The Magnificent Monsters of Cedar Street

by Lauren Oliver

  “And then she ‘helped’ you into quite a pickle,” Plancke said. “So I suppose her ‘friendship’ came with a price tag.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Gregory shrugged. “Buying friends is your line of work.”

  The effect was immediate. Newton-Plancke’s face twisted so suddenly into a rage, his eyes popped—literally—and he barely managed to push them back in place. “I have more friends than you have breaths left in your body!” he shrieked. “I have so many friends, I’ve lost count of how many friends I’ve lost count of!”

  “And how many of them would sit in a cage just to keep you company?” Gregory fired back.

  “Shut up!” In his anger, Plancke seemed to bloat. His eyes bulged in his face, and his head ballooned on his neck. “Shut up! Or I’ll cut you up into so many pieces, even the dogs won’t have use for you!”

  Cordelia’s fear turned to fury. It was because of people like Byron Newton-Plancke that Elizabeth had carried the burden of loneliness and worry along with her all these years. It was people like Byron Newton-Plancke who imagined monsters everywhere, insisted monsters be everywhere, just to have an answer for the gnawing fear inside them.

  “All right, then. Go ahead. You can start with me.” Cordelia grabbed hold of the bars and shook; not because she thought it would do any good, but because she needed to push something, to squeeze something, to work the anger out of her palms. “If you’re so desperate to kill us, why waste time?”

  “Cordelia,” Elizabeth whispered sharply.

  Newton-Plancke’s fit of temper had passed. He turned to Cordelia with a look of some amusement. “I assure you that your time here will be well worth it. But since you are so eager to get down to business . . .”

  He came closer, and closer. Cordelia noticed that he didn’t seem to walk so much as ooze, or glide, and she thought of those long trails of slime. What was this man?

  Finally, his shadow fell across her, and all her bravery withered. His eyes were colorless, dead-looking. His skin was the marbled white of bad cheese.

  “Tell me, Cordelia.” His fingers were so long, he threaded one easily through the bars to lift her chin, even after she scooted away from him. “Where are the monsters?”

  Chapter 31

  Cordelia felt as if the question had turned solid and blown a hole through her chest. “What do you mean?”

  “The monsters, Cordelia. The only private collection of monsters in the world. The world’s only private collection of monsters, representing more than a dozen species. So many different kinds of living horror, here, right in Boston. Proof of evolution gone horribly awry. Proof of life gone terribly wrong.” He withdrew his finger slowly, letting her feel the sharpness of his fingernail. “Where are they?”

  It was Elizabeth who spoke. She’d given in to the surge of goblin and was almost completely green. Warts ran down the length of her nose, dividing it exactly in the middle. “Very funny,” she said. “You’ve obviously had lots of practice playing dumb.”

  Plancke kept one eye on Cordelia and spun the other one in Elizabeth’s direction to glare. “I will ask you again nicely.” His voice was very quiet, but Cordelia wasn’t fooled. She could hear the anger pulled tight underneath it. “Then the question will be very painful—for you. Where. Are. The. Monsters?”

  Panic was building inside Cordelia, pressing at her stomach and throat. “You tell me,” she fired back. “You’re the one who stole them. You’re the one who’s got my dad locked up somewhere. You’re the one playing games.”

  Plancke jerked backward, as though touched by an electric shock. For a moment, he said nothing. His eyes roved every inch of her face, and she imagined that they left her covered with a film of slime.

  Then he gave a short sigh and turned away from her. “I see,” he murmured, frowning. “How foolish I’ve been. You were unaware . . . that is, he never told you . . .” Producing a pair of glasses from one coat pocket and a handkerchief from another, he began to polish the lenses. “Well. It’s no matter now. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. We will draw him out, from wherever he’s been lurking.”

  Cordelia swallowed. Her mouth was as dry as dust. “Are you saying . . . are you truly saying . . . you have no idea where my father is? Where the monsters are?”

  Newton-Plancke brought the glasses to his mouth and gave a little huff to mist them. “How could I?” he said unconcernedly. “I had been keeping an eye on them—literally—for quite some time. I even wrote him a letter, hoping he might see reason once he realized all of the benefits that his cooperation might buy. Unfortunately, it seems he decided on a most unreasonable course of action.” Having polished his glasses carefully with a silk handkerchief, he repositioned them on his nose. “By the time I arrived—under the legal authority of the governor’s office, and with the full support of the Boston Police—your father had made off with them.”

  Cordelia felt as if the ground was spinning beneath her. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. Her father had taken the monsters? But why? And where?

  And why hadn’t he brought Cordelia with him?

  “Surely you see, child. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It had been many years, of course, since our last . . . run-in. I wish I could say it was a pleasant one.” Newton-Plancke’s lips curled back over gums the gray-pink of a dead salmon. Even his teeth were long. “Your father and I exchanged some very nasty words. He even, I’m ashamed to say, managed to throw in a punch.”

  “He should’ve thrown in a few more, for good measure,” Gregory muttered.

  Newton-Plancke ignored him. His eyes were fixed on Cordelia. “He might have killed me then,” he said. “He wanted to. I could tell. All because I’d said to be careful proof of his wife’s love for monsters wasn’t growing in her belly . . . after all, she was seven months pregnant then. . . .”

  “You’re a monster,” Cordelia spat.

  Suddenly, he drew closer again. “Say it again,” he said.

  “You’re a monster,” she said, a little louder. Then louder again: “You’re a monster! You’re a monster!”

  “Go on,” Newton-Plancke said. “Let it out. You’ll feel better.”

  “You’re a monster!” She was screaming now. Now the fire was inside of her, scorching her insides, clawing up her throat and burning through her mouth. “My father should have killed you when he had a chance!”

  Unexpectedly, a wide grin split his face. He reminded her in that moment of a jack-o’-lantern, behind which some maniacal fire was burning. “You see?” he said. “You see how good it feels—to scream, to point your finger, to say die?”

  Cordelia realized, in that second, that he’d tricked her.

  He bent down, so they were eye to eye. “Your mother intervened that night to save me,” he said softly. “She told your father to leave me. She even, I believe, made him apologize for getting blood on my shirt. Vince malum bono, she said. Good overcomes evil. . . .”

  Cordelia recognized the words from the frontispiece of her mother’s unfinished book. Now the fire had turned to a kind of sickness. She didn’t feel well. She felt as if she needed to throw up.

  “She even offered me her hand. . . .”

  “Stop.” She couldn’t listen anymore. “Stop it.”

  For the first time ever, she was gripped by hatred for her mother. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have loved monsters—any monsters, all monsters—more than she loved the people who really needed her protection? How could she have loved evil, more than she did its victims?

  “That’s exactly what I told her,” Newton-Plancke said. “But it was just another one of her misguided ideas, and she was as stubborn about it as all the others. My philosophy has always been Vincere est vivere—to conquer is to live. In fact, I was just having a lively debate with my publisher about whether or not it should subtitle my next book. You see, Cordelia . . .” A strange ripple pulled his face, for a moment, into a hundred other faces—dimly familiar, people s
he had seen at the pharmacist, in the park, on the street. “I know better than anyone that monsters can be very, very dangerous. That is why, for years, I let your father go on collecting proof. I waited until he had all the evidence I needed.”

  The room was spinning into dark. Or it had disappeared, and Cordelia was spinning, down into the darkness of Newton-Plancke’s eyes, where she could see the past distorted. The only known domestic collection of monsters in the world. More than two dozen species. Here, in Boston.

  They’d been so stupid. All along, they’d been doing Newton-Plancke’s work.

  “I waited until I would be able to use it for good. For the country. For the world. There must be rules, you see. There must be right . . .”

  Now, he slotted all ten fingers into the cage, between the bars. As she watched, his fingers grew, flowed like narrow rivulets of skin toward her face.

  “. . . or else how would you know that you aren’t wrong?”

  Cordelia skittered backward, choking on a scream. But there was nowhere to go. Soon the fingers were at her jaw and pinning her gaze to his.

  “You do have her eyes, you know,” he said. He passed a long, slick finger over her cheek, and Cordelia fell into the hole of fear in her stomach. Then, in a different voice: “I want you to know I regret what I had to do,” he said. “I tried to avoid it. It was her fault. She gave me no choice. It had become a matter of survival. She was trying to expose me, you understand, even if she didn’t know it. . . .”

  “What—what are you talking about?” Cordelia’s voice sounded as if it came from far away.

  “It gave me no pleasure to kill your mother,” Newton-Plancke said simply. And in a second, with a terrible, wet, suctioning sound, he retracted his fingers—and Cordelia, at last, knew what he was.

  “A morpheus,” she whispered. “You’re . . . you’re a morpheus.”

  “Your father taught you well.” He stood up. He neatened his shirt and coat, readjusted his sleeves. “Now you see, I think, why I had to do it. Your mother had already written several prominent universities to claim she’d even tracked down fossil evidence. . . .”

  “In Brazil,” Cordelia said. “That’s why she went.”

  “An absurd gambit,” Newton-Plancke said sharply. “She knew better than to believe the morpheus would possibly leave evidence in Brazil. I should have seen right through her trap.”

  A question tickled the very back of Cordelia’s mind. A doubt. But she couldn’t make it take shape. “Her . . . trap?”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was too focused on making sure her evidence—if she had any—would never become public. It might have ruined everything.” He turned away with a shrug. “Stupid woman. Perhaps she’d thought to weaken me. But I was still strong enough to kill her.”

  He made hardly a sound as he oozed across the exhibit hall toward a door marked Private—No Trespassing. Cordelia assumed the museum abutted his living quarters directly. “I look forward to seeing your father again. Soon, I should imagine, now that my whisperers have begun their work. Your father is a wanted man, you know. It is quite criminal to leave a twelve-year-old child unattended. And Boston is a civilized city.”

  Cordelia finally understood. He would lure her father out—using Cordelia as bait.

  At the door, he paused to look back at her. “I hope we can put all that unpleasantness behind us. After all, I am quite grateful to him. I will be president because of him.”

  He smiled. “And you, of course.” Then, casually, as he slipped through the door: “I hope you don’t mind the dark.”

  And with that, he slammed the door shut.

  Chapter 32

  Time seemed to stretch interminably. Moonlight reached across the exhibit hall with long, pale fingers, like the frigid reach of Newton-Plancke’s hands.

  Cordelia’s mind was turning so quickly, she felt dizzy even sitting down.

  Newton-Plancke had reminded her of something . . . something she had read . . . something important . . .

  Cordelia closed her eyes. She saw, in a flash, Professor Natter leaning heavily on his walking stick down by the docks. She saw his eyebrows drawn into a single, dense cloud. . . .

  In the jungle? Even in her memory, she saw his eyebrows leap. You’re sure?

  “Give it up,” Elizabeth grunted. “You don’t have the key, anyway.”

  “But if I could just reach—” Gregory panted.

  “Elizabeth’s right,” Cordelia said. Her voice echoed. “We’ll never get out of here without the key.”

  “We may never get out of here at all,” Elizabeth said quietly.

  There was a moment of heavy silence. They all knew what she said was true. At last Gregory gave up and sat down with a sigh. Cordelia’s throat was tight. All her fault. This was all her fault.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted. It was easier to apologize in the dark. Easier to talk, really, when she didn’t have to see the way that Gregory and Elizabeth were looking at her. “This is all my fault. If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “That’s all right,” Gregory said.

  “No.” Cordelia shook her head. “No, it isn’t all right. I nearly got us killed a half-dozen times. And now . . .” And now all hope is lost, she added silently.

  “I’m sorry too,” Gregory said, after a moment. Cordelia turned to him. “Why are you sorry?”

  “Just because,” he said, shrugging. “You shouldn’t have to be sorry all on your own.”

  Cordelia felt her throat squeeze up to the size of a pea. She wanted to reach out and hug Gregory. But of course, the cage bars prevented it. There was another moment of silence. Elizabeth cleared her throat.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said.

  Cordelia was so startled she forgot, temporarily, to feel awful. “What are you sorry for?”

  “For lying,” Elizabeth said. “And for being so horrible. And for being, well . . .” She held open her hands, which were swollen to double their normal size, and blinked her yellow eyes mournfully at them. “This.”

  “You aren’t this,” Cordelia said. “You aren’t anything. You’re you. And that’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “Besides, the green looks good on you,” Gregory said cheerfully. “Goes with your haircut.”

  Cordelia felt it then—something shifting, growing, knitting together between them in the dark, something delicate as silk, invisible as wind. They were changing. They were changed. Cordelia had spent so long trying to keep everything exactly the way it was. But about this, too, she’d been wrong.

  It was so cold in the exhibit hall, their breath seized on the air. Soon Cordelia’s fingers were numb, and Elizabeth’s shivering was so bad that her three sets of teeth chattered together.

  “You’d think a big-timer like Plancke could afford a bit of heat,” Gregory said, hugging his knees to his chest. “But it’s always the rich ones don’t like to spend a dime. . . .”

  “It isn’t that,” Cordelia said. She plunged her fists into her pockets and was surprised to feel her mother’s little oval stone had made it past Newton-Plancke’s inspection of their pockets, perhaps because it had slipped underneath the empty bag of pretzels. The rest of her tools were gone. “It’s because of what he is. The morpheus despises the heat. Imagine how it feels to be melting, if you’re actually in danger of—”

  She broke off, gasping.

  “What?” Gregory said. “What is it?”

  “—in danger of melting,” she finished in a whisper. “No morpheus would ever dream of living in the jungle. . . .”

  “The jungle?” Gregory frowned. “Who said anything about a jungle?”

  “My mother sailed to Brazil before she died. She claimed she was looking for fossil evidence of a morpheus. But she can’t have been. She knew better. Heat and moisture weaken the morpheus’s shape and make it much harder for it to take a lasting form.” Cordelia was breathless with excitement. Now she understood what Newton-Plancke meant by
trap. “She must have been trying to lure Newton-Plancke to go after her, to a place where he would be weak enough to . . .”

  But she trailed off. Weak enough to trap? To reason with? Surely she hadn’t been planning to kill him. . . .

  And just as quickly as her excitement came, it left. Whatever she’d been planning to do hadn’t worked. In the end, he had beaten her at her own game.

  Just like he had beaten Cordelia.

  Like he would no doubt beat her father.

  It was like Plancke had said: even weak, he was strong enough. Stronger than they were, certainly.

  She had the funny oval stone in her hands now, this little relic of her mother’s life—meaningless and beautiful and easily mistaken for any other, but for the etchings on its surface. Lives, too, were like that. Insignificant, beautiful only to the people who looked closely enough.

  Who would miss her mother, if Cordelia and her father were gone? Who would think about her?

  Had her mother been thinking of Cordelia when she died?

  She was crying without meaning to. The tears were hot on her cheeks, and fell so hard and fast she didn’t bother to try and stop them. Who got to say what was beautiful and what wasn’t, who was important and who didn’t belong, which lives had value, and which ones more value? Whose lives disappeared like stones down a well, forgotten and ignored, dismissed and vilified, because they simply weren’t the right shape? If only certain stars got to shine in the night sky, wouldn’t the sky be a little uglier? Wouldn’t it be missing pieces?

  The stone was now dark with tears, and warm from her grip. She’d been squeezing so tightly, she’d even left the imprint of her fingers on its surface. . . .

  Cordelia blinked. She’d left the imprint of her fingers on its surface. Even its shape was different now—no longer oval, but tubular and flesh-colored, and sized exactly for her cupped hand. But when she opened her fingers, it pooled immediately across her palm. . . .

  She dropped it with a cry and saw it wink, and harden into sharp edges, and flush the exact color of steel.