AI The wrought-iron gates of Richmond Park lay half a mile behind. Rory adjusted the strap of her satchel, her boots sinking into the saturated turf. Frost clung to the dead bracken of the heath, but the air ahead shivered with an unnatural, heavy warmth .
She reached the perimeter.
Ancient oak standing stones, grey and split by centuries of lightning, rose from the mist like a circle of decaying teeth. Beyond them, the darkness deepened into an impossible velvet black. The ambient rumble of London—the distant whisper of the A3, the drone of late-night flights into Heathrow—died instantly. It was as if someone had laid a giant palm over the earth, smothering every vibration .
Rory gripped the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit she hadn't broken since childhood. Beneath her coat, the Heartstone Pendant throbbed . The thumbnail-sized crimson gem beat against her sternum, heat radiating through her thin cotton shirt. She fished it out, letting the silver chain swing. In the gloom , the stone pulsed with a low, internal light, casting bloody ripples across the grass.
"Silas?"
Her voice sounded flat, stripped of echo . The dense air swallowed the syllables before they could travel five paces.
No one answered.
She stepped past the first oak monolith.
The temperature jumped ten degrees. The crunch of frozen grass gave way to the soft, spongy yield of damp peat. Beneath her boots, pale wildflowers bloomed in the dark—an impossible carpet of white wood anemones and bluebells, thriving without a sun. They smelled sweet, cloying, like rotting peaches left too long in a sealed drawer.
Rory took a slow, deliberate breath. She had to locate the source of the heat. The pendant's pulse grew sharper, a rhythmic sting against her bare skin.
A snap broke the quiet.
She froze. Her eyes scanned the dark. The sound had come from her left, where a thicket of gnarled hazel-wood bent low over a trickling stream. The water ran black and silent, reflecting none of the starlight.
"Who's there?"
She dropped her hand to her pocket, fingers closing around her keys. She slid the brass spikes between her knuckles.
The shadow between two hazel trunks shifted. It didn't step forward; it merely elongated, stretching upward until it touched the canopy. A trick of the low-frequency light from her pendant. Rory forced herself to believe that. She took three steps forward, her eyes locked on the spot.
The air grew thicker. A wet, rhythmic clicking sound started up behind her.
*Clack. Clack. Clack.*
Like fingernails tapping against dry bone.
She spun around, heels digging into the peat. The standing stones looked further away now, their massive shapes blurred by a sudden, rising ground fog. The wildflowers began to bow their heads, their petals curling shut as if a heavy footstep were pressing them down one by one, moving in a direct line toward her.
Yet the grass remained empty.
"I don't have time for games," Rory spoke to the dark, her voice tighter this time, the cool-headed pragmatism she prided herself on fraying around the edges. "Show yourself."
Nothing. The silence returned, heavier than before. It pressed against her eardrums like deep water.
The pendant burnt her skin. She winced, dropping the stone. It swung on its silver link, casting frantic red beams across the ancient bark of the oaks. The red light caught something.
A pale face, suspended ten feet in the air, wedged in the fork of a massive branch.
Rory’s breath hitched. She didn't scream. She stared.
The face was wide, features dry and stretched, lacking any eyes—only deep, moss-lined hollows where eyelids should have been. It had no neck. It seemed to grow directly out of the wood, its bark-like skin peeling at the cheeks.
As she watched, the mouth split open.
It didn't speak with a voice. It leaked a sound—a high, vibrating hum, like a swarm of wasps trapped inside a hollow wall.
Rory stepped backward. Her heel caught on a thick root, and she stumbled, her palms slapping into the wet earth. The scent of ozone and copper flooded her nose. When she looked up, the face in the tree was gone .
The humming hadn't stopped. It had multiplied.
It came from the left. From the right. From the roots beneath her fingers. The soil vibrated , sending tiny shivers up her arms.
"Rory..."
A whisper . This time, it was a voice. A familiar one.
Rory scrambled to her feet, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She wiped her muddy hands on her trousers.
"Eva?"
The voice had sounded exactly like her friend, but the cadence was wrong. The vowels were too long, drawn out into a mockery of human speech.
"Rory... come back... the tea is... cold..."
The voice drifted from a dense patch of ferns near the center of the grove. The ferns rustled, though there was no breeze. The air remained dead, suffocatingly warm.
Rory took a step backward, toward the boundary stones. The pendant was now roaring hot, the silver chain searing her collarbone. She grabbed the metal with her sleeve-covered hand, trying to pull it away from her skin, but the heat penetrated the fabric.
A silhouette emerged from the ferns.
It was tall, impossibly thin, its limbs moving with the stuttering, liquid grace of an insect. It wore the shape of a person, but the proportions were warped. The arms hung past its knees, the fingers scraping the tops of the wildflowers. It moved without making a sound on the peat, gliding through the white blossoms.
"Stay back."
She pointed the brass keys at the shape. Her hand shook, just a fraction.
The entity stopped. It tilted its head, a sharp, jerky movement that ended with its neck bent at an impossible ninety-degree angle. The face was a blank oval of grey skin, save for a single, horizontal slit where a mouth should be.
It mimicked her voice.
"Stay back... stay back..."
The words tumbled out, layered over one another like an untuned radio. The pitch rose, mimicking her childhood Cardiff accent, then dropped into the deep, gravelly tone of Silas, then back to Eva's panicked gasps.
The standing stones behind Rory seemed to recede further. The gap between them narrowed, the ancient oaks sliding together like teeth closing a mouth. The path she had taken into the grove was disappearing .
She turned and ran.
Her boots tore through the wildflowers. The cloying scent of decay grew overpowering, clawing at her throat, making her gag. The ground grew soft, mud suctioning her feet, trying to drag her down with every stride.
Behind her, the clicking resumed. It wasn't one set of fingernails now. It was dozens.
*Clack-clack-clack-clack.*
They paced her on either side, invisible in the deep shadows of the undergrowth. Something pale and multi-jointed darted between two tree trunks to her right, gone before her eyes could focus on it.
"Rory..." the choir of voices called from the dark, closer now, right at her shoulder. "Rory..."
She reached the perimeter. The gap between the two central oak stones was barely two feet wide.
She jammed herself into the crevice. The petrified wood was cold, a stark contrast to the stifling heat of the grove. It scraped against her shoulder blades, the rough bark tearing at her coat.
Something tapped her ankle.
A cold, damp grip, like wet leather, tightened around her boot.
She cried out, kicking backward with her free leg. Her heel struck something dense and yielding. The grip loosened just enough. She lunged forward, throwing her weight through the narrow gap.
She tumbled out onto the frozen heath of Richmond Park.
The sudden cold slapped her face. She lay panting on the frosty turf, her breath blooming in the crisp, winter air. Above her, the orange glare of London’s light pollution stained the clouds. The distant, comforting rumble of a night bus echoed from the lane.
She rolled over, looking back at the grove.
The standing stones stood silent and motionless under the starlight. There was no fog. No hum. No tall, pale shapes. Just the dark, empty line of ancient trees.
The Heartstone Pendant against her chest went cold, its crimson glow fading back into a dull, dormant red.
She pushed herself up, her hands trembling as she brushed the dead grass from her knees, her eyes never leaving the dark space between the stones. This place wasn't finished with her. She knew it. She could still feel the warmth of the grove clinging to her coat like grease. Keep going, she told herself. Walk. Don't look back.
A single white wildflower lay on the frozen ground just outside the stone boundary, its petals slowly blackening in the cold.