Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAFJFWVC8DNV9T8MJ3R4F3

The bus let her off at the Sheen Gate at twenty to midnight, and the driver pulled away before she had her feet fully on the tarmac. Rory stood with her back to the iron railings and listened to the engine fade toward Roehampton Lane. Then the park closed over the silence like water. She checked the time on her phone. Eleven fifty-two. The screen threw a pale square onto the grass, and the bracken beyond it swallowed the light within a few yards. Eva's sketch was folded in the inside pocket of her parka, drawn in green biro on the back of a takeaway menu. Seven oak trunks in a loose ring. A gap on the north side. A cross marked in the middle with the word *here* underlined twice. Rory had photographed it, then burned the photo, then spent three days convincing herself she had not imagined it. The pendant sat under her jumper. She had worn it every day since the parcel arrived with no return address, and most days it was just a stone against her skin, cool and faintly heavy. Tonight it sat warm against her sternum. Not hot. Warm like a mug somebody else had just put down. She told herself it was the walk. Three miles from the bus stop through the dark, uphill most of it, her breath misting. She told herself a lot of things on the walk. The path bent left at a fallen beech, and the trees thinned. Rory kept the torch low and her footsteps light. Somewhere to her right, something moved through leaf litter, pausing and starting again. Deer, she thought. Park was full of them. The sound stopped when she stopped, and started again when she did. She turned her head. Nothing. Only the grey trunks, the bracken, a sky the colour of wet slate with no moon in it. "Right," she said to nobody. The word came out flat. The trees did not echo it back, which was worse than an echo would have been. A few paces on, she noticed the flowers. They grew along the verge in a thin strip, pale and papery, the sort of thing she associated with late May. Foxgloves, maybe, or something close. She crouched and put the torch on them. Dew sat on the petals in beads. Their stems were green and new, and when she touched one with a fingertip, it was cool and slightly yielding, the way a living thing is. It was February. The frost had only lifted from the lawns that morning. She had read about the grove in a book that smelled of damp and tobacco, and the author had written that the flowers never died there. Rory had assumed it was a metaphor. She stood up quickly and her knee cracked. The path continued. She followed it for what she judged to be ten minutes, though the phone clock refused to move and the screen flickered each time she looked at it. Her watch said the same time. Her breathing was loud in her ears, and under it the other sound persisted, the rustle that kept pace on the far side of the trees. At the edge of her vision, something pale slid between two trunks and was gone. She did not turn toward it. She had learned that from Evan's flat in Canton, from years of learning which sounds in a room meant someone was about to come through a door. You did not give the thing the satisfaction of your head snapping round. You kept your shoulders level and your eyes on the path and you counted your steps. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three. The pale thing appeared again, low, at the height of a crouching child, and then it was standing beside an oak twenty feet ahead, perfectly still. Rory stopped. Her torch beam found the trunk, the bark ridged and black with age, and the shape beside it resolved into nothing she could name. Too long in the limbs. Too patient. It had the stillness of a coat hung on a hook, except coats did not lean. She switched off the torch. The dark did not swallow her. It settled around her, and in it she could see the outlines of the standing stones, the seven oaks, the gap on the north side, all exactly where Eva's biro had placed them. Her pulse knocked against the pendant. The warmth grew, spreading outward under her ribs. From somewhere beyond the ring came a sound like someone breathing through a reed, slow and deliberate, in time with the stone against her chest. Rory took one step forward. The grass beneath her boot made no sound at all.