AI "Cheung, the address is a tree."
"Then deliver to the tree."
I wedged the phone between ear and shoulder and pushed through a screen of bracken. Behind me, the Penrhos Gate stood open. Unlocked. Waiting. Richmond Park shut its gates at nine and somebody had left one open just wide enough for a girl with a delivery bag and a bike chained to the rail outside.
"Read it to me again."
Yu-Fei sighed the sigh of a man doing arithmetic. "'The old oaks, past the deer pen, follow the deer path, knock thrice.' Written order. Hand delivered, Monday, paid ahead. Cash. Sixty pound tip."
"For pad thai."
"For you, apparently. The envelope had your name on it." He said it the way he announced a bad fish delivery. Flat. Letting the fact do the work. "Miss A. Carter. Old hand, green ink, slanted like a schoolteacher's."
I stopped walking.
"Any chance it's a mate having a laugh?"
"At this hour? Take the sixty pounds, Carter. Feed the tree. Go home."
The line died. Yu-Fei Cheung had run the Golden Empress for thirty years and ended calls the way other men slammed doors.
I kept walking. The deer pen came up on my left, and it was empty. Every gate on it stood open too, swinging in no wind at all, and I filed that away with the unlocked park gate and the envelope with my name on it and told myself the pile wasn't growing.
The pendant woke at the third oak.
It hung at my throat on a silver chain, a chip of crimson no bigger than a thumbnail, and in the eight months since it had turned up in my jacket pocket, no note, no sender, it had done exactly one thing. It warmed. A coin held in a closed fist, that kind of warm, with a pulse under it and a faint red glow that showed through my shirt if the light was right. I'd learned what the warmth meant. Doors. The sort that shouldn't exist.
I stood on the deer path and weighed sixty pounds cash against the heat spreading through the stone.
"Delivery," I said to the dark . "Somebody order a green curry?"
Nothing answered. No wind, no traffic, none of the hum that lives under every silence in this city. Even the insects had clocked off.
The grove announced itself by smell first. Honey and old paper, sweetness with a spine to it, and under that, thin as a hair, copper. I came round a wall of hawthorn and there they were. Nine standing stones in a ring, ancient oaks grown into them over centuries until bark and rock shared one grey skin, and inside the ring, in November, poppies and cornflowers stood wide open. Frost silvered the grass a foot from the boundary and stopped dead at the stones, the way water stops at a weir.
I checked my phone out of habit. 11:47. I checked again ten steps later. 11:47. The battery had dropped from sixty per cent to twelve without the torch ever being on.
Crossing the ring felt like wading through a curtain of warm water. The copper smell strengthened. My boot found grass and made no sound. The next step, none. I might as well have been walking on wool, and the grove ate my voice the same way when I tried a cheerful "hello" that died at my feet.
An hour in a place like this could cost you a day outside. A week. A season. I'd heard the stories over the bar below my flat and filed them under drunk talk, and Silas didn't strike me as a man who wasted drunk talk on strangers he liked.
I stopped. Listened. Counted my own heartbeats, four, five, six, and on the sixth came a footfall . Behind me. Half a beat late, the way an echo is late, except echoes wait for you to stop first.
I turned. The deer path lay empty all the way back to the hawthorn.
Movement, off left, at the far limit of the torch. I swung the beam. Tree. Tree. Tree. When I swept it back the other way, something at the right edge of the light leaned out of the dark and back in, the way a fish moves at the corner of an aquarium. Pale. Tall. Patient.
The poppies nearest me had turned their faces up. All of them. Flowers don't track without a sun to track, but every open bloom in the ring pointed at me like a compass needle finding north.
"Rory."
My mother's voice. Cardiff in it, the lift she put on the first syllable, the one she'd used when I was small and it was time to come in. My mother lived in Cardiff. My mother did not know I was in Richmond.
Then a laugh, low and pleased. Eva's laugh. My chest loosened before my brain caught up and pointed out that Eva was in Walthamstow, that I'd left her a text an hour ago saying weird order, weird park, and that she could not have beaten me here by foot, by cab, or by miracle.
Then, close. Right-ear close. Breath that was not mine on my neck.
"Rory."
Evan.
The thermal bag came off my shoulder faster than thought and I swung it round and hit nothing, air and flowers, and the follow-through carried me a full turn. Where my breath should have ended, it didn't. A ghost of cloud hung at the height of my mouth. My own breath, hanging. Then it drifted sideways, off between the oaks, the way breath drifts when somebody keeps walking and you don't.
I pressed my thumb against the crescent scar on my wrist. Old habit, for when the numbers stop adding up.
Cool head. Three rules. Take the photo, leave the food, knock on nothing.
I set the bag on the flat top of the southernmost stone and unzipped it. Containers, chopsticks, two fortune cookies. I raised the phone and took the proof-of-delivery shot, flash and all, and the flash showed me the ring full of people.
Dozens. Standing between the oaks and the stones and among the flowerbeds, shoulder to shoulder, still as furniture, every face turned to the camera. To me. Grey skin, old clothes, clothes from a great many different yesterdays.
The second flash showed the ring empty.
I lowered the phone. The screen still held the first picture. I looked at it longer than I wanted to, and I made myself look , because a thing you can see twice stops being imagination and starts being evidence. Then I turned back to the bag.
It stood open. I hadn't left it open. The containers sat on the grass in a neat square, lids off, steam rising into no wind, and the two fortune cookies lay side by side on a flat stone like a place set for company. On top of one sat a card. Cream. Green ink. The same schoolteacher's hand.
Aurora. Sit while it's hot. I.
I knew one person whose name began with that letter, and I knew her from Silas, who said it the way people say cancer. Never mind Isolde, he'd told a punter one night, never mind her grove, and I'd been eavesdropping over a crate of limes and hadn't asked, because asking Silas questions was how you got answers, and his answers kept rent cheap and sleep expensive.
The pendant went from warm to hot.
I clapped a hand over it and the stone pulsed against my palm like a second heart, once, twice, and the glow bled red between my fingers. Time to go. The gap I'd come through stood between two stones ten paces off, and it looked narrower than I'd left it, the oaks leaning together over it like men sharing a secret.
I ran.
Three knocks stopped me at the fifth pace. Not from behind. From ahead, from inside the largest stone, wood-deep and patient, the sound of knuckles on a door that had all night. Rap. Rap. Rap. The third knock landed soft, almost kind, the knock of somebody who knows you're home.
Something stood in the gap.
It had been there the whole time. I understood that with my stomach and not my head, the way you understand a drop before you look down. It had been standing in the gap since before I arrived, waiting its turn, and it was tall and pale and its face was a shadow with patience in it, and it did not move aside, and the pendant burned like a coal against my sternum, and the poppies all around us turned their faces toward the sound of its voice.
"Dinner's getting cold, cariad."