Page 43 of An Invocation of Monsters

I had to return to the Void and find the monsters myself.

13

Elle

I curled my toes on the cold wood of the dock and stared down into the water.

I’d stripped off my boots and gloves and hidden them behind a forsythia bush, and tucked my camera down into the toe of one of my boots.

Someone would have to be searching really hard to find them there, even if I didn’t like the idea of leaving my things available to be plundered by the Society.

But I couldn’t risk ruining my camera while trying to breach the Void once more. I wondered how my mother had gotten her Polaroids in the other world; maybe she’d wrapped the camera in plastic bags on her way in.

Or maybe there were other doors.

But the only way I knew into the Void was in the water, so that’s where I’d go first.

I hoped that it wasn’t a one-time deal.

Knowing that the water was warm didn’t make it any easier to jump in. With the cold wind and the dock feeling icy underfoot, my lizard brain was screaming at me to stay away from the water, insisting the temperature had to match its surroundings.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and jumped.

Warmth enveloped me, my clothes immediately saturating and dragging me down. I kicked hard, but in true idiot fashion, I hadn’t accounted for the weight of wet jeans.

I sank and sank, further from sunlight, deep into blackness.

But I felt it when I crossed over. A heaviness on my skin that wasn’t quite water, wasn’t quite air. A ripple in my surroundings, and then there was a slightly different sensation to the liquid I sank into, like the water in the Void wasn’t the same weight as that on Earth.

But I was still sinking. Into the depths of the Void, where monsters abounded…

I started flailing upwards, bubbles spewing out of me as my lungs began to protest. I broke the surface for a moment, long enough to draw in a quick gasp of air, and then the weight pulled me under again.

Working quickly, I unbuttoned my jeans, tugging and kicking to get them off.

As soon as I was free of the encumbering weight, I resurfaced and kicked towards the shore, dragging in more gulps of air and letting out a screech of relief when I felt the pebbles of the shore.

“Lesson one, don’t be a moron,” I said aloud, clambering to my feet with wet jeans in hand. “Swimsuits are the way to go in the Void.”

I laid my jeans out on the beach, a clear sign to any of my nice new monster friends that I was around, and picked up a pebble before I straightened.

Like the billions of other pebbles around me, it was translucent and pitch-black. A tiny, dim core of light flickered in its middle. That was why the shore here looked like stars; their collective muted light lit the dark world around me.

I couldn’t deny that as alien as this world was, it was also the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

I put the pebble back where I found it and tugged my wet t-shirt down over my hips. It looked like I was going to be exploring the Void in my undies.

But before I moved, I slowly rotated in place, taking in the wilds around me and trying to superimpose the blurry Polaroids with what I was seeing now.

Had my mother found the lake door? Had she stood right where I was standing, snapping pictures of another world?

“Why were you here?” I muttered, hardly realizing I was talking out loud. “How did you get through? Why did you want to?”

Something occurred to me as I thought about those photos.

The selfie I’d taken to send to Juno… my face had been blurred and smeary, just like my mother’s pictures of the Void.

A shiver ran through me, and I wrapped my arms around myself.

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