AI Rory reached the standing stones at eleven minutes past midnight. Her phone said so, at least. The screen had lost its signal somewhere between the last park gate and the trees, and the clock had been stuck on 12:11 for long enough that she’d stopped checking it.
She had come to the grove to see if the pendant would react.
At nine that evening, the crimson stone had grown warm against her chest while she was standing in her kitchen, a delivery bag still slung over one shoulder. It had cooled when she moved toward the stairs and warmed again when she faced the window. Richmond lay in that direction. She’d tried the same thing three times before putting on her coat.
Now, at the edge of the clearing, it gave off no heat at all.
The ancient oaks stood in a rough circle, their trunks broad and dark as pillars. Wildflowers crowded the grass between them. Rory could make out white petals, yellow cups, a scatter of blue, all blooming in the middle of a cold March night. She knew they would be here. She’d seen the grove before, once in daylight. Even so, the sight of them made her stop.
A wind had followed her across Richmond Park. It worried the hem of her coat and pushed damp hair against her cheek. At the first oak, it fell away. She heard it moving through the trees behind her, but she felt nothing.
“Right,” she said.
Her voice sounded ordinary, which helped. She stepped between two oaks and into the clearing.
The flowers had a sharp, green smell, like stems snapped between fingernails. Moonlight lay across the grass in broken strips. Beyond the ring of trees, the path she’d taken remained visible for a few yards, then disappeared into the dark.
Rory pulled the pendant from beneath her jumper. The stone was roughly the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson, held on a silver chain. A faint light showed inside it when she turned it toward the moon. That was usual. She closed her fingers around it and walked toward the centre of the clearing.
Nothing changed.
She had hoped for an answer more precise than a warm stone pointing east. The person who’d given her the pendant hadn’t left a name, and the few things Rory had learned about it since were all variations on a warning: it grew warm near a portal to Hel. She wanted to know whether the warmth in her kitchen had meant something was close to her flat, or whether the pendant had been drawing her here.
At the centre of the grove stood a patch of bare earth no wider than a dining table. She stopped beside it. The air was still enough that she could hear water dripping somewhere beyond the oaks.
One drop. Then another.
There was no water nearby that she knew of.
She waited. A third drop came, followed by the faint scrape of something dragging across stone.
Rory looked toward the sound. The trees were too close together to see far between them. Pale flowers shifted at the edge of the clearing.
She held her breath. They went still.
“Deer,” she said, though deer did not drag across stone. Richmond Park had plenty of them, and she preferred an explanation she could picture.
She took out her phone. Still 12:11. The torch worked. Its beam cut across the bare earth, the flowers, the nearest oak. Water glistened on the trunk. She raised the light.
The bark was dry.
Something dripped again, directly behind her.
Rory turned. The beam swept an empty stretch of grass. A few flowers stood bent, their heads touching the ground. While she watched, they lifted.
She backed away from the bare patch. The pendant lay cold in her palm. She rubbed it with her thumb, annoyed at herself for wanting it to do something. If it stayed cold, perhaps there was no portal here. Perhaps she could go home and think through the rest in daylight.
The scrape sounded again. This time it came from the path.
Rory aimed the torch between the two oaks she had entered through. The path ran straight for four yards, then bent left behind a stand of holly. A figure stood just past the bend.
She saw only a narrow slice of dark coat and one pale hand against the leaves. She held the light steady.
“Hello?”
No answer. The hand slipped out of sight.
Rory’s skin tightened along her arms. She had passed no one coming in. Whoever it was might have been walking another path, might be as startled as she was. She kept the torch pointed at the holly and moved sideways, making for the gap on the opposite side of the clearing.
A footstep sounded in the grass behind her.
She stopped. The footstep stopped too.
Her own shoes were planted on soft ground. She looked back. Empty clearing. Bare earth. Flowers. On the far side, her torchlight caught a pale hand withdrawing behind an oak.
It was the same hand. She was sure of it: four fingers close together, the thumb held apart.
Rory broke into a run.
She crossed the clearing and reached the opposite trees in seconds. The gap between them opened onto a narrow track. She remembered it from her daylight visit. It would take her out toward the road, farther from where she’d left her bike, but that no longer mattered.
She passed the oaks and nearly collided with a trunk.
The track was gone . A wall of hazel branches filled the space where it should have been. Rory stumbled back and turned her torch on the clearing. She could see the bare patch at its centre. Across it, between the oaks by the holly, the path she had used to enter remained open.
She went toward it, walking quickly because running made it harder to see. Halfway across, the pendant grew warm.
Rory stopped so abruptly her shoes slid on the grass.
Heat spread through the stone, gentle at first, then insistent. It pressed against her palm like something alive. She looked at the holly. No one stood there now. The path beyond was dark and clear.
She moved one step closer. The pendant warmed further.
A portal to Hel. Somewhere ahead.
Rory retreated. The heat faded. She crossed the clearing again, watching the stone as she went. At the bare patch it cooled almost completely . Near the wall of hazel, it stayed cool.
She put the phone in her coat pocket with the torch still on, freeing her hand, and pushed into the branches. Twigs snagged her sleeves and hair. Beneath them was solid ground, not a path but ground she could walk on . She forced a gap wide enough to squeeze through.
The branches snapped back behind her.
The grove vanished from view. Her torch lit a tangle of narrow trunks and wet leaves, all of it close enough to touch. Beyond the circle of light, something knocked softly against wood.
Rory edged forward. A low branch caught the chain at her neck. She ducked, freed it, and felt the old crescent scar on her wrist brush rough bark. Then she saw a patch of open ground ahead.
She stepped out into the grove.
The bare earth lay in the middle. The flowers stood bright under the moon. Across the clearing, the path by the holly waited between the oaks.
Rory stared at it. She could still feel a twig caught in the back of her coat. She reached around, pulled it free, and held it in front of her. Fresh hazel leaves hung from one end.
A footstep sounded behind her, among the trees she had just pushed through.
She did not turn.
A second footstep followed. It was close and deliberate. Whoever made it stopped just inside the gap she had left in the branches.
Rory walked toward the centre of the grove. Her mind offered her scraps of things she knew: that time behaved strangely here, that an hour inside might cost minutes or days outside. She had understood that as clocks running at different speeds. She had not expected the grove to send her back to where she started.
She tried her phone again. 12:11. The battery had fallen from sixty-three per cent to forty-one.
Behind her, someone took another step.
The pendant remained cool. She looked down at the bare patch, then at the flowers around it. Their heads all faced the path by the holly, though the moon was on the other side of the clearing.
Rory moved in a circle, keeping clear of the earth. The pendant warmed as she neared the path and cooled as she moved away. She tried two other gaps between the oaks. At the first, she met a thicket she could not get through. At the second, she found a short path that curved out of sight; when she took it, the sound of dripping began ahead of her, and the pendant heated in her hand. She came back before it could lead her anywhere.
All the while, she heard footsteps . They crossed the grass when she crossed it. They stopped when she stopped. Once, she heard the brush of a sleeve against an oak. She caught movement at the edge of the torchlight but never enough to see a face.
Rory reached the bare patch again. The soil looked recently turned, darker than the earth beneath the flowers. Along its edge was a shallow mark like the heel of a shoe.
She crouched. The mark matched the shape of her own heel.
Her breath caught. She set her foot beside it. The tread was the same. There were two more marks farther in, leading toward the centre, and none leading away.
The footsteps behind her stopped.
For a moment she could hear nothing but her breathing. Then a voice came from the trees near the holly.
“Rory.”
It was her voice.
She rose slowly . She wanted to dismiss it as an echo , but she had not spoken her name tonight. The voice had sounded strained and a little breathless, as hers would after running.
“Don’t take the path,” it said.
The pendant burned in her hand. Rory looked down. She had drifted toward the holly without noticing. She stepped back, and the heat eased.
A shape moved between the oaks. Black hair. A dark coat. The phone in its hand cast a white glow upward, showing the line of a cheek and a bright eye.
Rory knew her own face. She also knew that the light showed too little for her to trust what she saw.
The figure raised its phone. On the screen, large white numbers read 12:11.
“Come here,” it said.
Rory stayed where she was.
“Please.” The figure’s voice broke. “I can’t get back.”
The cold had reached Rory’s fingers, though the pendant was hot against her palm. She looked at the figure’s feet. They were hidden by the flowers. She looked at the bare soil and her prints leading inward.
“What’s in the middle?” she asked.
The figure did not answer.
“Did I go there?”
It lowered the phone. For an instant its face fell into darkness.
Then she heard a footstep behind her.
Rory spun. There was no one by the hazel. When she turned back, the figure had moved closer. It stood just beyond the bare patch, its shoes visible now. One heel was caked with dark soil.
The pendant heated sharply . Rory looked from it to the figure, then past the figure to the holly path. The heat had been strongest there before. Now it was strongest here.
The figure saw her look . It stepped onto the bare earth.
The flowers at the edge of the patch tilted toward it.
Rory backed away. The figure took another step, placing its foot neatly in one of the prints. It held out its free hand, palm up. On the wrist was a small crescent-shaped scar.
She could not see what stood before her clearly enough to know how it had acquired her scar. She knew she would not let it touch her.
Rory turned and ran for the hazel. Branches whipped her face. She kept the pendant in her fist and pushed through the thickest part of the thicket, where she had found solid ground before. The phone torch flashed wildly from her pocket. Behind her, something crashed into the branches.
She stumbled out of the thicket into the grove.
The bare patch waited ahead. The figure stood in its centre, watching her.
Rory stopped. Her lungs hurt. The twig she had pulled from her coat lay on the grass beside her shoe.
The figure lifted its hand again.
This time Rory looked at the pendant. It pulsed against her skin, then cooled, then pulsed once more. Its warmth was not coming from any one path. It was coming from the bare patch. From the soil beneath the figure’s feet.
The thing in the centre took a step toward her. Rory stepped sideways along the boundary, keeping the oaks at her back. She watched the flowers. Their heads followed the figure as it moved.
When it reached the edge of the soil, she flung the pendant toward the holly.
The silver chain flashed through the moonlight and caught on a low branch. The crimson stone swung there, throwing a faint red light across the path. The figure turned its head.
Rory seized the moment and went between two oaks beside her, a gap she had not tried. She expected brambles, or another path bending back toward the clearing. Instead her shoe struck gravel. Wind hit her face. She heard traffic, thin and distant, beyond the park.
She ran until the grove was hidden by ordinary trees. At the road, she stopped beneath a streetlamp and bent with her hands on her knees. Her phone showed 4:38 in the morning. She had no missed calls. Her coat pocket held three crushed flowers she did not remember picking.
She straightened and looked back toward the dark trees. The pendant was still in there. She could picture it hanging from the holly, its chain caught on the branch.
Across the road, a public clock above a shuttered café read twenty minutes past twelve. Rory checked her phone again. It still said 4:38.
From somewhere in the park came the soft scrape of a shoe on gravel.
Rory put the phone away and walked toward the lit street without looking back.