Page 68 of An Invocation of Monsters

I popped the doors open as quietly as I could, cringing a little when one of them squeaked, but no one came to see what was going on in here.

There were no photo boxes in here. A few dead moths lay scattered in the dust at the bottom of the armoire.

But the planchette Sophie had worn around her neck on a ribbon hung from a bent nail. It dangled there, in the center of the armoire, in front of a rectangle of pure black.

My heart squeezed in my chest, a moment of fear pounding through me. It was an unnatural darkness, a rectangle of pure nothingness that signified a doorway into the Void.

Four, I told myself. I was up to a total of four doors, if I counted the one Toth had flown me through.

But this one I had found all on my own.

I licked my lips, my mouth suddenly feeling as desiccated as the dust in this room. Then I reached out and tugged the planchette free of the nail.

I smoothed the dust away, revealing polished wood covered with burned-in filigree swirls. The hole in the center of the planchette was inlaid with a piece of pure, clear glass.

My hands were shaking a little. I was holding a tangible piece of my own history, my great-grandmother’s planchette, forgotten in a wardrobe.

I stepped into the light, took a better picture of the planchette in the palm of my hand, and sent it to Juno. She’d lose her freaking mind.

Then I wrapped the ribbon around my wrist several times, and rose up on my tip-toes to deposit my phone on top of the armoire, where no one would find it.

I had no need of a phone where I was going.

I stepped into the tall furniture, glad for the first time that I was only two inches above five feet tall, and just managed to fit comfortably inside it. The door to the Void seemed to call to me as I eased the armoire’s doors shut behind me.

Even with darkness pressing in on my eyeballs, I felt a shiver when I touched the door to the Void. It was like no sensation ever felt on Earth.

I pushed through the thick sensation, hands held blindly in front of me, and was pretty freaking grateful I’d had the foresight to keep my eyes open when I popped free of the doorway.

There was a fraught moment where my heart was in my throat, my arms windmilling wildly, but I grabbed onto tangled roots rising from the ground and kept myself from plunging down a fifty foot drop.

The door, unfortunately, opened onto a long ravine. And if my eyes were seeing things correctly, there were sharp, spiny rocks protruding from the bottom, reaching upwards as though seeking the sky.

I tasted copper in the back of my mouth as I hooked a leg around one of the roots at the top of the ravine, glancing around cautiously. Behind me, the door that led to an armoire in a dusty room was formed in an arch made by these roots.

It was a little strange how neither world seemed to fully align. There was no sign of the ruins where the Lodge was in this world, even though I’d come through smack in the middle of it.

When my heart stopped galloping like it wanted to burst free of my chest, I slowly disentangled myself from the root, working my way along the edge of the ravine until I found my footing.

The crevasse didn’t seem to ever end. I followed the edges, occasionally peering down at the spiny rocks, but it wasn’t until five minutes later that the first anomaly appeared.

The rocks below were dark, but one had a round, white protrusion growing from it. I stopped and squatted down, studying it.

Was it a mushroom? Or just another weird twist where the general landmass of the Void changed without warning into something inexplicable?

I finally kept going, wondering why Sophie had chosen to leave her planchette in front of that particular doorway. There didn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason for it.

Unless it was the first doorway they’d ever found.

Maybe she was staking out her territory, in a manner of speaking.

Many more strange white protrusions appeared in the ravine, but I was no closer to figuring out what they were until a path appeared.

A path to the bottom, cut into the ravine wall in a series of switchbacks.

I stared at it, wondering if there was a trap, or if I was way overstepping my welcome here by plunging into whatever part of the Void I wanted to.

But… the doors had opened for me, hadn’t they? Even Toth had said the Void cried out welcome.

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