The dragon stiffened. Smoke flared from his nostrils, as he swiveled his head to face her, his single eye glinting with malice. The knife was embedded deeply in his flesh, but Cordelia saw that the monster wasn’t bleeding. Instead, a sticky, gooey slime was oozing from his wound, and Cordelia scrambled out of the way to avoid getting spattered. It was the same slime she had seen in her father’s room; the same slime the eyeball left in its wake; the same slime a slug might puddle on a stone floor, after its back had been sprinkled with salt.
The idea hit her like a punch to the stomach: Byron Newton-Plancke was mostly water. Easily heated. Easily blurred by wet.
And fatally allergic to salt, which would evaporate it into its true shape.
“Cordelia, watch out!” Gregory shouted just in time. She dove as the dragon exhaled a wall of fire and smoke. She somersaulted into the corner, bumping her head on the wall. Sitting up, she shook her head to clear the stars from her vision.
The dragon’s yellow eye hovered right in front of her, reflecting a terrified Cordelia cowering at its center. The dragon’s nostrils quivered with pleasure. Every time he exhaled, Cordelia felt as if she were being blasted by air from a hot oven. With his crooked teeth exposed, the dragon looked as if he was smiling.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. Dimly, she was aware of her father shouting, of Gregory calling her name, of Elizabeth telling her to get out of the way. But there was nowhere to go. She was trapped.
It was over.
Cordelia squeezed her eyes shut as the dragon sucked in an enormous breath—
But instead of the expected blast of heat, she felt the dragon jerk backward. Looking up, she saw Icky—cowardly Icky—clinging determinedly to the dragon’s nose, letting off an explosive artillery of farts.
Cordelia rocketed to her feet. Doubling over to pass underneath the belly of the monster, she sprinted for her jacket. Someone—Gregory?—called to her to watch out.
Whoosh. Once again, the dragon turned its eye on Cordelia. She was so close. . . .
She dove as a stream of fire incinerated the wall behind her. She landed hard behind the cage, using it as a makeshift shield against the shimmering heat as she reached for the jacket that Plancke had cast off into a corner. From a pocket she rooted out the paper bag that had once contained the pretzels. She dug a fist into the bag and withdrew a handful of salt, praying it would be enough.
And as the dragon’s head rose, rose, rose over the top of the cage, his yellow eye like a sun just rising, steam issuing from his massive nostrils, she threw.
The salt landed directly in his eye. The dragon drew back, roaring with pain. Cordelia tossed another handful, straight up the dragon’s nostrils. For a terrifying second, nothing else happened, and Cordelia’s heart stopped: they were lost.
Then there was a sizzling sound, like bacon in a fryer. The dragon blinked. Then he began to melt.
His eye went first, oozing and popping, transforming into the same bubbling slime that had oozed from Plancke’s wounds. Then his snout, and his gigantic, quivering nostrils, began to blur—melting, melting, pouring away, so that even when Plancke attempted one last burst of flame, the fire itself transformed into liquid, splattering the walls and ceiling and dousing the remaining flames.
And as Byron-Newton Plancke puddled, shriveled, and collapsed, he started to howl. The sound was so loud and so horrible, Cordelia covered her ears. But the smaller he got, the fainter the noise became.
Until at last, when he was no larger than a house cat drowning in a pile of slime, the sound was tolerable again; and when he was no bigger than a mouse, the howl was no louder than a faint whistle.
And finally, Plancke the morpheus assumed his true form: a long, sluglike creature the size of a child’s finger, marbled with a complex pattern of veins, like the one her mother had found, fossilized into stone.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Gregory was panting. Elizabeth was shaking so hard her knees were knocking together with a hard, wooden clanging. She had broken out in warts all over.
Cordelia didn’t even try to stand up. She was flooded with exhaustion, suddenly; she felt as if her body had been replaced with iron.
Cornelius adjusted his glasses, which were perched crookedly on his nose. “Well,” he said. “Well.” He limped a little closer and stared down at the sluglike morpheus with distaste. He raised his boot. “Now that he’s been salted . . .”
“Don’t,” Cordelia cried out. Cornelius looked at her in surprise. “Don’t,” she repeated. “Let him live this way, as himself. Put him in a jar, and set the jar next to a mirror, and let him live with his reflection. That’s punishment enough, isn’t it?”
“You’re sure?” Cornelius asked quietly.
Cordelia nodded. “It’s like Mom thought,” she said. “Good overcomes evil. Then the evil has no one to blame for its evil. Right?”
Cornelius stared at her. Tears dampened his eyes. Then he pulled her tight into a hug. “That’s right,” he said. Then he released her and turned his attention back to Byron Newton-Plancke, in his true form.
“We’ll need to find some kind of container . . . ,” he began.
In a way, they did, a minute later, when Elizabeth, still gripped in an explosive outbreak of goblin, spotted the slug on the floor—and instinctively darted out a long, pink tongue to snatch it up.
A horrified Elizabeth clapped both hands to her mouth. There was a beat of silence.
Then Elizabeth cried out, “Slugs?”
Gregory patted her on the arm. “At least it’s not a spider,” he said.
Chapter 35
Less than six weeks later, on the day before the grand reopening of Clay Home for Veterinary Services, a passerby might have startled at the strange grunts, bumps, groans, and creaks emanating from the open windows of the house known as Clay Manor. This stranger might then jump, hearing a cheerful voice from the garden, only to see Mrs. Emily Perkins, founder of the New Collective School, waving cheerfully with a garden spade.
And then, a moment later, the door would burst open, and Cornelius Clay would emerge to cart a ratty armchair to the growing stack of furniture on the corner, earmarked for the dump. Or a sweet-looking girl with an unfortunate haircut would float by in one of the windows, holding a paintbrush and complaining that Gregory, whoever he was, had chosen the wrong color.
And the passerby would hurry on, embarrassed for having been caught spying.
The same scene had been replayed for many weeks. Since late January, Clay Manor had been full of the drumming of feet up and down the stairs, shouted conversation, and furniture bumping through the doorways. The rhythm of a hammer was almost constant, as was the rhythmic shush of paint on the walls. And laughter. Almost always, laughter.
What was missing from Clay Manor were the screeches and squawks, the wailing, the animal grunts and growls.
What was missing, in fact, were the monsters.
“I still don’t see why you had to give them up,” Gregory grumbled, even as Cornelius and Cordelia wedged a dresser into the corner of his new room. The walls had been patched and painted sky blue. The floors repaired and refinished. No one would guess that mushrooms had ever grown in the corner.
“You still have Cabal,” Cordelia pointed out.
“Cabal’s different,” Gregory said dismissively. Down in the garden, Cabal began barking, as if he’d overheard and taken offense. Cordelia went to the window and watched him rooting around the planting beds, while Mrs. Perkins’s husband tried to shoo him away from the beds. Elizabeth and her mother were kneeling side by side, carefully tamping down the earth around a trellis meant for climbing roses. The garden was already taking shape under their care. Goblins were known for their green thumbs. Literally.
“Professor Natter says you can visit Icky whenever you want,” Cornelius said, carefully centering a lamp on the dresser. The professor had come to visit not long after they’d escaped Plancke, and his bond with the filch
, a double of his favorite childhood pet, was undeniable.
“But what about all the others?” Gregory said. “I don’t mind sharing a room with a squelch, even if it is molting. . . .”
“We miss the monsters too,” Cornelius said, laying a hand on Gregory’s shoulder. “But what we were doing—keeping them here, locked up in the house—it wasn’t right. Monsters belong to the world. They belong in the world. We had no right to keep them here.”
“But what if something happens?” Gregory persisted. “What if they get hunted down, or caged up, or—?”
“We can’t stop all the evil in the world,” Cornelius interrupted him. “We can only make sure we don’t repeat it. A cage is a cage, even if it has a roof. Even if you name it ‘protection.’ Now go on,” he added, tousling Gregory’s hair. “There’s still plenty to do before the grand reopening of Clay Veterinary. Especially since someone’s been spreading a rumor that I can perform miracles, like bringing dogs back from the dead. . . .”
“People say all kinds of twaddle,” Gregory said, flushing a deep red. “Come on, Cordelia.” He seized Cordelia’s hand and yanked her toward the stairs.
They slid down the polished banisters, Gregory’s favorite new trick, and landed with a soft thump on the new carpet that ran the length of the first floor hallway—all of it courtesy of the New Collective, a school founded by Mrs. Perkins for “project-based education and learning,” for students who did not fit traditional models of schooling. So far, forty-five people had enrolled for the fall, and while the ground floor would be dedicated primarily to Cornelius’s practice, the upper floors were slowly being converted into classrooms and project centers.
But the school’s heart, its center, its library, was almost complete.
Cabal was still barking, and Mr. Perkins was shouting something about his trouser leg.
“I’ll get him,” Gregory said. “Before he tries to sample blood straight from the source.”
“Good idea,” Cordelia said.
He dashed down the hall. Moments later, she heard the kitchen door wheeze open and bang shut.
She stood for a moment, enjoying the rare stillness. The rustle of paper made her turn. The windows were open in her mother’s former library, and a breeze turned the pages of the large books, open for display on the lower shelves.
She passed into the room, both familiar and unrecognizable. Gone was her mother’s desk. Gone was the crib. Gone were the heavy curtains. Sunlight spilled over the bookshelves, now filled with not only her mother’s collection of scientific treatises, but other books Mrs. Perkins had selected for the school—plays and poems, historical volumes, dictionaries, foreign language primers. Still, her mother’s first book was among them—and some of her collection of natural objects too.
Not the fossilized morpheus, though. They’d lost that during the scrum with Newton-Plancke.
But in the end, perhaps, it didn’t matter very much.
Cordelia moved to the glass-topped table at the center of the room, where the first bound copy of her mother’s now-finished manuscript, featuring an introduction and conclusion by Professor Natter, was proudly displayed. She turned again to the tree of life: a river of ink, flowing from a single source into dizzying rivulets of being, into everything that exists and has existed.
She placed a finger on the blank space, where the morpheus was meant to be.
It was funny, how the pattern was so clear, as soon as she was staring down the length of her finger. The veins of life on either side of it looked just like the pattern she’d seen cross-hatched in the fossil. Like you could twist them all together around her finger, and make a coil.
Two coils, actually. Each coil coiled, and coiled around the other. Like a double staircase, winding upward toward infinity.
Cordelia closed her eyes and heard her mother’s voice come in, carried by the wind, alive everywhere.
About the Author
Photo by Charles Grantham
LAUREN OLIVER is the bestselling author of many novels, including the E. B. White Read Aloud Award nominee Liesl & Po, The Spindlers, which received four starred reviews, and the Edgar Award–nominated Curiosity House series, cowritten with H. C. Chester. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and she has written for teens and adults as well as children. Her novel Before I Fall was adapted into a major motion picture starring Zoey Deutch, and Lauren’s YA novel Panic is being adapted into a streaming television series with Amazon Studios.
The cofounder of Glasstown Entertainment, where she serves as president of production, Lauren divides her time between New York, Los Angeles, Connecticut, and a variety of airport lounges.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Books by Lauren Oliver
Before I Fall
Broken Things
Liesl & Po
The Spindlers
Panic
Vanishing Girls
Replica
Ringer
Curiosity House: The Shrunken Head
Curiosity House: The Screaming Statue
Curiosity House: The Fearsome Firebird
THE DELIRIUM SERIES
Delirium
Pandemonium
Requiem
Delirium Stories: Hana, Annabel, Raven, and Alex
FOR ADULTS
Rooms
Copyright
THE MAGNIFICENT MONSTERS OF CEDAR STREET. Copyright © 2020 by Laura Schechter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover illustration and hand lettering © 2020 by IACOPO BRUNO
Cover design by CATHERINE SAN JUAN
* * *
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-234507-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-234507-3
* * *
Interior art by Ethan M. Aldridge
1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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