Page 56 of An Invocation of Monsters

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.

“But as luck would have it, that was where we found the first eye-witness accounts of Deepwater. Gillian and Tasha were already working on astral projection by that time, and of course it seemed perfectly natural that the next step would be to find a place where they may be able to travel even further… possibly to a whole new world.”

I was mute, unable to speak if I wanted to.

My mother had worked on astral freaking projection, and she’d once laughed at me when I told her Juno saw ghosts.

“Gillian was the one who initiated the project,” Joseph added. “Desirée Vaughn, the owner of Deepwater Lodge at the time, was overjoyed to have us, having inherited the family’s interest in occultism. We spent the next summer living here, penetrating deeper into the mystery of the place than anyone had ever gone before, with Desirée’s help. How could it not give up its secrets, with four of the most determined occult researchers within its walls?

“And it did. It opened to us. That summer was the first time we saw a door… a door leading to another world, alien and beyond comprehension.”

Mary’s smile had returned as she stared at me across the flames. “We spent three more years at Miskatonic, returning to the Lodge every summer and expanding on our project. The day we graduated, the four of us got into a car together and came straight back here. We’d discovered other doors in the years since our first visit, but the time had come to go further. Astral projection was all well and good, but finally we asked… why do we not cross over ourselves? And within a year, we accomplished our first crossing.”

“Gigi was the first one,” Joseph said. “She went through the door, and came back with tales of another world. It was similar to ours in some ways, but… different. Like a dark mirror overlapping this world. She returned calling it ‘the Void’.

“After that, we were insatiable. We had proof that another world, another dimension, existed, and that we could travel to it at will.”

“And that was when we discovered this place.” Mary held out a hand, encompassing the stone circle we all sat on. “An ancient relic of the Void. It was on a night like this one, with a full moon overhead and a fire roaring, that we made a pact amongst ourselves. The five of us—Desirée had joined our group eventually—had named ourselves the Wendigo Society in the years before that, but that night it became official, swearing in blood to know, to dare, to will, and to keep silent about our secrets.”

Joseph caught the questioning look in my eyes.

“The wendigo was one of the initial theories around this place,” he said quietly. “A creature of darkness and hunger, stalking the forest. We now believe that it was not a wendigo responsible for the vanishing of Deepwater, but a storm from the Void itself. Regardless, the name stuck.”

Well, my mother had certainly managed to do one thing right.

She had kept those secrets buried so deeply that if it weren’t for Mary and Joseph, I never would’ve had the slightest hint of any of this.

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