Instead, she stamped down on the accelerator. Her car shot forward, breaking the spell.
She drove as fast as she dared on the winding road, too petrified to look in the rearview mirror.
She tried to tell herself that she must be mistaken. That the rain was playing tricks on her.
But it was no use. She knew what she’d seen. Her worst suspicions had just been confirmed.
Mrs. Smith was done hiding.
20
Jill
For the rest of that rainy Saturday, Jill searched for monsters in her books. If she found something that could explain what happened to the missing boys, she was supposed to call Una and tell her all about it. Knowing Una was on her side made Jill less afraid.
She started off looking for creatures from Greek mythology that were capable of biting through bone. The Kraken was an obvious choice. It was a behemoth with tentacles and a mouth filled with teeth the size of short swords. It could easily swallow a human whole.
Did Charles see eels?Jill wondered, her fingertips tracing the black-and-white drawing of what looked like a giant octopus.Or tentacles?
Turning the page, she examined the illustration of the Scylla, a six-headed sea monster with a dragon-shaped head that reminded Jill of Gidorah from the Godzilla movies. Scylla terrorized a channel of water somewhere in the Mediterranean, guarding one side of the channel while another monster named Charybdis, who was basically a whirlpool, guarded the other.
“You don’t bite,” Jill said to the drawing of Charybdis.
She added Scylla’s name to the list she was compiling in her Hello Kitty notebook and continued reading.
There were dozens of sea nymphs and minor ocean goddesses. None had sharp teeth.
The illustrations of sirens varied. In one book, they were beautiful naked women from the waist up. The water hid their serpent tails. In the second book, which was fifty years older than the first, sirens were birds with women’s faces.
The second book had a much longer description of the sirens, including how they’d been created by Demeter and how all three had killed themselves after a man named Odysseus had managed to escape their deadly song.
Jill didn’t add sirens to her list. No bird had bitten off the finger Charles had seen floating in the water next to his boat.
Charles said it didn’t look like it had been cut by a blade. It had bits hanging out. Like it had been chewed.
After reading about the sea goddess Derceto in the newer book, Jill dismissed her because she was essentially a mermaid. But in the older book, she was not only described as a great whale, but as the Greek version of a Syrian goddess named Atargatis. This goddess was older and more powerful than the Greek Derceto. Atargatis ruled over all the fish. However, fish weren’t the only creatures sacred to her. Snakes were as well.
Picturing the stone face in Mrs. Smith’s garden, Jill added Atargatis to her list. She also addedCeto, a general term for sea monsters. There were different descriptions of these creatures sprinkled throughout the book, but most resembled giant sea serpents.
After reviewing her list, Jill noticed something.
“They’re all women. Scylla. Sirens. Atargatis. Ceto.”
She still had a hundred pages to go in the older Greek mythology book and hoped that her dad and brothers wouldleave her alone so she could finish it. It was slow going. The typeface was small and there weren’t many illustrations. It was harder to find descriptions of monsters without reading about the heroes who killed them.
She skimmed over the familiar stories of Perseus and Heracles, Theseus and Jason, and the section on wars and temples. Suddenly, all that was left was a glossary on gods and goddesses and the minor deities and creatures under their dominion.
Jill flipped to the page listing Poseidon’s underlings. Many of his creatures were familiar to her now, from mermaids to hippocampi, but she was only interested in the ones with teeth. Creatures who had teeth and bodies with snakelike appendages or tentacles.
She was just about to close the book when a line caught her eye.
Lamia. Female demon. Sea monster. Mother of Scylla. p. 114.
Jill turned back to the chapter on the Children of Zeus. This was an abbreviated history of all the women he’d slept with, what form he’d taken to seduce them, what children the union had produced, and what Hera had done to punish the mortal women and their offspring.
The paragraph about Lamia was short. Jill’s eyes flew over the words.
Zeus became enamored with Lamia, a queen of Libya who’d descended from the Titans. When Hera learned that Lamia had given birth to twins, she was enraged. Taking the form of a lioness, she crept up to Lamia’s children as they played in the gardens and slew them. Lamia had spent the day swimming in the sea, but when she returned to the gardens and came upon the bodies of her children, her grief knew no bounds. She vowed to spend the rest of her life punishingthe Greeks. Under the cover of darkness, she used her magic to lure their children into the water. Then she carried them beneath the waves and devoured them.
