Run: 2026-10-08-01M4D9W8MB3ZVEVMAPY4EPT7V8

The gate clicked shut behind her with a sound like a breath let go. Rory stood on the gravel verge of Richmond Park, bracken rising waist-high on either side, the last headlights of the road already swallowed by the rise of the hill. Her phone said eleven fourteen. It had said eleven fourteen when she left the bus stop, too, and the screen had dimmed to a grey smear twice since, so she had stopped trusting it. She pulled her coat tighter and felt the pendant against her breastbone through the wool. Warm. Not the warmth of skin or a radiator, but a steady heat, like a stone that had sat all afternoon in the sun. It had started on the Northern line somewhere past Clapham. By the time she reached the bus stop it pulsed, faint and regular, like someone tapping on glass from the other side. "Right," she said. "You wanted to come here. So here I am." The path dipped into a hollow. At its lip, eight oaks stood in a rough ring, trunks split and furred with moss, their limbs bent inward like the ribs of a cage. Someone had once told her these were only oaks. Someone else had told her they were older than the park, and that nobody who counted them ever got the same number twice. She counted them now. Eight. She filed the number away and walked between two of the trunks. The air changed on the other side. It did not get warmer, exactly. It got closer, the way a room does when a door shuts in another part of the house. Foxgloves grew along the path. White campion nodded in the grass, and bluebells, and clusters of cornflowers so blue they looked painted on. It was the third week of November. An hour ago the frost had silvered the windscreens in the car park at the top of the hill. Rory crouched beside a foxglove and touched one bell of its flower with a fingertip. Damp, cool, real. She stood up quickly and wiped her hand on her jeans. Something called from the trees to her left. A bird, she thought, though the note was too long and too low, and it dropped at the end like a question. Then silence. The kind of silence that has edges. She kept walking. Her footsteps sounded wrong on the path. She stopped to test it, and the steps went on for half a beat after she halted, then faltered, then stopped. She waited. Her own breathing filled her ears. Then she took one step forward, and the echo took one step too, soft and deliberate, a half-beat behind. "Okay," she said quietly. "That's not funny." The pendant flared against her chest, a sudden hot pressure that made her gasp. She pressed a hand over it. Through the coat it felt like a coal. The warmth pulled her to the right, toward the centre of the hollow, the way a compass needle swings toward something it cannot see. She did not move in that direction. She did not move away from it, either. She stood with her hand on her chest and looked at the trees. Pale shapes stood between the trunks. Not figures, not quite. Smudges of white at the edge of her eye that held still when she turned to them and resumed their shape only when she looked elsewhere. A slender limb of birch, perhaps. A coat hung on a branch. She fixed her gaze on the nearest one and counted to ten. It did not move. She counted to twenty. It did not move. On thirty she blinked, and it stood a little closer to the path than it had before. "Hello?" she called. The word came back from the trees in her own voice, a fraction slow, the vowel stretched thin. *Hello.* Her throat tightened. She swallowed against it. "Is anyone there?" *Is anyone there?* She looked at her watch. The second hand twitched forward and stopped. Eleven fourteen. She had walked, by her reckoning, for a quarter of an hour. Perhaps twenty minutes. She looked at the watch again, and it still read eleven fourteen, and somewhere far off, beyond the hill and the road and the city, a church bell struck once, the sound thin and faraway as a thing heard through water. She counted her breaths. In for four, out for four. The old trick, the one her mum had taught her before exams. It did not help much, but it gave her hands something to do other than shake. The footsteps came again, slow and even, a pace behind hers. She had not started walking yet. She had not started walking at all. Rory did not turn around. She kept her eyes on the path ahead, where the bluebells bent in a wind that did not touch her face, and she listened to the soft, unhurried sound of someone else breathing, very close, matching her rhythm breath for breath.