Lamia

The smell of the meat crisping over the small fire is overwhelming, teardrops of golden fat dripping on the flames is all I must appear to hear. I will make no sudden movements nor let my breath quicken lest the beast towering behind me feels my fear and senses my sleeping children. I see her cursed body shaped against the wall, shaped by the bright night outside, its blessed light stronger than the fire I’ve lit to musk their nocturnal sounds and scent. A serpent tail is sweeping the air behind her, making a swooshing, whip-like sound that is freezing the blood in my veins. The proximity to the heat and smoke is burning my eyes, wide and panicked, darting between the open fire and the shapes she’s casting on the wall my children sleep behind. Androlykos often talks in his sleep, please Gods, don’t let him speak tonight. Little Lysistrata nestles next to him, always looking for more heat, and will kick him to shut him up if he wakes her up. If she hears them… Gods please don’t let her hear them.

I did not believe the stories when I first heard them a few days ago. There were children going missing in the hunters’ village to the north, over the creek. Initially, the hunters blamed the disappearances on wild boars feeding too close to their settlement, and scoured the woods for any signs of a sounder. We saw their crunching forms a few times in our part of the forest too, faces painted in the Huntress’s colours, bows resting low, crouching, searching. After a couple of days, they only found a little boy wandering, lost. The poor thing was mad with fear and kept spewing nonsense, we thought, about a long-tailed monster that rocked him gently on its arms before feasting on his brothers, but the Hunters sympathise with the king’s brother, the usurper, so we don’t trust a word any of them say. Curse of Hera, they concluded, damned to crave the blood of children, a Lamia. We all know an infinity of tales about the sky father’s indiscretions–and subsequent consequences–but Hera is herself a mother, and the idea that she could be so cruel to children to cast blights like this one on them, seemed unthinkable to me, so I didn’t pay it much mind. That they should craft stories of her wrath to justify whatever neglect or worse they’ve let happen to their children was hubris, but I should have known better. For here we are, the damned thing behind me outside, and no patrol or guarding fires me and the other guards have been keeping up in the past week has protected us from it.

Our elders have been at each other’s throats since their fathers’ time, nothing new for where we are; close enough to the kings’ ancient seat to be included in their politics and man their army for whatever war they choose to send us to, but too far away for them to settle local disputes or react fast when we need them to. We are left on our own to bicker and to defend ourselves against bloodthirsty serpentlike beasts. The hissing of her… I can hear it through the flames, an unnatural sucking of whatever little air my throat can find between her and the smoke I’m making, drowning the song of the fire, silencing the nightbirds and the cicadas that speak of home.

My old spear is resting on the altar to my left after last night’s scouting, but these are no longer war times and I’m no god-born Achilles. Fool, it is always war times. Calculate the distance to the wall. I can’t run to it without opening up the path to my sleeping children to the beast. How fast could I get to it? I’d need to shift in my position; sit on my feet to be able to launch myself towards the stone altar we all built together when we moved to this house, years ago when the fight ended. The daughters of Hephaistos, praise his crooked limbs, are on my side for now, crackling the logs in my hungry fire, dancing wildly with the promise of another drop of fat, showing me the movements of the enemy, but for how long? What if the smell of the fire wakes my children up? Lighting up a fire to distract her was the only thing I could think about when I heard the hissing and saw her arching figure against our hearth. How long has it been? My stiff limbs and the colour of the hearty piece of suckling pig roasting away tell me it has been a long while. My wife was out in the front collecting our dry clothes and putting out the fire eating away at our offerings for the coming harvest. I can no longer feel her gentle presence in this world. She could not have survived this, this thing, coming for us. Our clothes, our children’s clothes, drying out in the wind out the door, the Lamia must have seen them, it’s must have been what drew her to doorstep. Did my wife suffer, I wonder. I need to find her, bury her with a coin on her tongue, has any left of her been left behind? Will I survive to do this for her? Will anyone do the same for me?

My hands are shaking as I rotate the meat a little to make it look like I am actually cooking it to eat. Quiet, calm movements, don’t aggravate the monster, don’t show it you know it’s there. My back is sweatier than my chest. There’s a cold hand clutching my lungs, and I can feel the hungry eyes on my back, watching. Is it amused by the process? Waiting for something? I don’t understand why it hasn’t attacked me yet, unless it’s more afraid of the fire than I originally thought. The stack of small logs and twigs on my right is dwindling much faster than I had hoped; it will not be enough to last me till dawn. Would she even retreat at dawn?

I dare a timid stretch. The shadow pauses in response and I dare to bring my knees under me. Slowly. Ignoring the stabbing pains from moving out of the position I held so far. I cannot hear it, but I imagine it drooling on our threshold, excited on the prospect of a feeding. It takes everything I have not to shudder at the image I’m sculpting in my head. Long teeth, sharp claws, half the body of a woman, wild hair sweeping the ground, snake tail, maybe snake eyes too? I noticed the neck early on, so abnormally long it’s curving when it looks around as if the vile head is too much for it to bear. I move my lips to a prayer; I make promise of offerings to Athena and Ares for I need her mind to find a way to get to my spear and his might to skewer the demon with it.

My fingers are black with ashes from the hearth. I take them to my face, run two across my eye; one to my lips. Old habits. Ashes. Ashes. I tie a patch of my tunic around itself in the front into a small pouch. I steal opportunities to fill it with small handfuls of ashes as I feed the fire and taste the meat. I should pretend it’s not ready. What if it’s not looking at me when I need it to?

Guard my eyes, Glaukopis Athena.

- ‘It is not yet ready,’ I say out loud, hopefully quiet enough to not interrupt my children’s fragile peace. ‘You’ll have to wait a bit more.’

The tail freezes in place. The hypnotic movement stops for just a few seconds. I hold my breath. The neck strains left and right, then tilts horizontally, until the head almost reaches the base of the neck, looking at me upside down. Bile rises to my mouth. My breath is shards of bitter metal cutting me.

- ‘Is it not?’ it hisses at me. I can barely make out the words, the voice is coarse and strained.

- ‘It will be soon. You can have some of it if you’re hungry.’

The neck moves back to a more comfortable, for my sanity, position. Bony shoulders cross the threshold of my home, nails scrapping the open door as she slithers inside, headfirst. The screeching sound makes my hairs stand on end.

- ‘What is it?’ it asks.

- ‘Child,’ I say, cursing away under my breath the bad oracle of speaking such a horror into existence.

- ‘Child!’ it snaps in surprise.

I move a bit to the left to give it a better view all the while making sure I’m still keeping my back turned; I might lose all courage if I look at it directly.

- ‘Yes.’ My stomach yanks control of me for a second and I cough to supress the urge to let it all out. ‘The last piece I have, but I will share it with you as you’re a guest in my house.’

It sounds like it’s laughing now. Laughing is a very generous way of describing the well-deep echo I hear behind me, closer now, cautious. It’s much slower than a human’s, much slower than any natural sound should be, but loud enough to reverberate against the walls around us, and–curse it–beyond. I’ve run out of time.

- ‘How generous.’

I cut out a slither of the meat.

- ‘There. The rest is yours.’

Its body scrapes the dirt floor making its way towards me as I launch myself to my left with all my might. My ankle snaps under the sudden weight. As I turn to face her, I release a handful of ashes from my makeshift pouch I was clutching in my left hand. Aim for the eyes; I know which direction they’re lusting towards. I bump onto the wall with a painful thud as she screeches and scrabbles at her eyes. I only have one shot. I grab the spear with my right hand and redirect it from further down the shaft with my left. Too close to the wall still, I lunge forward springing off the base of the altar and drive the iron point diagonally up through her human-fleshed chest. Hot blood licks the body of the spear, soaking the ash wood all the way to my hands.

The monster shrieks a cuss from the depths of the underworld and I pull out the spear with all my force. The tail wiggles violently to my direction and I’m too out of breath to avoid it. I only see it coming once, I feel its sting slashing at my eyes and then I see no more.

The impact knocks me back against the wall and I crash my ribs on the stone altar. My right arm is bearing all my weight, slammed on the stone, trapped under me, and I cough blood through my bitten tongue. Scalding rivers are coursing on my cheeks beneath where my eyes used to be. I turn around to where I can hear her chocking. I toss the spear hanging from my left hand to balance over my shoulder and I throw it forwards in the darkness as hard as I can, like a javelin.

I hear it piercing through and the shrieking stops. There’s a soft thud, and a downwards slither, and then nothing.

I wait.

- ‘Father?’

I know this sleepy little voice; I’d know it anywhere. But the face of it I will never get to see again.

The fire can die out now, and so can I.