AI The pendant had been warm for most of the walk.
Rory noticed it at Richmond Gate, a low steady heat against her sternum that had nothing to do with the cold on the outside of her coat. She’d stopped under the lamp there and fished it out by the chain, the deep crimson stone turning in her fingers, and it had pulsed once under her thumb, slow and deliberate, like something turning over in its sleep. It had been six weeks since she’d felt it do anything but lie against her skin like a coin. Six weeks of carrying it up and down the Holloway Road, of taking it off before every shift at the Golden Empress and putting it back on after, of turning it over on delivery runs and getting nothing back.
She’d been following it since the beginning. It was the only thing she’d been given without a price attached, and it only did one thing. It warmed near a Hel portal. That was the rule. It had warmed, faintly, in a car park in Barnet. It had gone briefly, startlingly hot outside a dry cleaner’s in Hackney, which had turned out to be nothing at all, or nothing she could find. Tonight it had gone from a flicker to a held note, steady and insistent, and when she’d walked west it had cooled, and when she’d walked south it had cooled, and when she’d turned toward Richmond it had warmed again, and kept warming, and now every step she took into the park kept it at the same heat, neither brighter nor dimmer, as if she were walking the long spoke of a wheel toward a hub.
The gates had closed at dusk. She climbed the fence where the deer had worn the wire down and dropped into the long grass on the inside with a softness that surprised her, and then she stood a moment and listened.
That was the first thing.
There were no owls. There were always owls. There was also no deer, and no foxes, and none of the small scuffling arguments the bracken carried on after dark. The park she knew at night was a racket. This was a held breath with trees standing in it. Even her own footsteps came back too clean, not the flat slap of trainers on wet grass but something muffled, as though the ground were a little further away than it looked.
She went on.
The path to the clearing was where she remembered it — she’d been here once, in the summer, with Eva, who had known about it the way Eva knew about every door in the city that didn’t open onto anything. They’d eaten sandwiches on the grass and laughed at nothing. Daylight had made it a nice place. A ring of ancient oaks that had grown up straight and fluted, no branches low down, like a set of fluted columns somebody had planted a thousand years ago and forgotten to build the rest of the building around, and inside them a clearing, and inside the clearing wildflowers.
The wildflowers were still there. That was the second thing.
It was the second week of February. There was a skim of old frost in the hollows of the path. But the clearing was full of them — small white things on thin stalks, blooming in the dark, thousands of them, pale as bone in the light off her phone screen. She crouched and put her fingers among them and they were soft, and alive, and they didn’t move in the air.
There wasn’t any air. No wind in a place that had been full of wind ten steps back on the path.
Rory stood up and checked her phone. 11:41. She turned the screen off and stood in the dark and counted, for no good reason, the trunks of the oaks. Twelve. She was almost certain of it. She turned a full slow circle, because she was the kind of person who checked things, and there were thirteen.
She didn’t move. She counted them again, out loud, with her finger, the way she’d have done on a page.
Twelve.
The thirteenth was behind her. She knew it was behind her the way you know a person has come into a room without hearing the door. When she turned, it was where it hadn’t been — thicker than the others, so wide she couldn’t have got her arms around it, and it hadn’t grown there in the last ten seconds, because there was moss on it. Moss on one side only, furred and grey, and the way the moss sat on it made a shape a person could have found a face in, if a person wanted to.
Rory did not want to.
The pendant was burning against her chest. Not warm now. Hot, and pulsing, quick and shallow, like the heartbeat of something small and terrified that she was holding , and it had never once done that, not in six weeks, and she understood all at once that it had never been a compass.
It was a bell.
Something walked behind her.
It was very light, that walk. Bare feet on loam, a half-pace behind hers, and she had stopped, and it went on for one more step before it understood, and then it stopped. The silence came back around them both like water closing.
Rory stood in the ring of the standing oaks with the wildflowers nodding at nothing and made herself breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth and did not turn around. She had read things, and Eva had told her things, and the things agreed on one point, which was that you did not answer. You did not turn around. You did not say thank you, and you did not say sorry, and you never once said a name.
The footsteps began again, in front of her now.
She could see the flowers move.
Something walked through the clearing toward her through the middle of the flowers, and the flowers bowed out of its way without being touched, and it was walking slowly , as slowly as she was not walking , and at the edge of her vision there was a thin dark shape with a pale oval above it, and black hair falling straight to a shoulder, and one hand held out, palm up, the way you hold a hand out for a dog. There was a small crescent scar just above the wrist, pale and clean against the skin.
It was on the wrong arm.
Rory’s own left wrist, in the cold, under her sleeve, itched where hers sat.
“Rory,” said the thing, in her voice.
It said it exactly the way she said it. Not the way her mother said it, or Eva, or Yu-Fei barking it down the kitchen pass. Her own voice, out of her own mouth, the flat London vowel she’d spent years sanding the Cardiff off. It said it with the little downward turn she used in the doorway of the flat above Silas’ when she was tired and answering the phone anyway.
“Rory.”
She didn’t answer. Her jaw hurt. She hadn’t noticed she’d closed it.
It took another step, and its shadow moved the wrong way — toward her, against the pale light, rather than away — and where it stepped there were still flowers, and they were still white, and they had not been stepped on.
There was one thing Rory could do, and it was the thing she’d done her whole life, which was find the door. She turned, very slowly , keeping her eyes down, and the gap between the twelfth oak and the eleventh was where it should have been, and it was narrow, and it was dark, and the real night she knew was somewhere on the other side of it, the one with owls in it. She walked backwards through the gap, facing the clearing, and the thing stood still in the middle of the flowers with its hand out and did not follow her to the boundary. It stopped at the ring. It stayed where a thing gets to stay, which is inside.
She let the trunks close behind her, and then she walked, and she did not run until she was out of sight, and then she ran, badly, over the frosted roots, until the path was under her and the wind came back like a hand on her face and somewhere far over toward Roehampton an owl said the one long syllable it had to say.
She got over the fence with her coat torn at the shoulder and her hands black to the wrists with soil. She must have fallen. She didn’t remember falling.
Her phone said 4:47.
She stood in the lay-by on the road with the dark sky thinning to grey behind the trees and the street-light haloing the frost on the little Ford she’d borrowed, and she looked at the time, and then she looked at it again, and then she put her hand inside her coat, and the pendant was cool. Just cool. As if it had never been anything else in its life.
There was a white flower in the pocket of her coat, its stalk snapped, its petals shut. She had not picked it. She was sure of that, in the way she was sure of very little else that had happened between the gate and the fence.
She got into the car and locked every door, and drove, and did not look in the rear-view mirror once, all the way back, on the cold empty road, in the dark that was beginning , slowly , to be morning.