Page 69 of An Invocation of Monsters

If anyone was welcome here, honestly, it had to be me.

That was the thought I clung to as I began making my way down the series of switchbacks. Even when the walls of the ravine began to ripple around me in strange colors, and I heard the first faint whisper, I really held on to the fact that I had been welcomed.

“If you didn’t want to show me anything, you wouldn’t have shown me the door,” I grumbled, carefully jumping over a section where the path had fallen away. “So maybe try being a little less creepy about it, please and thanks.”

In answer, the wall I had my hand supported on flexed, as though the rock itself were breathing.

“This is stupid of me, isn’t it?” I asked the Void, not waiting for an answer.

It was stupid, all right.

Soon enough I reached the bottom of the ravine. The distance from the top had played tricks on my eyes; down here, the spiny rock formations jutted ten feet in the air, creating an eerie forest of stone growing from sparkling black sand.

I kept going, trying very hard to ignore that from the corner of my eye, the spires appeared to be twisting.

The walls of the ravine began to narrow. There were fewer rock spires, and I brushed up against the walls more than once before I came across one of those bulbous white anomalies at the base of one of the spires.

I knelt down, brushing glittering dark flecks aside, and picked it up, a bad feeling growing in me.

It was too hard to be a mushroom or other natural occurrence, and separated too easily from the sparkling sand, and—

I turned it, revealing two gaping eye sockets, a row of upper teeth, an empty nasal cavity.

I held a human skull in my hands.

A small sound of horror escaped me, sounding too loud as it bounced off the walls. The skull fell from deadened fingers, landing in the sand with its eyeless sockets peering up at me.

All those anomalies were just human bones.

And how many had I seen? How many half-buried corpses had I passed?

Too many.

I thought that maybe… this was where the villagers of Deepwater had ended up.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I whispered. I should have guessed the minute I’d seen the first white protrusion.

Then I heard a sound that wasn’t made by me. I was perfectly silent, hardly breathing, unmoving.

The sound of something rasping against stone… getting closer.

Please just be echoes, I thought, moving just enough to peer around the spire in front of me.

But of course the sounds weren’t just echoes. That would’ve been way too easy.

The pale thing that had chased me from the ruins was here.

The worst part was that it looked almost human at first glance. It had a head. A torso. Five-fingered hands.

But it also had maggot-pale skin stretched too tight over warped bones, multiple triple-jointed arms extending from its back and sides, the wasted legs curled up beneath its torso like dead things, and worst of all, a gaping jaw lined with more rows of teeth than any human could ever have.

My lungs had actually stopped working. Every nerve ending in my body was too frightened to inhale, to move, even to blink.

The thing was only twenty feet away, sniffing at the air. Its eyes were black, almost jelly-like orbs bulging from its sockets.

And despite the horror of it, there was something vaguely familiar about the thing, too.

I couldn’t stay here. It would sniff me out soon enough, and already I felt the malevolence emanating from the entity.

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