An Invocation of Monsters (The Void Book 2), page 12
I stopped in place, staring at him. He still wore his usual whites and beiges—no color for this Society kid.
But now he wore a crown of white flowers with it, along with red paint streaked liberally across his face.
“Um… did I miss a memo about dressing up?” I asked, staring at three lines extending from the corner of his eye to his jaw, clearly drawn on with his fingers.
Kase smiled, a hint of self-consciousness playing about his lips. “You’re not a full Society member yet, so no. This’ll come later, after your induction.”
“Tonight?” I asked, locking the door behind me as I followed him out into the hall.
He shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe. Every moment you spend in the Lodge, you’re being vetted for entry. A lot of people get asked to leave after a week when it’s clear they’re not our sort of people.”
“The sort of people who see the doorways, right?”
He led me outside, towards the forest path that cut through the abandoned village. “Yeah. You’ve got to have a touch of the extradimensional to your essential genetic make-up to see one at all. Some have more, some have less. Gillian was probably the strongest Society member, but Mary and Joseph have seen plenty of doors.”
“How many have you seen?” I was up to two, and couldn’t help but wonder what the average count was. Did they have a running tally somewhere?
“One.” Kase smiled sheepishly. “But that’s more than a lot of people, so… I’m not upset. I just have to work harder at opening my mind to the Things Beyond.”
“So how many have Mary and Joseph seen?” I asked, picking my way around a fallen log. Kase had pulled out a large Coleman lantern, otherwise I would’ve tripped right over it and eaten dirt.
He hesitated for a full minute. “Mary says she has seen ten. Joseph says he’s seen seven.”
Before I could stop myself, I’d snorted and blurted out, “Bullshit.”
But Kase didn’t take offense. The line of his shoulders relaxed.
“Don’t tell them I said this, but… yeah. I love them, but I think they’re insecure that they couldn’t quite measure up to Gillian.” He cut a sideways glance at me, the shadows playing across his young face making him seem oddly sinister. “I already told you that she actually went through and met the Things Beyond.”
I made suitably awed noises, even though this was old news to me.
But the good thing about Kase was that once you got him rolling on a subject, he happily took the wheel.
“She opened the door and actually communed with them, becoming a vessel for their power.” The fanatic gleam in the eye I’d seen before had lit up again. “No one else has done it since.”
I bit my lip, keeping mum.
“But you know what really supports my theory?” Kase continued. “Gillian said she found five doors, and she was there. She was actually on the other side. So I think Mary and Joseph are just trying to one-up her, because there hasn’t been any sign that the Things Beyond have communed with them. You can find all the doors you want, but it doesn’t matter if the other side doesn’t want you. It’ll keep you from crossing over.”
“So you’ve seen a door, but you haven’t crossed?” We passed through the village, and on a hunch, I watched Kase’s gaze as we passed the building where chalk marks were still just visible on the ground, where Toth had been trapped.
Kase didn’t notice the marks at all. “No, not fully. Sometimes if I sort of… peer in I can get a glimpse of the other side, but that’s about it. I have to concentrate really hard just for that. Joseph said it's because my genetic lineage is weak, but… I can’t do much of anything about that. So I’m going to keep up with my studies and maybe I’ll be able to cross over one day.”
It was the second time he’d mentioned genetics, and there was a feeling I didn’t like very much forming in the pit of my stomach.
Especially when combined with the fact that all of these people looked the same. They could’ve all fallen off the same branch of a family tree. Dirty blonde hair, blue eyes… and yet somehow none of them appeared to be actually related.
Of the visitors who’d been asked to leave the Lodge, I wondered how many had dark hair or eyes. My own father, Benjamin, had been dark-haired, and they had no compunctions about telling me how he hadn’t been fit for their group.
“So what about Willow? How many has she seen?”
We turned off the beaten path I’d come to know, into deeper forest. Now we were on an uphill incline.
“She’s seen two so far, but Mary has high hopes for her. She thinks Willow’s from a strong line, and could potentially cross over in a few years when she comes into her prime.” He kicked a rock aside as we climbed. “I won’t lie, I’m a little jealous of you, though.”
“Me?” I was somewhat surprised. Kase was weird, but he more or less seemed like a nice kid.
“Yeah. You’re Gillian’s daughter.” He said it like a benediction. “You come from the strongest line of all. We all knew you’d see a door within days of being here, that went without saying. They’ve been planning your induction ceremony since you showed up. You’ve already crossed over, it’s only a matter of time before you speak with the Things Beyond. But look…”
He glanced around, as though someone were hiding behind a tree and eavesdropping on us. When he was sure Mary wasn’t about to jump out and shout surprise!, he leaned in closer.
“You already know what it is,” he whispered. “You’ve been to the Void. Have you met them yet?”
I was out of breath from the steep incline, and gratefully stopped for a moment to catch my breath. Kase was watching me, rapt, as I wiped sweat off my forehead.
“Yes.” Despite myself, I spoke it in a whisper. “I’ve spoken to them.”
He stared at me, his free hand clenching and unclenching. A brief spasm crossed his face.
Something in that look made me want to back away from him.
Finally he mastered himself. “Jesus. It’s going to take me another five years of study just to cross over, let alone speak with the Ones on the Other Side. I’m really happy for you, though. I hope someday we can talk like this over there… in the Void.”
He smiled at me shyly, looking so young and hopeful that I felt bad for the instinctual reaction.
He was just a kid with extreme pressure on him to do something most normal people could never even conceive of.
We kept moving, puffing our way up a heavily-wooded ridge. The trail was worn, but so thin and faint that if you didn’t know it was here, it would be easily missed.
“But it all comes down to the luck of the draw,” he added, a tinge of bitterness in his tone. “You’re from a pure and ancient blood. Joseph ran ancestry tests on the rest of us. He said Willow is pretty close to pure, but my bloodline is polluted, so it’ll be much harder for me.”
And there it was again. The sinking, horrible feeling that there was something going on in the background of the Lodge and its Society that was going to look very ugly when dragged out into the light of day.
“There’s no such thing as ‘polluted’ blood,” I snapped. “And exactly what does Joseph claim he is, hmm?”
Kase mumbled something under his breath.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that.”
He took a deep breath, scowling. “He and Mary are ninety-nine percent pure.”
“Funny how that works out, huh?”
My companion was silent.
I softened a little. There was a lot I didn’t like about the Wendigo Society and its current two leaders, and a few things had clicked into place while Kase opened up to me.
He was just a teenage boy, without any blood relatives here as far as I could tell, in the thrall of an older, more experienced man.
A man who I knew to be quite an excellent actor.
“Stop thinking of yourself as tainted, Kase. His ancestry tests are probably complete bullshit. There is no such thing as ‘polluted’ or ‘pure’ blood. He’s just telling you that to break down your self-confidence and make you reliant on his guidance.”
Kase’s lips, flattened to a thin line, twitched a little, but he didn’t speak.
“I’m willing to bet cold, hard cash that if you and I took actual DNA tests, there’d be almost no difference between us. You’re being sold a lie.”
He shook his head a little, pulling ahead a step or two.
I sighed. Joseph was using Cult 101 tactics on teenagers, and unfortunately, I had no idea how to break through to Kase.
I was also willing to bet that if I went looking, I’d find out that Kase and Willow either didn’t have any surviving relatives, or that they had been failed by their parents. They were probably already vulnerable in some way before Joseph found them, two malleable minds for him to mold to his liking.
“I’m sorry. Where did you come from, Kase?” I asked, trying to make it sound casually curious. “How old were you and Willow when you were inducted into the Society?”
Kase slowed, his face already returning to its usual happy expression. He was easy to please. “I was thirteen. Willow was twelve.”
The poor kid. Offer him kindness, and he opened up again like a flower in the sun. I wondered if that was how Joseph got his claws into them in the first place.
But my stomach churned as he spoke.
“My mom died when I was a kid, so I know how it feels.” He offered me a sympathetic smile. “My dad was… well, he wasn’t great. A lot of time for booze, not a lot of time for me. After my second stay in Juvie, Joseph found me. He saved my life. He brought me here as part of a program to get my shit together, and that’s how he found out that I was one of the bloodline. When I first saw the door… that’s when I realized I had more to live for. And Willow, she was in the same boat. We owe a lot to Joseph, because without him, we never would’ve found our calling.”
I suppressed a groan by grunting with effort instead. My calves were on fire.
So they had been vulnerable, and that’s how he’d targeted them. It wasn’t lost on me that while Kase, a headstrong teen boy, was slowly crushed under Joseph’s heel until he was willing to bark like a dog for a drop of affection, Willow was treated like a princess.
He’d isolated the exact elements required to keep them under his thumb, so desperate to reach the doors to the Void and please their new mentor.
As we struggled up the last portion of the ridge, I mulled it over. I had a bad feeling about why Joseph might want to build up Willow’s self-esteem as being a super special pure-blood princess.
There was no way to draw them out. I was no psychologist, and didn’t have the skills to fully understand or undermine Joseph; Kase and Willow, although they still looked like children to me, were both legally adults.
I had no way of fighting him, especially on his home turf. This was Joseph’s playground, and if I didn’t play by his rules, I’d be forced out.
When we reached the top of the ridge, the wheels churning in my mind ground to a halt. I’d been so focused on Kase I hadn’t realized how far we’d climbed.
The lake shimmered below, a black mirror set in the forest. A hint of vertigo touched me, making my stomach flip, and Kase took my hand.
“Stay away from the edge,” he told me. “That’s a long way to fall.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I muttered, putting a solid ten-foot boundary between myself and that drop.
We followed the trail along the cliff, and when I saw a light through the trees, I wanted to sigh with relief.
The trees finally opened on a bonfire, and I suppressed a gasp.
Mary, Joseph, and Willow were waiting for us, their scarlet-streaked faces illuminated by flames. The heat of the fire conflicted with the brilliance of the silver moon overhead; with their pale clothes and bloody-looking faces, it was like walking into a pagan ritual.
But it was the stone plate they all stood on, etched with alien runes, that made me gasp.
It was a mirror of the ruins in the Void.
17
Elle
“Welcome, Elle.” Joseph rose, holding out his arms. The fire flickered off his painted face, making him look far more sinister than usual. “Join us.”
I stepped forward onto the stone circle, hyper-aware of the sheer drop off a cliff only a few feet away.
From this vantage point, I could see the lights of the Lodge across the lake, several hundred feet below us. I’d been so caught up in what Kase was saying that I hadn't realized how far we’d walked.
“Tonight we begin the process of initiation.” He raised a hand, indicating the full moon. “Now you will learn of the history, and soon, you will be brought fully into the fold.”
I imitated Mary, sitting cross-legged on the stone across the fire from her. She smiled at me, her lips dripping red paint like blood.
Kase settled next to Willow, who stared into the flames as though mesmerized by them. His eyes flicked between me and Joseph, but he said nothing.
“You must understand these things,” Mary told me, as Joseph settled next to her. We were all spaced evenly around the flames; if lines were drawn between us, we would all have formed a perfect pentagram. “The Wendigo Society has a long and rich history behind it, a history that took much sacrifice to make real. Sacrifice of the mind, body, and soul.”
Joseph cleared his throat. “The story of the Society begins three hundred years ago. All of this—” He held out a hand, encompassing the lake and the forest. “This was the wilderness. True wilderness. It took men and women of unsurpassed courage to cut their way through these forests and build their homes here. And when they had tamed their little slice of the wilds, they called it Deepwater for the lake they had settled near.”
He smiled at me, paint cracking at the corners of his mouth. “The village ruins in the forest are the remains of the original Deepwater.”
Mary nodded as he spoke, taking up the thread herself. “Deepwater was a small, very insular town. It was difficult to reach, and unwelcoming to outsiders. We dug long and hard for this history; from what we now know, it was a thriving community despite its remote location… except for the disappearances. Young women in particular had a habit of vanishing into thin air.
“Perhaps because of this, they were very superstitious people. We’ve explored the ruins ourselves and found witch bottles beneath nearly every foundation, and from surviving historical accounts, they were particularly adamant against stepping foot outside at night.”
That sounded about right to me. If you lived in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere in the 1700s, odds were pretty good that going outside at night was a dicey risk at best.
But I kept my thoughts to myself, absorbed in listening to what they had to say.
“The final first-person account of Deepwater was testimony given by a woodsman in August of 1793. He was heading there to visit his aunt, but when he arrived, Deepwater was completely empty of souls.”
It was Joseph’s turn, and something in the way they switched off, seamlessly telling the story, was hypnotizing. “There had not been fire nor flood. The houses still stood there, but the people had simply… vanished. All of them. There were plates left on tables, ovens gone cold with bread half-baked in them, shoes left by doors.
“It was as if every person in Deepwater had just walked out barefoot, leaving no tracks behind. He returned to Dunwich, contacted the constables, and when they investigated, they could find nothing else explaining the disappearances. Deepwater became an enigma overnight, a child’s ghost story, and was eventually forgotten.”
He fell silent for a long moment, and a log popped in the fire. I watched as sparks swirled upward, towards the silvery moon. A chill went down my spine as I imagined where, exactly, all of those vanished people might be now.
“But Deepwater didn’t fully die, not then,” Mary finally said. “A spiritualist from London named Margaret Vaughn bought the land and property not even fifty years later, and used the remains of Deepwater to build the original Lodge. That is why the houses are ruins now; the timbers and stones of those houses are now in the bones of the Lodge itself.”
Despite myself, I was a little shocked by that. What sort of psychopath would use the remains of a ghost town to build their fancy new home?
I wasn’t one to fear ghosts—not that I’d ever seen one—but it was still eerie to think that when I went to bed, I was sleeping surrounded by the house of someone who had disappeared off the face of the earth.
“But let us move forward from there, to late in the last century.” Mary stared into the fire as she spoke; Kase and Willow were doing the same. “Margaret Vaughn sensed, I think, the otherworldly nature of this particular patch of land, but she was only one person. In the end, it took five of us to fully uncover the history of this area.
“We met at the Miskatonic University in the fall of ‘78: myself, Joseph, Gillian, and Tasha.” Mary smiled fondly, her eyes clouded with memory. “The original four of what would become the Wendigo Society. Of course we were all immediately friends; we were outcasts, losers, the dregs. The oddballs obsessed with the occult.”
My stomach cramped; this was history I had never been privy to. The side of my mother she had always hidden from me.
“Except Gillian,” Joseph said softly. “She was… like the sun, drawing all of us into her orbit. Everyone gravitated to her, and she quickly became the leader of our ragtag little group. We might’ve splintered under other circumstances, but with Gigi in charge, we were immediately put to work on our strengths. Everything she did was intended to strengthen us as a whole.”
Mary’s smile had fractured, her lips thinning. “Gillian did have a knack for taking an idea and running with it. Soon we were meeting every night, comparing our new talents as we learned, digging through the darkest, dustiest archives of the University for more knowledge. I… I saw things there…” She shook her head slowly. “That University was a place like this, a place where the veil between worlds grows thin. I can’t help but think it was fate that we all met there.
