Page 65 of An Invocation of Monsters

Elle: Do you have any Innsmouth historical birth records in your library? She seems to think one of the people who lived here was our great-grandma

I added on a smiley face with its tongue sticking out, hoping Juno wouldn’t sense that I was breaking into a nervous sweat from a hundred miles away.

While I waited, I closed the genealogy book, which appeared to have been no more than a hiding place for this far-fetched sheet of paper, and opened the one titled Deepwater.

It was immediately more interesting from the get-go: the title page was decorated with an etching of a deer skull, its empty eye sockets blooming with flowers, the horns spreading wide into more points than any natural deer had.

My nightmare popped back into my head, making me shiver.

But the book only got worse from there.

I had to give credit where credit was due: Mary and Joseph had not lied about the terrible history of the town of Deepwater.

If anything, they’d rather sanitized the tale, which might’ve been wise seeing as how we’d been hanging out in the woods at night.

My eyes scanned quotations, flipping the pages faster and faster as the book disgorged the town’s dark history:

In September of that year, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the local miller gouged the eyes out of several children using the broken-off antlers of a buck…

After the cholera outbreak of 1756, superstition began to abound: several Deepwater women were to pay the price, burned at the stake on the shores of the lake. Later excavations determined that these bones carried heavy kerf marks, which were later analyzed and determined to match human dentition patterns…

By that time, it was often the females who carried the burden of the town’s hardships on their shoulders. Dunwich constabulary was driven from the forest, no longer permitted within the town’s borders; they became, in the words of a local judge, ‘a nation of heathens, carved apart from the fabric of society, recognizing neither the authority of God nor man’. Cut off from greater society, the women of Deepwater were now entirely under the thumb of the men, and they suffered for it.

For every child that went missing, a single white morning glory, wrapped around a bone, was left on their pillow. No remains were ever recovered, even in future excavations.

My mouth felt dry. I was only a third of the way through the book, and so far it had been a smorgasbord of death, mutilations, cannibalism, and in one memorable case, necrophilia, which had ended with the accused man being kept alive as his bones were removed from his body one by one.

Altogether, it was not the most cheerful book I’d ever had the pleasure of reading.

I skipped past a large chunk in the middle, wondering if the women who’d been burned alive and eaten, cooked in pots, sold off in marriage before their preteen years, hung from trees, and drowned and raped had been all that upset about being wiped from the face of the earth in one night.

Frankly, it had probably come as a relief.

The later chapters were an examination of the Deepwater ruins, backed by one Margaret Vaughn, a London occultist who had purchased the ruins in 1845.

I frowned at her name, turning back to the title page and searching for the author: Marie Vaughn. The girl in the picture with Sophie.

Lowering the book, I grabbed my camera from the end table and scrolled through my photos until I found it.

This time I skipped over Sophie, zooming in on Marie’s face. She’d been a sharp-faced little girl, tow-headed, leaning against Sophie.

I wondered when she’d decided to write the absolutely awful history of this place. It seemed occultism traveled in that family, much like it seemed to in mine; I made a quick accounting of the Vaughn family, scribbling it on the backside of my mother’s family tree.

Margaret, Marie and Tessa, Desirée…

There were possibly other generations mixed in there, but I thought I had the main players.

Margaret purchased the land and built the Lodge. Marie had dug more thoroughly into Deepwater’s history than anyone else, committing the atrocity to paper. Desirée had eventually helped found an occultist group on these lands, and passed it on to them.

I wondered where Tessa fit in… or if she had just said fuck this nonsense and moved on to a more normal life.

I was so focused on the paper that I almost jumped out of my skin when my phone buzzed and rang. I picked up, wedging it between my ear and shoulder.

“You can’t say something like that and not call me,” Juno said by way of greeting. “I’m working on a genealogy project as we speak.”

In the background, I could hear the crashing of waves, the cry of a gull, and then a low, brief grumble.

“Is that your super-secret boyfriend I hear?” I teased, tapping my pen against the paper. “I would’ve called earlier, but I was doing research. Does the name ‘Sophie Marsh’ mean anything to you?”

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