Page 111 of An Invocation of Monsters

She was mysterious and smelled like patchouli, a scent that haunted him.

I settled into my pillows, unable to resist rolling my eyes at the endless paragraphs of purple prose about my mother.

But I could read between the lines: while Joseph meandered on and on like a lovestruck calf about every time Gillian talked to him, I could just imagine my mother smiling and nodding, humoring this guy.

Mary and Tasha made their appearances, becoming his new best friends over the course of that year, but for my mother, he’d reserved the largest chunks of text.

I found myself growing bored with Joseph as I continued.

The four of them had formed a bond, instituting their own areas of study outside of class time, digging into forbidden texts that were only to be found in the Miskatonic University.

My mother had apparently engineered an entire elaborate project that was devised for the sole purpose of accessing a single page of the Book of Eibon, which I’d never heard of, but according to Joseph, that one page had been exceedingly dangerous.

My god. My mother had been stealing texts and digging into areas of the occult no one else had ever heard of, and all Joseph managed to do was wax eloquent about how pretty her hair was while she did it.

What a small-minded little man.

Even though I found him lacking, his journal drew me in with tales of my mother.

She’d gotten her page from the Book of Eibon, all right.

And she was ravenous for more.

Apparently my mother had been excellent at charming her teachers; she soon gained their trust enough to be allowed access to the Asenath Archives far below the Miskatonic, where she obsessively read books like De Vermis Mysteriis and The King in Yellow.

But it wasn’t until the next year, when she’d found a book called the Necronomicon, that the journal began to change.

Joseph read that book as well, and soon his journal entries grew angrier, his pen slashing across the page; his neat lines were now disordered and sometimes moved up and down the page instead of left to right.

He had changed, though his obsession with Gillian hadn’t.

Mary suggested they spend a summer in Deepwater Lodge, her family home. Everyone jumped at the chance, but Joseph wrote about how happy he was that he’d get to see Gillian outside of school.

He documented all of it.

The rituals, the animal sacrifices, the long nights spent chanting on the clifftops.

He wrote about how Desirée was strangely compliant to Mary’s will; he considered Mary in abstract terms, wondering if she was worth stringing along. Gillian, he said, was too headstrong sometimes.

She plunged too deep, too fast, without waiting for anyone else.

I lost track of time as I consumed Joseph’s words. The sun skidded by, illuminating the pages, all the faster for me to devour them.

And then, he wrote, Gillian finally opened the first door.

He was furious; Gillian had promised to bring them with her, but she pushed ahead.

He was in a frothing rage when my mother returned. She tried to explain that she hadn’t been able to bring him through, that the things on the other side had no interest in him.

Joseph contemplated killing her.

He lamented it, giving flowery words to his feelings, but all the same… he’d wanted to kill her.

But he decided he would be gracious and allow her another chance.

It wasn’t until Gillian started returning from this place she called the Void with flushed cheeks and mussed hair that he grew suspicious again.

He regretfully informed me, the dear reader, that she broke down one night and confessed all after he broke her wrist: she had met a monster.

---