The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street

by Lauren Oliver

  “Why’d he do that?” Gregory said.

  “He’s a dragon, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “He can’t help it.”

  “A dragon,” Gregory repeated. Once again, he started nudging his hat back and forth, a gesture Cordelia now recognized as a sign of deep thought.

  “I warned you, didn’t I?” Cordelia said. She squatted, extending one hand tentatively toward the monsters. “Come on,” she cooed. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Her throat was so tight she could hardly swallow. They had survived. Somehow, while the others had been taken—while her father had been taken—they had stayed hidden and so they had survived.

  It took some further coaxing, and their last meat pie from the pantry, before the dragon poked his head tentatively from the oven and at last ventured out into the kitchen. The filch emerged soon afterward and promptly leapt for Gregory and began anxiously gnawing at his shin. The more Gregory tried to shake him off, the more desperately he wrapped his arms around Gregory’s leg, and the more he gnawed.

  “He’s traumatized,” Cordelia explained apologetically.

  “So’s my shin,” Gregory responded. But after that, he didn’t complain, and clomped around the kitchen with the filch still clinging to him. Cordelia had never much liked Icky. He was old and bad-tempered, and he farted. But she was so grateful to see that two of the monsters remained, she could have leaned down and kissed him on his puckered nose. The dragon, too, had she not suspected that he might set her hair ablaze.

  “Did you find anything upstairs?” Gregory asked.

  Cordelia wasn’t ready to tell Gregory about the slime she’d found upstairs. She didn’t know what it meant, or whether it meant anything. But she showed him the note she had found among the tattered remains of her father’s clothing. It took Gregory a long time to work out the message.

  “I never went to school,” he explained, squinting over the page, until Cordelia showed him that he was holding it upside down.

  “I never went to school, either,” Cordelia said. “I learned everything I know from books, and from my father. My mother too, before she . . . went away.” Cordelia had never gotten used to saying the word died out loud. And in truth, she didn’t actually remember how her mother used to read to her—for hours, sometimes, occasionally from a book of old nursery rhymes, and sometimes simply by reciting from the manuscript she worked on painstakingly every night. But her father had told her that when Cordelia was a baby, she could fall asleep nowhere but in her mother’s study. So they had installed her crib next to the desk, where, lulled by the gentle hiss of her mother’s pen across fresh pages, and by the murmuring recitation of her words, Cordelia had slept peacefully through the night.

  “Never had any books,” Gregory said nonchalantly, forgetting even to complain that Icky had gnawed a hole in his trousers. Or maybe he merely hadn’t noticed, since his trousers were already so full of holes. “Never had a mother and father, neither. Aha! I know that first letter. H. It’s a funny-looking shape, isn’t it? Looks like two I’s got stuck together with a stick. Oh, look! Speaking of I’s, there’s one right there. Sneaky things. They slink past so quick you hardly notice.”

  Cordelia was quiet. She tried to imagine what it would be like if she had never had a father or a mother, but she couldn’t. She imagined an empty room, stretching in all directions. She suddenly felt like hugging Gregory again. But he was still puzzling out the letters, so she didn’t.

  “I know that word. C-O-M-I-N-G. Like ‘the train’s coming in five minutes, boy, so scram out of here before I boot you.’ And that word too. Y-O-U. ‘You can’t be in here! You don’t belong here! It’s people like you dirtying up Boston! You should go back to where you came from!’ See? I taught myself to read just fine, didn’t I? ‘I’m coming for you,’” he finished triumphantly. Then, as the meaning behind the message registered, he frowned.

  “Let me get this straight,” Gregory said at last. “Some guy named HP—”

  “Or girl,” Cordelia said.

  “Okay, some guy or girl named HP—”

  “Some Hideous Person,” Cordelia suggested.

  “Okay, some Hideous Person was threatening your dad. And maybe he wanted the . . . monsters for himself.” Gregory tripped only a little over the word. “Somehow he sneaks in, convinces your dad to go with him, and gets all the monsters out without making a noise.”

  Cordelia had to admit it sounded unlikely. Still, her father was gone, and the monsters were too. And the letter was proof someone had come for them. She tried to think whether she knew of anyone who might want to hurt her father or steal the monsters. But she came up blank. No one even knew about the monsters—she and her father had been so careful over the years. And how could her father have enemies, when he didn’t even have friends?

  Still, she could think of no other possible explanation.

  “My dad couldn’t have had any other choice,” she said. “And the Hideous Person might have had help.”

  Gregory sighed. “There’s only one thing to do, then,” he said. At last he succeeded in shaking the filch from his pant leg, though unfortunately, Icky scurried off with a large square of fabric from Gregory’s cuff. The filch retreated to the corner, where the dragon was keeping Cabal at bay by breathing smoke into his face every time the zuppy got too close.

  “I can’t go to the police, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Cordelia said.

  Gregory made a face. “The police won’t do anything but take notes and poke around a bit. No.” His eyes were a very clear green, like the color of new grass. “We find HP.”

  Chapter 7

  “We?” Cordelia was so surprised to hear Gregory say the word that for a second she couldn’t even react to the rest of his suggestion: We find HP. As if it were as simple as strolling down to the butcher and asking for a sausage link.

  “I’m going to help,” he announced, puffing out his chest slightly—which, since he was so narrow, had the effect of making him look like an upside-down exclamation point. “You helped save my dog.”

  “Zuppy,” Cordelia corrected.

  “Sure, zuppy. Dead or alive, Cabal’s a friend. And you’re a friend too.”

  Cordelia couldn’t speak immediately. Friend. Funny how a bundle of letters could add up to so much. Friend meant she wasn’t alone, not entirely. Friend meant she had hope.

  Even so, the idea of trying to find HP was overwhelming. Where could they possibly begin? Cordelia had never been outside Boston; it was rare that she ever left the house, unless her father accompanied her. She had no idea how far the world extended, how long and wide it might be, what it looked like beyond the familiar slanting streets of her hometown.

  “They’ve had a head start,” Cordelia said. “They might have gone in any direction.”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Gregory swiped his straw-like hair from his eyes. In the corner, Cabal and Icky were fighting over a canister of dung beetles, which the dragon, in his awkward attempts to fly, had knocked off the pantry shelf. Icky poked Cabal in the nose.

  Cordelia had to admit that she didn’t. Still, she felt almost sick with fear. “We’ll have to be very careful. HP—whoever he or she is—managed to steal two bullieheads, two growrks, and a family of pixies without any trouble. He’s strong, and clever, and sneaky.”

  “That’s all right,” Gregory said. “Careful’s what I do best. Besides,” he added and grinned, “we got a dragon.”

  At that moment, the dragon coughed out a long stream of flame. Gregory yelped and jumped backward, knocking over one of the kitchen chairs. As he sprang forward to put out the smoldering wallpaper, and succeeded instead only in breaking Cordelia’s favorite mug and a jar full of dried arrowroot, Cordelia’s stomach sank all the way to her toes.

  “Why,” she sighed, “do I get the sense that we’re about to do something very, very stupid?”

  The filch let out a delighted fart.

  Gregory packed a bag with supplies from the pantry while Cordelia went
upstairs to change out of her nightgown. She put on a pair of old corduroy pants and carefully transferred the note into a pocket. She layered a large, moth-eaten sweater that had once belonged to her mother over a turtleneck and wrestled on her favorite jacket, which was fitted with seven deep pockets in which she liked to keep various tools of the monster-hunting trade: a spyglass, a sound-amplifier of her father’s own invention, and nose plugs (useful when hunting the bogs); a wrench, wires, pincers, and dingle clips; goggles, adjustable harnesses, square nails, and a pair of pliers whose handles had been gnawed practically into uselessness by one of their diggles.

  She retrieved her rucksack from her closet, where she had discarded it the night before, and checked it to make sure her lantern, blanket, and collapsible net were still undisturbed. Satisfied that everything was in place, she shoved her feet into her mother’s rubber boots, slung the bag over her shoulder, and returned downstairs. In the pantry, she found her father’s leather coin purse, tucked away in an empty tin of biscuits. She counted out the total inside: twelve dollars and eighty-five cents. They would have to make do.

  In the kitchen, Gregory ticked off pantry items he’d packed. “Salted beef jerky, sardines, seed bread, dung beetles”—he made a face—“tinned peas, a dozen bone cookies, a jar of peanuts, and Mrs. McGregor’s sweet buns.”

  “What about the wormroot and the yak grease?” Cordelia asked, bending down to fix a collar and leash onto Cabal, Icky, and the dragon in turn. The dragon twisted his head and tried to spit flame at her fingers, but only succeeded, this time, in coughing out smoke.

  “Got ’em,” Gregory said.

  “And the fermented fish cakes? Icky—that’s the filch—is crazy about them.”

  “Check,” Gregory said.

  Standing in the warmth of the kitchen, surrounded by the clutter of familiar objects, Cordelia felt a sharp pang. She had no idea how long it would be before she returned, sat by the warmth of its ancient stove, or walked its warped floorboards.

  “Hang on,” she said. “There’s one last thing I have to do.”

  Chapter 8

  Cordelia had been inside her mother’s study on only one occasion since her mother had left it for the last time: the day the confirmation of Elizabeth Clay’s death had come back to them by wire, a full three years after she had first set sail for the jungles of Brazil.

  Her father had delivered the news in the old parlor, as a drift of feathers fell from the overhead chandelier, where two adolescent squelches, the first monsters he had ever kept at home, were encamped to grow their wintertime fur. They had been there since they had sprouted their summertime feathers, the year before. And although for a long time, Cornelius had pretended he would let them go “any day now,” he had recently stopped speaking of their release at all. Then, the week before, he had brought home four baby squinches, abandoned by their mother, rescued from the bottom of an old laundry chute in Chinatown.

  Now, one of the baby squinches bounced rhythmically on Cordelia’s toes for her attention.

  And for the first time in her life, Cordelia felt a sudden well of hatred—for the squelches, mindlessly shedding feathers, happy and unaware. For the baby squinch, the size of a golf ball but quite a bit more rubbery, thunking her toes over and over. For all the monsters, everywhere, and for her mother’s stupid desire to protect them, even though they would never protect her back.

  “It isn’t the monsters’ fault, Cordelia,” her father had said, as if reading her mind. “Your mother believed in her work. She died doing something that mattered to her. If you have to blame someone, blame me. I should have gone with her—”

  “Great idea. Then I could have been an orphan.” The baby squinch had gummed onto her bootlaces, and she tried to shake him off. “She went to the jungle for the monsters, didn’t she?”

  “Cordelia . . .”

  “She chose to go. She knew it was dangerous.” Cordelia looked down, blinking back tears. The squinch had latched onto her bootlaces, using its mouth for suction. “Let go of me,” she ordered it. But it only clung tighter. “I said let go.”

  And in a sudden fury, blinded by a flash of grief and hatred, she kicked it.

  For a split second, as the squinch spun through the air, time seemed to slow. Cordelia had time to register the squinch’s startled expression, her father’s look of horror, and a stabbing guilt that drained away all her anger.

  Then the squinch hit the baseboard with a horrible, wet splat.

  And Cordelia ran. She careened into the hall, pinballing off the radiator. And as the thunder of her own guilt, and the sound of her father shouting her name, filled her head with terrible echoes, she threw herself inside her mother’s study and bolted the door behind her.

  She had killed the squinch.

  Her mother was dead.

  It wasn’t the monsters’ fault. It was her fault, for being a monster.

  Otherwise her mother would never have left Cordelia to sail to the jungle. She would never have left Cordelia at all.

  She heard the drumming of her father’s footsteps as he moved from room to room, looking for her. She dropped onto her hands and knees beside the fireplace and folded herself into the hearth, still covered in a silt of old ashes. She had been five years old when the telegram came, and whenever she thought of the word dead, it brought with it the taste of ashes.

  When her father had finally found her, shivering inside a cold wind that swept down the flue and lifted the grit of old fires all around her, like a snowstorm in reverse, he had merely dropped to his knees and opened his arms. She had fallen into him, sobbing, choking on the taste of all the ash she’d inhaled. He had held her tight, rocking her like a baby, until at last she’d run through her store of tears, and felt as dark and empty as a chimney, swirling with cold ash.

  Only then did he say, “You didn’t kill the squinch.”

  In an instant, an ember of joy sparked to life inside her stomach. Cordelia pulled away, swiping at her nose. “I—I didn’t?”

  Her father stood up and moved to the bookshelves. By then, it was after dawn, and sunlight peeked through a fissure in the curtains, illuminating the spires of books rising toward the ceiling. He withdrew The Guide to Monsters and Their Habits, her mother’s first book, from the place she had long kept it. He thumbed through the pages until he found what he was looking for. Then, clearing his throat, he read:

  “‘The squinch at rest resembles a small, furry globe, “plumped up” by a normal circulation of liquid through the flexible tubing. In this state, squinches move primarily by bouncing, often reaching heights of twenty feet or more. At that point, the squinches “shed” water, expelling liquid from the structural tubing that keeps their shape intact, and flattening to the shape of a disk. . . .’

  “‘In this “disk” shape, they are effectively conserving energy, and are capable of gliding or flying great distances, before landing without any harm to their structure. Starting from an early age, North American squinches are lulled to sleep when they are dropped from a height . . .’”

  For a second after he finished reading, Cordelia could only stare at him, speechless. “It was sleeping?” she said.

  “Thanks to you. I couldn’t understand why the little beast wouldn’t bed down. I’d forgotten all about your mother’s research.” He had snapped the book closed, letting up a drift of dust from its pages.

  Then, very deliberately, he’d extended it to her.

  “I think, Cordelia,” he said, “that it is time for you to begin your real education.”

  And Cordelia, holding the book to her chest, felt the echo of her own heart, beating fast against the binding.

  “Come,” her father had said, in a quiet voice. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let us leave our ghosts in peace.”

  That day, he had closed the door to her mother’s study for the last time, and locked away their memories inside it.

  The key was still right where her father had left it—hanging on a faded purpl
e ribbon on the crooked nail on the wall outside the door. It took her several tries to fit the key in the lock. She jumped at every creak and groan of wind. She half expected to hear her father shout and demand to know what she was doing.

  She had to remind herself that her father was gone, and that she was leaving, too, to go look for him.

  Finally, she got the door open. She slipped inside, holding her breath, as if otherwise the room might hear her coming and startle away.

  Inside, it smelled just like she remembered: like ash, and paper, and ink. In the bare moonlight trickling through the curtains, Cordelia could just make out the silhouette of her mother’s desk, and the familiar shape of her crib positioned next to it. Seeing it there made a lump grow in her throat. She swallowed quickly and felt her way carefully to the small paraffin lamp that stood on the mantel. She was now tall enough to reach it, and easily got the wick lit before replacing the lamp chimney.

  Warm light leapt suddenly across the carpet. Now Cordelia could see another oil lamp, this one standing on the bookshelf, next to the long, curved talon of an extinct breed of cockatrice her mother had mounted behind glass. She lit that one, too.

  Now light washed the shadows from her mother’s desk, still stacked with the pages of her unfinished manuscript. Cordelia had never looked at it closely. She had been too young before; and of course, for years the study had been strictly off-limits.

  But now she approached, leaving faint imprints in the carpet thickened with heavy dust.

  The pages of her mother’s unfinished manuscript had been brittled by age into the texture of old leaves. There was a stack of nine-year-old correspondence, pinned beneath the sterling silver letter opener engraved with her initials; there was her leather blotter, splotched with ink stains, and a sketch pad filled with diagrams and illustrations she intended for the inserts of her book. In one, her mother had drawn the arterial branches of the whole vast evolutionary tree of life, as it fissured from kingdom to phylum and all the way down to different species, from snapping turtles to squinches. In another, she’d carefully detailed the mandible of both an armadillo and its distant cousin, the growrk, to demonstrate the similarity. In a third, she’d resurrected the long-extinct Giant Hippogriff in the glorious details of her pen strokes, and given it a head that very clearly suggested a relationship to the common dairy cow.