message was gone, as if it had only ever existed long enough to be read. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist itched. An old, childhood ache, suddenly vivid, suddenly present, as though something in the grove had reached through her years and touched it. Rory walked. Fast. Between the oaks, through the gap in the fallen birches, across the open grassland toward Sheen Gate with her burned hand curled against her chest and the pendant swinging cold and small and ordinary against her sternum. She did not run. Running felt like it would constitute an admission of something she was not ready to admit. Behind her, the wildflowers in the grove bloomed on in their impossible season, their pale faces turned now toward the space the figure had occupied. Waiting, patient, for what might come next.