Fleeced Read Free Page A

around paddocks ringed with high bronze fences. The three gorgons , women with snakes for hair, bickered behind special one-way screens to stop their glances turning ghost visitors to stone.
    What’s that?
    You’re surprised that
ghost
gorgons could still turn spectators into statues? Or that
ghost
monsters needed locking up at all? I suppose that’s because someone’s told you that a ghost’s just a ghost. It’s dead, so it can’t be harmed? Well, Greek ghosts are rather different. In fact, they’re more like candles. Bright and brilliant they can spend an eternity in the Underworld. But, if they’re killed a second time, they’re snuffed out. POOF! Like an extinguished flame they vanish in a smoky smudge and become nothing. So the ghost monsters had to be locked up to protect the ghost visitors. Or more importantly,as Alex saw it, to protect the monsters. You see, Alex was not a typical Greek hero. He’s certainly one of the heroes of our story and it is a Greek story, but that’s not the same thing at all. This is because Greek heroes were famous for two things:
Not liking monsters.
Killing them.
    Alex couldn’t have been more different.
    He wouldn’t have given you last week’s stale sardines from the bottom of Hydra’s tank for a Greek hero. Even now, he couldn’t understand why people admired them so much. Of course, it’d been the same old story when he was alive. He remembered how the customers loved pots showing Jason sneaking up on Drako or Herakles firing arrows at the harpies . It was stupid, Alex thought, how people swooned over biceps and shiny armour and never once stopped to think what the heroes actually did. Like attacking monsters that’d simply been minding their own business. It made him sad to think that every one of zoo’s exhibits was the victim of one hero or another’s handiwork with a sword or a spear or a magic shield. He could imagine the monsters’ surprise and terror at being attacked and tried to make up for it withkindness now.
    Which isn’t to say he would ever step into one of their enclosures. Oh, no. He understood the monsters and their habits too well to do anything so foolish. After all, habits like tearing people’s legs off with your fangs or goring them through with the spikes on your tail are harder than most to break.
    Not that he had to imagine anything when it came to Aries, who told him his opinions on a daily, no hourly, basis. He smiled, wondering what was taking the ram so long at the pavilion this afternoon, and collected the long ladder from the store. Neither a monster, nor in the zoo bosses’ eyes a particularly fabulous animal any more, Aries hadn’t fitted in and, but for Alex’s insistence, he would have been abandoned on some Elysian hillside, anonymous in a shepherd’s flock. It was Alex who had stepped in and demanded that he become his assistant. More than that, he’d built him a small white-walled barn in the courtyard of his family’s house, despite the protests of his mother and two sisters. Now they too had grown used to sharing their sunlit spot with a ram that they loved even when he chewed the heads off the sunflowers or knocked the arms off the statues with his horns.
    Late afternoon was Alex’s favourite time of theday, the time after the tourists had gone home and he could be alone and feed the monsters. And so, at about the time Aries was splintering the back door of the pavilion, Alex was climbing a ladder propped up against the side of Scylla ’s tank. Scraping away the green weed that floated on the surface of the water with a long pole, he peered down through the iron mesh that covered its surface, just able to make out the sea monster’s dark shape against the tiled floor. She looked like a giant backwards squid with women’s heads fanned out on six tentacles that led into a pair of women’s shoulders. Further down, several dogs’ heads on stalks sprouted from her waist and from then on she was a silvery fish tail.