The Snow Nymph

By Jon Jacks

Khione is a snow nymph: or so the showman Glaukos claims, as he displays her amongst his mermaids, fallen angels, and Minotaur’s brethren.
As for Khione – well, she can’t remember if it’s true or not.
But she abruptly knows that it is true that a great sea monster prowls the oceans.
For as they take ship across the Mediterranean, it bears down upon them – and easily swallows up their ship whole...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: Nov 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005944667

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

The Snow Nymph

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)

The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666

P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque

Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent

Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak

Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife

Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland

The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas

Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen – Thrice Born – Self-Assembled Girl – Love Poison No. 13

Whatever happened to Cinderella’s Slipper? – AmeriChristmas – The Vitch’s Kat in Hollywoodland

Blood of Angels, Wings of Men – Patchwork Quest – The World Turns on A Card – Palace of Lace

The Wailing Ships – The Bad Samaritan – The 13th Month – The Silvered Mare – SpinDell

Swan Moon – The Unicorndoll – Lesser Nefertiti – My Shrieking Skin – Stone in Love

Font of All Lies – The Bared Heart – The Fairy Paintbox – An Angelic Alphabet

Forewarnings and Three Grapes – Death of a Fairytale Princess – The Incurable Caress

The Maid’s Caul – Nu’s Ark – A Disgraced Angel – Wake Me Up When it’s Christmas

God’s Toybox – Aurora Rising – The Veil – Petals: Portals of Desire – Ripppples

The Golden Elk – The Deep and Secret Yes

Text copyright© 2021 Jon Jacks

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Chapter 1

‘Gather round, gather here, and see the caged snow nymph!’

Showman that he was, Glaukos tried to add spurring tones of conviction to his proclamation.

Yet it was all pitiably lacklustre, compared to his usual standards.

She could be any other scraggy girl.

She could be dead, she lay so still.

The smattering of an audience thought so too.

‘It’s just some poor slave girl you can’t be bothered feeding!’

‘Or washing down!’

Glaukos regretted his decision not to dress his prize up in any way.

If, indeed, she was actually any ‘prize’ at all.

She’d come his way because he’d found her, exhausted and delirious, in a pile of snow on the edges of the southern desert.

The snow had long gone.

Melted away into nothing but water, even though Glaukos’s aids had tried to shovel it all into the bottom of her cage as they’d taken possession of her.

The water had stayed there until it evaporated, held in place by a trough that originally held the ‘Mermaid of the Western Seas’.

When Glaukos had first put his ‘mermaid’ on display, he’d naturally replaced her legs with the crudely stitched on lower parts of a dolphin.

She’d soon died, of course, but not before she’d brought in enough money to save his floating menagerie of the weird and wonderful.

He glanced up to where Matto, his ‘angel’, swung precariously amongst the ship’s rigging, the huge wings strapped across the poor man’s back constantly threatening to unbalance him and send him plummeting to his death on the timbered deck.

Then there was the child of the minotaur, an infant born with cruel disfigurements Glaukos had permanently blackened with ingrained soot before splicing horns from a young bullock into raggedly cut flesh.

His even more torturously constructed three-headed spawn of Cerberus was now noticeably weakening even in the darkness of what passed for a hold (any oarsmen, if Glaukos could afford them, would have found that their benches had been removed long-ago), a poor draw for crowds expecting to be terrified.

What, though, should a snow nymph look like?

What should he do to make his miserable specimen even halfway believable?

*

‘Well, what do you expect a snow nymph to look like?’

Glaukos’s tone towards his audience was suitably belligerent, hiding his hope that they might be able to provide him with a helpful answer.

‘That river nymph you had last time you visited,’ cried out an older member of the crowd, ‘didn’t she have scales and seaweed growing everywhere about her from her skin?’

Yes, thought Glaukos – but how long do river nymphs last?

Hardly any time at all, no matter how carefully the grafting was applied.

‘So you’re saying a snow nymph should have scales?’ Glaukos spat back as jovially as he could muster, wishing to give the impression he wasn’t in anyway affronted by the man’s implication that everything on the ship had always been and would always be fraudulent.

That’s the problem with any real creatures, thought Glaukos bitterly.

They’re always a disappointment; none of them could hope to live up to the expectations of a crowd parted from their money.

‘I bring to you a wonder,’ Glaukos announced proudly, ‘only to fall foul of your own lack of knowledge as to what a snow nymph looks like!’

‘We don’t even know what snow looks like!’ admitted another member of the crowd with a depreciating guffaw. ‘We’re lucky these days if we can even see it from miles away on a mountain top!’

‘Is that it?’ yelled out another. ‘Is she melting in the sun?’

Glaukos glanced down towards the prone nymph.

She certainly looked in a bad way.

Maybe if she wailed a bit; well, maybe then she might look like she was wilting in the heat!

Maybe this had been a bad idea all along.

Maybe she should be a river nymph, perhaps with water lilies fountaining out from her flesh; at least, that way, he’d get a few weeks’ worth of entertainment out of her!

*

Chapter 2

What are we to make of Glaukos’s apparently foolish assertion to have acquired a snow nymph?

Certainly,