Veltham Wood at midnight was a different city.
The sounds of traffic and the distant percussion of someone’s music from an upper flat fell away within thirty feet of the tree line, replaced by something that wasn’t quite silence but was silence’s close relative — a dense, pressurized quiet in which every footstep on dead leaves felt like a small announcement. The oaks here were old enough that their canopies knit together overhead, blocking the sky and the orange ambient glow of the city, leaving us in a darkness that our torch beams barely dented. The trunks were massive and dark-barked, furred with moss in long vertical stripes, their root systems erupting from the earth in tangled arches that made the ground uneven and treacherous. The air smelled of wet soil and something else — something faintly sweet and faintly wrong, the way certain flowers smell lovely until you get too close and realize the sweetness is decay.
We moved in a loose cluster. Simisola and I ahead, Ekene and Guadalupe just behind, Tomasz at the rear. Our torches threw lurching shadows between the trees.
Ten minutes in, Guadalupe stopped.
“There.”
A figure, standing between two oaks perhaps forty feet ahead. It was wearing running gear — the same neon-yellow jacket Simisola had described. It was standing with its back to us, very still, in a way that no person stands still. Not frozen in surprise, not waiting. Just… paused. Like a video on hold.
“Davide,” Simisola said, and her voice cracked on the second syllable.
The figure turned. And it was Davide’s face, Davide’s build, but the expression it wore was one I can only describe as approximate — a smile assembled from memory rather than feeling, the eyes tracking us with an attention that was too even, too consistent, without the small flickers and adjustments of a real person’s gaze.
“Simi,” it said. The voice was right. That was almost worse.
“Where is he?” Simisola asked. She didn’t move toward it. I put a hand on her arm and she let me.
The thing wearing Davide’s face tilted its head. It looked at each of us in turn with that steady, cataloguing attention. Then it looked past us, back toward the tree line we’d come through, and something in its expression shifted — not softened, exactly, but recalculated.
“Further in,” it said. “You’ll need to go further in.”
That was when Tomasz walked past me.
“Tomasz.” I grabbed his sleeve.
He pulled free, not roughly, but with a certainty that frightened me. “I can hear him,” he said. He wasn’t looking at the Davide-thing. He was looking deeper into the wood, into the dark between the trees where our torches didn’t reach. “Something’s calling. Don’t you hear it?”
None of us heard anything.
“Tomasz, stop.” Ekene moved to block him, and for a moment the two of them stood chest to chest, Tomasz’s face turned toward that unreachable dark with an expression I had never seen on him before — not hunger, not fear, but a kind of yearning that looked almost peaceful.
“Let me go,” Tomasz said quietly. “There’s something in there that belongs to me.”
“There’s nothing in there that belongs to you,” Guadalupe said, her voice sharp and flat. “That’s what it wants you to think. That’s the mechanism.”
She was right. I knew she was right. But Tomasz’s certainty was a physical thing in the air between us, and for three long seconds I wasn’t sure Ekene could hold him.
Then Simisola stepped forward, put both hands on Tomasz’s face, and made him look at her.
“My brother came back wrong,” she said. Steady. Absolute. “I will not let the same thing happen to you.”
Something in Tomasz’s face shifted. The yearning drained out of it slowly, like color from a bruise healing in reverse.
“Okay,” he said. His voice had gone hoarse. “Okay.”
The Davide-thing had not moved during any of this. It watched us with that patient, assembled expression.
“Further in,” it said again. “That’s the only way.”
—
We found the real Davide twenty minutes deeper into the wood, sitting against the base of an oak so old its trunk had split and grown back together into a shape like a doorway. He was conscious but slow, the way people are after a shock, his eyes tracking us with a recognizable, imperfect, entirely human attention.
“Simi,” he said, and the nickname came out slurred and automatic and absolutely real.
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