A Redress for Andromeda (2001)

"A Redress for Andromeda (2001)" is a short story by Caitlin R. Kiernan that first appeared in October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2000). It begins Kiernan's Dandridge Cycle, a series of interconnected stories about a mysterious house on the coast of Northern California and the sacrifice hidden beneath it.
This story introduces the Dandridge House, built in 1890 on the Northern California coast by someone named Dandridge, a "tall gabled house with its turrets and lightning rods." In the 1960s, "it was one of those places that hippies and occultists liked to haunt." In 2001, Tara, an ichthyologist at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, is invited to a Halloween party there, by her friend Darren Quince, that turns out to be a strange annual ritual. Given a silver coin, she joins a procession down stairs cut into the rock below the house, down to a grotto where a woman, like Andromeda in the myth of Perseus,Wikipedia, "Andromeda (mythology)." is chained to a rock in a pool of seawater. The "thing that was a woman once" has "pulpy cheese-white skin," "crimson tentacles between her alabaster thighs," and barnacles encrusting her legs.
“She keeps the balance," Darren tells Tara. "She stands between the worlds.... She watches all the gates.” He tells her to drop her coin into the pool: "It helps her hold the line.”
The story ends with Tara knowing that she is now bound to be part of the ritual every year.
==Publication History==
"A Redress for Andromeda" was reprinted in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (Corvus, 2011; Tor, 2012). It also appears in Kiernan's collections To Charles Fort, with Love (Subterranean Press, 2005) and Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press, 2018; Subterranean Press, 2019).Internet Speculative Fiction Database, "Title: A Redress for Andromeda." 
==References==
Category:Mythos-Inspired Works
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works
Category:The Dandridge Cycle