Even—perhaps especially—monsters.
From a distance, the home Cordelia’s grandfather had purchased on Cedar Street after emigrating to America with his wife and twelve-year-old son, Cornelius—and earning a small fortune selling wagons and supplies to westbound prospectors—looked as stately as it must have a hundred years earlier, when it was first built. There were four chimneys, a sweeping front porch framed by a grand balustrade, and a total of forty-eight windows studding the redbrick facade.
The impression of wealth began to fade, however, as you approached, like a mirage that broke apart before you could reach it. Up close, it was obvious that at least half of the forty-eight windows displayed major cracks. Three were missing altogether, and the holes had been hastily patched with plywood. Mortar decayed by decades of Boston snow and rain had slowly loosed dozens of bricks from the facade, giving an impression of pockmarked skin. Shutters hung crookedly, beating an erratic rhythm in the wind, and briars grew so thickly over the porch and balustrade that Cornelius and Cordelia had long avoided it altogether. Only the kitchen door was still in use. There, a wooden placard—once polished to a high sheen, now stained so much from wind and rain it was nearly illegible—welcomed visitors (who hardly ever came) and customers (who never did) to the Clay Home for Veterinary Services.
The inside wasn’t much better.
The great room, which had once seen dinner parties and dances, was the baku’s preferred spot for napping: the twelve-foot-high shelves, spongy with moss, no doubt reminded him of a treetop habitat. Piles of feathers lay in drifts over the carpet—a natural result of the hufflebottom’s periodic molting—and no matter how often Cordelia scrubbed, she could not fully get rid of the smell of hay and wet chicken.
Four of the bedrooms were homes to monsters in various stages of recovery: a diggle healing from a bad laceration below one of its eyes; a squinch just now getting over the flu; a goblin suffering from bouts of melancholy. A lionfish made its home in the cast-iron tub in the larger of two washrooms; Cordelia and her father shared the other.
The office, where Dr. Clay had long ago greeted clients and examined their sniffling German shepherds, their bleary-eyed Labrador retrievers, or gassy tabby cats, had been completely taken over by a family of pixies rescued years earlier from an overflowing gutter, in which they had been drowning. Now they had rooted in the leather armchair, ripped the paisley wallpaper to shreds, and built a nest out of old receipts, bills, and veterinary reports, so that entering the room gave the impression of stepping into a snowstorm of paper.
Many years ago, the veterinary office had received actual, paying clients, and the slew of injured, sick, and recuperating monsters were kept carefully locked away upstairs in case a friend or neighbor should stop by. Eventually, the clients had become tired of the Clays’ erratic hours (monsters were, for the most part, nocturnal; Dr. Clay’s office began to open later and later, until it was open only from five p.m. to seven p.m. on weekdays and five thirty p.m. to seven p.m. on Saturdays), just as they were afraid of the unexplained creaks and groans and growls emanating from the upstairs rooms.
Still, Dr. Clay had kept a handful of old clients, enough to buy milk and cheese and eggs, and enough to buy Cordelia a new pair of boots every year and the occasional surprise of a box of chocolates or a new tool for her own collection.
But that was before the Hard Times. The change to forty clients from sixty, then twenty clients from forty, then to ten clients from twenty, then nine clients from ten, then eight, then five, had happened over so many years that Cordelia hardly noticed it until her father’s stack of client records was so thin it hardly counted as a stack.
Then Mrs. Durling’s Doberman had finally been put down. Four. Then Mr. and Mrs. Brodely couldn’t afford to keep their two beloved retrievers anymore, and had to give them to a wealthy cousin in New Jersey. Three. Then the Culvers’ tabby cat wasn’t eating, and Cornelius found a suspicious lump, and the suspicious lump turned out to be a death sentence. Two. Then Mr. O’Reilly lost his job and had to pick up and move to New Hampshire, where his brother had found him work at a steel mill, taking his two Yorkshire terriers with him. One.
Cordelia remembered, with a certain wistfulness, their very last client: Mrs. Allan, a robust woman with a gray topknot, who had brought in her fluffy Persian cat for an annual examination. Mrs. Allan had been threatening to take her business elsewhere for the ten years she had been coming as a client. The waiting room was too cold or too hot. There was a strange smell. You might think they would at least offer her some tea. Her beloved Persian, Ophelia, was her primary obsession, and she seemed to blame Cornelius anytime he suggested that she might need to lose a pound or two, or require medication for worms—as if he weren’t diagnosing a problem, but causing it.
“There’s nothing wrong with little Fee,” she would say. “She’s perfect.” Cordelia wondered why she bothered coming at all.
That day, she was especially offended. There was a smell, most certainly. Ophelia was very sensitive to smells, and she was very upset. There had been strange fur caught in the welcome mat—not a very nice welcome at all, was it? And had she heard something growling upstairs? Because Ophelia did not do well around dogs, especially violent ones . . . see how upset her little princess was . . . ?
Cornelius had just managed to wrangle the enormous Ophelia onto the table with Cordelia’s help. “No need to be upset,” he said cheerfully. “Probably just the floorboards. Old houses do have a tendency to—”
CRASH.
A thunderous noise trembled the ceiling, sifting plaster into the room, and Ophelia broke out of Cornelius’s grip and launched, screeching, for Mrs. Allan’s arms. She landed instead on her face, and toppled Mrs. Allan, screaming, to the ground.
Upstairs, more than two dozen monsters decided to respond. Grunts and wailing, screeches and nattering, thuds and crashes and screams—the sound was so loud it shook the walls and crashed Cornelius’s university diploma from the wall.
It was perhaps the only time Cordelia was sorry to see Mrs. Allan leave. Luckily, since she was sprinting, Cordelia barely had time to regret it.
That was several years ago now. At the same time, Mrs. McDonough, Cordelia’s final tutor, quit after a two-week-long campaign of harassment by the pixies, who pulled her hair and put pepper in her tea when she wasn’t looking, and once, when she dropped off to sleep, inked her eyebrows together. By then, Cornelius could hardly afford to hire a replacement.
So Dr. Clay had shut down his veterinary services—at least, he’d shut them down to normal animals. Slowly, the collection of monsters grew, until the third floor, and then the second, could no longer contain them. They had three griffins alone; two bullieheads; four phoenix birds, two squelches, six squinches, two werewolves, eighteen vampire bats, three wailers, two chupacabras, four cockatrices, one baku, a lionfish, a filch, the extended family of pixies, a hufflebottom, a baby growrk and one adolescent that was growing alarmingly fast, dungaroos, a stand of diggles, a carbuncle, and even a bogey.
Every morning Mr. Clay would scour the newspapers for news that might lead them to an injured monster: unexplained howling in the woods; sightings of a monstrous, limping wolf that might, in fact, turn out to be another growrk; fishermen’s tales of strange fish with human eyes. Every few months, he and Cordelia would suit up and head out in pursuit of some poor creature. Sometimes they returned home empty-handed.
Often, they brought home another monster.
Each new monster was supposed to be only a temporary addition. But somehow, the monsters stayed. Out in the world, they might be shot or trapped, caught in nets and gutters, choked by soot, or run over by carriages.
There may have been occasions that Cordelia resented living in a home where the tub was occupied by an adolescent lionfish, still nubbing its legs; where the heavy bedroom curtains had to be sealed continuously to keep sunlight off the delicate skin of the bullieheads; where her best friends had extra eyes, or sharp teeth
, or wings, or all of the above. But if there were times she longed for normal playmates, for the orderliness of a house in which carpets didn’t shake themselves and turn into hippogriffs, and pixies didn’t rattle the kitchen pots all night long, she no longer recalled them.
She loved the way the hufflebottom curled its soft black tongue around her wrist whenever she fed it carrots, the proud strut of the cockatrices, and the way the baby growrk whimpered in his sleep. She loved her father’s patience and kindness, and the way even the most dangerous and difficult monsters would eat vitamins from his palm. She loved the big, drafty rooms, the sifting snow of wallpaper and plaster, the smell of leathery hides and hay and feathers.
Most of all, she loved the feeling that she and her father lived together in their own little world, a place of secrets and magic. The attic was the North Pole, where the heat-loving baku migrated in summertime and the cold-loving hufflebottoms lived in the winter. The third floor was a continent of different habitats—marshy bedrooms where the ceiling leaked rain onto moldy carpets, and mushrooms grew in corners for the wailers to eat; stifling linen closets, where burrowing diggles loved to snooze; the old conservatory, flooded with light and filled with a jungle of overgrown plant life, where the diggles and the bullieheads often chattered late into the night. Cornelius’s bedroom, on the other hand, was perfectly normal. No one would ever guess that only a single wall divided it from a riot of squinches—unless, of course, they started bouncing.
The second floor was a series of interconnected islands, rooms with walls broken or crumbled away to allow passage between them, a constant, fluid flow of the more social monster species. Between them was a parlor they had converted into an aquarium, now full of enormous glass tanks and oceanic sloshing (the dungaroos surfed their bathwater on the floor whenever they wanted attention). Even these were connected to the rooms on either side, although outraged screeches erupted whenever the lionfish was caught in the tub with its ruffle down.
Only the walls of Cordelia’s bedroom were intact, except for a small hole in the wall the pixies had tunneled so they could play tricks on her while she slept. This, however, had been blocked by an armoire.
The ground floor was a vast city, full of bustle and energy, especially during the rush hours of midnight to four a.m. The great room was the transportation hub, where monsters slid, flew, bounced, or tumbled on their way to different places. The sitting room was a public garden, a colorful landscape of different nests, a wilderness of fur and twig and mud and leaf piles, mulchy with shredded newspaper, its walls honeycombed with miniature burrows. The kitchen, the old veterinary office, the corridors, the pantry, the root cellar: all of these were different countries, regions, landscapes on the map of her world. Every day, Cordelia traveled the globe. Every day, she journeyed from one end of the world to the other, leaving no territory unexplored, no landscape unmapped.
Except for one.
Except for the one.
There were nineteen rooms in Clay Manor. And then there was that room.
The room on the first floor, at the end of the corridor, at the edge of the world: her mother’s library, her mother’s study, her mother’s world.
Cordelia imagined that it must look exactly as it had the last time that Elizabeth Clay, PhD, had shouldered her travel bag, dimmed the lights, and closed the door firmly behind her, although she had been inside it only once since then. The mahogany desk and the old leather blotter, the row of pens gleaming dully in their stands of ink, the floor-to-ceiling shelves and the stairways of books that climbed them, her mother’s unfinished manuscript, its hundreds of pages like leaves slowly withering: none of it had been touched, or even cleaned, since her mother’s fatal journey. It was as if Cordelia and her father had, without ever discussing it, agreed that Elizabeth Clay’s study be kept waiting for her—as if she might thus be tempted to return.
So, one day, he had locked the door, and it had never since been opened.
And slowly, slowly, their house began to fill with life, and their lives began to fill the rooms, until the rooms became their lives—all of them grown around the single, quiet center of a closed door.
But Cordelia was happy in Clay Manor with her father. She knew very little about the world, but she knew enough to know she wasn’t missing anything.
Out in the world, bad things happened: mothers went on voyages and never returned from the jungle. People broke promises, lost faith, turned traitorous. Out in the world, it wasn’t the monsters you had to worry about.
Cordelia knew from experience: the monsters people name are not the real danger. They are never the real danger. It’s the monsters who name themselves that you really have to watch out for. Problem is—you can never tell just by looking at them.
Chapter 3
By the time Cordelia and her father made it back to Beacon Hill, the sun was just breaking over the Boston Harbor, like the yolk of an egg spilling over the wide bowl of the sea. In the morning light, Clay Manor—rising to the sky, vast and stately, surrounded by a wild nest of tangled growth, like a large ship sailing through a froth of dark waves—struck Cordelia as very beautiful. A single light was burning in the kitchen window, and it looked like a fire seen from a distance, across a dark plain.
Cordelia hopped over the large cracks in the paving stones and dodged the brambles that were reaching out to snag her jacket, taking the crumbling stone steps in one easy jump. It took several tries to get the door open. Everything at Clay Manor was just a little bit crooked. For a time, she and her father had done their best to keep up with repairs. But there were too many monsters, and never enough money, especially now that they had to Tighten Their Belts.
Inside, Cordelia and her father were greeted with a quiet chorus of thumps, bumps, growls, and snuffles.
“Not again.” Cornelius sighed as they passed inside, directly into the snug warmth of the kitchen. Several jars had been smashed on the floor, and a large puddle of what looked—and smelled—like fish oil was seeping out from underneath the old wooden table. Two pixies, both females and coated in heavy brown fur, were perched on the woodstove, chattering excitedly, and a diggle was sleeping in the corner, its spikes rising and falling gently with its breath.
“Out of here! Out of here!” Cornelius shifted the dragon carefully into the crook of his left arm so he could shoo away the pixies. They took flight, still chittering, and disappeared into the darkness. “You too.” Cornelius nudged the diggle with the toe of his boot. The diggle stretched, yawned, and continued sleeping.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Cordelia said quickly. “I’ll clean up. You take care of the dragon.”
Cornelius patted her on the shoulder. “I think a few stitches and a splint ought to do it.” He grabbed a matchstick from the mantel and used it to light a new lantern. “I’ll be in the office if you need me.”
Hefting the lantern high, he set off down the hallway. Cordelia watched the light fade, like a star into the darkness. After a minute, she heard a muffled curse, and then another burst of happy chittering. She repressed a smile. Pixies. They were always causing trouble.
She had just finished sweeping up the glass and disposing of it in the dustbin, when the ancient bell above their door gave a weak jingle. At first she barely spared it a glance, telling herself that the wind must have set it dancing. No one ever came to the house besides creditors, demanding payment for overdue bills—and creditors, she knew, didn’t bother ringing the bell. They pounded on the door. They screamed and pressed their red faces against the windows, like gigantic blowfish.
Ring-ring-ring. This time, the bell rang more insistently. Cordelia was so surprised, she dropped her dustpan with a clatter. Ring-ring-ring. The ancient bell jumped on its string.
There was no denying it. Someone was ringing the bell.
Cordelia debated going to her father, but she knew he hated to be disturbed when he was operating. Instead she hefted herself onto the wooden counter so she could peer through the windowpanes. She swip
ed at the smudgy glass with a sleeve; even so, she could barely see through the clutter of withered wisteria growing outside.
Standing outside her door was an enormous, overgrown mushroom.
She soon realized she was merely looking down at the top of a floppy hat. Whoever had rung the bell must be even shorter than she was, so she could make out no individual features: just the hat, and a lumpy coat, and a bit of straw-colored hair protruding around a pair of large ears.
Ring-ring-ring.
She knew she wasn’t supposed to let strangers into their home, but curiosity won out over caution. Quickly, she hopped down from the counter and shooed the sleepy diggle out into the hallway, closing and locking the door to the hallway once the monster was safely out of sight. She tidied the kitchen as best she could, shoving anything mysterious or unusual—her father’s dingle clips, the jars full of exploding phoenix feathers, a large glass filled with frothy pink hufflebottom milk—into the pantry. She glanced at her reflection in the bottom of a copper pot, combing a few leaves from her hair, then took a deep breath and opened the door.
The boy standing on the stoop was indeed several inches shorter than Cordelia, though he looked to be about her age. He was as dark as she was fair, and she knew him at once for a street urchin—likely, from the reek of shoe polish he exuded, one of the many orphans who made their living blacking boots for the lawyers, doctors, and merchants of the North End. His clothing was filthy and seemed to have come from a variety of eras and styles. He wore too-large boots with a hole in one toe, a too-small jacket with patches at the elbows, a striped undershirt that could only have come from a fisherman at the docks, and a pair of bow-legged riding pants. In his arms, he carried a puppy wrapped in a blanket.
“Are you the vegetarian?” the boy asked, as soon as she swung open the door.
This was a decidedly strange beginning to the conversation. But the boy didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed. “What?” Cordelia said.
The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street Page 4
