“Never mind,” she said. “Just do it.” He dragged a hand across his chin and adjusted his hat, which had begun to gravitate backward.
The train came to a halt just north of the city, and its furnaces were extinguished. A team of horses rigged to the front carriage would tow the train into the underground tunnels that fed into Grand Central Station. Cordelia was almost relieved when they descended into a darkness that swallowed up the view.
Soon, the tunnel belched them out at the platform, and once again, the train lurched to a stop. This time, everyone disembarked, and there was a sudden chaos of shouting and pushing, a blur of luggage loaded and unloaded. Cordelia had a hard time getting ahold of Cabal, who had gotten used to their little compartment and dodged her neatly when she tried to come at him with the scarf. Finally, she and Gregory teamed up to snatch the zuppy, and with a few twists and turns of the fabric, Cordelia had once again turned him into something resembling a furry, squirmy little baby. Cabal, however, refused to play along this time and managed to extract both front paws. Cordelia could only hope that no one would notice that their baby brother had very sharp claws.
Wrestling the dragon back into her jacket proved even harder. He swiped at her and even let out a burst of flame, singeing the lining of her pocket.
“Bad dragon,” she whispered fiercely, once she had him tucked away again. A bit of smoke puffed up from her pocket in response.
As they joined the crowd of passengers shuffling out of their compartments, unloading luggage and flowing onto the platform, Icky toddled along happily, baring his nubby teeth at anyone who stared at him too closely. They merged with the vast river of people coursing along the platform into the waiting room. There, Cordelia realized they might have gone undetected even if they had been accompanied by a full-grown dragon and a whole menagerie of monsters. Everyone in New York City, it seemed, was too busy to take notice of anyone else.
The air was sooty and filthy and swelteringly hot, despite the winter chill that seeped in from the platforms. It reeked of machine oil and human sweat. But the energy was thrilling. Cordelia could practically feel it, humming in the air all around them. She quickened her pace as they approached the doors that let out onto the street. Her father was here. The monsters were here.
She, Cordelia, would rescue them.
Suddenly Gregory whipped around with a little cry. “What is it?” Cordelia said.
He shook his head, frowning. “That feeling again,” he said. “Like a ghost licked my neck. We’re being followed, Cordelia.”
Cordelia turned around and scanned the teeming crowd. She saw no one. That is, she saw a vast number of people—a big-bosomed woman screeching at a porter, a mother trying to herd along her four children, men in greatcoats crowding the entrance to a beer saloon—but no one who looked familiar, or seemed to have any interest in Cordelia and Gregory.
“Stop it,” she said sternly, turning back to Gregory. “It’s all in your head. You’ll only drive yourself bonkers.”
“What if Crunch is still after us?”
“Crunch is back in Boston, picking splinters out of his snout.” She didn’t want to admit that even thinking about the dog made a zip of fear go up her back.
Gregory didn’t look convinced, but at least he shut up about being followed.
Outside, their breath condensed in little clouds on the cold air. But at least it wasn’t snowing. Though it had been years since Gregory had lived in New York City, he still remembered they had to go south to reach Union Square, and the numbered streets made it easy to know their direction. Soon, Cordelia was warm enough to unbutton her coat.
She felt a spike of nervousness. New York City was even larger than she had imagined. Her father had told her stories of his infrequent trips to the city: of the towering mansions on Fifth Avenue, with dozens and dozens of rooms patterned with marble, and electric lights that burned through the night; of the bridges like vast metal insects that spanned the snaking East River; of the museums and theaters, and the crowds of sheep that grazed like earthbound clouds in Central Park; of the pickpockets and vandals, the criminals and con artists.
But his stories could never have prepared her for the sheer scale of the city, and its great avenues lined with towering buildings, dazzling hotels where white-gloved attendants carted masses of luggage through revolving doors, cabs and carriages, buggies and broughams, whole boulevards filled with nothing but shops. Every street sizzled with light and electricity, holding the night at bay. High street poles threw cones of electric light down onto the sidewalks, and theaters threw it up into the sky. The whole city, it seemed, was under construction: rickety towers of scaffolding encased half-finished buildings that flowed ever northward. Private homes loomed behind massive iron gates, and all of their doors—positioned high above the street, at the top of sweeping stone staircases—reminded Cordelia of upturned noses.
And yet . . . even here Cordelia heard the whispers of Hard Times. She heard it in the shushing of the stray newspapers tumbling the streets, shouting headlines of injustice. She heard it in the mournful cry of the peddlers and the newsies, in the angry signs plastered on darkened storefronts. No vagrants. No immigrants. No Jews. It was a bright city, and a hard one, scaffolded in steel and stone and greed.
One thing was clear: it was no place for monsters.
As they got closer to Union Square, flyers identical to the one Cordelia was keeping in her pocket sprouted on the streetlamps and scabbed the store windows, until at last they were moving through a forest of paper, words emblazoned across every surface. There were flyers posted on top of flyers, so that the words overlapped, creating new nonsensical phrases: COME SEE NO CHILDREN. AFFORDABLE FAMILY MONSTERS. WORLD-FAMOUS TOILETS.
Cordelia’s pulse picked up. She could hear tinny notes of circus music, and the swell of excited conversation—like the sound of distant waves, breaking against the wharves. Soon, she caught a glimpse of a purple silk tent in the distance, puffed above a fringe of dark trees like a hugely swollen grape.
“What is it?” Gregory said. He was trying to hold Cabal back from a bloat of garbage piled in the gutter, and the rats that had nested inside it.
“What do you think? The circus.” Cordelia grabbed hold of Gregory’s arm and steered him across the street, where the view was even better. “There. See?”
But Gregory didn’t answer. He had stopped, rigid, like a hound dog that had just caught wind of a squirrel.
“Do you . . . do you smell that?” he said in a hushed voice.
Cordelia took a deep breath and nearly fell to her knees. The smell was heaven. It was better than heaven. It was . . .
“Popcorn,” she breathed.
Unconsciously, they began to speed walk, and then to jog, and then to run. They cut into the park, following the footpaths through the barren trees and scrubby patches of grass. Icky squeaked in protest and did his best to keep up, tripping every few feet over his shawl and landing in a pile of furry limbs and fabric.
Now Cordelia could make out a voice shouting to the crowd, “Step right up, step right up! For the amazing and the awe-inspiring! The marvelous and the manic! The wondrous and the one-of-a-kind!”
Then the footpath whipped them through the trees and emptied them out in front of the circus, and Cordelia lost her breath.
An enormous crowd had assembled in the square. Cordelia had the impression of looking at an ever-shifting ocean of fabric and color. She had never seen so many people in her whole life. Shoeless beggars shouldered up next to women in fur-trimmed coats and diamond earrings; kids hung on the streetlamps and swarmed the frozen fountain, craning for a better view. Jugglers and magicians moved through the square, causing the crowd to ripple and part, again like waves; there were fire-breathers and sword-swallowers, men with tattooed faces, and tall women on stilts waving colorful banners. The tent loomed over all of them, like some kind of enormous violet mushroom, dwarfing the crowd in its shadow.
But the thing that struck
Cordelia speechless, and made her heart rocket into her throat and her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth, was the monster.
In front of the gaping mouth of the entrance, a very small man with an oversize head was standing on several overturned milk crates, and gesturing grandly with a brass-topped cane to the very angry-looking growrk crouched in the cage beside him.
Her growrk.
One of them, at least.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up and don’t be scared . . .” The barker’s voice rolled out over the crowd, but Cordelia’s heartbeat was throbbing so hard in her ears, she could barely make out what he said.
“It’s him,” she said, elbowing Gregory.
“Who?” His eyes lit up. “Your father? Where?”
“No. Him.” She pointed to the cage. “The growrk!”
“The what?” Gregory stretched onto his tiptoes, as a woman in a huge, bustled skirt shuffled to the left, blocking their view.
She gripped Gregory’s arm. “Gregory, that’s our growrk.”
He squinched up his nose. “How can you be sure?”
“What do you mean? I can tell. I recognize him. See those spots on his nose? I remember those spots.” In truth, Cordelia didn’t recognize the growrk—she had never paid any attention to whether the adolescent growrk had spots on his nose or not. But she was sure she was right. “We have to get into the circus. We have to rescue the growrk, and the rest of the monsters, and find my father.”
Even now, as she spoke, two enormous tattooed men emerged to wheel the cage back into the tent.
“Expertly done, don’t you think?” trilled the woman in front of Cordelia. “They look so real. It gives me goose bumps!”
“The circus is all about deception, m’dear,” said the skinny man next to her. Cordelia didn’t have time to puzzle over what they meant.
Just then, the carnival barker crowed that the circus was open for business, and the crowd surged forward.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step right up, step right up!” The carnival barker didn’t so much speak as open his mouth and let a thunderous stream of words pour out of it. Cordelia wondered how he didn’t faint from lack of oxygen. “This is a show you just can’t miss, a spectacle of epic proportions, a pageant of wonderful and weird . . .”
“Come on,” Cordelia said to Gregory. She at last judged it safe to put Cabal on a leash; he was squirming so badly, Gregory could barely keep hold of him, and everyone was too busy shouting and jostling to get into the circus to pay him any mind. In her pocket, she could feel the dragon furiously batting his wings, mimicking the rhythm of the music floating out of the tent.
They pushed forward toward the entrance. It was slow going. She was blocked at every turn by a new kaleidoscope of people, a knot-like formation of elbows, arms, and backsides. Gregory trailed her and Icky struggled to keep up, holding up his long shawl like a skirt to keep it from getting trampled. Cabal darted back and forth, scooching under legs and around wagon wheels, yipping with excitement, as though urging them forward.
Slowly, the crowd poured into the tent, thinning, like a wide river being filtered into the mouth of a narrow bottle. As they drew closer to the small man on his milk crates, Cordelia noticed canvas banners strung up on either side of the entrance, painted with the images of various attractions the audience could expect inside: trapeze artists and elephants, clowns and jugglers, and—her heart leapt—a giant feathered bird that must surely be her baku; a shaggy beast with a ferocious scowl and multiple eyes that looked just like Tomkins, their Atlantic Firr; and a wrinkled dungaroo she would have known anywhere as Alexander I. Or perhaps Alexander II. They were twins, after all.
All the monsters were imagined in vivid detail, roaring or gnashing their teeth, while a painted audience cowered in terror. An absurd bit of artistic liberty: the baku were notorious cowards, and the dungaroo twins were as sweet as twin kittens. But Cordelia supposed it was how they justified the cages.
The square was nearly empty by now. Cordelia and Gregory were among the last dozen people jostling to get up to the entrance and take their place in the tent. Cordelia was so focused on the painted images on the banners, and the idea that her father might be near, that she sped right past the man on the milk crates without even pausing.
“Not so fast.”
Suddenly Cordelia received a hard blow to her chest. She was thrown backward and landed on the ground, directly in the remains of a trampled tea cake.
“Hey.” Gregory helped Cordelia to her feet and glared up at the man. “What’d you do that for?”
The man on the milk crates aimed his cane at Cordelia in an accusatory fashion. She rubbed her chest, which was still smarting, and backed up a few inches, in case he decided to whack her again.
“That’ll be one dollar and thirty cents, please,” he said, in a prim voice. He jerked his chin at Icky. “Plus fifty cents for grandpa.” When he was speaking at a normal volume, he sounded very different. He rapped his cane against the uppermost milk crate, across which was written: PRICE OF ADMISSION: 65¢). 50¢ ADMISSION FOR SENIORS OVER 65 AND CHILDREN UNDER 3.
Cordelia swallowed. That would leave them with barely any money to return to Boston.
“Before I go gray and the elephants lose their tusks,” the man added, tapping a highly polished shoe. When he smiled, Cordelia saw his teeth were yellow and very crooked. “The show is about to start, dearie. Are you in, or are you out?”
“In,” Cordelia said firmly. She reached into her pocket, carefully avoiding the dragon, and felt for her little leather purse. It wasn’t there. She reached into a second pocket, thinking she must have put it elsewhere. Nothing but the spyglass and a pair of pliers.
The man tapped his shoe faster and faster. “Well?”
“Give me a minute,” Cordelia said. She was unloading pockets desperately now, wiggling and tugging, patting and poking. She turned out all her tools, and the funny stone she’d found in her mother’s library and forgotten about. No purse. She must have looked like her skin was crawling with fire ants.
“What’s the matter?” Gregory whispered.
“My purse,” she whispered back, casting a nervous glance up at the small man. He was glaring harder and harder at them every second. Even his mustache curdled into a look of disapproval. “I can’t find it.”
“You must have it,” Gregory said. “I saw you put it in your pocket.”
The man’s foot was now tapping so rapidly, it was practically a blur. His face was the color of an eggplant. “You’re wasting my time, girlie. And if there’s anything I hate in the world—besides balloons and broccoli—it’s wasting time!”
“You hate balloons?” Gregory said, frowning.
“Be quiet, Gregory,” Cordelia said. “Please, sir. Just one more second . . .” She shoved her hand into the first pocket again, ignoring the nip of the dragon’s teeth, thinking she must have simply failed to feel the coin purse. Her fingers went to the very bottom of her pocket.
And through it.
Her heart sank all the way to her shoes. She stood there, wiggling her soot-covered fingers in the empty air. The dragon had burned a hole straight through her pocket, and her little purse, with her remaining money, was now lost somewhere in the vast city of New York.
“Gone,” she whispered.
“What?” Gregory cast a nervous glance at the small man on the milk crates. “What—what do you mean?”
“The money.” Cordelia’s voice was hoarse. The pavement underneath her feet was turning slowly. “I lost it.”
The man leaned down, so his unpleasant face floated directly above Cordelia’s, like a moon—so close she could smell the wax on his mustache, and the sickly sweet cologne clinging to his clothing. “If you don’t have the money, young lady,” he said softly, “kindly do me a favor and GET OUT OF MY WAY!”
“Please,” Gregory jumped in. “We’ve come all the way from Boston. . . . We’ve got to get into that circus.”
“No money, no ticket,” the man sniped. “It’s as simple as that.” He pivoted neatly and rapped his cane twice against the milk crates, summoning the two tattooed giants who had earlier taken charge of the growrk. “Tomaseo! Alonzo! It’s showtime, please. If you would be so kind as to take over the box office . . . ?”
The two oversize men, with arms as thick as tree trunks and coils of veins in their tattooed necks, came stomping toward their master obediently. They hooked him under the arms and lifted him cleanly off the milk crates, setting him gently on the ground. Standing, he was even shorter than Cordelia. She attempted to plead with him one last time.
“You don’t understand,” she said, following as he trotted toward the entrance of the tent. “It’s really very important. It’s urgent. If you could just make an exception—”
He spun around and shoved the point of his cane directly into the soft cavity of her chest. “No exceptions! Can’t you read?” And once again, he whacked his cane against one of the milk crates, across which more words were scrawled: NO REFUNDS, COMPLAINTS, BACKTALK, OR BALLYHOO! AND ABSOLUTELY NO EXCEPTIONS!
“But—”
“No buts!” he screeched. Whack. The cane went down to another line of text, these words painted so minutely that Cordelia had to lean in to read them.
No buts, either.
A great tide of frustration welled up in Cordelia’s chest as the man once again turned his back on her.
“Please!” she cried out. She was desperate—desperate and angry. Her monsters were here. Her father was here. “Five minutes—just give us five minutes—”
“Enough!” The man’s eyes glittered dangerously. “I have been very fair, and very kind.” Cordelia opened her mouth to protest; he had been neither of those things. “But you’ve abused my patience long enough. Tomaseo? Alonzo? See that these two troublemakers stay far away from my circus—or I will call the police and have them thrown into jail for trespassing. Good day to you both.”
And with a short bow, the man disappeared into the darkness of the tent, swishing the fabric closed behind him.
The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street Page 11