AI The Richmond Park gate stood open.
Rory stopped on the kerb outside and shone her torch across the chain. The padlock hung from one link, shut, intact. The gate itself gaped inward, wide enough for her delivery bike, wide enough for a car. Hinges held black grease and a crust of frost. No marks scored the tarmac beneath the swing.
She checked the note again. The paper had come inside a Golden Empress takeaway bag with no order name and no house number, folded under a tub of rice that no customer had paid for. Bring the Heartstone to the grove. Midnight. Come alone. Underneath, in ink the colour of rust, someone had written a fifth name among her own. Malphora.
No one in London knew that name .
Her torch beam climbed the information board. Closing times marched down the sign in white print. Dusk. The park shut at dusk in winter. Beyond the gate, the road vanished under beeches stripped down to wet black limbs. No lamps lit the route. No traffic hissed past behind her on the main road, though traffic had filled it ten minutes before.
Rory lifted her phone and pressed record.
"Eva, the gate is open and the lock is still shut. If this is your idea of a joke, you owe me petrol money and a new set of nerves."
The recording screen froze. 00:07 sat in the corner, white and square. She tapped it. The numbers held. She powered the phone off, powered it on, and watched 00:07 return.
The Heartstone Pendant knocked against her breastbone as she pushed the bike through the gate. The deep crimson gem sat on its silver chain, thumbnail-size, cold from the ride. Then heat bloomed inside it. One pulse . A pause. A second pulse, stronger than the first.
Rory wrapped her fist around the stone.
"You picked the route. You can pay for the blister."
The heat ran through her knuckles and lit the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. The scar ached in a ring. She shoved her sleeve down and walked the bike forward, though the pendant tugged her attention toward the trees on her right, off the road, where no path showed on the daytime map in her head.
Richmond Park at night had a shape she did not know. The open grass became a black pan. The beeches crowded the road in ranks. Her torch picked out bark, root, pockets of frozen mud, her own breath in white rags. It found no deer. It found no fox. On delivery runs she heard the city in every gap, sirens and trains and planes stacking above Heathrow. Here, rubber on wet tarmac made the sole sound, and even that dropped flat, as if the trees drank noise at the trunk line.
A stone stood beside the road where no stone belonged.
Rory braked. The bike light tipped. Granite rose from the grass, shoulder high, flecked with quartz, its top worn into a shallow bowl. Snow filled the bowl. A handprint marked the snow, five fingers spread, each finger too long between the joints and wet at the tips.
She swung the torch left. Grass. Road. Beeches.
She swung it right. The stone stood bare.
The snow lay smooth.
"Parks department has a strange sense of art."
Her voice came back from the beeches.
"Parks department has a strange sense of art."
The echo hit late. Four full breaths late. It used her mouth, her Cardiff edge, the drop at the end of the sentence, but breath scraped between the words in a wet pull, as if the speaker had run a long distance without rest.
Rory killed the bike engine sounds in her head one at a time. No engine ran. No wind moved the upper branches. Her pulse beat in her ears and under it, under the road, a second beat kept time with the pendant.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The pendant matched the beat in the ground.
She left the bike against the stone and followed the pull on foot, torch in one hand, the note crushed in the other. The trees changed after twenty paces. Oak replaced beech, trunks thick as van doors, roots knotted above soil black with leaf rot. Wildflowers pushed through the rot in dense heads, white and violet and a red that caught the torch in points. Petals opened as she passed. Stems bent away from her boots. A scent rose from them, iron and honey and rain on hot stone, and the scent coated the back of her tongue.
No frost touched the flowers.
One patch ahead of her lay flat.
Rory stopped with her boot above a crushed stem. The flat patch held the shape of a foot, heel and toe sunk deep, the print longer than her own boot by a hand span. Another print sat ahead. Another. They led between two oaks where a mist hung in a sheet, waist high, unmoving.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
The screen showed 03:47. Beneath the time, a voicemail waited from Eva, timestamped 00:09. Rory pressed play and held the phone hard against her ear.
"Rory, where are you? Your shift ended an hour ago. Yu-Fei has your curry in the warmer and Silas reckons you took the long way home to avoid his quiz night. Ring me."
The message ended. The time flipped to 00:11.
She pressed record again.
"Eva, I walked ten minutes. My phone says three hours. Pick up. Please pick up."
The message refused to send. A red mark sat beside it. Signal bars gave way to a cross.
From beyond the mist, a phone rang.
Her ringtone. The dumb piano jingle Eva had set for unknown numbers. It played through once, clean and bright among the oaks. It played again. On the third run, the notes stretched, each one dragged lower, until the tune lost its shape and became a voice humming through closed teeth.
Rory shone the torch into the mist. The beam hit a wall of white and died.
"Show yourself."
The grove answered with her voice.
"Show yourself."
This time the echo came from behind her.
She spun. Torchlight tore across oak trunks and flower heads. Every flower faced her. White petals, violet petals, red petals, all turned on their stems toward her boots, though she had passed them and left them bent toward the road.
At the edge of the beam, between two trunks, a patch of dark held still in a way the other shadows did not. It had height. It had width at the top that narrowed, then widened again. Torchlight slid across it and found bark, found leaves, found nothing that explained the outline, but the outline stayed while her hand shook and the beam wandered. When she fixed the light dead centre, the shape slipped to the rim of sight, past a trunk, past the crushed footprints, closer to the road.
Closer to her bike.
Closer to the way out.
Rory backed toward the mist instead. Her heel struck a root. The pendant burned through her coat. She caught the chain before the stone touched skin and the heat ran up the silver links in pulses, fast now, a fist hammering inside a box.
Thumpthump. Thumpthump. Thumpthump.
The ground answered at twice the speed.
A twig snapped on her left.
She turned her head. Her body kept its angle toward the mist. No animal moved in the undergrowth. No bird burst from cover. Yet the flowers on her left flattened in a line, stem after stem, in a slow procession from the far trunk toward the spot where she stood. Petals folded. Stalks bent under weight that left no foot she could see.
"Eva?"
The name left her mouth as a question for the trees, for the prank, for any person with a pulse and a face.
The grove took the name and gave it back from three places at once.
"Eva?"
"Eva?"
"Eva?"
One copy came from the mist. One came from the road. One came from above her, high in the oak limbs where branches held their load of dark without a creak.
Rory ran her thumb over the note in her fist. The paper had gone damp. Ink bled through onto her palm, and in the torchlight the rust-coloured letters had spread into a new arrangement. She smoothed the sheet against her thigh.
Bring the Heartstone to the grove. Midnight. Come alone.
A line sat beneath the first three now, thin as a hair, wet as fresh paint.
Do not answer when it wears your voice.
Her mouth went dry. She read the line twice. The paper shook. No such line had marked the sheet at the restaurant, at the gate, in the bike light beside the stone.
She lifted her head.
"Who wrote this?"
The answer came at once, in her voice, from the mist.
"Who wrote this?"
It came again from the road, a breath behind.
"Who wrote this?"
The third copy never finished. It broke off at wrote, and the sound of her own throat closing cut through the trees, a choked click she recognised from nights in her old flat, from Evan and a hand over her mouth and the effort to keep air moving. The grove had found that sound inside her. It played the sound back with care, note for note.
Rory folded the note into her glove.
"I am leaving. Keep the flowers. Keep the stone theatre. I want no part of this."
She turned for the road.
The dark patch stood beside her bike.
Torchlight found the bike frame, the delivery box with the Golden Empress dragon curling gold across black plastic, the front wheel cocked toward London. It found the standing stone. It found seven stones now in a ring around the clearing that had held two oaks when she entered, stones shoulder high and crowned with snow, each one bearing a smooth bowl at its top. She counted again. Seven. She counted a third time and got eight, the eighth low and sunk between roots on the far side, its bowl full of flower heads with the petals torn off.
Her breath came short. The flowers at her feet faced the mist.
From inside the mist, bare feet padded across wet leaves. One step. A halt. A step that landed out of rhythm with the pendant, then corrected itself, then matched the beat in the ground with a soft slap of skin on soil.
Thump. Step. Thump. Step.
Rory raised the torch with both hands. The beam punched a hole in the mist and showed a strip of black soil, a spill of white flowers, and prints filling with dark water. New prints formed in the mud ahead of the sound, heel first, toes dragging, each one steaming in the cold.
The pendant jerked on its chain toward the prints.
"No. You do not get to choose."
She spoke to the stone. She spoke to keep her teeth from meeting. The heat climbed her chest in waves and the scar on her wrist stood out white against her skin, a small moon with its edge raised.
The footsteps halted beyond the torch reach.
Silence pooled in the grove, thick enough to press on her eardrums. No ringtone. No echo . No breath but hers, loud and ragged in the white sheet.
Then a voice spoke from the mist without borrowing hers. It came low and hoarse, worn thin at the edges, a voice that had repeated one phrase for a long time and lost the rest.
"Malphora."
Rory froze with the torch aimed at nothing.
"Malphora. Malphora. Malphora."
Each repetition gained strength. Each one shed a layer of hoarseness. By the fourth, the voice had her pitch. By the fifth, it had her accent smoothed clean away. By the sixth, it sounded as she sounded on the voicemail she had left Eva, tired and brave in a way she did not feel.
Her phone lit in her pocket. Light leaked through the coat fabric. She pulled it free with numb fingers.
A call connected. No number. Duration 03:47 and counting. Eva's name sat at the top of the screen in Eva's handwriting font, though Eva had never set a picture, never set a font, never reached this grove on any call.
Rory put the phone to her ear.
"Rory, look at me."
The voice came through the phone and through the mist at the same time, one layered on the other, wet leaves shifting under a foot that took its next step as she raised the torch higher.