AI The pendant warmed against my sternum, and I stopped walking.
Not the pleasant warmth of a mug held in cold hands. This was blood heat. Skin heat. Like something under my jumper had a pulse of its own and had just decided to use it.
"Right," I said. "Lovely."
Richmond Park at two in the morning does not answer back. I'd come over the wall near Ham Gate with a torch I hadn't switched on, a flask of Yu-Fei's jasmine tea, and directions written on the back of a delivery receipt in handwriting that wasn't mine. Nine hundred acres of grass and bracken and deer, and somewhere in it, a ring of oak stones that shouldn't exist on any Ordnance Survey map ever printed.
Eva had gone in three nights ago. Eva had not come out.
So. Splinters in my palms, mud to my ankles, and a stone the size of my thumbnail beating like a second heart. I kept walking.
The bracken thinned. Ahead, the ground rose into a low swell crowned with oaks, and between the oaks stood the stones, black against grey, tall as a man and leaning inward like people sharing a secret. Seven of them. I counted from the bottom of the slope because counting is what I do when my hands want to shake. Seven stones, one gap where an eighth should sit, and past that gap , colour.
That was the first wrong thing.
Wildflowers. In November. Cowslip and ragged robin and something blue I had no name for, all of it open and nodding as though it were the middle of May and somebody had told it good news. The grass inside the ring came up to my knees and it was green, properly green, the green of a football pitch in a photograph.
The second wrong thing took longer to notice, because absence always does.
No planes. London wears a permanent ceiling of aircraft, that low grinding hush you stop hearing by the age of six. Under it, the M3 hum. Above it, gulls. I stood at the boundary of Isolde's grove and heard none of that. No wind in the oaks, though I could see the high branches moving. No owls. No mice in the leaf litter.
I heard my own blood, and the flowers, and the flowers were making the softest sound, like fingers rubbing silk .
"Isolde," I said.
The word went out of my mouth and did not come back. No echo , no fade. It simply stopped, three feet away, as if it had walked into a wall.
I stepped between the stones.
Warm air met my face. Not summer warm. Breath warm, close warm, the warmth of a room somebody had left recently. The temperature drop should have gone the other way and my body knew it, because every hair on my arms stood up in protest.
The deer were watching me.
They stood outside the ring, six or seven of them, does and one stag, and they had arranged themselves in a rough arc facing the stones. Deer in the park spook at a bicycle bell. These didn't move. Their ears didn't flick. Their eyes caught what little light there was and gave it back flat, like wet coins, and not one of them was chewing.
"You lot are supposed to run," I said.
The stag lowered its head. Not a charge. A bow.
Something in my chest made a noise it had never made before.
I turned my back on them, which took more than I'd like to admit, and walked into the middle of the grove, and there I found the third wrong thing, and the third one was mine.
Footprints in the wet grass.
Two lines of them, crossing the ring, deep and fresh, the grass still springing back. Trainers. Size five. The left one dragged slightly at the heel, because I'd twisted that ankle at seventeen on a hockey pitch and it has never quite forgiven me.
They came from the stone gap, exactly where I had come from. They went out the far side, into the dark under the oaks.
I looked behind me. My own prints ended at my heels, ordinary and sensible.
"No," I said, out loud, because saying it made it a statement rather than a plea. "No, I've been here four minutes."
The flowers rubbed their silk together.
I crouched. Pressed two fingers into the nearest print. Cold water welled up into it, and under the water, at the bottom, a black hair. Straight. Shoulder length. I pulled my hood forward and kept my hand there a moment, feeling the mud accept me, feeling the pendant burn against my breastbone.
Then I stood, and there were eight stones.
I did not scream. I want that noted. What I did was breathe out through my nose, slowly , and count again, twice, left to right and right to left, and both times I got eight, and the new one filled the gap I had walked through, and it was leaning inward with all the others, sharing the secret.
"That's fine," I told it . "That's absolutely fine. There's always another way out."
Somewhere behind me, out past the oaks, a child laughed.
It was a good laugh. That's the thing nobody warns you about. Not a horror film cackle, nothing wet or clever. A little girl's laugh, delighted, breathless, the laugh you make when someone chases you round a garden and pretends they can't catch you. It came from about thirty feet away, and it stopped as though a hand had closed over it.
I found I had drawn the torch and not switched it on. My thumb sat on the button and would not press.
Because if I pressed it, I would see.
"Eva?" My voice came out wrong. Small. Cardiff crept back into it, the way it does when I'm five years old and frightened. "Eva, if that's you being funny, I will end you."
The laugh came again. Closer. Fifteen feet. To my left this time, though nothing had crossed the open grass, and the grass was knee high and would have shown it.
Movement, at the edge of my eye. I turned my head and it went where my eye went, always sliding to the margin, a pale shape between two trunks, the height of a person standing very still and very badly. When I looked directly, oak bark. When I looked away, shoulders.
The tea flask had gone slippery in my hand. I set it down in the grass, slowly , keeping both hands free, and as I bent I heard the second breathing.
It matched mine. That was the obscenity of it. In, hold, out, at my own rate and my own depth, close enough that I should have felt it on the back of my neck, and when I held my breath to test it, it held too. We stood there, the two of us, not breathing, for four seconds.
Then it breathed out, and it did not need to any more, and it laughed with a little girl's mouth right behind my ear.
I ran.
I made nine strides towards the stones before the grass took hold of my ankle, and it was not grass, and the pendant flared white-hot through my jumper as the ground under the wildflowers came open like a mouth.