I realize in this moment, completing Rudzitin’s spell, however feasible or foolish, is something I’m not willing to do. And if Arla is to be believed, she can’t do it without me.
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” he says, breaking through my train of thought. “I looked into that lithograph like you asked. Went by the oddities market and spoke with the owner, then went through some old newspaper archives on my own.”
My eyes go to his, searching. “Did you find anything?”
“The store owner had heard of it, though he didn’t have much detail. Seems the actual contents of Rudzitin’s Pit Show remains a contested mystery. The man himself had a reputation as a two-bit showman, a cad who struggled to establish himself and his act as one of significance. Mostly because he was already known in the area as a fabulist, full of tall tales and exaggerations. And his origins were unknown. I’m afraid America wasn’t much kinder to immigrants in those days than it is now.”
“Mm.” I don’t imagine a squat Latvian man crowing about a fortune-telling vampire mermaid he lured from the bay and locked in his tiny room would manage to garner the respect of the locals. But, oh, if they only knew…
“I did find some articles from theSeattle Star, though,” Levi goes on, unaware of my disappointment.
“Articles?”
“Two, in fact. The first one details the strange circumstances around several missing persons cases in the area. Pioneer Square had quite a reputation then as a place of ill repute, full of brothels, bars, and boardinghouses. The men who lived there were rough, mostly working in lumber mills and fishing. So, I don’t think anyone took much note until the number of disappearances became too high to ignore.”
“How many disappearances are we talking about?” I ask, a growing sense of urgency and alarm sounding in my brain and belly.
“Nine,” he answers. “Mostly women, prostitutes, but two men as well, notable drunks.”
My hand flies to my mouth.
“The last case at the time of the article is what really got journalists to take note. It was a young woman, the daughter of a reputable pharmacist and drugstore owner. Unfortunately, she had suffered from a decline in mental health, and was lured to the area, though no one seemed quite sure how. The last witness to see her claimed he watched her go down into Rudzitin’s Pit Show, though Rudzitin himself adamantly denied it. No one ever saw her come out,” Levi finishes.
I swallow the dread building beneath my tongue and along the back of my throat. The image of the mermaid on the poster, her sharp, red teeth, is impossible to ignore.
“You said there was a second article?” I ask, remembering his earlier statement.
“Yes,” he confirms. “Police were becoming increasingly suspicious of Rudzitin, until he himself went missing a short time later. After that, the disappearances seemed to stop.”
“Missing?” I have a terrible inclination that Arla is in even more danger than I first thought.
Levi shrugs. “I guess he was innocent. Man couldn’t have abducted himself. Whoever was working in the area must have got him last and moved on. Other than that single mention, there’s no other word about his show or what happened to it.”
I look at Levi, my hands darting out to grab him by the arms. “I do. I know what happened to it.”
His face contorts, surprised.
“That’s what I saw in my friend’s basement today,” I tell him. “Rudzitin wasn’t a fabulist. He was a demonologist. And the Fathom, the star of his pit show, wasn’t a prank or a stunt to draw in crowds and make some quick cash. It—she—was real. And she’s still down there.”
Levi’s eyes go even wider than before as he connects the dots between this news and my condition today.
“Only, what he caught isn’t a demon. Not in the strictest sense. I believe she’s something far more powerful and destructive than that.”
“A goddess.” He repeats my earlier assessment.
“An entity of chaos.” I slide the Egyptian volume I found his direction, open it up, and flip to the page I was reading when he came in. “Have you heard of these—the Ogdoad?”
His eyes narrow as he reads the text on the page, glancing several times at the picture. “Not really, no. I’m familiar with the more commonly known myths—Isis, Osiris, Re. These sound like they come from an earlier period. Why? Do you think what you saw was Egyptian?”
I frown and close the book. “No, but I think it may be related to these in a different way. It’s something the artist I spoke to told me—there are primordial goddesses like this that exist in every culture and govern ‘unknowable’ things. We associate them with our deepest fears, like fire and winter and magic and death.”
He rises and circles the room, picking books off the shelves here and there before bringing a stack over to me. “You are in a great deal of luck, then,” he says, setting them before me. “We specialize in esoteric antiquities—religious objects, occult materials, and so on. People always want to believe there’s some ancient knowledge we’ve overlooked that will give them the keys to the universe, and they’ll pay heartily for it. Just like my grandfather did.”
He spins the first cover toward me:Tales of the Celts. A border of gold knot work encircles it. “The Cailleach,” he says, pointing. “A hag goddess of storms and winter possibly related to the sheela na gigs that predate early Christianity.” He turns over the second book,Myths of the Middle Ages. “This talks a bit about Baba Yaga,” he says. “An archaic Slavic witch figure who has powers of magic, death, regeneration, and fire.” Then, he stacks another three too fast for me to read the titles. “Tiamat,” he says with the first one, then, “Hecate and Nyx.” At last, he passes me one more. The title says,Kabbalistic Mysticism. He points to it. “Ayin. The Abrahamic primordial deity of chaos and nonexistence. She is the void.”
The void.My chest tightens as I pull the books toward me. “Do you believe in these?”
Levi sits down. “It’s not that simple, is it? These aren’t like other gods. They don’t care if we believe, don’t need our praise or offerings. But I suspect there’s something there, yes. A principal, if nothing else, of life and death, light and dark. An impulse. In Kabbalah, Ayin is the all-seeing eye of God. If Yesh is the light, then Ayin is the darkness. If the light is God, then who is the dark? Ayin came first. She is older, then, than God himself. Some classify her as the evil to his good, the destruction to his creation, but the truth is that she’s neutral, simply not governed by morality or conscience.Ungovernable, or more likely still,beyondgovernance. I believe she’s the result of our human mind splitting the divine into polarities because we can’t comprehend it any other way.”
