Chapter 1
Róisín grinned as she pulled her car around the corner. The hill loomed over her, the silhouette of the standing stones just peaking over its crest. Beautiful and magic. It felt good to get out of the city, and especially to this place.
She parked at the edge of the narrow track and cut the engine, letting the quiet settle around her.
She checked the time on her phone, the screen a little too bright on her dusk-adjusted eyes. Just in time. The sun hadn’t fully set yet, though it was close, low and red, bleeding slowly into the horizon.
She grabbed her camera bag from the passenger seat, slung it over her shoulder, and shoved her notebook into the front pocket. It was already thick with sketches, diagrams and half-legible scrawls, the pages warped from damp and use. Her dissertation supervisor had tried to steer her toward something more conventional, understandable… a good grade on a solid topic. This was the final part of her degree afterall, and he reasoned, surely she wanted to do well.
Róisín had refused to switch topics. Her gut told her she was onto something genuinely interesting. A truth unexplored. History is vast but people have had a long time to write about it and she hungered for the thrill of uncovering something fresh.
The stones were a short walk from the road. No signpost. No tourist boards. Just a narrow break in the hedge and a path worn down by sheep and weather. The ground was soft under her shoes, the cold leeching through the soles. She followed the faint track until the first stone came fully into view.
It was smaller than the famous sites, nothing like Newgrange or Carrowkeel, but the stones had the same quiet authority. Seven carved lumps of sandstone, irregularly spaced, mossy and sagging into the ground at time-worn angles. A crisp packet tangled in the grass nearby. Someone had stacked pebbles on top of the nearest one, a walker drawn in by the ritual of the place.
Róisín felt her chest swell as she approached. Old places did that to her. The air was crisp and ancient and she could feel the thousands of footsteps that had trodden this place before her. She brushed her fingers against a stone, it was cold and sure. Here forever.
She stepped into the circle and crouched to unpack her camera, setting up the tripod in the damp grass. She worked quickly while the light was right, snapping shots of the stones from different angles, tracking the lengthening shadows as the sun dipped lower. She checked the alignment of the stones, hills and sun twice, then a third time, frowning as she compared it to the notes she’d sketched earlier that week.
Even accounting for wear and subsidence over time, it wasn’t quite how she had expected it to be. A little off. The people who built these places millennia ago could engineer a 60ft stone passage to precisely catch a single beam of winter solstice sun at dawn, this was rough and sloppy. Shit. Maybe her theory was bollocks afterall.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, startling her enough that she nearly knocked the tripod sideways.
“Jesus,” she muttered, then smiled when she saw Niamh’s name on the screen. She answered before the second ring. “Yes Mammy?”
“Feck off. I’m just checking you’re not dead,” her flatmate replied. “Are you at the field?”
Róisín glanced around her, the stones dark against the sky. “Yep.”
“At night.”
“It’s not night yet.”
“You’re alone. At night. In the back-arse of nowhere. With no streetlights. And no people.”
“I have my phone.”
“Great,” Niamh said. “No danger. You can let me hear your last words if you bump into a serial killer out there? …I said I would have come with you.”
Róisín smiled and adjusted the focus on her camera, her back against one of the stones. She was getting a really good shot of the carvings now that the moonlight shone over them.
“I won’t be long. I just need to take a few more pictures. Then I’ll head back.”
“You said you wouldn't do this again.”
“Do what?”
“Run off in the dark alone like Indiana-fucking-Jones.”
Róisín opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. She leaned back on her heels and let the phone rest against her shoulder while she scribbled into her notebook:
‘Shadow aligns with carving on eastern face. Not solar?’
“I told you I was coming here.”
“You told me you might go.”
“That’s basically the same thing.”
“It is not.”
Róisín laughed softly and rose, moving closer to the tallest stone. Its surface was rough beneath her fingertips, the texture uneven where centuries of wind and rain had bitten into it. She traced a shallow groove running down one side, barely noticeable unless you were looking for it.
“I just—” She hesitated, searching for the right words. “There’s something off about this site.”
Niamh sighed, the sound hissing through the phone. “Off how?” Róisín could almost hear her friend rolling her eyes through the phone.
“I guess not off,” Róisín said. “Just… dismissed. Everyone has written this place off as insignificant. The weird placement as a sign of later reuse. But the wear patterns don’t match that. And the shadows—”
She broke off, watching as a cloud finally rolled back and the moon bathed the place in light.
“Róis?”
“Sorry. I’m watching something.”
“What?”
Róisín didn’t answer straight away, watching the light and the stones and the landscape.
“Róisín?”
“I think,” she said, “that I’ve been looking at it wrong.”
Niamh snorted. “Uh-huh.”
“I mean—everyone assumes that if there is astronomical significance, then these sites are for big obvious moments. Solstices. Equinoxes. Annual rituals. Right?” She flipped open her notebook and began sketching, her pen moving faster now. “But what if it’s not about the position of the sun? What if it’s about… …Fuck’s sake. I can feel it but it’s on the tip of my tongue. Y’know?”
“Is this the part where I remind you that your tutor is expecting your first draft next week?”
“Probably.”
“And that you need to eat occasionally?”
Róisín glanced at the time again. “I promise I’ll come home after this. I just need a few more minutes.”
There was a pause on the line. “You okay?”
Róisín leaned against the stone behind her, letting its coolness sooth her back. The moon cast a wash of light across her open notebook as she habitually tapped the end of her pen against the blank page.
“I’m fine,” she said, and it felt true. “I’m just working on my dissertation as I’m supposed to be doing. Plus it’s really beautiful out here. Like, quiet and ancient. So damn cool.”
Niamh laughed. “That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
Róisín smiled and continued writing, only half listening as Niamh, apparently now reassured enough, launched into a rambling, gossipy rant. Róisín hmmmm’ed at the right places, her attention drifting between the familiar cadence of her friend’s voice and the way the moonlight slid across the stone beside her.
She didn’t hear the footsteps at first.
Niamh was still talking on the other end of the phone. Something about tomorrow’s rehearsal and a hot new fiddle-player for the band.
Róisín’s pen paused mid-word. She strained to listen, picking up the sounds coming from further down the hill.
“Róis?” Niamh said. “Are you listening? I just said- ”
“Shh,” Róisín whispered. She tilted her head, listening past the phone, past the breeze brushing the grass. There it was again. The beat of shoes against earth.
Someone was running.
Her pulse leapt in her chest. She straightened, desperately scanning the darkness beyond the stones. The moonlight only reached so far, leaving the field beyond hidden in shadow.
“Niamh,” she said. “I think someone’s—”
A scream tore through the night, echoing off the stones around her.
It was close. Too close.
Róisín ducked, the phone slipping in her grip. She tried to get to her feet, but her shoes slipped in the wet grass. Drunk students? A fight? Someone messing about?
The runner thundered toward her now— his breathing heavy and desperate. A figure burst out of the shadow of the hill and into the moonlight between the stones, stumbling, his eyes darting to her and around the circle. There was blood on his shirt. So much blood.
“Help—” he gasped.
Something followed him out of the dark.
Róisín had just enough time to register the movement, a blur, impossibly fast, before the man was wrenched sideways. There was a sound like wet fabric tearing.
Blood sprayed across her face and chest in a hot, soaking arc. It struck the stone behind her with a dull splatter, streaking the pale rock.
Róisín screamed.
Her knees buckled. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Her body locked in place, terror pinning her to the spot.
The man’s body lay collapsed in front of her.
His head was gone.
The blood began to pump from the ragged opening of his neck, dark and rhythmic, soaking into the grass and mixing with the fresh dew.
Róisín gagged. She looked up.
A figure stood between the stones. Tall. Shadowed. Too sharp. Too still. He took a step toward the body, then slowed, as if noticing her for the first time.
Her mind finally regained control of her heavy limbs.
Run!
She pressed her fingers against the stone behind her, trying to push herself upright, but her hands slipped, slick with the sprayed blood as she had defensively put her hands up. She fumbled her hand against the rock searching for leverage. This time her bloody palm made full contact with the stone.
The world dropped away.
The night went quiet, replaced by a deep, pounding ring that filled her skull. Her vision narrowed to a pinpoint and then vanished entirely, swallowed by darkness. For a moment, an eternity, there was nothing but the pressure in her ears, like the sensation of falling without moving.
Then the ringing receded.
Her sight returned in a rush of blurred shapes and silver light. She blinked hard, gasping, her breath coming in sharp, painful pulls.
The shadowed figure was gone.
The body was still there.
Róisín clamped a hand over her mouth, stifling a sob as bile burned at the back of her throat. Blood coated her lips. She could taste it— metallic and thick, clinging no matter how hard she swallowed.
Her ears rang again, sharp and disorienting.
When the sound faded this time, she realised she was no longer alone.
A man stood a few paces away, just inside the circle of stones.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, his presence filling the space without effort. Long hair fell loose around his face. His clothes were dark, old-fashioned, and spattered with blood.
He was watching her. Not the body. Her.
His eyes fixed on her, watching intently with a faint crease in his brow.
“Help,” she said, barely audible. She wasn’t sure she’d even spoken aloud until his jaw tightened.
He hesitated. His gaze flicked to the stone behind her, to the blood smeared across it, then back to her face.
Then he stepped forward and took her arm, his grip firm but not rough, guiding her out through a gap in the stones.
“We can’t stay here,” he said.
His voice was low, steady.
Róisín stumbled as he led her, her legs weak, her mind still reeling. She twisted once, looking back over her shoulder.
Her phone lay face-up in the grass, screen lit. Niamh’s name glowed insistently as it rang again.
Then the man pulled her onward, and the scene slipped out of view.
The ringing stopped.
The clouds moved over the moon once more and night closed in around them.
She felt weak and her head throbbed with pain. In the dark she could barely tell as her vision darkened but she heard the man swear and felt him pick her up in his arms. Her head rested against his chest, feeling the rhythm of his breath and footsteps as he carried her away into the night and she lost consciousness.
