AI The note had been in Eva's handwriting. That was the problem.
Rory swept her phone's torch across the seventh standing stone and the oak-shaped monolith drank the light. No lichen. No weathering. Just dark grain frozen mid-flow, as if the wood had decided to become stone and never explained itself.
*Richmond. The old stones in the deer park. Come after dark. Come alone. E.*
She'd found the note under her door that morning, folded twice, the paper smelling faintly of honey. Eva never signed things E. Eva signed things with a smiley face that ate its own pen, because Eva couldn't manage solemnity for longer than four seconds. But Eva had also dragged Rory out of Cardiff with two bin bags and a wrist she refused to explain to A&E, so when Eva wrote *come alone *, Rory came alone.
Alone didn't mean stupid. She'd told Silas where she was going . Torch, keys, fully charged phone, and the pendant.
The pendant hung against her sternum now, pulsing like a second heartbeat, warm as a coin held too long in a fist. It had been doing that since she'd crossed the park boundary at Pen Ponds, warming by slow degrees the deeper into the dark she walked.
Seven stones ringed the clearing, each one carved with the ghost of bark, the suggestion of branches. She ran her palm along the nearest and pulled it back. The stone was warm. Stone, at midnight, in November, holding heat like a radiator.
"Okay," she said to the clearing . "Okay, noted."
The air between the stones sat wrong. She felt it the way you feel a door left open in a familiar room, a pressure change with no source. When she stepped through the gap between the sixth and seventh stone, the pressure closed over her like water and her ears popped.
Inside, the grove refused her torch. The beam reached perhaps three feet and gave up, dissolving into a dark that had texture, that had weight . She clicked the torch off and her night vision bloomed instead, and that was worse, because now she could see.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing. She knew about the flowers, Eva had brought her here once in daylight, a whole meadow blooming in November, an impossibility the grove wore like a party hat. In daylight they'd been white and violet and open to a sun that wasn't there.
At night, every bud was closed. Every stem was bent.
Every closed bud faced her.
Not the sky. Not the gap between the stones where a moon might slip through. Her. A thousand pale teardrops on black stems, all pointed at the place where she stood, and when she took a slow step to the left, the nearest hundred flowers turned with a sound like silk sliding over silk .
She stopped. They stopped.
"Right." Her voice came out flat, stripped of echo . Open air should have carried it. Instead the words dropped dead at her feet, absorbed by flowers and dark and that honey smell that had followed her from the park gate, sweet and thick, with something underneath it now. Something like a butcher's bin at the end of a hot day.
She checked her phone. 23:52. No signal, but the grove didn't strike her as a place with strong coverage, so she pocketed it and walked.
The grass made no sound under her boots. Her steps made no sound. She could feel the ground, feel the give of it, the wet seeping through her left sole, and all of it in perfect silence , and then, four steps in, the sound arrived. Footsteps. Hers. Wet grass, a squelch in the left boot, arriving half a second after the step that produced them, like the grove was dubbing her.
She stopped. The echo stopped, one beat late.
"Eva?" The name fell dead too. No echo . No answer. Just the honey smell thickening, and somewhere off to her right, low down, a blackbird began to sing.
A blackbird. Full night song, that bright liquid cascade they do at dawn in June, every note perfect and placed, and Rory stood in a frozen November clearing while it sang and sang and never repeated a phrase. Real birds repeat. Real birds get bored, get interrupted , get eaten . This one sang like a recording on loop, except it never repeated, which meant it wasn't a loop, which meant it was composing , and birds didn't compose at midnight in November, and her pulse was in her throat now, and the pendant against her sternum had gone from coin-warm to cup-of-tea warm.
She walked faster. The clearing shouldn't have been this deep. Eva's daylight grove had been a pocket, a minute across, and she'd crossed it in forty seconds while Eva complained about her shoes. Rory had been walking for minutes now. The stones stayed behind her. The flowers tracked her. The blackbird followed at a fixed distance to her right, keeping pace, and beneath its song she caught the echo -footsteps again, except this time they continued after hers stopped.
One extra step. Squelch. Then silence .
She turned in a slow circle, torch up, and the beam found nothing in three feet and flowers beyond it and the blackbird still singing and the honey smell now so thick she could taste it, flowery and spoiled at once, coating her tongue.
Her phone buzzed against her hip. She snatched it out. 03:07.
She'd entered the grove at 23:50. She'd walked for minutes.
The screen dimmed. The clock read 03:07, then 03:12, then, as she watched, 02:31. The numbers ran backwards, unhurried, the way water drains, and the battery icon slid from half to red to a sliver while the phone sat cold and unplugged in her hand.
"Nope." She said it out loud, flat and dead in the air. "Nope, absolutely not."
She turned back the way she'd come. The stones were gone .
Not moved. Gone. The ring of them, the gap between the sixth and seventh where she'd stepped through, replaced by more clearing, more flowers, more of that patient dark, and the flowers between her and where the exit had been were open now. All of them. A thousand white faces unfurled in a night with no moon, and every one of them turned on its stem as she looked, a soft creaking like knuckles cracking, all of them orienting, all of them watching, and the pendant flared.
Not warm. Hot. Heat flooding through her shirt, the silver chain biting her neck, the crimson stone pressing a scalding coin of light against her chest, and through the fabric she could see it glowing, a red heartbeat visible through cotton, faster now, faster, and the blackbird stopped mid-phrase.
The silence that followed had teeth.
"Eva?" Her voice cracked on it. "Eva, if this is you, it's not funny, and if it's not you, I'm sorry, and either way I'm leaving."
The grove answered in Eva's voice.
"Rory."
From everywhere. From the flowers. From the dark past the torch's three feet of reach, Eva's voice, her exact voice, the South London drag on the vowel, the little laugh underneath the word, and Rory's legs went heavy as wet sand because it was perfect , it was her, and perfect was the problem. The grove had swallowed every sound she'd made since the stones. It had her footsteps . It had her voice.
It had been listening to Eva too.
The pendant burned. Rory's eyes watered from the heat and she looked down at it for one second, one, and when she looked up, a figure stood fifteen feet away.
Green parka. Eva's parka, the one with the torn left pocket Eva refused to mend, and the figure stood among the flowers and none of them bent, none of them moved, and it was already facing her. It hadn't arrived. It hadn't walked in. It was as if the clearing had simply decided this was where it went, and it stood with Eva's posture, Eva's height, Eva's dark hair loose past her shoulders, and it did not breathe . Rory watched the chest. Nothing. The honey smell rolled off it in waves.
"Rory," it said, in Eva's voice, and the flowers turned from her to it, a thousand pale faces transferring their attention like a crowd at a tennis match. "You came alone."
The head tilted. Too far. The hair slid off the face and the face was Eva's, Eva's freckles, Eva's chapped lower lip, Eva's eyes, except the eyes were already looking at her before the hair finished moving, already had been, and they held no white. Just dark, all the way in.
"You came alone," it said again, and the voice slid in the middle of the sentence, the vowels melting from Eva's South London into something older, something that dragged its consonants, and then into a voice Rory knew the way she knew her own scar .
Evan's voice. Evan's warm, patient, reasonable voice, the one he used right before the apology, every time, for three years.
"Good girl."