AI The note had said midnight, and Aurora's phone had died at half eleven.
She stood at the edge of Richmond Park with her torch in one hand and the crumpled page in the other, reading it for the dozenth time under the beam. *Come to the stones. Come alone. I can explain everything.* No signature. No address. Just handwriting she half recognised and couldn't place, the way a song sits on the tip of your tongue for days.
She should have turned back an hour ago. Instead she had walked past the locked gates, slipped through the gap in the railings that Eva had shown her years before, and followed the torchlight into the dark belly of the park. The pendant beneath her shirt had grown warm against her sternum somewhere around the second kilometre. It pulsed now in slow, steady beats, like something breathing in its sleep.
"Brilliant, Rory," she muttered. "Following anonymous notes into parks at night. Dad would be so proud."
Her voice came back wrong. Not an echo , exactly. Just flat, swallowed, as though the dark around her had no interest in returning anything.
She pushed on.
The grass gave way to wildflowers somewhere past the third rise. She noticed them because her torch caught the colour, whites and blues and a deep bruised purple, swaying gently though the air hung still as glass. Flowers. In autumn. In the dark. She crouched and touched one, and the petals were warm.
The standing stones rose ahead of her, seven ancient oaks petrified into grey columns, arranged in a rough circle around a clearing. Moss crawled up their flanks in patterns her eyes kept sliding off. Every time she tried to trace one, it seemed to rearrange itself behind her gaze.
She stepped between two of the stones.
The sound of London vanished.
One moment there had been the distant hum of the city, traffic, a siren somewhere, the low electronic murmur that never truly leaves your ears. The next, nothing. A silence so complete it had pressure to it, like being deep underwater. Her own heartbeat filled her skull.
And beneath it, something else. A rhythm. Faint, wet, patient.
Drip. Pause. Drip.
She swept the torch around the clearing. The beam caught the far stones, the flowers, a fallen branch. Nothing that could drip. The ground was dry as bone.
"Hello?" She hated herself for calling out. Every horror film she had ever half watched over Eva's shoulder told her what happened to people who announced themselves. But silence had a way of pressing worse. "Is someone there? You wrote the note."
The flowers swayed. Still no wind.
At the edge of her vision, off to the left, something crossed between two stones. She snapped the torch round and caught only darkness and bark. She held the beam steady. Held her breath with it. The stone stood quiet, grey, ancient. Nothing moved.
When she looked back to the centre of the clearing, the fallen branch was gone .
Aurora stood very still. She had seen that branch . She had noted it, registered it, the way you register furniture in a room. A pale crooked thing, maybe a metre long, lying across the flowers. Now there were only flowers, undisturbed, heads tilted towards her.
The pendant beat harder against her chest. Hot now. Uncomfortably hot.
"Right." She backed towards the gap she had come through. "Nope. Absolutely not. Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying."
She turned to leave and found herself facing the centre of the clearing.
She stopped. Looked down at her feet. She had turned, she was certain of it, a full about-face, and yet there were the flowers ahead of her, the far stones beyond, the same view as before. Her shoulders remembered the turn. The world disagreed.
"Okay," she said softly . "Okay, okay."
She walked anyway. Straight line, eyes fixed on the stones directly ahead, counting her steps. Ten. Twenty. The gap between the stones grew no closer. Thirty. Forty. The clearing stretched beneath her feet like dough under a rolling pin, and the stones watched her cross it with the patience of things that had all the time there was.
Something giggled.
It came from her left, high and bright, a child's laugh filtered through a long pipe of water. Aurora froze mid-stride. Her torch hand had begun to shake, and she watched the beam tremble across the flowers with a strange detachment, as though it belonged to someone braver.
"Who's there?"
The giggle again. Behind her now.
She spun. Nothing. The clearing, the stones, the flowers. But the flowers were closer than they had been. The ring of them had tightened. She was sure of it the way you are sure of things in dreams, without evidence and without doubt.
The dripping grew louder. Drip. Pause. Drip. It came from everywhere now, from the stones, from the earth, from the hollow of her own chest where the pendant hammered heat into her skin. She tore it out from under her shirt and held it up in the torchlight.
The crimson stone glowed from within. Not reflecting her beam. Producing its own light, a deep red pulse that matched the rhythm of the dripping, beat for beat, and with each pulse the darkness beyond the stones thickened, leaned in, pressed its face against the invisible wall of the clearing.
"Where did you come from," she whispered to it. "Who gave you to me?"
The pendant answered with a throb so hot she nearly dropped it, and in that flare of pain the clearing changed. For half a second, no more, the flowers were not flowers. They were faces. Hundreds of them, small and pale and upturned, eyes shut, mouths open in that patient, waiting way, and then the light steadied and they were petals again.
Aurora made a sound she had never made before, low and cracked, and she ran.
She ran for the nearest gap between the stones and the gap slid aside like a bead on a string, always two paces ahead, teasing her round the circle. Her breath tore in her throat. The dripping became a chorus, became a voice, became several voices, wet and layered, murmuring in a rhythm that was almost words, almost her name.
*Aurora. Aurora. We've been waiting, Aurora.*
She stopped dead. "I never told you my name."
The murmuring paused. The whole clearing seemed to inhale.
Then, from directly behind her, close enough that she felt breath stir the hair at her nape, damp and cold and smelling of riverbeds, a single voice spoke clearly.
"You did."
She could not move. Her legs had stopped belonging to her. The torch slipped from her fingers and rolled, and its beam swept the clearing in a slow arc as it settled, and in that moving light she saw them at last, figures standing between every pair of stones, tall and thin and gently swaying, their faces smooth as the stones themselves, featureless, patient, ancient.
The breath at her neck came again.
"The door is so thin here," the voice said, conversational, almost kind. "And you brought the key. That was thoughtful. We've knocked and knocked, you know. For years. And nobody ever brought the key."
The pendant seared against her skin. She looked down.
The crimson stone had begun to beat in earnest, fast and bright, and with every pulse the air in the centre of the clearing folded, creased, split like wet paper, and through the split she saw a depth that had no bottom, dark water rising up a stairwell of black stone, and something on those stairs below, climbing, patient, one slow step at a time.
"Now," the voice said warmly , "hold still."