After a pause that felt like an hour, Gregory reached up and rubbed the hat back and forth on his head, as if he were trying to heat up his brain. “I think—” he said, squinting at her. “I think you’d better start at the beginning.”
Chapter 5
All in all, Gregory reacted surprisingly well to the news that not only were there monsters in Boston, but many of them had been, until earlier that day, living in Clay Manor. He kept moving his hat back and forth, back and forth, as if working the idea into his scalp.
Finally he said, “Cabal’s not a regular dog, is he?” Cordelia shook her head.
Gregory’s hat tilted right. “I knew there was something strange about him when I saw him come up out of that grave.” His hat tilted left. “He’s still a good dog, though.”
“He’s a good zuppy,” Cordelia corrected. “A zombie puppy,” she added, when Gregory stared at her with both eyebrows raised. “Although the name is a little misleading, because it implies . . .” Cordelia shook her head. She didn’t have time to explain her mother’s research. “Actually, just forget it.”
They were still standing on the street—Cordelia in her bare feet and nightgown, Gregory in his patched, small coat and too-large boots. The mist was clinging to Cordelia’s skin, and the wind felt like a cold, damp touch.
“All the monsters are gone?” Gregory asked.
Cordelia nodded. “And—and—my dad’s missing too.” Just saying the words made her feel like she was going to cry again. “Something terrible must have happened. He would never have left on his own.” Her father had seemed worried yesterday. Had he anticipated that this would happen? If so, why hadn’t he warned her directly? Why hadn’t he tried to prevent it?
“Okay. Okay.” Gregory scratched his head, leaving a long, smudgy black mark across his forehead in the process. “So . . . so he was forced.”
“Maybe he was kidnapped,” Cordelia said. She wouldn’t think about the other possibility, the even worse possibility.
“Grown-up-napped,” Gregory said thoughtfully. “What about the monsters?”
“They must have been taken too,” Cordelia said. She didn’t see how one person could control so many monsters. Maybe it was a conspiracy. She’d learned that word from her father only a few months ago. It meant that a group of people was working together to do something awful.
Never believe the people who tell you there’s no magic left in the world, he’d said to her. It’s a big conspiracy, designed to keep people sewing buttons and buying ribbons and thinking only about pork roast.
“So . . . what now?” Gregory asked. It was already late. The sky was a bruised color, and fog was rolling into the streets off the harbor, like billowing clouds pulled to earth.
“I don’t know.” Panic threatened to overwhelm her again, rising like a wave from her stomach to her throat, and she took several long, deep breaths. The Aeriol complainus are known for their piercing shrieks, loud enough to pierce an eardrum, she thought. The bogey cannot actually fly but only coasts on air currents, scanning for prey. It helped her to recite from A Guide to Monsters and Their Habits when she was very afraid.
The number one rule of tracking monsters: you must never, ever panic.
All at once, she felt as if a lamp had flared to life inside her. Tracking monsters. That was it.
She had no doubt that her father and the monsters were together. And she, Cordelia, knew how to find monsters. She had once surprised a sniffly hufflebottom in its lair. She had once tracked a family of feverish diggles to the bottom of a burrow. She had recognized an injured succubus from the way its shadow fell across a tree stump.
She could find them. She would find them.
She would begin at the house, and follow the trail of the missing monsters, wherever it led.
“I have an idea.” She seized Gregory’s hand, gripping him the way she would have a life preserver in the middle of open ocean, and started walking. She did not think about the fact that she barely knew him. She did not think about what would happen when Gregory abandoned her to search for the monsters on his own, as she was sure that he would. He was here now, and for the moment, that was enough. She didn’t even notice the way that people were staring.
At the corner of Spruce and Chestnut, Mrs. McGregor was just leaving her bakery for the day, carrying a basket of day-old pastries, and she startled as Cordelia and Gregory hurried around the corner of Spruce Street. “Cordelia!” she said, and then frowned as she took in Cordelia’s nightgown, bare feet, and generally disheveled appearance. “What’s wrong with you, child? Where’s your coat? And your shoes?”
“I was in a hurry,” Cordelia said quickly. Her toes were purple from the cold.
Mrs. McGregor’s face was like the wrinkled surface of her raisin bread. She frowned even more deeply. “I’m going to have a word with your father when I see him. Young girls shouldn’t run wild in the streets like stray dogs after a scrap o’ meat.”
“Her father’s—” Gregory started to say, and Cordelia nudged an elbow in his ribs before he could say missing.
“Busy,” she burst out. “Very, very busy.”
Mrs. McGregor shook her head. “Don’t think I won’t give him a piece of my mind, Cordelia Clay, about what’s what. I heard what you did to little Henry Haddock. You should be at St. George’s playing with other nice young girls, not keeping company with . . .” Her voice trailed off into a disapproving rumble as she looked Gregory up and down. “Well, with whatever that is.”
“His name is Gregory,” Cordelia said defensively. Only then did she notice the sign prominently placed in the bakery window: No Beggars. No Foreigners. Absolutely NO Catholics. Since the start of the Hard Times, identical signs had sprouted on more and more businesses, like some fast-growing and devilish varietal of weed.
“If only your mother were still alive,” Mrs. McGregor said, clucking her tongue.
“My mother loved running wild,” Cordelia burst out, with such ferocity that Mrs. McGregor startled again. “She was running wild in the jungle when she”—at the last second, she couldn’t say died—“disappeared.”
“Well, let that be a lesson to you,” Mrs. McGregor said. She took one more look at Gregory and sighed. Then, in a softer voice, she said, “Go on, take some sweet buns home for you and your father. If you get any skinnier, I might mistake you for a broomstick and start sweeping with you.” She passed Cordelia her basket, piled high with walnut-studded sweet buns.
Cordelia realized she hadn’t eaten since a poor supper of nettle soup and seed bread the night before, and she was starving.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly.
Mrs. McGregor sniffed. “Go on, then, both of you,” she said, but didn’t miss the opportunity for a final warning. “Tell your father I’ll be along one of these days to have a word.”
“What’d you do to Henry Haddock?” Gregory asked, as soon as they left Mrs. McGregor behind.
“Not half as much as he deserved,” Cordelia said. Just thinking about it made her insides spark with anger again. Haddock was a bully, the kind of kid who’d liked to pull the wings off moths and butterflies when he was little. He’d moved on to sticking frogs with pins and yanking cats by the tail. Now, apparently, he’d moved on to people.
“What did he do?” Gregory asked.
“Breathe,” Cordelia said. She didn’t want to think about Henry Haddock, or his blockhead friends, who trotted after him like dogs starved for attention. She usually managed to ignore them when she was unlucky enough to pass them in the street, even though they never ignored her—insulting her clothes for being ratty, her face for being narrow, her father for being poor.
But for the first time, only a week ago, they had ignored her. They were busy taunting a man who’d made a home of old shipping crates not far from the park. He didn’t speak English, and thankfully couldn’t understand what they said. But Cordelia heard him cry out when they snatched up his duffel bag and shook out his belongings in the mud.<
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“You want to learn some English? Try this: we don’t want you here,” Henry said.
Cordelia’s feet carried her in his direction before she could think about telling them to run. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop!”
Henry finally noticed her. “Cordelia Crazy, right on time. You want to help us clean up some trash? Because you’re either trying to stop the mess, or you’re the one filling the city with litter—”
Then she drove into him with her shoulder and knocked him to the ground. She got in two good punches, and her only regret was that she hadn’t had time for ten.
Luckily, Gregory didn’t ask any more questions. He didn’t say anything at all, just kept pace with Cordelia as she carved around the corner and cut down Willow Street. She was grateful for the silence. Worry and fear were screaming loud enough inside her head.
But no sooner had they reached the corner of Mt. Vernon Street than a shrill voice stopped Cordelia in her tracks.
“This is a private street, you know. That means you’re trespassing.”
The high, reedy voice was like the crawl of spiders up a spine. Horrible, and impossible to ignore.
She turned to see Elizabeth Perkins, insufferable snot, horrible snob, and her former best friend, standing just behind the iron gates of Number 122. Her new house was so large it looked like it had digested a few other houses and then burped them out into wings.
“Look,” Cordelia said loudly. “The little windup doll knows how to speak.” There was no one in all of Boston that Cordelia despised more than Elizabeth and her empty-headed friends from St. George’s.
“Very funny.” Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. Her hair was curled into ringlets. She wore a fur-trimmed cape fitted with a shiny gold clasp at the neck, a frilly dress, and shoes polished so well they reflected the fog drifting past. “Where are you off to, looking like a street sweep?”
In an instant, Cordelia saw herself through Elizabeth’s eyes: the mess of her uncombed red hair, the scattershot of her freckles, the hem of her old nightgown now filthy from the streets. “Where are you off to, looking like a cream puff?”
“Nowhere that you’ll ever go,” Elizabeth said serenely. “I’m afraid that most theaters have a strict policy against admitting wild animals.”
“Then I’m surprised they allow sheep,” Cordelia fired back. It was hardly imaginable that the girl at the gates—coiled and steamed and carefully pressed as a linen closet—had once been called Lizzie, Cordelia’s best and dearest friend. But of course, they weren’t the same girl, not at all. Lizzie had liked to dig in the mud and help tend to the dogs and cats that came to the Clay home seeking treatment, long before the steady accumulation of monsters meant that Lizzie was invited less and less to Cordelia’s house, and Cordelia more and more to hers. Still, Lizzie had a passionate interest in Cordelia’s stories about monsters, although she thought they were just that—stories.
Then one day, when Cordelia was nine, they’d decided to go on an adventure to discover any monsters they could find nearby, a ritual of theirs. They had explored the wharves and the woods, the park and the playground. That day they decided to explore the Perkins’ garden. By chance, Cordelia had stubbed her toe on a slab of flagstone, and shifted it by a few inches, revealing the mouth of a gently sloping tunnel.
Only by chance, Cordelia and her father had not yet come across a goblin burrow, so Cordelia didn’t think twice about following Elizabeth inside to see where it went.
The answer was: to a goblin.
It was one thing to pretend to be on the hunt for monsters. It was another to discover a sixty-five-pound goblin living beneath your potatoes—especially a goblin startled awake by your screaming.
Afterward, Elizabeth changed. It was as if she blamed Cordelia for the discovery of the goblin; as if by ending her friendship with one, she could deny the reality of the other. Cordelia had never forgotten the way Elizabeth had looked after fleeing the burrow—her hair entangled with a scattering of dried leaves, her face dirt-streaked and leeched of its color, her eyes like two puncture wounds. She had never forgotten the way she trembled, or the way she spoke the two words that ended their friendship.
“Get. Out.”
That was three years earlier, when Cordelia was eight. She didn’t see Elizabeth for a full year. And by the time they began speaking again, it was only to insult each other.
“At least sheep have a flock,” Elizabeth said. “You’ve always been more of a black sheep, I suppose.” She swept her eyes briskly over Gregory, like a broom hurrying up the dirt. “I suppose you’ve begun collecting strays now?”
“Gregory,” Cordelia said, through gritted teeth, “is my friend.” The words were out of her mouth before she considered them, and she felt a tiny thrill of excitement. Was Gregory her friend? Probably not. Still, it felt nice to pretend.
“Well, you know what they say. Quality over quantity. And since you’ve neither”—Elizabeth’s teeth were small and sharp—“remember that beggars can’t be choosers.”
Another surge of anger swept through the whole of Cordelia’s body, from toes to head. Before she knew what she was doing—before she could remind herself she should be staying out of trouble—she scooped up a rock and hurled it. Gregory shouted. The rock hit Elizabeth square in the hand, and she jumped backward, shrieking, bringing her fingers to her mouth.
“What’s wrong with you?” she shouted, clutching her hand. “Why are you such a monster?”
“Come on.” This time it was Gregory who dragged her down the street.
Chapter 6
Cordelia made Gregory wait in the kitchen while she went very slowly through the house, starting with the upstairs. In her father’s room, she immediately spotted an unusual trail of green goo she had missed in her earlier panic. It stretched from just beneath the open window to the foot of the bed and back, as if a large slug had oozed its way in from outside and then made a rapid escape. Except she didn’t know any slug that would climb a house and try to gain entry. She certainly didn’t know any slug that could beat a hasty retreat.
She went to the open window and looked out into the misty courtyard. The crooked branches of the oak tree outside her father’s window swayed in the wind. A sudden gust lifted the curtains, and a loud bang made Cordelia jump. But it was only the closet door, slamming shut behind her.
A monster might be responsible for the slime, she supposed—it might have climbed the tree and come in through the window. But then what? She couldn’t imagine. And the only monster she could think of that left a similar trail was the Bilious caterpillarus, related, according to her mother’s theories, to both a variety of twice-molting newt and the common gypsy caterpillar. But those had been extinct for a hundred years now.
She was about to leave her father’s room when she heard a faint scratching from inside the closet. She froze. Scratch, scratch, scratch. And a soft, whimpering sound.
She picked up the old brass candlestick from her father’s nightstand. She crept toward the closet, arm raised, ready to strike . . .
Then seized hold of the door handle, and flung open the door.
Instantly, a ball of white fur rocketed out at her, knocking her off her feet and sending the candlestick clattering across the floor.
“Cabal!” she cried, as Cabal licked her face enthusiastically and drooled all over her. He must have gotten away from Gregory and followed her upstairs. “You scared me, little guy.”
Cabal made a noise somewhere between a howl and a bark. Cordelia sat up and returned him to the floor. Only then did she see what he had been doing in the closet: he had made a kind of nest by ripping apart several newspapers and various items of clothing, including her father’s favorite work pants.
“Bad zuppy,” she said, and even though she supposed it didn’t matter, she began to separate the torn paper from the shreds of her father’s now-destroyed work pants, as though by collecting them, they might spontaneously repair themselves—and repair, too, what had gon
e wrong, bring her father and all the monsters back.
She was almost finished arranging the scraps of fabric in a neat pile when she noticed a piece of paper, largely intact, buried among the cloth. It was soft, as though it had been handled often, and for some time.
She unfolded it and saw words written in unfamiliar handwriting. Portions of the letter were blurred by a liquid spill, so only certain phrases were legible. She sniffed. Fungal oil. Her father must have been carrying some in the same pocket.
Hello . . . I should thank . . . making my work easy . . . Do not underestimate what I can do . . . I am coming for you . . . and for your monstrous collection . . . soon.
The last word was underlined with such force, the pen nib had left a hole in the paper. At the bottom of the note was an ornate signature; Cordelia could make out only what she thought was a comma, and the initials of the first and last name, HP.
She stood up, dizzy with both fear and excitement. Here, at last, was a clue: a message from a person unknown. And now she thought she knew why her father had been acting so strangely. He had known that he was a target. He had suspected that any day he might be compelled by HP—whoever he was—to leave Cordelia. And now the day had come.
Downstairs, Gregory was sitting in front of the stove. “Look what I found,” he said. He had a curious expression on his face, as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of quince paste when he’d been expecting chocolate, and now was trying to puzzle out the flavor. He leaned forward to open the oven door.
Cordelia couldn’t believe it: Icky, the filch, was huddled in the oven, sniffling piteously. It was no surprise. Filches—amphibious, mud-dwelling monsters very closely related to monkeys—were notoriously cowardly. The baby dragon, its wing still splinted, was squirming inside Icky’s panicked grasp, clearly agitated, and let out a burst of flame when Gregory leaned too close. He drew back. A small portion of his eyebrow caught flame and then, when he clapped a hand to his head, was quickly extinguished.
The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street Page 6