Run: 2026-07-09-01KX416GQ0KRW2QHZZFAN7JKNM

Aurora left the delivery scooter beside the service gate and killed the engine. Richmond Park swallowed the sound at once. London still glimmered beyond the trees, a low orange bruise on the horizon, but the park held none of it. No traffic hiss. No sirens. No distant laughter from a pub garden. The night pressed against the iron gate and the narrow strip of tarmac beneath her boots. She checked the screen of her phone. No signal. “Of course.” The message still sat open in the restaurant’s group chat, though the sender had no name. Just an unknown number and a photograph of a white takeaway box resting on a mossy stone. DELIVER TO THE GROVE. MIDNIGHT. NO SUBSTITUTIONS. Yu-Fei had been downstairs counting receipts when Rory showed him. “Don’t go.” “It’s a paid order.” “It’s an impossible order.” He had taken the phone from her hand, his lined face drawn tight. “We do not deliver to Richmond Park at midnight.” “It’s two cartons of noodles and a box of dumplings, not a blood oath.” His eyes had flicked to the pendant at her throat. “You had that when the order came through?” “Why?” “Because I asked.” She had waited for the lecture. Yu-Fei favoured them when he was worried: practical, circular talks that always ended with him pushing extra food into her hands. Instead, he had packed the order himself. Salt-and-pepper tofu. Beef ho fun. Prawn dumplings. No chilli oil. Then he had shoved a paper bag across the counter. “You leave it at the gate. You do not walk into the trees.” “There’s no gate in the photo.” “There is always a gate.” Now Rory stood before one. The gate had not appeared on any map. It sat between two trunks swollen with age, wrought iron black beneath a coat of lichen. Its bars twisted into the shape of branches. The lock hung open. Beyond it, a path ran into darkness. She lifted the insulated delivery bag from the scooter’s footwell. The food smelled warm and ordinary, rich with sesame oil and fried garlic. It made the woods beyond the gate seem worse. Her Heartstone pendant rested under her jumper, hot against her sternum. Rory pulled it free. The crimson stone gave off a muted glow, no brighter than a coal buried in ash. It pulsed against her fingers. Once. Twice. Then faster. “You couldn’t have done that at the restaurant?” The gate creaked open. Rory froze. The wind had not touched the trees. Their leaves hung black and motionless overhead. The gate continued its slow swing until it struck one of the stone posts with a soft, final knock. A path waited beyond it. She could leave the bag by the entrance. Yu-Fei had told her to. She could take the scooter back, call him from somewhere with reception, and tell him the customer had failed to collect. Then something moved in the dark behind the gate. Not a person. It had been too low and too quick. Rory set the delivery bag on the ground. “Hello?” Her voice travelled down the path and vanished. A child laughed. The sound came from somewhere ahead, light and sharp, followed by the scrape of shoes over gravel. Rory bent, picked up the bag again, and stepped through the gate. It shut behind her. She spun round. The iron bars stood in place, closed tight. The latch had dropped. Rory grabbed it. Cold metal bit into her palm. The gate would not move. “Very funny.” Her breath clouded in front of her. Outside the gate, the park lay under a softer darkness, silvered by a moon she could not see from where she stood. The air on this side smelled of wet soil, crushed leaves, and something sweet enough to turn her stomach. She looked down at the path. It had changed. The strip of gravel had narrowed, curling between thick roots. Wildflowers crowded its edges. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Poppies. They grew in the dead of night, in late autumn, their petals open wide beneath the black branches. The pendant burned against her skin. Rory slipped the chain back under her jumper and started walking. “You wanted delivery,” she called. “I’m delivering.” The path gave nothing back. Her boots sank into moss. She kept one hand in her jacket pocket around her phone and the other hooked through the delivery bag’s handles. Her torch app threw a weak beam over the ground. The light reached only a few feet ahead before the dark swallowed it. A shape passed between the trees to her left. Rory stopped. The torch beam shook across trunks striped with pale fungus. “Park staff?” No answer. She listened. A wet clicking came from the undergrowth. Slow at first. Then a second clicking answered from farther away. Click. Click-click. Click. Rory had heard deer in the park before. She knew the crack of branches under hooves, the snort and stamp of startled animals. This sounded like someone tapping teeth together. She moved again. The flowers brushed her jeans. Their stems bent towards her boots, then lifted after she passed. Her phone buzzed. Rory snatched it from her pocket. A call filled the screen. MUM. For one clean second, relief cut through her. She answered. “Mum?” Static crackled against her ear. Then Jennifer Carter’s voice came through, thin and distant. “Rory, don’t take the path by the water.” Rory stopped breathing. “Mum?” The call ended. The screen went black. She looked down at it. No missed call. No recent call. Nothing except the emergency icon and a battery symbol in red. Her mother had not called her Rory in years. Not since Cardiff. Not since before Evan had started smashing plates against the kitchen wall and apologising with flowers the next morning. A branch snapped behind her. Rory wheeled round, phone torch raised. The path behind her had gone. There were only trees. Not a bend. Not a rise in the ground. The path had ended at a wall of oaks, their roots tangled together like knotted fingers. Her mouth dried. “No.” She walked back three steps. The moss deepened beneath her shoes. Her light caught a stone standing upright between the trees, taller than she was, its surface carved with grooves worn smooth by rain. Another stood beside it. Then another. They formed a ring. The old standing stones marked the Grove’s boundary. She had heard that much from Silas in one of his drunker moods. A pocket of ground in Richmond Park where time slipped loose and things from the other side walked through when the world’s seams thinned. She had laughed at him. Silas had stared into his whisky and said, “You laugh because you still think places need your permission to be real.” Rory turned back to the path ahead. The delivery bag felt heavier. A voice spoke from the dark. “You are late.” She faced it. Nothing stood in the path. “I got the order twelve minutes ago.” “You are late.” The voice came from close behind her this time, low and dry. It sounded like leaves rubbed between hands. Rory did not turn. “I’m here now. Where do you want the food?” A breath touched the back of her neck. It carried the smell of pond water left too long in a bucket. “Set it down.” She crouched, her muscles locked tight, and placed the delivery bag on the moss. “Receipt’s inside.” “You brought the red stone.” Rory’s fingers went to the pendant. “You ordered dinner. That’s what I brought.” The unseen thing made a sound that might have been amusement. It came in short bursts, too many voices layered over one another. “You do not know what you carry.” “That puts me in excellent company.” The clicking started again. Not from the trees now. From beneath the bag. Rory’s gaze dropped. The paper carton holding the dumplings twitched. Once. The bag handles quivered. She backed away. “Customer gets their order. I go home.” “You cannot go home.” The food bag tore open. Rory flinched. The tofu carton slid onto the moss, followed by the noodles, then the dumplings. Their lids lifted one by one. Steam spilled out, thick and pale in the night. No food sat inside. Each container held wet black soil. Something shifted beneath it. A pale finger pushed through the noodles carton. Rory stumbled back. Her heel caught a root. She hit the ground hard enough to jar her teeth. Her phone flew from her hand and rolled into the flowers, its torch beam swinging wildly across the grove. For a moment, the light caught a face. It hung upside down from a branch above the path. The skin had the colour of candle wax. Its eyes were open and glassy, each pupil huge and black. A mouth stretched across its face in a smile that reached almost to its ears. Then the beam moved. Darkness took it. Rory crawled towards her phone. The soil in the cartons whispered. She could not make out words. It sounded like several people speaking through walls. Her fingers closed around the phone. She got to her feet and ran. Branches struck her cheeks. The path buckled beneath her, turning from gravel to soft earth to a carpet of flowers that crushed without breaking. She kept the torch aimed ahead, breathing through her mouth, the pendant hammering heat into her chest. The grove went on too long. She passed the same foxglove three times. Its purple bell had a tear down one petal. The fourth time, it stood on the opposite side of the path. Rory stopped. Her lungs scraped. Behind her, something walked through the flowers. No footfalls. Just stems bending in sequence. She forced herself not to look. “Not alone,” she whispered. The pendant’s crimson glow leaked through her jumper. The flowers nearest her feet folded shut. A voice rose from the trees, soft as a parent waking a child. “Aurora.” Every muscle in her body tightened. No one here should have known her full name. The voice came again. “Aurora Carter.” She turned. A woman stood between the standing stones. At first Rory saw only a pale dress and bare feet sunk into the moss. Then the phone light climbed higher. The woman wore Aurora’s face. Not exactly. The black hair hung longer, trailing over a dress stained dark at the hem. The bright blue eyes reflected no light. The crescent scar on her left wrist sat in the same place as Rory’s, but it had split open into a thin red mouth. The woman smiled. “You left something at the gate.” Rory looked down. The Heartstone pendant was gone. Its chain lay loose around her neck. The woman held the crimson stone in one pale hand. Rory reached for it. The woman closed her fingers around the pendant. The trees clicked their teeth.