Chapter 18 The Heart of the Gorgon #2
“It was a shadow, wide as the mountain and darker than night, flowing like water, pouring over the landscape in a flood. It wore the face of a woman and the antlers of a reindeer, the wings of an owl and the hooves of a herd of musk oxen, as if it had cloaked itself in animal parts the way an octopus covers itself in shells to hide from predators. It boomed like a volcano erupting as it barreled toward me. And, heaven help me, I couldn’t look away. ”
“Was it an avalanche?” I ask, because it can’t be what she’s describing.
“No.” She peers through me, as if she can see it again on the other side. “It was the night itself, running for its life from the morning.”
“I don’t understand. Did you stare into the sunrise too long? Is that what damaged your eyes?” I recall a second after the words are out that she already said her blindness was caused by conversion disorder, not a physical injury.
She looks directly at me now, her face cold and blank. “It was power, raw and unrelenting. And it was darkness. And it was streaking straight for me like a comet dropped from the sky and screaming the whole way.”
Whatever she saw, it terrified her. “What happened?”
“It ripped a hole through me,” she says.
“And I’ve never been the same. I couldn’t see to find my guide.
He had to locate me on the ice where I’d been thrown more than a dozen yards from where I’d been standing, help me up, and walk me like a child back to the vehicle.
I started painting the day I arrived home.
I’d never even so much as drawn a stick figure before.
I gave up my career in academia, became a full-time artist, and my eyesight never recovered. ”
“How awful,” I whisper into my tea.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s what I was truly there for.
Did I see her because of my background in mythology?
Because I’d already been studying these beings?
” she asks hypothetically. “Was I primed for my encounter by my work? I really can’t say.
It’s an ancient place, Svalbard, where people still live close to nature, to the sublime—the beauty and the fear.
But I heard one thing as she passed over me,” Anneli says now, voice grave. “áhce?eatni.”
“Ah-chay-sayrt-nee,” I repeat slowly, breaking it down. “What’s that?”
“She’s an ancient deity of the early Sámi people.
A goddess of winter, shadows, and night who was said to protect the deer and the wild animals.
The Sámi are indigenous to the Arctic, much like the Inuit.
They inhabited many regions of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. An old one, like I told you about.”
When I don’t respond, she adds, “There are many things in this world we still don’t understand, to say nothing of the worlds we have yet to explore. But I have a theory, if you want to hear it,” she offers.
“Why not?” It can’t possibly leave me any more befuddled than I currently am.
“Dark matter,” she says, as if this clears it all up.
“You’re talking about energy?” I ask, confused.
She smiles lazily. “I’m talking about the void.”
My brows crease. “The void?”
“Chaos,” she whispers.
“And what about magic?” I dare to ask, thinking of my own family, our many tales of woe.
“What about it?” She regards me coolly.
“You’re talking about dark matter and the void, but I want to know where magic fits into your theory,” I repeat.
Her eyes drift away, untethered. “Who says they aren’t the same thing?”
I fall back in my chair. I’m not sure what I came here for. An explanation? Reparation? But this woman didn’t do anything. She’s just a channel. I, of all people, should know what that is like.
“I’m retired from academia,” she says after a moment, “but let me give you a brief lesson.” She points to my painting.
“Primordial beings—I call them the old ones—exist in every culture, every corner of the globe. Maybe they go by different names—this one Nephthys, that one Tiamat, in my own country, Nerthus—but there are similarities.”
“What similarities?”
She shrugs a shoulder. “They govern unknowable things—often the things that scare us most, warnings buried in our subconscious by our ancient ancestors. Things like—”
“Fire,” I interject.
She smiles. “Yes, things like fire or night. Things like magic, dreams, and clairvoyance. Things like death.”
Me, Twig, Rock, Cadence. Brennan’s words float back to me— She’s collected us, a full set.
“What does this have to do with the painting?” I ask her.
“Everything, Miss Cole.”
I stare at the canvas, unnerved. “I’m giving her back,” I blurt. “I don’t want a refund. You can keep the money, and you can keep her.”
She grins. “Sounds like it’s far too late for that. She found you. She knows where you live.” She pulls the painting over to her side of the table and studies it a moment. “Yes, she belongs to you now. Thalassa, goddess of the sea. It’s where we get the word thalassophobia.”
“Thalassophobia,” I repeat, reluctantly taking the painting back when she holds it out for me.
“Fear of the deep,” she says, leering.
Come if you dare. Learn what waits in the deep. The last two lines of the invitation the Fathom left me.
“I study goddesses, and I paint them,” Anneli says now. “But it’s these—the old ones—that I revere the most. You should, too, if you know what’s good for you.”
I gulp. “Are you saying she flooded my condo as a punishment?”
Anneli smiles. “A punishment or a blessing. With these old ones, they’re often the same thing.”
“How do you mean?”
Anneli takes another drag on her joint, coughing it out.
“It’s like my sight. Many people would view this as a limitation, but it enhances my art.
I wouldn’t change it.” She holds out one palm and then the other, the joint still pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “A punishment and a blessing.”
I can’t shake the sense that there is something lurking beneath the surface of what she’s telling me, like the basement beneath Arla’s club. “What would you be punished for?”
She shifts back in her chair. “To gaze upon the immortal is a transgression in every language. To see beyond your horizon. To reach for what you were never made or meant to hold,” she says. Her light eyes bore into me. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I—I guess,” I stammer futilely, thinking she’s too high to know what she’s saying anymore. “Thank you. This has been enlightening.” I rise to leave, less settled than I was when I arrived, and pass the book across the table.
“Keep it,” she says. “I have more.”
I tuck it and the painting under an arm, Anneli following me to the door where I turn back with one more question. “You said energy is especially attached to art.”
“I did,” she confirms. “To create is to be divine.”
I rake my teeth across my lower lip. Before Thalassa, there was one painting that dominated my life, that stood at the center of everything I wondered about and everything I feared.
A painting that should have been destroyed with the house, with my family, but like me, survived.
With no explanation. “What about a portrait?”
Anneli smiles easily. “Well, that depends.”
“On what?” I can’t help asking.
“Who it’s of.”
WHEN I LEAVE Anneli’s studio, I sit in my car watching cords of cloud drift over the sky and chewing my lip until it aches, her words nesting in me like unwanted sparrows.
I should head back to work, focus on the task at hand, stay at Aaron’s tonight, and try to forget everything Brennan and Anneli said today.
I’m in enough trouble as it is. But instead, I take my phone out and dial Arla’s number. She answers on the first ring.
“We need to talk,” I find the courage to tell her.
“Not like this,” she says, low. “Come to the penthouse. We’ll talk in person.”
When I pull up in front of Medusa half an hour later, Jordan is waiting for me. He comes around and opens my door. “Go on in. I’ll park it for you.”
I bite back resistance and nod, climbing out with the keys still in the ignition.
The green doors of Medusa loom before me, looking for all the world like they bar the passage to another realm, but when I clasp the handle of one and yank, it swings open easily.
Inside, the cognitive dissonance of being in the club by day, where all its practicalities are laid bare—vacuum cleaners and scraping gum off the underside of tables, polishing lipstick off the glassware—sets my teeth on edge.
Or maybe it’s that, despite these, I can still feel it ticking below my feet—a pulse, a beat to the magic of this place, the heart of the gorgon pumping glitter through its veins.
The daytime staff ignore me as I make my way to the elevator, climb its golden pulley to the top—Arla’s penthouse.
She’s got the front door waiting open, and I find her seated alone on one of the sofas, windows of sea-foam gray hemming her in.
She wears a long dress of embroidered black mesh that grazes her ankles, and has a pale lip, more demure than I’m used to seeing her.
She looks small backlit by the fireplace and the lackluster day without the others flanking her, so much smaller than I realized.
Her head rises. “Judeth, come. Sit.” She pats the velvet cushion beside her, a haze of melancholy stirring, as if she knows already what I’m here to say. “You work fast,” she tells me once I’m seated.