The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street

by Lauren Oliver

  He was right. They were sinking. They drifted over the complex of redbrick walls like a cloud scudding on the wind; and inch by inch, foot by foot, as the dragon gasped for air and Cordelia’s fingers cramped, they dropped.

  Cordelia was hoping they might land on the university’s central quadrangle—the lawn, at this time of year, blanketed under a heavy layer of snow—where at least the impact would be softened. But no. They were hovering over the quadrangle—she saw a man she took for a professor gasp and stagger backward—and then they were beyond it, heading directly for the bell tower. The bells were still ringing. The noise was deafening; even the air vibrated with it. Cordelia could feel the sound in her nails, in her teeth.

  Gregory yelled something, but she couldn’t make out what it was. Elizabeth tried to steer, but it was too late. Gregory threw himself to the floor and covered his head, as though it would protect him from the impact of a thousand tons of brass. The bells kept ringing, ringing—vast, large as metal horses, tossing and bucking, and Cordelia imagined being trampled beneath them, mashed into a pulp.

  The basket jerked to a sudden stop, barely an inch from the bells’ sweeping path. “What—what happened?” Gregory uncovered his head. At that moment, the bells stopped ringing. In the resulting silence, Cordelia could feel her jaw buzzing.

  “We’ve stopped.” Cordelia edged carefully to the side of the basket and peered over the rim. They were suspended a hundred feet above the ground; below them, two professors, dressed in maroon robes and matching caps, were shouting and pointing. “Just in time too.”

  She looked up. The balloon had snagged on the bell tower, hooked by its fabric to the steeple, like a hat pinned onto a hat rack.

  “Any idea how we’re going to get down?” Gregory said.

  A dozen feet below the basket was a small stone ledge abutting a set of narrow glass windows. Cordelia guessed they could enter the tower that way; there must be a staircase that gave the ringer access to the bells. It was worth a shot, anyway. Better than hanging in the air like a rotten fruit, just waiting to drop.

  When Elizabeth and Gregory lowered the rope ladder, it just skimmed the top of the ledge. Clutching Icky tightly to her chest, Cordelia took a deep breath and climbed over the side of the basket, ignoring the outraged shouting of the two robed men down below. The ladder twisted violently in the wind, and her stomach plummeted.

  But she made it safely down the ladder and onto the narrow ledge and moved into a crouch, trying very hard not to think of the sheer drop only an inch or so to her left. The first window was painted shut, but after a few minutes of digging with her pincers—which, luckily, were still in her pocket—she managed to pry it open. She shimmied through the window legs first and deposited Icky on the floor, then gestured for Elizabeth and Gregory to follow her with Cabal and the dragon.

  Cordelia’s instincts were correct: she had landed in a small, circular room, which gave access, via a rickety ladder, to the bells up above. A set of rough stone stairs, spotted with dampness, wound down toward the courtyard. Cordelia caught sight of a dirty brass plaque winking dully on the far side of the room and crossed over to investigate. She had to wipe the plaque clean with the bottom of her shirt before she could make out what it said.

  The University of King’s College at Halifax, founded 1789.

  Cordelia’s heart sank. She knew the University of King’s College, and Halifax—both from the stacks of correspondence she had turned up in her mother’s study.

  Halifax was in Nova Scotia.

  Nova Scotia, Canada.

  Chapter 21

  “Where are we?” Elizabeth said. She had just slid through the window and was doing her best to slap the dirt from her dress—a hopeless cause, given that it was now ripped, stained, and even singed in one place. Gregory dropped to the floor beside her, holding Cabal in one arm, and the dragon swooped into the room behind him. Despite the splint, the dragon was flying almost perfectly now. “What is this place?”

  Cordelia was too upset to speak. Instead she stepped aside so that Elizabeth could read the plaque for herself. As she did, her face shed its color, then turned bright red, then finally settled on a swampy kind of green.

  “I was sure we were headed in the right direction,” she whispered.

  “Well, you were wrong.” Cordelia crossed her arms. “Thanks to you, we’ve taken a scenic tour to a totally different country.”

  “Thanks to me, you’re not working your way out of a lion’s digestive tract right now.”

  “Cordelia. Elizabeth.” Gregory was still standing by the window, looking out over the quadrangle. He spoke now in a voice so full of repressed excitement that Cordelia fell immediately silent.

  “What is it?” Elizabeth snapped.

  He didn’t budge. “Come look,” he said, still in that strange voice.

  Cordelia went to join him at the window. After a second, Elizabeth followed.

  “I could be wrong,” Gregory said. The corners of his lips twitched, and Cordelia could tell he was trying not to smile. “But do those letters say what I think they say?”

  Through the dirt-streaked panes, Cordelia could make out a large banner strung across one of the redbrick buildings on the other side of the quadrangle.

  MONSTERS AMONG US: WHEN FEAR WALKS,

  8:30 A.M.−10:30 A.M.,

  SATURDAY, JANUARY THE 11TH,

  A LECTURE AND BOOK SIGNING BY

  SAMUEL NATTER, PROFESSOR.

  ALL STUDENTS WELCOME.

  SNP.

  Cordelia read the words again to make sure she hadn’t mistaken any of them—and then again, and again. It was Saturday, just after eight o’clock. Was it possible—was it even remotely possible—that they had flown all the way to Canada only to stumble across the SNP they’d been tracking? The chances were one in a million.

  “It’s a coincidence,” Elizabeth pronounced finally, as if in confirmation of Cordelia’s doubts. “It has to be.”

  “Or it’s our lucky break,” Gregory said. “It says ‘monsters’ right there on the sign, doesn’t it?”

  “So—what? This Professor Natter just dipped down to Boston, abducted a whole house full of monsters, and invited them all to a book signing?” Elizabeth shook her head. Her perfect curls had knotted into a dense, electric tangle, as if even they were losing patience. “I told you. I know where to find Cordelia’s monsters.”

  “Oh, sure. Just like you knew we were going the right way,” Cordelia couldn’t help but fire back.

  Elizabeth’s eyes flashed yellow. Cordelia blinked, and they returned to normal.

  A trick of the light.

  “That’s fine,” Elizabeth said, in a voice deepened by fury. “You don’t have to believe me. It doesn’t matter anyway. If the society got their hands on your little friends, it’s already too late.” When Elizabeth thinned her mouth into a smile, Cordelia thought she looked rather monstrous herself. She had half a mind to seize Elizabeth’s tongue from behind her rows of teeth and tie it up in a knot so it could do no more trouble. . . .

  Then a shock passed through her. Elizabeth had rows of teeth.

  Three of them, stacked one behind the other. Very small—imperceptible except when you were standing close—the extra rows were just beginning to emerge.

  She was so startled, she lost several seconds of Elizabeth’s speech. “. . . want to waste your time, then be my guest.” Finally, Elizabeth caught Cordelia staring. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  Cordelia swallowed. “Nothing,” she croaked out. “You—you had something in your teeth.”

  Immediately, Elizabeth clamped her mouth shut. A muscle twitched in her jaw.

  This time, Cordelia was sure her eyes turned a fiery kind of yellow. Just for a second.

  A long second.

  Jaundicing of the eyes was a temporary emotional response. The real change, the discoloration of the iris, the reshaping of the pupil, the double-lidding of the eyelid . . .

  Well, all that
would come in when all the teething was complete.

  Probably around her thirteenth birthday.

  According to the relevant entry in A Guide to Monsters and Their Habits, thirteen was standard for most goblins.

  Cordelia felt curiously calm. In control, even. Elizabeth Perkins, who squealed at puddles, had goblin in her family. Cordelia would have to tell her. But not now. Not yet.

  Maybe she’d wait until they were separated by an iron gate, or a wall, or a bank vault.

  Elizabeth was going to kill her.

  “My father says that ‘coincidence’ is just a trail that no one knows how to fit together,” Cordelia said. “He says there’s no such thing as coincidence.” If she closed her eyes, she could see in the darkness the wild of Blue Hills Park take shape around her. She could see her father’s lantern bobbing between the trees, like an overgrown firefly. She could feel the riot of unseen creatures everywhere—tiny crabs scuttling in the mud, tadpoles finning in the shallows of the marshes, bats coasting on the shadows. Everything means something, Cordelia, he always said. Even trails are just threads, and every one of them is woven together.

  Cordelia opened her eyes. Gregory and Elizabeth were both silent, watching her. “Maybe the society stole the monsters, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe the professor did, or maybe he didn’t. But we’re thousands of miles from Worcester right now, and only a lob of spit from Samuel Natter.”

  Cordelia turned again to the window. She thought the wind carried the smell of ink and paper, of bound books, of ugly letters.

  Of manuscripts unfinished, and ideas left incomplete.

  All life comes from the same place, and all of it is equally deserving.

  “Besides,” Cordelia said. “I, for one, would like to hear what our dear professor has to say about monsters.”

  They would need to be cautious. If Professor Natter had stolen the Clays’ monsters, it wasn’t, as Elizabeth had pointed out, for the purpose of inviting them as guest speakers. It might be dangerous to confront him directly, and insanity to confront him with three monsters in tow. Cabal, Icky, and the dragon must stay behind, safely concealed, and the tower was as good a place as any.

  Gregory coaxed the filch into a corner by feeding him yak jerky, and Cordelia delicately wrapped the dragon’s wings in a heavy tarp so that he wouldn’t fly away, and set him in another corner. Cabal proved nearly impossible to abandon, however. He whined and yipped so piteously when Cordelia tried to leave him, she was sure someone would hear and come investigate. Then Elizabeth had the idea to leave one of Gregory’s shoes behind, so that Cabal would know they were returning. Since it was ridiculous to wear one shoe, Gregory left both, despite the cold.

  “Oh, I’m used to it,” he said cheerfully, when Cordelia pointed out that he would freeze. “I went a whole winter once with nothing on my feet but a pair of pillowcases. Loaves of bread, too, when I could find ’em. A nice rye loaf’ll keep your toes good and toasty.”

  Cordelia thought of the ragged crowd they’d seen filing down the gangplank toward the immigration checkpoint, back in Boston, and wondered whether all of them had shoes to last the winter.

  “You’re amazing, Gregory,” she said. “You might be the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

  Gregory waved her off. “Nah,” he said. “Nothing to it. All you have to do is just take out the middle bit.”

  At last they were able to make their escape, leaving Cabal happily gnawing on the holey leather.

  But as Cordelia, Gregory, and Elizabeth neared the door at the bottom of the staircase, a buzz of conversation reached them from outside.

  “Forget the balloon. It’s nothing but a student prank,” one man was saying. “We should be grateful, actually. Last year they turned out a hundred geese in the dining hall. . . .”

  “The dining hall is not a historical monument,” another man sniped back. “The tower predates the university by a hundred years. The undercroft alone has more history in its tunnels than the entire department can bore out of its students. . . .”

  Someone else piped up, “We should organize a committee to vote on a procedure to select the academic office that will organize a vote on whether to open an investigation—”

  “Hang on. We’ll need a committee to organize a committee—”

  “And a vote to determine the procedure for finding one—”

  “We’ll grow ear hair before they can agree on a fart,” Gregory whispered. “And we can’t get past them.”

  “We can get under them, though,” Cordelia whispered back. “The woman mentioned tunnels. . . .”

  It didn’t take them long to find the small trapdoor in the floor. It opened to reveal a set of dirt stairs, leading steeply down into the dark.

  The very, very dark.

  Cordelia had always hated tracking monsters underground. And not just because of all the slime.

  But Gregory scampered quickly ahead of her. He disappeared from view like a stone dropped down a well.

  Cordelia crouched down by the opening. Cold air rose out of the hole, clammy as a dog’s breath, and she shivered. “Gregory?” she called. “Are you okay?” When he didn’t answer, she felt a rising panic. “Gregory? Can you hear me?”

  “Sorry,” he called up at last. “I had a spider in my throat. At least, I had a spiderweb. Didn’t taste any legs go down.” A moment later, his head popped out of the opening. “Well, aren’t you coming?”

  Cordelia glanced over at Elizabeth. She looked as if she was about to be sick. Of course, some of the greenish hue was only to be expected. Like the jaundice of her eyes, it was one of the signs of a developing goblin.

  A sign that showed especially in times of terror or distress.

  “I hate spiders,” Elizabeth said, without looking at Cordelia. Cordelia saw that she was shaking.

  Cordelia straightened up. She knew spiders weren’t the reason Elizabeth was so afraid: the last time they’d entered a tunnel together, it had taken Elizabeth across the threshold of a totally new reality—and, Cordelia felt, dumped them right at the calloused feet of a family secret. Even now, she didn’t know how much Elizabeth understood, or whether she understood anything.

  But for Elizabeth, tunnels led not from place to place. They led from before to after.

  “You can wait here, if you want,” Cordelia said. “That way you won’t mess up your party dress.”

  Elizabeth’s party dress was, by now, hopelessly ruined, and carrying clots of Icky’s fur like burrs among the folds. But Cordelia wanted to give her an excuse to stay behind.

  Elizabeth looked at Cordelia for a long beat. This time, her eyes didn’t change color. Her pupils stayed the same as they always were.

  But even so, Cordelia saw someone totally new inside of them.

  “I hate this dress,” Elizabeth said finally. “It looks like a cream puff.”

  But the stranger in her eyes smiled. And the smile, Cordelia remembered. Actually, she didn’t have to remember, because she had never forgotten.

  Smiles are like that.

  Elizabeth cut in front of Cordelia and beat her down the stairs. After only a few steps, the light simply ran out. Exhausted by the pressing darkness, it retreated back toward the surface.

  Cordelia edged down the last few stairs at Gregory’s instruction. But touching ground was no relief. She could have been upside down or sideways or floating in an ocean of nothing: she couldn’t see Gregory, or even the white of Elizabeth’s dress. She couldn’t even see her own feet. She couldn’t even see her own hands.

  She took a step forward, and Elizabeth yelped.

  “That was my toe,” she said.

  “Believe me, I wasn’t aiming,” Cordelia replied. Only a whiplash of hair to the face suggested that Elizabeth was still in front of her.

  “This way,” Gregory said unnecessarily: there was only one way to go. “I went ahead a little. It gets easier to see a little ways on.”

  Cordelia took another step, and Elizabeth yelped a
gain.

  “That was my heel,” she said. “Will you watch where you’re going?”

  “I’d love to,” Cordelia snapped back.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Elizabeth said, and seized Cordelia’s hand. “Stop being dramatic. It’s not even that dark.”

  It wasn’t, of course, for Elizabeth. Goblins saw perfectly well underground. Better, in some ways, than on the surface. Some goblins found all the color too distracting.

  The tunnel narrowed, so that Cordelia could feel dirt walls bumping her shoulders. Every so often she heard claws, the patter of feet, and a dry slithering that might have been made by a snake. She had been down in plenty of tunnels with her father, and every time, she had the feeling that she was walking inside the packed-dirt chambers of a living heart—a breathing, chambered, slumbering monster the size of the whole world.

  She’d rather hunt a monster into a mud pit, or down a chimney, or on a roof. She’d rather hunt a monster anywhere but underground.

  She was glad that she had an excuse to hold Elizabeth’s hand.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the tunnel began to slope upward, and the darkness lessened. Shafts of sunlight, fine as tendrils of blond hair, appeared ahead of them: they had found the end of the tunnel, and another trapdoor.

  “Let’s hope it isn’t locked,” Elizabeth said.

  “Move aside,” Cordelia said, and shoved in front of Gregory. She’d helped her father pick plenty of locks before; under the assault of winter storms, injured or sick monsters often shimmied down the chimneys of abandoned houses, or burrowed up into the shelter of old warehouses.

  The stairs that led to the trapdoor were no more than a dirt ramp beveled into angles. She scrambled to the top, then pushed hard against the underside of the trapdoor. For one terrifying second, it didn’t move.

  She leaned in with a shoulder. A fine spray of dirt landed on Cordelia’s neck and in her hair, and the door shifted, and groaned, and began to open upward, like a jaw moving in reverse. The light became a blinding stream. More dust rained down on them; Elizabeth coughed, Gregory sneezed, and with a grunt and a final shove, Cordelia pushed the trapdoor open all the way and hauled herself into the light.