Scylla

Ancient poems warn of a narrow channel of water so treacherous that death touches all who approach. Sailors must choose to risk their ship, traveling close to the monstrous whirlpool Charybdis, or instead hug the rocky shoals where dwells a creature some say is made from the nightmares of all men.

Scylla, they call her, Horror of the Sea. No ship that dares sail in her waters goes unscathed. Those that cling to survival whisper panicked tales of enormous black tentacles tipped with slavering hound heads ravaging whole ships to splinters with pitiless precision. Though it’s her laughter, they say, that’s most horrible; child-like, delighting in blood soaked murder as men are dragged into the dark abyss.

Poets have tried to romanticize this beast, to provide some humanity to her monstrosity. They write she was once a beautiful Naiad, wronged by a jealous priestess and transformed. Yet the old poems say she was born this way, beget by gods full of jealousy and loathing; dropped into the sea to terrorize mankind.

Would that she had remained in the sea, but the nightmare has come ashore. Dragged by dog-headed tentacles she roams our streets, plucks us from our beds, and fills the night with disturbing laughter. Scylla has come, and not even the gods can help us.