The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street

by Lauren Oliver

  But what if he was wrong?

  And what possible use could he have for her father?

  The road finally gave up its pretense and melted into a churn of mud that flowed down to the docks. Elizabeth climbed out of the cab, still spluttering about her shoes, only to step directly into a giant mound of horse manure. She stood, trembling with mute fury, as Gregory leapt down after her.

  “Aw, cheer up. It could be worse. You could’ve planted both feet.”

  And Gregory, demonstrating, stomped around a bit to show her—splattering an unfortunate sampling of the bad luck on her coat.

  Cordelia hopped the short distance to the ground, keeping well clear of the manure. She had to coax Icky from Professor Natter’s arms; the filch clung so hard to Professor Natter’s shirtfront, the separation effort nearly plunged the professor facedown into the mud. He caught himself only by bracing hard against the ground with his walking stick, and at last, very slowly, he managed the dismount. But at the last second, he lost his balance again, and Cordelia reached out to grab him.

  “I’m all right,” he said. But he was panting. “Nothing to it.”

  Cordelia could feel his fingers, knotty with age, crush hers in their grip. And she realized, with a sinking feeling, that it would be wrong to ask him to accompany them all the way to Boston. He had his work here, with his students, to attend to. And he had already done more than his fair share. He had fought monsters all his life. He had given half his face up to the fight.

  His place was here, among his books, where the battlefield was drawn in printed letters on the page.

  “You can’t come with us, Professor,” she said. “I can’t let you.”

  Professor Natter’s eyebrows gave a ferocious leap. “Don’t be absurd,” he said, and nudged Cordelia aside with his walking stick. “Of course I’m coming with you. You can’t stand up to Newton-Plancke alone.”

  “We’ve made it this far,” Cordelia said. But Professor Natter was old, and obviously tired. He had earned his right to his books, and his comfortable office, and his hot chocolate. Marshmallows, too. He had fought bravely in the war; this was Cordelia’s battle. “We made it all the way to New York from Boston. We made it here in a hot-air balloon. We gave a pair of lions the slip. We can handle Newton-Plancke.”

  “We can?” Gregory whispered.

  “Yes,” Cordelia said, with confidence she didn’t feel. She turned back to Professor Natter. “You have your students, and your work with the university,” she finished.

  Professor Natter shooed off those concerns. “Stopping Plancke is far more important,” he said. “So step aside, please, before I write you up for disobedience.”

  “No.” Cordelia stepped in front of him again when he tried to get around her. For a second, the old man glowered at her so fiercely, she almost shrank back. But she forced herself to hold his gaze.

  And finally, his expression softened. “You’re just like your mother, you know,” he said quietly. “A real firecracker. Stubborn as an ox, and brave as a lion.”

  Cordelia was momentarily speechless. She had never thought of herself as especially brave. She had been afraid since the moment she’d closed and locked the door of Clay Manor behind her. She’d been afraid even before then—afraid to go to school, afraid their secret would be discovered, afraid of a world full of menacing strangers, their faces blurred by her imagination into shadow.

  But all that time, she had ignored the real danger—not that people would discover the Clays’ monsters, but that they would invent their own.

  “She would be so proud of you,” Professor Natter said, and pretended not to notice Cordelia swipe her eyes. “You’re wrong, by the way, that your mother’s greatest work was never finished. She’s standing right here in front of me.” Then: “I want you to see this.”

  He removed the copy of A Guide to Monsters and Their Habits from his satchel. Cordelia hadn’t even seen him tuck it away. Flipping open to the title page, he indicated several neat lines of faded cursive, writing as familiar to Cordelia as the lines that creased her father’s face.

  “She’d promised she would sign a copy for me when the book was published. You were just a few months old. But she didn’t forget.”

  Cordelia blinked away the tears blurring her vision and read:

  To my good friend Sam,

  Every life is a miracle, no matter what we name it. Ours is named Cordelia.

  Affectionately,

  Elizabeth

  This time, Professor Natter discreetly nudged a handkerchief from his pocket, and didn’t even flinch when Cordelia returned it, soaking wet, a moment later. But he wouldn’t take the book when she tried to return it.

  “Keep it,” he said.

  Cordelia shook her head. “It was meant for you,” she said. “We have a whole stack in the library, anyway. . . .”

  And, as if stirred up on the memory of ink and paper rustling, an idea came to Cordelia.

  “There is one thing you can do to help, you know,” she said. The idea grew louder, and sharper, and wrote its way into a spark of excitement. “My mother never got to finish her book,” Cordelia said. “She never found the proof she needed. Maybe . . . maybe you can.”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “But I’m not the right person to ask. I was only ever an amateur, a hobbyist. You need an expert—”

  “There are no experts,” Cordelia said, a little more loudly than she’d intended. “There aren’t any experts, because the truth my mom saw doesn’t exist yet. You can make it true. You can find what she was looking for. You can at least try.”

  Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

  Cordelia’s relief broke in waves in her chest. “I don’t know everything,” she said. “Only what my father told me. He said that for years my mother had been trying to track proof of the Omnia morpheus—the common shape-shifter. She thought the shape-shifter explained the gaps left in the evolutionary tree. Trouble is, we could have proof of a hundred thousand shape-shifters and never know it. If they die in the form of another kind of creature . . .”

  “Then the proof they leave behind is of the disguise. I understand.”

  Cordelia nodded. “But she thought she’d finally, finally caught a break. She’d been writing to people all over the world: biologists, anthropologists, archeologists. And finally, someone wrote back. There were rumors of a fossil found in the jungle. A ‘cursed stone,’ the locals called it, that kept twisting and changing. . . .”

  “In the jungle?” Professor Natter’s eyebrows scurried a little closer together. “That’s where this fossil was actually discovered?”

  She nodded. “Somewhere in Brazil.”

  Another half centimeter, and his eyebrows merged into a single knit. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said, a little impatiently. “My father saw her onto the boat two days later. And the telegram that came with the news was from São Paulo.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. . . .”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Impossible things are true all the time.”

  Chapter 25

  “Now what?” Elizabeth said, after they’d said goodbye to Professor Natter.

  “Now we find a boat,” Cordelia said, and instinctively touched her hand to a folded stack of money in her coat pocket—not, of course, the pocket singed by the dragon’s constant snoring.

  The professor had insisted on giving them enough to pay their way onto one of the southbound whalers. But there was a small problem: hardly any ships were headed south, and the few that intended to put in at Boston Harbor had no room for passengers. They made their way painstakingly from one end of the wharves to the other, trying to negotiate for passage. But in all instances, the answer was the same.

  “Save your money, girlie. Got no space for you,” the captain or first mate would say, glowering down on them. “Don’t take pets, neither. That’s an ugly dog you got. And what’s that othe
r thing—a lizard? I’ll give you two dollars for the lizard. That way ’e can help catch spiders on deck.”

  “He’s not a lizard,” Elizabeth burst out, the third time someone made the same mistake. “He’s a dra—” Until Cordelia elbowed her in the ribs, and she fell silent.

  One by one, the ships took off from port, floating away into the mist and drizzle until they were nothing but ghostly silhouettes. Soon there were only four ships left in the harbor; then two; then only one.

  The rain continued falling. Cordelia was wet, and cold, and miserable.

  “You’re making a mistake!” she yelled, sloshing into the waves, as the final ship—their last hope—floated proudly off to sea, masts pointing to the sky like an accusation. Then, changing tactics: “Please come back! Please! Don’t leave us!” But it was no use. She screamed herself hoarse as the waves battered her ankles and weighed down her trouser legs, making each step a chore. And still the ship drew farther and farther away, until it was swallowed by the billowing fog. Cordelia’s voice echoed back to her across the surface of the roiling water.

  Please. Please. Please.

  “Come on, Cordelia.” Gregory waded into the shallows and put an arm around her. “Let it go.”

  The water surged at her ankles, kicking back salt spray and sea foam. She wished she could call up a behemoth from the depths, as drowning sailors had once done; they might lash ropes to the backs of the Gargantuan oceanus and ride all the way to Boston. But those days were over. Their last remaining relative, the Minius oceanus, was roughly the size of a flounder and lived primarily in the shallow waters of the Caribbean. The last ship was vanishing, dissipating like a mirage—and with it, their only hope.

  “Hey,” Elizabeth said. “What about that ship?” She lifted a finger to point, and Cordelia noted a wart cluster—one of the more embarrassing symptoms of goblin pubescence. But now didn’t seem like the time to point it out.

  “Is that a ship?” Gregory asked, scrunching up his nose. “Looks more like a shipwreck.”

  He was right. Only now did Cordelia notice the remaining ship, a haphazard heap of timber and sail, listing in the waves at the very end of the wharves. It was half the size of the other ships that had sailed off, and twice as ugly.

  “You won’t be wanting to waste your time on that ship.” The voice, which seemed to materialize from thin air, made Cordelia yelp. But it was just a fisherman, squatting on an overturned crate and gutting sardines from a bucket.

  “Why not?” Cordelia and Gregory sloshed out of the water, careful to stay at a good distance from the man and his fish knife.

  The man shrugged. “She’s cursed,” he said casually, as if it should have been obvious. “Got ghosts in the floorboards. At night you can hear ’em wailing.”

  “Ghosts?” Elizabeth repeated, paling.

  The fisherman nodded. “No man ever took a haunted ship out to sea and lived to tell the tale. Captain Wincombe hasn’t set out of port in months. Not since October at least.”

  “Well, thanks very much,” Elizabeth said. She grabbed hold of Gregory’s elbow, seized Cordelia’s hands, and piloted them in the opposite direction. “I guess we’ll just have to find some other way to—”

  “Wait,” Cordelia said, and pulled away from her grip. Her mind was racing. Goblins were real, obviously, and had been intermingling with humans for so long they showed hardly any visible characteristics of their ancestry, except for the occasional wart cluster or a strange proclivity to roll around in the mud.

  Gremlins were real, and more common than anyone knew. They existed in every part of the world, perfectly camouflaged; in every part of the world, they lived for nothing so much as stealing keys and important papers and socks. Socks, especially.

  Specters were real. Specters weren’t even really specters. They were simply a translucent species of the two-legged wailer, a birdlike creature distantly related to the dinosaurs.

  But ghosts weren’t real. At least, no one had ever proven it. And Cordelia’s father knew plenty who had tried.

  A handful of young animals, especially dogs, were susceptible to a viral infection that kept their brains alive even after their hearts had stopped. Like Cabal, they could be revived and nourished.

  Otherwise, dead was dead.

  “We’d like to talk to Captain Wincombe,” she announced.

  Gregory looked startled. “We would?” he asked.

  “We wouldn’t,” Elizabeth said firmly.

  “Try the Gull and Tackle.” The fisherman gestured toward a salt-stained shack, which loomed like a deformed mushroom at the end of the pier.

  “You heard what the man said,” Elizabeth whispered, as they started off. Gregory hurried to keep up, shepherding Cabal and Icky along. The dragon followed a few feet behind, pecking at invisible crumbs. “No haunted ship that sets sail on the seas returns.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Cordelia said. “Besides, do you have a better idea?”

  The inside of the Gull and Tackle was even more dismal than the outside. Battered, water-warped tables were huddled together beneath a fog of tobacco smoke, like refugees taking comfort in the middle of a storm. The haze was so thick that the few customers were transformed into shapeless lumps. At least the darkness would keep Cabal, the dragon, and the filch from attracting any attention.

  Gregory cleared his throat. “We’re looking for Captain Wincombe,” he announced into the gloomy silence. No one spoke. “Do you know where we can find him?”

  They were met only with a rustling laugh, hollow as the sound of autumn leaves. This came from a pile of filthy rags, heaped into the rough silhouette of a person, sitting at a corner table.

  “You won’t find him here,” the pile of rags said. “You won’t find him anywhere.”

  Then the pile of rags swept off her hat, shook out a wild tangle of curls, and angled her face toward the light. Cordelia was momentarily speechless. She’d never known a woman to captain her own ship. But evidence of the ocean was written all over her face: in the weather-carved look of her skin, in the wind-tossed mess of her curls, in her black and glittering eyes, the color of a nighttime ocean.

  “State your business and be off,” Wincombe said briskly.

  Cordelia took this as an invitation to approach, and herded Gregory and Elizabeth along with her to the table. “We’d like to ask you about passage on your ship.”

  “There is no passage,” Captain Wincombe said. “’Cause there is no ship. A ship that doesn’t sail ain’t nothing but floating firewood. And no one sails the Medusa. She’s come down with ghosts. Contagious with ghosts, she is.”

  Elizabeth made a gurgling sound. Icky ducked behind her legs. Cordelia shot them both a dirty look.

  Then she turned back to Captain Wincombe. “When did the hauntings begin?” she asked.

  “It was last summer when I first heard ’em. We’d just pulled through a bad hurricane south of the Carolinas. I remember because at first I took all the knocking and shrieking for water damage.” She shook her head. “But we couldn’t find a hole to spit through, and it only got worse. All night long, I heard ’em wailing, a sound fit to drive a cuckoo clock crazy. Sometimes it sounded like a hundred fists pounding the walls. Then they started coming after the crew. Tore all my skivvies to shreds one time. Plucked my first mate clean of eyebrows another. That ship is cursed.”

  Captain Wincombe hadn’t invited them to sit, but Cordelia took a seat across from her anyway.

  “If I can get rid of your ghosts, will you take us down to Boston?”

  Wincombe let out a scrape of laughter again. “If you can get rid of my ghosts, girlie, I’ll take you to the end of the world.”

  “Good. Then we have a deal.” Cordelia stood up, extended her hand for a shake, and tried not to wince at the force of Wincombe’s grip.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Elizabeth whispered to Cordelia, as they followed Wincombe out of the Gull and Tackle, toward the ancient boat listing sadly in the
waves. From here, the ship did look haunted: its decks blackened, its sails sad and sagging, full of holes, and lichen crawling up the hull, mottling the figurehead of a mermaid. “Since when did you become an expert on ghosts?”

  “I’m not. I told you, there’s no such thing,” Cordelia said. “But Wincombe doesn’t have ghosts. She has pixies.”

  Chapter 26

  Cordelia had lost count of how many pixies she and her father had captured, and treated, over the years. Because they lived in cramped colonies and were known for their explosive tempers and their habit of spitting, licking, punching, and even biting their opponents, illness spread among them quickly.

  It took her only an hour to make a simple trap from a length of rope, an empty whiskey barrel, and a bit of plywood she scavenged from the galley. It was likely the pixies were the South American variety, which often migrated north at the start of the sweltering summer; they had either been blown onto the ship by hurricane winds or had deliberately taken shelter there and simply gotten comfortable. The fact that they were setting up for the long haul was confirmed, she thought, by all the pounding and wailing, and by the fact that they’d gone after both underthings and eyebrows.

  It would soon be mating season, and they were no doubt decorating extensively for at least one wedding.

  It took Cordelia nearly another hour to convince Elizabeth to sacrifice several inches of her curls to the cause, to make a lure. Pixies loved human hair and used it for bunting, carpet, elaborate garlands, and even decorative accessories. But they loved curls most of all. Cordelia would need a good heaping pile of them to attract the attention of the group. Nothing brought a pixie colony together like the fight about how spoils should be divided.

  “If I end up looking like a shorn poodle, I’ll toss in your eyebrows for free,” Elizabeth said, after finally submitting. But once a cascade of golden curls was lying at her feet, she marveled aloud how much lighter her head felt. And afterward, she kept swishing her hair back and forth across her shoulders and admiring her reflection in the back of a large cooking spoon.