Chapter 20 Jill #2
Jill nodded. “We’re not the only ones, either. I think Una feels it, too. Something’s wrong with that house. Because of her.”
Charles gazed down at the illustration of Medusa and her two sisters. “Maybe she is a witch. Maybe she, like, controls something in the water.”
Jill waited a moment to see if he was being serious, but she could tell by his deep frown and frightened eyes that he was.
“Maybe. I’ve mostly read about Greek myths, but I also found this woman called Lamia. She was, like, a combo of witch, demon,
and sea monster. And she ate kids.”
Charles muttered something in a language Jill didn’t understand.
“Is that Hebrew?” she asked.
“Yiddish. It’s something my bubbe used to say to ward off evil spirits. It means, ‘In the balcony there are three cracks.
Go there, Evil Eye, and hide yourself.’”
Charles’s cheeks were scarlet with embarrassment, but Jill wished she knew a charm to protect her from demons.
“Is this the grandma who comes over all the time?”
“No, it’s the one who died when I was ten.
She was really cool. She was in the circus when she was young.
She always told the best stories. She was kind of my best friend.
” He swallowed hard and tried to distract himself by looking around Jill’s room.
Then he pointed at the book in Jill’s hand. “Does that have a picture of Lamia?”
Jill sighed. “No. There are photos of Greek vases showing almost all of the other monsters. The vases are super old. Like
this amphora of Scylla? It’s from 450 BC. If Lamia is Scylla’s mother, then she’s even older. I need to look up monsters in
other myths. Like from China and Norway. Because if other people wrote about a monster like Lamia . . .”
“Then she might be real,” Charles whispered. “What are we gonna do?”
“Tell Una. She—”
A crash came from Justin’s room followed by a squawk of dismay. Something thumped against the wall behind Jill’s bookcase
and Justin let out a wail. Jill heard J.J. trying to placate their baby brother.
“Stop crying!” J.J. barked. “I’ll fix it. Look! I’m fixing it!”
“What’s going on in there?” their dad bellowed from down the hall.
“Nothing! One of Justin’s LEGO towers collapsed, but I’m fixing it!” J.J. shouted back.
I bet you knocked it over with Mr. Potato Head. Or your foot, thought Jill.
She heard unintelligible murmuring from J.J. and a few sniffles from Justin. As soon as the house grew quiet again, the carousel
music box with the creepy horse began to spin. The twang of an off-key note echoed in the air. After two or three seconds,
another dissonant note played. Then another. Every pluck of the metal comb inside the belly of the music box caused Jill’s
hand to vibrate with pain.
Charles got to his feet and stood in front of the shelf of music boxes. Glancing down at Jill, he said, “Is it hurting you?”
Jill whispered, “Yeah.”
Charles grabbed the carousel horse and held it by the base so that it couldn’t turn anymore. “I have to go to temple now.
Do you want me to take this?”
Jill nodded gratefully. “Throw it in the trash at your house. Don’t let anyone see. If my mom asks, I’ll tell her I broke
it.”
She walked Charles to the front door and followed him out onto the stoop. Together, they stared at the mist-veiled shadow
that was Mrs. Smith’s house.
Charles said, “Do you have to go back there?”
Jill didn’t bother to disguise her misery. “Tomorrow. After church.”
“Can’t you just tell your mom that you don’t want to do it?”
“She isn’t like your mom,” Jill said with a conflicting mix of jealousy and pride. She wished her mom was soft and sweet like
Mrs. Bernstein, but she was also proud of how smart her mom was. How strong. If Mrs. Bernstein was Aphrodite, then her mom
was Athena. And Jill would rather be the daughter of a warrior. Especially if there was a monster in the water.
Witch. Demon. Beast. Child killer.
Jill said goodbye to Charles and returned to her room. Feeling a little better now that the music box was gone, she reached
for a book called Mythical Beasts of the World. She ignored the beautiful illustrations of unicorns and griffins, searching only for creatures with a woman’s face.
She’d gotten through half of the book before her dad asked her to help make bologna and cheese sandwiches for lunch. Suddenly
hungry, she yelled, “Be right there!”
After she ate her sandwich and a bowl of fruit cocktail, Justin asked her to play with him. She wanted to get back to her room, but he looked at her with his puppy dog eyes and she couldn’t say no.
They played Candy Land, which Justin won, followed by two rounds of Chutes and Ladders. Justin landed on the cookie jar space
and had to go all the way down the long slide, but he didn’t pout, even when it was clear the action meant he’d most certainly
lose. He just shrugged and waited for Jill to take her turn.
“Charles brought us a box of cookies,” she said after packing up the game. “Want to ask Dad if you can have some while you
watch a show?”
“Yeah!” Justin trotted down the hall.
Back in her room, Jill continued looking though Mythical Beasts of the World. She was reading a description of an Inuit sea monster called the Qalupalik when her dad knocked on her door.
“Phone’s for you, Jilly Bean.”
“Okay.”
Her dad surveyed the array of library books. “Working on your summer reading for school?”
“It’s research. For a story.”
As she passed him in the doorway, he gave her a one-armed hug. “My little Hemingway. Maybe you’ll work in the city one day.
Your brothers and I will be on Wall Street, and you’ll be a reporter for The Times or The Post. We could have lunch. I’d take you to all my favorite places.”
Jill didn’t want to be a reporter, but she loved the idea of meeting her dad for lunch. Even more, she loved that he saw her
as being smart enough to land a job with a major newspaper.
She paused for a second to lean against her father’s warm chest. He kissed the top of her head and then gave her a gentle
push. “Phone’s off the hook in the kitchen.”
Jill picked up the handset and said, “Hello?”
She fully expected to hear Heather’s voice and was startled when Charles said, “Jill? Hey. It’s, uh, Charles. I—I wanted to
tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I had to stay after the service today to talk to the rabbi. He wanted to make sure I was ready to come back to Hebrew school
after, you know, after the regatta.” Jill heard the rustle of paper in the background. “We were in his office, and I asked
him if there were other creatures in the Torah like the Leviathan. The Torah’s basically the Old Testament of the Bible and
the Leviathan is a sea monster.”
Jill stared out at the harbor, her eyes searching for shadows between the moored boats. “Okay.”
“The Talmud, which is all these Jewish laws and other stuff, mentions a bunch of monsters and demons. So, I asked Rabbi Greenberg
if one was named Lamia, and he gave me a funny look. Then he went to his shelf and pulled out this really old, old book. It
was brown with big, yellowy pages. There was no title on the cover or anything. He read to himself for a bit and then told
me that Lamia is in the Old Testament. Not in our Torah, but in a Bible like you’d use.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. The lines are from the Book of Isaiah. I wrote them down. They say, ‘And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy
ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself.’”
Demons. Monsters. Lamia.
“So, she meets with other demons and then rests? I don’t get it.”
“That’s just one version. In another version, she doesn’t have a name. She’s just called the Night Monster. In other versions, she’s Lilith. My rabbi said Lilith is older than Judaism. She was around before the Bible. Some translations call her the Night Demon. Guess what horrible thing she did?”
Jill was scribbling notes as fast as she could, but now she stopped. She felt clammy again. She didn’t want to hear what Charles
was about to say, but she knew she had to. “What?”
“She devoured children.”
Jill’s gaze shifted to the shallow water directly behind her house. “This can’t be real. It just can’t. It’s totally crazy.
If there was a demon swimming around, eating kids, people would know. I mean, where could she hide?”
“I asked the rabbi what Lamia looked like, and he said he didn’t know. He said there are demons called shaydim. They’re shapeshifters. The only way you can tell they’re not human is if they take off their shoes. The shaydim will never take off their shoes because they have chicken feet.”
Charles let out a nervous giggle, but Jill glanced from the gray, rain-needled harbor to the bloodstained bandage on her hand.
“Maybe the shapeshifters who lived on land had chicken feet,” she said. “And the demons from the water—the night monsters—had
something else that showed what they really were.”
“Like what?”
Jill closed her hand and rested it over her heart. “Scales.”