AI Rory had not intended to stay past the gates. She had intended to check, and leave. That was the rule she had set for herself while she locked her bike to the railings outside Richmond Park, while the last joggers thinned out and the deer moved deeper into the dark between the trees. Check, and leave. The pendant had been warm for three nights straight, a low, insistent heat against her sternum that would not ease even when she took it off and left it on the kitchen table above Silas' bar. On the third night it had pulsed when she turned north on her delivery route for the Golden Empress, and pulsed stronger the further she went, until she stood with a bag of cooling food in one hand and understood that if she did not follow it tonight she would follow it tomorrow, and the night after that, until following it became the only thing she did.
She pushed her straight, shoulder-length hair back from her face and stepped off the main path.
The park at night had always been too large for her comfort, but she had walked it before in daylight, cutting through to the quieter edges when she needed to think. At night it was a different place. The streetlamps by the gate threw orange pools that did not reach far. Beyond them the trees were black columns and the ground was soft and uneven, covered in last year's leaves that gave slightly under her trainers. Her breath fogged. It was October, and the air smelled of damp earth and distant rain that had not yet fallen. Somewhere west a fox screamed once, thin and animal, and then stopped.
She found the stones because the present she had been following tightened, suddenly , into a point directly ahead of her.
They were not the tidy stones of a monument. They were thick, weathered, half-sunk, streaked with moss and lichen, and the old oaks grew so close around them that their roots gripped the stone as if to hold it down. Ancient oak standing stones marked the boundary, the guidebook in the library had said, though the guidebook had not said boundary of what. Rory stood for a moment with her hand on the warm pendant through her jumper, her bright blue eyes fixed on the gap between two of the stones, and then she stepped through before she could talk herself out of it.
The Grove was quieter in a way that had nothing to do with volume. She felt it first in her ears. On the park side there had been that faint, constant wash of London, traffic on the roads beyond the park, a plane, the creak of branches. Here there was nothing laid over the silence . No wind moved the high leaves. The hair at the nape of her neck, which had stuck damp to her skin on the path, lifted and fell and then hung still. She stood very still herself, listening for her own breathing, which came too loud and quick.
The wildflowers should not have been there. She knew that with a part of her mind that catalogued things whether she wanted it to or not. Foxgloves and cowslips and small, red poppies she could not name bloomed in dense clumps between the trees, their colours too saturated in the dim light, as if the dark were a colour after all, and a deep one. They had no scent she could pick out, only the heavy sweetness of the place itself, like rotting fruit under honey. When she brushed one with her ankle it did not bend so much as spring back long after she had passed, slower than it should have.
She tried to be methodical . At twenty-five she had learned to be methodical about fear, the way she had learned to be methodical about everything since leaving Cardiff and Evan and the life her parents had mapped for her in such clean lines. Pre-Law had taught her to make a list. So she made one. Pendant warm. Stones crossed. Flowers out of season. Silence wrong. She did not add the other item to the list, the one that sat at the back of her mind and would not come forward: the note that had been tucked into her delivery bag a week ago, in handwriting she did not recognise, three words only. It is near. She had assumed it was a joke, or a mistake. The pendant had been a gift from an unknown benefactor too, left for her with no name attached, and she had kept it because it was beautiful and because taking it off made her feel oddly exposed. Now the stone in it, deep crimson and no bigger than her thumbnail, glowed faintly against her skin through the fabric, as if lit from inside.
A twig snapped behind her.
She turned too fast. The movement sent a small, dull pain through her shoulder where she carried delivery bags all day. There was nothing behind her but flowers and the dark spaces between trunks. No deer, though there should have been deer. In Richmond Park at night the deer were always there, a hush of movement, eyes catching light. Here she could not find even the suggestion of them. She held her breath and counted the seconds until her lungs burned. One, two, three. On the fourth second something else made a sound, softer. A rustle. Not wind. A shifting of weight , as if something had decided to stand differently on the soft ground.
She walked forward to give herself something to do.
The ground was spongy and the light was wrong, a kind of moonless grey that came from no source she could identify and made every shadow look shallow. She looked up once, through the canopy, and could not find the moon or the stars. That bothered her more than it should have. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check the time and the screen woke too brightly, washing her hands white. Eleven forty-seven. She stared at it. She had locked her bike at eleven forty-five by the tower clock. Two minutes. She thumbed the side button to wake it again. Eleven forty-seven. The battery indicator had dropped from forty percent to thirty-nine and then, while she watched, back up to forty. She turned the phone face down and put it away.
The warmth in the pendant increased. Not steadily, but in pulses that matched, she realised with a cold prickling up her arms, the rhythm of her own heart. It thumped against her breastbone, warm, warm, warm, then fell quiet for a count and thumped again. She slipped her hand under her jumper and closed her fingers around it. The silver chain dug into her neck. The stone was hot enough to be uncomfortable. She thought, absurdly, of the scar on her left wrist, that small crescent left from a childhood accident, and the way her thumb still went to it when she was nervous . She rubbed it now, hard, until the skin smarted.
She decided to go back. That was the sensible thing. Turn round, find the stones, cross again, be in the park where the lamps were and the path was and the deer were, and let whoever had sent the note and the pendant find someone else to follow. She turned and walked.
After a minute she stopped, because the stone in front of her had a dark split down its middle shaped like a long, thin leaf, and she was certain she had passed it going in. After another minute she stopped again, because her trainers had left prints in the soft earth and the prints were ahead of her as well as behind her, leading away from the boundary in the same direction she was walking . She crouched. The prints were shallow, too shallow for her weight , and there were more of them than hers, overlapped and overlapped again, going round in an arc.
The pendant throbbed .
She stood up and called out, because the silence had begun to feel like something pressing on her eardrums. "Hello?" Her voice came back to her flattened and close, as if the trees had caught it and handed it straight back. "I'm just leaving," she said. "I don't want any trouble." The words sounded foolish and small. She cleared her throat. "Rory Carter. I'm just passing through." She said her full name because in films people did that, and because she wanted the sound of a real person to fill the space, a person with a flat in London and a job and parents in Cardiff who would expect her home for Christmas.
Something moved at the edge of her vision, between two oaks.
It was not a shape at first. It was the sense that a shape had been there and was no longer there, a dark that had briefly been darker. She snapped her head round and saw only flowers. She did it again, slower, and caught it at the very limit of sight, a vertical smudge that vanished when she tried to fix it. A tree. It had to be a tree. She told herself that. Trees shifted when you were tired and your eyes were adjusting . But her eyes were not tired. Her eyes were wide open and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth, and the smudge was in a place where there had been no tree a moment before, or perhaps where there had been a tree all along and she had simply not looked.
She began to walk faster, not running, because running would make noise and because the ground was too soft and root-tangled to run safely. The pendant's heat spread outwards now, making her sternum ache. She pressed her palm over it to muffle it and felt her own pulse jump under her fingers, out of time with the stone. That frightened her most of all. She could not get the two rhythms to agree. Hers went fast, faster. The pendant went slow, deliberate, patient.
"Stop it," she whispered. She did not know if she meant the pendant or the place.
A voice said, "Rory."
It was not loud. It did not need to be. It came from the left, where the trees thickened, and it used the name her friends used, the short name Eva had given her when they were children and that her parents had never once used. She froze with one foot lifted off the ground. The voice had her mother's cadence, she thought, the musical Welsh rise at the end of a question, and then she thought it had Eva's laugh in it, and then she thought it had neither, and that the similarity was the point. She did not answer. She set her foot down very carefully and took no other step.
"Rory," the voice said again, a little closer, or perhaps exactly the same distance and only clearer because she was listening harder. "You came."
She had not come for anyone. She had come because the pendant was warm. She wanted to say that. She wanted to say, I came because it was warm, I don't know why, I don't want anything. But her mouth was dry. She swallowed and tasted metal. The wildflowers all around her seemed to be leaning, minutely, away from her, as if a breeze had passed through them and then decided not to continue. The scent thickened. It was sweet and it was wrong, like breath from a closed room.
She walked. She did not run. She walked in a straight line now, as straight as she could make it, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, counting to keep herself steady. Ten steps. Twenty. The pendant pulsed against her ribs and then, for a long moment, went cold. The cold was worse. It was the abrupt, absolute cold of a stone taken from a river in winter. She gasped. Her fingers, which had been curled tight around the pendant, cramped. She let go. The chain swung free and the pendant knocked once against her collarbone, hard and cold, and hung still.
Behind her, on the soft earth, she heard footsteps . They did not match hers. They came a fraction late, as if an echo had learned to walk, and they stopped when she stopped and started again when she started, always half a step behind. She could not bear it. She turned, quickly , swinging her arms, her hair whipping across her face, and found the flowers and the trunks and the blank grey light. Nothing that could make a footstep. But the prints in the earth were fresh, curving round her where she stood, and they were not hers.
She ran then, short and clumsy, stumbling over a root, catching herself on a tree whose bark was rough with moss. The cold of the pendant burned through her jumper. She ran because the footsteps had begun to come faster and because she could hear, very faintly, other sounds now that she had made enough noise to cover them, soft taps, like fingernails against wood, coming from all sides and none, and she understood that if she kept still the taps would come closer. Somewhere ahead the ground dipped and the flowers grew denser, so that she had to push through them with her hands. They sprang back against her legs, cold and wet, and closed behind her without a sound.
She reached a clearing at the centre of the Grove, if clearing was the word for a space where the trees stood further apart and the oaks were bigger and older. The air here was colder still. Her breath fogged thickly. The pendant was cold, utterly cold, and the faint inner glow she had seen through her jumper on the path was gone . She stood in the middle of that cold with her hands empty at her sides and realised that the footsteps had stopped too. The taps had stopped. The silence had returned, but it was a different silence now, alert. Waiting.
She backed until her shoulders hit a standing stone. It was cold through her jumper and the rough surface dug into her back. She slid down until she was sitting with her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them, her chin tucked down into her chest so that her hair fell forward and hid her face. From inside that curtain of black hair she listened. She could hear nothing except the blood in her own ears and, once, very far away, a bird that was not a bird, a single note that kept repeating because it could not remember how to finish.
She did not know how long she sat there. Time inside the Grove, the library book had said in an offhand footnote she had only half read, moved differently. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She checked her phone once, with fingers that shook so badly she nearly dropped it. Eleven forty-seven. She checked again a while later, or what felt like a while later . Eleven forty-seven. The battery sat at forty percent. She put the phone away and took the pendant off over her head. The chain caught on her hair. She held the stone in her palm and it was cold and dead and ordinary, thumbnail-sized, crimson dark as dried blood. She stared at it until her eyes watered and then, because she could not bear to hold it any longer, she put it back on. It was warmer than the air. It had to be close. Whatever it was near, it was near.
When she lifted her head, the trees at the edge of the clearing were not empty.
She could not have said when they had arrived, or how. They were standing beyond the flowers, upright, still, in the grey light that showed no other shadows. They were not close. They had not come close. They were simply there now, in a loose line between the trunks, tall enough that she had to tilt her head up to see where their heads might have been, though she could not make out heads at all, only the continuation of tallness against the dark. If she looked directly at them, her vision slid off. They were the movement at the edge of things, made permanent. They did not advance. They did not speak. They waited with a patience that had nothing human in it, and she understood, sitting with her back against the cold stone and her knees to her chest, that waiting was what they had been doing all along, and that she had walked a long way to join them in it.
She closed her eyes. She told herself that if she closed her eyes they would perhaps be gone when she opened them. She counted to ten. She counted to a hundred. The pendant against her sternum gave one slow, warm pulse , like a heart remembering how to beat.