Run: 2026-10-27-01M5YJENH69MF4JTC44W9ZAVQS

The first wrong thing was the flowers. Rory noticed them after she left the road and followed Eva’s dropped pin into Richmond Park. They crowded the grass beneath her torch beam, white and yellow heads rising through November’s dead growth. Frost had silvered the railings at the gate. Her breath had clouded on the climb over. Yet here the stems stood supple and green, and the air carried the green-pepper scent of crushed sap. She checked the time. 23:41. Eva’s message had arrived at nine, after three days of unanswered calls. No greeting. No explanation. A location pin, a photograph of oaks surrounding a dark clearing, and four instructions. Midnight. Bring the pendant. Come alone. Before leaving her bicycle at the gate, Rory had forwarded the pin to Silas and told him to call the police if she had not contacted him by one. Alone did not mean unaccounted for. She had also brought a torch, a power bank and the steel pen Yu-Fei kept for signing delivery receipts, though she had no clear idea what use the pen might be. The pendant rested beneath her shirt. It had arrived at the Golden Empress two weeks earlier in a plain box addressed to Aurora Carter, with no note and no sender. A crimson stone, no larger than her thumbnail, hung from its silver chain. She had meant to leave it at home. Standing outside her flat, with Eva’s message open on her phone, she had gone back for it. Now it held a warmth that did not match her skin. At 23:49, she found the oaks. Their trunks had split and folded with age, bark forming deep seams around hollows wide enough to hide a person. Standing stones marked the spaces between them, eight upended slabs with no carvings Rory could see. Beyond lay the clearing from Eva’s photograph. She stepped between the stones. The traffic noise stopped. Not faded. Stopped. The distant wash of tyres on wet tarmac, an aircraft’s labouring engines, the motorcycle that had followed her along the road for half a mile: all gone. A plane crossed above the branches, its red light winking between clouds. No sound accompanied it. Rory’s torch passed over grass, flowers, stones. No Eva. “Your directions were rubbish.” Her voice reached the oaks and died there. “I’m here. If this is your idea of an apology, you’re paying for my bike to be cleaned.” Something pressed moisture from a leaf behind her. Rory turned. The beam found a stone, a sheath of ivy, her own route through the grass. She took two paces to her left. Her trainers made two wet sounds. A third followed. She waited, then scuffed one foot across the ground. The answering scuff came a moment later, soft and precise, from the opposite side of the clearing. An echo needed a wall. The nearest stone stood no higher than her waist. She switched off the torch. Darkness did not arrive all at once. The clouds retained a diluted city glow, and the flowers kept pinpricks of it in their petals. At the edge of her sight, a pale shape stood beside one of the oaks. She turned her head and found only a patch of lichen climbing a stone. When she looked down at her phone, the lichen reached the height of a shoulder in the corner of her vision. Rory raised the torch and swept the beam across it. The stone stood bare apart from the lichen, fixed in its original ragged patch. “Very funny,” she said. No one laughed. She made herself approach the place as she would a bad delivery address: establish what she could verify, ignore whatever the customer insisted was obvious. Eight stones. A split oak near the centre. Thirty-two paces across the clearing. Her entrance lay between the two stones flanking a holly bush. She tore a blank strip from a Golden Empress receipt, wrote 23:51 on it, and wedged it beneath the left-hand stone. The pendant pulsed against her breastbone. She drew it out. The crimson stone contained a dim red light, buried below its surface. It faded as she watched, then returned with another touch of warmth. Rory closed her hand around it. The glow shone between her fingers. “Eva, if you can see this, come out.” A branch shifted at the edge of the clearing. There was no wind. The movement was too slight to identify: a withdrawal, perhaps, or the settling of weight. Her phone buzzed. Silas’s name filled the screen. For one clean, practical instant, Rory thought of the gate, the road, the locked door above his bar. Then she read the message. Rory, your bike’s still at the gate. Police are here. It’s Friday. Please call me. She looked at her watch. The second hand passed twelve. 23:53. Wednesday. The crescent scar on her wrist showed white beside the strap. Her phone gave the date as Friday. The time read 02:16. She pressed Silas’s number. The call failed before it connected. No signal. She tried again with the same result, then took a screenshot, though she could not have said what good that would do. Her watch advanced to 23:54. She had been inside for five minutes. Rory put the pendant back beneath her shirt and returned to the entrance. The strip of receipt remained beneath the stone. Rain had soaked it to pulp. When she lifted it, the paper tore along the fold and the ink she had written minutes earlier feathered into grey stains. She counted the boundary. Nine stones. The new one stood between the holly and her entrance, or where her entrance had been. It had the same weathered surface as the others, the same collar of wildflowers. No freshly disturbed soil surrounded it. Rory chose the widest gap and walked. She kept the holly at her back and took a straight line through wet grass. The ground dipped. She stepped over a root, adjusted her course to avoid a patch of bramble and continued without turning. The split oak appeared ahead of her. She stopped. The clearing lay beyond it. Nine stones. White flowers. The pulp of the receipt in her left hand. Behind her, where the holly should have been, rose the dark wall of an oak. She checked her phone. 02:16. Her watch had lost no time and gained none: 23:57. At midnight, something was due to happen. Eva had not said what. Rory looked at the impressions her trainers had left in the grass. They marked her route towards the centre, dark crescents in the wet blades. She followed them with her torch, searching for the point where her straight path had bent. Every print faced inwards. Even the ones she had just made. “Rory.” Eva’s voice came from the boundary. Rory put the split oak between herself and the sound before she answered. “Where are you?” “Outside.” “Silas is outside. So are the police. Speak to them.” A pause. Beyond the oak’s roots, a patch of flowers trembled, though the grass around it remained still. “Don’t bring them here.” “Then come out and give me a reason.” “You brought the pendant.” Rory’s fingers closed around the chain beneath her shirt. “You asked me to.” “I asked you to bring it. Not wear it.” The voice had moved. The first words had come from near the holly. These came from deeper in the clearing, close enough that Rory could hear Eva’s familiar catch on the final consonant. She did not turn towards it. “Which gate did I climb?” “What?” “Richmond Park has gates. You gave me a pin. Tell me which one I used.” The pendant warmed again. This time the pulse lasted long enough for Rory to feel the silver chain heat against her neck. “Take it off, Rory.” “No.” “You don’t know what it does.” “Neither do you.” The voice did not answer. Rory drew the pendant out and held it away from her body. Its inner light had strengthened. Each pulse began as a red point at the centre of the stone and spread to its edges. The chain slipped through her fingers by a fraction. The pendant swung towards the split oak and remained there, straining against the still air. She followed its line with her torch. Between two roots lay a narrow break in the ground. It was no wider than her hand. The beam lit the roots on either side, picked out grains of soil and a beetle folded beneath a leaf, then stopped at the gap. Not darkness waited within it. Her torch simply had nothing left to show. The pendant pulsed. A thread of air moved through the grass around the roots. It smelled of cold stone and, beneath that, the stale sweetness of a room closed for years. Rory stayed where she was. “Eva,” she said, “what was in your message?” The voice answered from the other side of the clearing. “Rory, please.” “What did you write?” “Take it off before it opens.” The gap between the roots had not changed. Rory measured it against the torch in her hand, then against the width of her boot. She needed facts, measurements, anything that would stay the same while she looked at it. Her phone remained in her other hand. No signal. Friday’s date. Silas’s message. She selected Eva’s number and pressed call. The screen displayed CALL FAILED. Under the split oak, a mobile phone began to ring. Three rising electronic notes sounded from the gap, followed by two lower ones. Eva had used the same ridiculous tune since Cardiff, an old game theme she refused to change because it made Rory wince. The sound came muted through whatever lay beneath the clearing, as though the phone were ringing in another room. Rory stared at the roots. The tune stopped. After two seconds, it began again. She pressed Eva’s number a second time. CALL FAILED appeared at once. The ringing continued beneath her feet. Behind Rory, close enough for the words to touch her ear, Eva’s voice said, “That isn’t my phone.”