Run: 2026-10-08-01M4E18VJHT5DASBN3HWJ9YR2P

The directions had been simple enough: past the Pen Ponds, off the gravel path, follow the deer fence until the oaks began. Rory had followed them with her phone torch angled at the ground, and by the time she reached the oaks the park had gone quiet in the particular way it did after the last joggers and dog walkers gave up for the night. No traffic hummed from the Kingston Road. No planes crossed the sky. Even the wind had stopped. She stood at the boundary and looked at the stones. There were nine of them, or she thought there were nine, rising out of the bracken like the teeth of something buried. Each was wrapped in oak, not carved but grown around, bark knotted over the stone as though the tree had swallowed it and thought better of the digestion. The gap between two of them was wide enough for a person. Beyond it, the dark was thicker, softer, the way a velvet curtain looks just before it's drawn. The pendant lay warm against her breastbone. She'd noticed the warmth on the Tube, a faint pressure like a fingertip resting against her skin, and had told herself it was the chain, or her own body heat, or the three cups of Yu-Fei's oolong she'd nursed during her shift. But it had grown steadily more insistent with every mile south-west, and now, standing a few feet from the gap, it throbbed in slow, deliberate beats. Heartstone, she thought. Like the thing was listening for something on the other side and had found it. She closed her fist around the pendant. It was warm. Not hot. Warm the way a hand is warm after holding a cup of tea. "Right," she said aloud, to nobody. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "You've come this far, Rory." She stepped through. The change was not dramatic. There was no rush of light, no pull at her stomach. The bracken simply gave way to grass, and the grass was longer and softer and somehow greener than the grass she had just left, and the air smelled of rain on warm stone. She could see clearly even though she had switched off her torch without remembering to. Wildflowers covered the clearing in drifts: foxglove, campion, something pale and star-shaped she didn't have a name for, all of them blooming at once. It was November. She had passed frost on the path. The clearing was perfectly round. She had expected a grove, trees and shadows, but there was only the open ring of grass and the oaks standing back from it in a wall, and no sound at all. That was the first wrong thing. The second was that she could not hear her own footsteps. She tested it, lifting her heel and setting it down. The grass took the weight without a whisper. She tried again, harder. Nothing. It was like walking on a photograph. She told herself that was a sensible thing to notice and a sensible thing to be unnerved by, and that she was allowed both. The clearing was empty. She made herself go slowly around its edge, keeping her back to the oaks as much as possible, and found the place she had been told to look: a flat stone at the centre, half-sunk in the turf, its surface worn smooth as soap. Someone had left a single white feather on it. The pendant pulsed so hard now she felt it in her teeth. She crouched and reached for the feather. Something moved at the far edge of her vision. She did not turn her head. She had learned that much from Eva, years ago, on a dare that had gone wrong in a Welsh quarry: the eye is quicker than the mind, and if you turn too fast you see only what you expected. So she kept her gaze fixed on the stone and let her peripheral vision work. A shape crossed between two trunks, low and unhurried, the colour of wet bark. It did not walk so much as lengthen, the way a shadow stretches when the light behind it shifts. She picked up the feather. It was cold. Everything else in this place was warm except that. When she straightened, the shape was gone, and the gap in the oaks where she had entered was gone too. The wall of trees looked unbroken, as though it had never had a gap at all. Rory breathed carefully through her nose. In. Out. Her left wrist ached along the small crescent scar, the way it always did when she was frightened, a habit of her body she had never managed to train out. "Hello?" she said. The word fell flat and dead. The flowers did not stir. Then, from somewhere behind the oaks, came a sound she recognised immediately, because she had heard it every day of her childhood at the kitchen table: a spoon tapping twice against the rim of a cup. Her mother's signal. Two taps meant *come and eat, it's getting cold*. Her throat closed. It was impossible. Her mother was in Cardiff, asleep, or at least she had been when Rory had left a message at ten. The tapping came again, patient and exact, and under it, faint as breath, a second sound joined the first. Footsteps. Slow. Circling. They were not coming closer. They were going around the clearing, a little further out each time, the way someone walks when they are looking for the place where a wall ends. The pendant beat against her skin, once, twice, and then held still, every pulse fading at once, as though whatever it had been signalling had finally arrived and no longer needed to announce itself. Rory looked down. The stone at her feet had changed. Its surface, which had been smooth and pale, was now marked with a fresh set of small prints, all pointing towards her, as if something had walked up to her while she was watching the trees and stood close enough to look at her face. She had not felt it come. She had not heard it. Behind her, very quietly, the spoon began again.