Run: 2026-10-13-01M4TACG7A9W9R2X3THT2ZACPG

The note came under her door on a Tuesday, folded once, no envelope. Six words in blocky biro: *Midnight. The oaks in Richmond. Alone.* She'd have binned it, except for the knocking. Three nights running, three knocks on her flat door at half three, never a soul in the corridor when she yanked it open, only the smell of wet earth rising off the stairwell carpet. On the third night the pendant had woken her — the crimson stone hot against her sternum where she'd fallen asleep wearing it, glowing like a coal in the dark. So. Midnight. The oaks. She wanted the knocking to stop, and she wanted to know who'd hung this thing round her neck, and both wants had pulled her across London on the last train with a torch in her coat pocket. Richmond Park's gates stood chained, so she went over the stile by the car park and into the dark beyond the reach of the lamps. The city fell away behind her faster than it should have. London never went quiet — there was always a plane stacked over Heathrow, always a siren threading some distant artery — but within a hundred yards of the stile she couldn't hear any of it. No traffic. No aircraft. Frost cracked under her trainers and the sound carried far too well, as though the park had swallowed every other noise to make room for hers. She checked her mobile. No signal, which figured, but the clock read 23:58 and then, when she glanced again ten paces later, 00:41. She thumbed it off and shone the torch ahead instead. The beam came back thin, eaten at the edges. Bracken hissed against her jeans. The path she remembered from summer runs had narrowed to a deer track, and the trees leaned over it at angles she didn't recall, black oaks with their roots heaving out of the ground like knuckles. Her breath went in front of her in white scraps. Cold air, cold ground — and the pendant warm against her chest, warmer the further in she walked, a steady throb of heat that matched her pulse and then, she noticed, stopped matching it. Two rhythms. Hers, and the stone's, a half-beat apart. The deer stood in a line across the track. A dozen of them, maybe more, does and a buck with a full rack, arranged shoulder to shoulder like a fence. She'd startled deer in this park before; they bolted, white rumps flashing. These didn't bolt. They faced her, all of them, heads up, and the torchlight caught their eyes and came back not green or amber but flat and depthless, the way light comes off wet paint. "Go on, then," she said. Her voice landed oddly, padded down by the dark. "Shift." She stepped off the path to go round them, and when she looked back over her shoulder the line had turned. All those heads, swung round to keep her in view. She hadn't heard a hoof move. She walked faster, and didn't look back a second time, and heard — she was certain she heard, over the rasp of her own breathing — footsteps keeping pace with hers in the bracken to her left. Soft ones. Unshod. They stopped when she stopped, one step late, like an echo that hadn't learnt the timing yet. She stood still in the dark and made herself count to ten, cool-headed, Eva would have said, Rory the unshakeable, while something out there counted with her. "Who's there?" She aimed the torch at the sound. The beam found bracken, a fallen branch, nothing upright. "I've come, haven't I? You asked, I'm here. Show yourself." From the trees to her right, her own voice came back: *here.* Not an echo. An echo repeats; this one chose. A single word, in her mouth's shape, spoken by something that had heard her say it once. She ran the last stretch. Cool-headedness had its limits and she'd found hers, trainers skidding on frost-rimed grass, until the track opened onto the clearing and she knew it at once for the place in the note. Ancient oaks ringed it, and among them stood stones — not boulders, stones, upright and deliberate, grey slabs twice her height with moss in their crevices, set in a broken circle older than the park, older than the city, old as the fear she was currently feeling. Wildflowers carpeted the ground between them. Wildflowers, in November, nodding in a wind she couldn't feel: campion and cowslip and stuff that had no business blooming for another five months, their petals pale as fingernails under a moon that hung lower and larger than any moon had a right to. The pendant burned. She hissed and pulled the chain away from her skin, and the stone swung free of her collar, crimson lit from within, throwing a red coin of light onto the frost. Pulsing. No longer bothering with her heartbeat at all — keeping time with something else now, something slow and enormous and near. Her mobile, when she checked it, said 00:00. Then 03:47. Then 23:59, as if the night couldn't decide where to keep her. "Right." She turned in a slow circle, torch raised, and the beam slid along the stones and found no one and somehow that was worse. "You've got me out of bed and across half of London. I've had three nights of your knocking. So knock, or talk, but pick one." Three knocks answered her. Measured. Polite. Patient as a debt collector. They came from behind the tallest stone, from the dark at its back — the same three knocks, the exact spacing of them, that had sounded on her door at half past three while she'd stood on the other side with a kitchen knife and her heart in her throat. She understood then, with a clarity that went through her like cold water, that nothing had ever been knocking to be let in. It had been knocking to be let *out*. And she'd come all this way to open the door. Movement at the corner of her eye — a figure between two stones at the far edge of the clearing, tall and grey as the slabs themselves. She swung the torch round. Nothing there. Bracken, shadow, a gap between stones shaped almost like a person if a person could stand that still. She looked back at the tall stone. Looked to the gap again. The figure had moved a body's width closer, and she had not seen it move. The torch beam passed straight through where it stood and lit the trees behind, and yet it stood there, darker than the dark around it, a shape the light declined to touch. Another glance. Closer still. Inside the circle now, among the flowers, and the flowers were turning their faces towards it the way the deer had turned towards her. "Stay where you are." She backed towards the centre of the ring, and the pendant flared hot enough to make her gasp, its red glow spreading across the frost in a circle round her feet. "I mean it. Stay." It raised one arm. The limb bent in more places than an arm should, and its hand — long, grey, patient — came up and knocked three times on the empty air in front of its face, and the sound that came out was the sound of knuckles on her own front door. From the darkness directly behind her, close enough that she felt it stir her hair, something knocked back.