The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street

by Lauren Oliver

  Professor Natter looked suddenly stern. “There’s a great deal of evidence to support the idea that the entire famine was a leprechaun offensive, to retaliate against the politicians who had reneged on promises of land conservation. Fascinating theory. I’ve long thought there’s a book there. But the leprechauns would never allow it. They’ve got their long, bony fingers in every newspaper and publisher in the world, and a fantastic publicity arm. That pot-of-gold twaddle? It’s all spin. The leprechauns wouldn’t give a penny to a piggy bank. . . .”

  “The hufflebottom,” Gregory prompted. “You were telling us about the hufflebottom.”

  “Quite right, young man. But I’m afraid there’s not much more to the story. Like I said—I was young, and eager, and uneducated. America has a completely different ecosystem of monsters. And much of what my father taught me was just hearsay and superstition. For example, he was simply wrong about the burrowing habits of the diggle . . . for years, I was actually scouting for gophers. Keep in mind, this was twenty years before the first—the only—comprehensive work on the world’s known monster species was even published. . . .” He stood up and, turning to the wall of books behind him, danced his fingers from title to title. “Brilliant work. Life-changing. I know I have a copy somewhere . . . aha!”

  But even before he had turned to pass it over for inspection, Cordelia recognized it by the deep maroon color of its spine, and the wink of the gold-stamped letters there.

  “That’s my mother’s book,” she said. “A Guide to Monsters and Their Habitats, the abridged edition.”

  “Let me see that.” Elizabeth sprang to her feet and snatched it from Professor Natter’s hand. He barely noticed. He was staring at Cordelia, openmouthed.

  “You’re—you’re Elizabeth Clay’s daughter? Cornelius’s little girl?”

  Now it was Cordelia’s turn to stare. “You know my father?”

  “Knew him,” Professor Natter corrected her. “And only very briefly, I’m afraid. We attended a symposium about the origin and expression of all that we deem monstrous. Mr. Darwin himself was the keynote. Great man. No pretense at all. Won’t publicly throw his hat into the ring about the question of monsters, won’t even say they exist, only that he hasn’t himself found evidence. Bull-honk, of course. The man’s been more places than most people can pronounce. . . .”

  Elizabeth had the book balanced carefully on her lap and took great care not to crack the spine. Cordelia noticed that she wiped her fingers, too, before she turned the pages. She felt a surge of old affection, and also of concern. Elizabeth needed to know what she was.

  Even if she would hate Cordelia forever, because she’d been the one to tell her.

  Gregory was frowning over Elizabeth’s shoulder. “If you ask me, the words look like they could use a little breathing room. Too many of them crammed together. Don’t see any bridge, either.”

  “Not ‘bridge,’” Elizabeth said, without looking up. “Abridged means the book has been shortened.”

  “Shortened?” Gregory’s face turned the chalky gray of Cabal’s fur. “You mean to say she didn’t use up all the words there are right there in those pages? You mean to say there are more of them out there?” He looked around fearfully, as if a storm of vocabulary might be hiding in the corners, waiting to attack.

  Elizabeth finally looked up with a huff of impatience. “You really must learn to read, Gregory. You must learn properly. You can’t go through your life illiterate.”

  “I’m no ill-idiot,” Gregory said, looking offended. “I’m no kind of idiot at all.”

  “I didn’t say you were an idiot, you idiot,” Elizabeth said. Then she rolled her eyes. “Illiterate means you can’t read. But I suppose I wouldn’t mind teaching you. . . .”

  Gregory, for once, had nothing to say. But his face lit up like one of the electric lamps in New York City, bright with sudden warmth. Elizabeth hunched over the book again and pretended not to notice. But she was smiling—and not just secretly this time.

  Cordelia turned her attention back to Professor Natter.

  “. . . in vino veritas, as they say . . . After we warmed him up a bit over dinner, he dropped the act and admitted to deliberate omission. Can’t say I blame him. Half the world was already calling him crazy when they weren’t calling for his head. ‘There are people,’ he’d said, ‘important people, experts, even—who refuse to believe all humans are related. They’re claiming different origins. But really they’re claiming different kinds of human—some, of course, better than others.’”

  Cordelia thought of the letter she’d found, and felt a chill.

  “He was quite broken up over it. ‘They won’t even believe that all humans belong to the same family tree,’ he told me. ‘How do you think they’d feel if I’d dropped in the molting slug, or the three-headed sea serpent, or the Scandinavian trolls, too? I’d be laughed out of the country. No one would believe a word I’d written. No one would want to believe they have the Loch Ness monster for a cousin.’”

  “He was exaggerating,” Cordelia said sternly. “The species Gargantua reptaurae is only very, very, very distantly related to any of the mammalian species.” Then, suddenly, she was walloped by a realization so enormous, it sent the whole room spinning. “Wait . . . But that means Mr. Darwin believes what my mother did. He believes that monsters evolved just like any other species did. Just like all of them did. He believes that we’re all related.”

  “Well, of course he believes that,” Professor Natter said. “It’s the only rational thing to believe. Life doesn’t just sprout up like a potato. Life is mind-bogglingly finicky. It’s a soufflé, but made of everything that exists. Plants and moss, trees and mushrooms. People and slugs, gigantic or otherwise. One ingredient missing, one minute too long or too short, and the whole thing collapses. The chance of life originating is less likely than the chance that a grain, scattered in the Sahara desert, will be selected by the only beetle that exists, as the only grain of sand it selects, and that this beetle will be carried by a wind across the surface of the entire universe and dropped on our world into a forest of a hundred million needles that exists only for the time it takes to blink, and dropped at exactly the right time that the grain of sand passes through the eye of the exactly right needle from a distance of two miles, and a millionth of a second later that the needle is then swept up by a single bird that has been migrating across the whole world and happened to arrive at exactly the right time to choose the needle, and that this bird will then wing over the oceans—all of them—circling the world incessantly, only to, at the precise right moment at the exact right angle, aim this needle so that it passes through a single bubble, the size of a grain of sand, traveling to the surface from the mouth of the only fish in the entire world. Now multiply by the chance that this broken bubble must join at the precise right time the precise right current the width of a thread, and that this current, cast out across a thousand miles blindly, must out of all the places it can land touch precisely on the only dry land in a world full of water, and that this land is the size of a grain of sand. Can you imagine all that? Good. That is step one. Only one hundred million steps to go.”

  “Hang on,” Gregory interjected. “That’s not a real number.”

  “Yes, it is,” Elizabeth said. “And even bigger ones than that.”

  Gregory shook his head and muttered, “Leprechauns are one thing. . . .”

  Professor Natter smiled. “The point is,” he said, “the fact that life originated at all is a prayer next to impossible. What are the chances that it could have happened several times, separately, without reference or connection?” He shook his head. “It’s one thing to believe the impossible; it’s another to insist on it. Impossible things turn out to be true all the time. But it’s absurd to take a true thing and insist it become impossible. That, my dear, is called insanity.”

  There was a beat of silence. Cordelia cleared her throat. “My mother wanted to prove that every living thing is connected,
” she said. “She had almost collected all the evidence she needed. Only one piece of the puzzle was missing. Proof of a single species, extinct ten million years ago.” She looked down at her hands, knitted tightly in her lap. “She died looking for it.”

  It was the first time she had ever said the word out loud. It fell across the room like a heavy curtain. But somehow, Cordelia felt a little, tiny bit lighter. Like she’d been carrying the horrible weight of its meaning her whole life, and now she’d given a little bit over to someone else.

  “I heard,” Professor Natter said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Those words, too, settled down over all of them. Simple. Plain. But warm too. Honest.

  “Your parents and I corresponded for a while. We kept running into each other at events, lectures, readings—the community of people interested in the topic was small to begin with, and it grew smaller every year. As Mr. Darwin’s theory of the origin of life gained more and more support, the category of species he’d deliberately excluded was similarly deleted from our scientific reality. Those who still doubted his theories were the same ones who believed that only certain kinds of life were meant to be here, and others were perversions. They believed in monsters, and in their total destruction, until the vast majority of the minority of people who believe in monsters were the same ones who wanted to kill them altogether.”

  “Like SNP,” Elizabeth said. “The Society for National Protection,” she clarified, when Professor Natter raised his eyebrows. “They came after all of Cordelia’s live-in monsters. And they took her father along for good measure.”

  Professor Natter turned to Cordelia, and in a second all his softness had gone. “Explain,” he said. But the word was as sharp and final as a door closed in anger.

  There was no reason to lie, so Cordelia took a deep breath and now, for the third time, confessed. Once again, she was at the end of the story before she fished the mangled bit of letter from her pocket and gave it to Professor Natter to inspect.

  “Elizabeth thinks that squiggly bit might be an S,” Cordelia said. “SNP.”

  “They say they want a safe America,” Elizabeth said. “But they don’t. They just want one where they’re the ones who get a say. They want control.”

  “They’re afraid,” Professor Natter murmured. He was still clutching the letter. Cordelia saw his fingers had begun to tremble. “They feel unsafe . . . if the threat is outside . . . if it can be conquered . . .” He looked up, but his eyes were fogged by some inner thought. “So obvious . . . I wonder . . . could it be that . . . ?” Suddenly, he roused himself, shaking off whatever memory had gripped him. “Well. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that we find him as soon as possible. What matters is that we stop him before he does something terrible.”

  Thinking he was speaking of her father, Cordelia straightened up a bit and angled her nose the way Elizabeth always did when she was offended by something, which was most of the time. “My father would never do anything terrible,” she said. “He would never hurt anyone—or anything.”

  Professor Natter was already on his feet and shoving his arms into his winter coat. He glanced over, looking mildly irritated to see Cordelia and the others still seated. “Your father? I wasn’t talking about him. I was talking about Byron.” He knuckled on a wide-brimmed hat and turned for the door. But seeing that Gregory, Cordelia, and Elizabeth were staring at him in puzzlement, he threw up his hands.

  “Byron Newton-Plancke. That first little squiggle isn’t an S, it’s part of a capital B. Oh for heaven’s sake,” he cried out, when the name inspired no reaction. “You’re as bad as my students. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?”

  “You can read the newspapers?” Gregory asked. “I thought they were mostly for blankets, and birdcages.”

  “Newspapers are for old people,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, my governess says that knowing too much will give me wrinkles.”

  “And? What’s your excuse?” Professor Natter glared at Cordelia.

  Cordelia fidgeted. She realized she didn’t have one, exactly. Or rather, she had a lot of them, but she was ashamed to speak any of them out loud. We don’t go out during the day. We try not to worry about what’s happening in the world. Our world is inside. Our world is the monsters. Things we know. Familiar things.

  Our world is ours alone.

  It’s safe. In our world, we know how to fix what’s broken.

  And Mother’s library stays closed, so we never have to see that the room has long been empty.

  In our world, time has stopped, and we are the ones stopping it.

  You see, we are afraid of the world outside, because we can’t control it.

  Cordelia couldn’t say a single one of those things out loud, because all of them spoke in a voice she now knew was very dangerous—the same voice that called for immigrants to go back to where they had come from, and shouted for monsters to die.

  “I—I don’t have one,” she stuttered finally.

  Professor Natter looked as if he wished desperately that he could enroll them at the university, only for the pleasure of flunking them immediately. “Byron Newton-Plancke is one of the wealthiest men in New England. He has also just announced his presidential candidacy. A long shot, and only recently it would have seemed impossible. Not so long ago, his ideas were considered either crackpot, or evil, or both.

  “You see, Byron Newton-Plancke claims proof that life originated not at a single source, and not from multiple sources, but from two distinct sets of evolutionary roots. One tree is essentially a version of what Mr. Darwin’s official theories suggest, with a very important distinction.

  “The second tree, you see, is one that started with a single deformity and grew to encompass every monster we know. It is similar to its counterpart in only one way. Both trees—one that gave birth to life, and one a deformity of it—resulted in the evolution of humans. Or so it seems to us—falsely.

  “In fact, the real crux of Byron Newton-Plancke’s argument is this: a good number, perhaps even a vast number, of the people we call humans are not humans at all. They look like humans, and they dress like humans. But they are simply monsters, several generations removed from having fangs, but no less dangerous. They belong not to the tree of life—but to the damaged roots of the thing that exists to destroy it.”

  Now Professor Natter’s voice sounded very far away. Or maybe Cordelia was far away. She felt as if she were listening from the bottom of a tunnel that grew longer and colder and darker with every word.

  “It is time, Byron Newton-Plancke believes, to uproot the threat that has for too long sucked water from the tree of life, and sunlight from its branches. It is time to kill off the disease before it spreads.

  “That is why we have to hurry. It isn’t just monsters that Plancke claims must be destroyed. The monsters are just proof—that monsters are real, that their descendants are real, that we must all go on the hunt. Plancke intends to tell us all the secret ways they can be spotted. Scientifically, of course.

  “Then people must track down all the monsters, and all the diseased perversions that evolved from them. The real humans, the whole ones, the ones who are supposed to be here, must track down every last seed of these horrible imitations of humanity. They must be uprooted, every one.

  “They must be destroyed, every one.

  “Otherwise, we will never be safe.

  “It is, after all, evil to kill people. But it is right to kill monsters, so that people are protected.

  “And though one may look almost exactly like the other, nowadays Byron Newton-Plancke is the world’s expert. And he will tell everyone—the real everyone, I mean, the only ones who count—just exactly what to look for.

  “Then the weeding must begin, and will continue, until all the true humans, the ones who deserve to be here, are the only ones left in the garden, and have nothing left to fear.”

  Chapter 24

  Less than thirty minutes later found Cordelia, Gregory, Elizabeth, and t
he professor—who was, luckily, delighted by the company of the three monsters in their care—bumping together in a hansom cab on the way to the docks.

  “I kept a filch for a pet before I knew what to call it,” he said, looking absolutely blissful when Icky squeaked a few farts into his lap. “A sort of a stray, he was. Kept sneaking to the door for wormroot cakes, when I thought I would lure a growrk. That’s what I meant about my dad, and how confused he was. Turns out growrks don’t even like wormroot cakes.”

  “What’s wrong with Cabal?” Elizabeth piped up as another rut in the road jolted them all six inches out of their seats. “He looks pale.”

  “He always looks pale,” Gregory said. “It’s because he’s dead.”

  “No,” Elizabeth insisted. “Usually he’s white-pale. Now he’s gray-pale.” Another jolt knocked her head against the carriage ceiling. “I hope he’s not going to be—”

  But at that second, Cabal reversed the contents of his stomach onto her shoes, and she began to scream.

  Almost immediately, his normal pallor returned.

  “Look at that,” Gregory said, while Elizabeth continued wailing. “He’s feeling normal-dead already.”

  The smell of fish announced the harbor long before it came into view. Seagulls rose in swarms above the thinning trees, and the forest slowly ran into enormous colonies of rocks, and the whitecaps breaking between them.

  The harbor teemed with longshoremen and fishermen, merchants and traders, and inspectors and smugglers posing as officials. Just off the coast, dozens of whalers and schooners, masts pointed confusedly at one another, were rocked by the waves.

  Cordelia’s heart was flapping wildly, like an unlashed sail. It would take at least three days to get to Boston, if the weather held. Professor Natter was certain Byron Newton-Plancke intended to put the monsters on display before he killed them.