Page 1 of An Invocation of Monsters

1

Elle

Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d majorly screwed up by accepting an invitation from a couple of total weirdos.

Maybe it was all just some sort of elaborate kidnapping or trafficking hoax. I leaned against the side of my beaten-up Crown Vic, a bursting-at-the-seams duffel bag at my feet, and raised an eyebrow at the sheer quantity of wilderness stretching out before me.

They had refused to give me an address. The tiny town of Dunwich, sandwiched at the mouth of a massive, forested valley, was the end of the line for me.

I had been instructed to park here on the outskirts of the forest and wait for transportation to Deepwater Lodge, my final destination.

Yeah. The whole thing was definitely shady.

And way too intriguing to pass up.

During my mother’s funeral service six months ago, two people claiming to be old friends of hers had approached me.

A man and a woman, wearing black suits that looked ill-fitted on their rather emaciated frames. They’d looked almost like identical twins, possessing the same suntanned skin, curly ash-blonde hair, and wide blue eyes.

Wide, rather crazed blue eyes. A shiver trailed down my spine as I recalled the hungry look in the woman’s gaze when she saw me.

Then she’d seen my cousin, Juno, coming towards us, and shoved a sealed envelope into my hands before the pair vanished.

The contents of the letter, read in private later that night, had floored me.

I’d always loved my mother… and I’d always been aware of her shortcomings. Gillian Gray had been a vain, rather selfish woman, but despite that, she was my mother and I adored her, so I could forgive those things.

There had been a brief moment in my life when I’d wondered if I might not harbor the tiniest seed of hate for her—when Juno, freshly bereaved of her own parents, had come to live with us.

I’d hero-worshipped my older cousin with a fervor that astounded Gillian.

Juno had been so cool, and what made her even cooler was that she didn’t even know it; somehow she made sitting around with her nose in a book about Victorian occultism seem like such a romantic, Goth thing to do.

But I’d overheard my mother complaining to my father one night about what a pain it was to handle a traumatized teenage girl, and how much she hated paying for her therapy, and that tiny pinch of hate had sparked to life.

That was when I first began to really notice my mother’s selfishness.

If Juno’s therapy appointments interfered with my immaculate mother’s nail appointments, there would be tiny, unhappy grooves carved around the corners of Gillian’s mouth that day.

If Juno needed new clothes and it cut into Gillian’s highlights budget, my mother would have a flinty gleam in her eye when she looked at Juno for the rest of that week.

Despite that, I still loved her. We all have our flaws.

But every summer, my mother disappeared for a month. I’d always thought that my looks-conscious mother had gone to a day-spa, where she could pretend she didn’t have a daughter or her sister’s ward or a grueling real estate job.

The letter had instead revealed that Gillian spent that month, every summer, in a lodge in these deep, dark backwoods. Not at a day spa, but as the best friend of those wild-eyed people who’d shown up at her funeral—and I was invited to come see exactly what she’d been up to.

I couldn’t imagine Gillian, with her French manicures and silk blouses and WASP-y book club dinner parties, being friends with them.

Something crinkled in my hand. Without thinking about it, I’d eased the letter from my pocket for the hundredth or so time.

The paper was already soft and worn from how many times I’d folded and unfolded it, or run my fingers over the spidery writing.

The Wendigo Society.

I hadn’t found so much as a peep about them online. Whatever they were, it was locked down tight. Still, it was hard to imagine her as part of a secret cult…

Okay, so my mother had been really into astrology. She’d religiously read her horoscope every day during breakfast.

---