Chapter 22

“Sorry about the marshmallows,” Professor Natter said, half an hour later, as he carefully polished his spectacles with a green handkerchief and leaned back in his desk chair. “Hot chocolate without marshmallows always seems like an essay that ends midsentence.”

Cordelia, Gregory, and Elizabeth were now installed in Professor Natter’s office, lined up in the row of mismatched chairs that faced his desk, enjoying the warmth of a cheerful fire.

“What’s wrong with that?” Gregory said. He had a ring of chocolate around his mouth that doubled his expression of perplexity. “Leave ’em wanting more, that’s what I say.”

Professor Natter smiled. “So,” he said. “Now that you’re warmed and fed”—he gestured to the tray of sandwiches and muffins he’d brought in from the dining hall, or rather, what was left of them in crumbs—“I think it’s time for you to give me something.” He replaced his glasses and peered sharply at each of them in turn. “What on earth are you doing here? What in the name of a griffin were you doing in a balloon? No stories, now,” he added, when Elizabeth opened her mouth. “I want the truth.”

There was an awkward pause. Cordelia stared down at the mug of hot chocolate steaming in her lap. “We—we wanted to hear your lecture.”

“Nonsense.” Professor Natter leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach. “Don’t take me for a fool, child. Half my students don’t want to hear my lectures. They only come because they have to.” When Cordelia opened her mouth to protest, he raised a hand. “Now, now. No more lies. State your business. You got fed. I get facts.”

It was quite clear to Cordelia already that Professor Natter couldn’t be responsible for the theft of the monsters. Despite his appearance—the scars that deformed his face, eyebrows that reminded her of the aggressive Northern Burr caterpillars, a particularly nasty and biting variety—he had rapidly proven that he was no threat. He had shepherded them upstairs to his office, fending off the enraged dean who had tried to intercept them, and even commanded one of his students to scare up new boots for Gregory from the dormitory Lost and Found.

“And some warm socks,” Professor Natter barked. “The boy’s have more holes than your last thesis. And while you’re at it,” he’d thundered, before the boy could slip out, “a decent coat, a winter sweater, and a hat that doesn’t slip around his head like a wet fish.” The student had returned with a mismatched pair of wool socks and two nearly identical boots that were only three and four sizes too large, respectively. The sweater’s arms had to be rolled several times before even Gregory’s knuckles showed. He swam inside the jacket.

But the hat fit him perfectly. He hadn’t adjusted it even an inch when he put it on for the first time, covering his dense cap of black curls.

The professor was, simply, far too nice to be the SNP they wanted.

But he knew something about monsters. So Cordelia swallowed. “Your lecture . . . ,” she began.

“Yes?” His eyebrows jumped all the way up his forehead.

She looked down at her lap. “We didn’t come to hear you speak,” she blurted finally. “But we do want to know about monsters. We want to know about the monsters among us, and how you know they still exist. . . .”

“Are you a monster hunter?” Gregory asked hopefully. “Is that where the scars come from? Did a werewolf bite you?”

“Gregory,” Elizabeth whispered fiercely. “Sorry,” she said to the professor, over the rim of her cup. “He was raised by a well-intentioned canine. He is house-trained, though.”

“You can tell us, honest,” Gregory said, ignoring her. “Even if you got chewed by something kind of stupid. Like a hufflebottom. Or a squelch! Wait. Squelches don’t have teeth, do they? Cordelia told me that. She’s seen every kind of monster there is, even werew—”

Cordelia elbowed him sharply into silence.

Professor Natter didn’t look any longer at Cordelia than he did at Gregory and Elizabeth. But she could tell that he looked harder.

Finally, he smiled. But it was a sad smile, resigned, like someone welcoming home a familiar pain. “I did lose my face to a monster,” he said. “But it wasn’t a werewolf, or a diggle, or a squinch.”

“Squelch,” Gregory corrected him.

“Nothing so romantic, I’m afraid,” the professor said. “I lost my cheek to a bullet. I’m not from here. I moved to Nova Scotia not long after the war. Thirty years ago, now.”

Gregory looked almost disappointed. “But you said there was a monster . . . ?”

“There was.” Professor Natter’s smile was gone. “The war was born from an evil that made certain people people, and others property. The war was fought by kids—kids barely old enough to pop their own pimples—who believed they were dying for their country, but died instead to preserve the right of rich people to stay rich and powerful people to stay powerful. They died for the most monstrous thing in the world—the right to be a monster, and call it being human instead. And die they did.”

When he spoke, Cordelia felt as if his words were making shapes—pictures she didn’t want to see but somehow understood. Ropes that drew her down into the past and tightened around her throat.

“That is what my lecture was about. That is what my book is about.” Now Professor Natter seemed to deflate, and Cordelia was struck by how thin he was, by how old his hands looked on his chair. “The Union won that war, but we won nothing but the right to give our evil different faces, different accents, different names. It’s only gotten worse since the depression hit . . .”

Finally, Cordelia understood. “You’re talking about people,” she said. “You’re talking about what they do to each other.” Her stomach felt like a hole. Once again, they were back where they’d started. “You don’t know anything about real monsters.”

“On the contrary,” he said matter-of-factly. “I am an expert in real monsters. What do you think monsters are? They are predators that prey on other lives unnecessarily. Not for survival. For fun. For the pleasure of it. That is what a monster is. Oh no,” he said, “I know more about monsters than anyone.”

“So,” Gregory said slowly, “you’ve never fought a werewolf?”

“I’ve never even seen one,” the professor said, and his eyes sparked with humor again. “The monsters from stories—the ones with teeth and tentacles and glowing eyes—aren’t really monsters. They’re myths. They gave us something to be afraid of, so we could believe the real danger was somewhere else. But the danger is never in the woods. It’s always inside the wilderness that lives right here.” He tapped his heart with a finger. “No. Not werewolves,” he said. “But I’ve seen men who can transform into beasts. I know plenty of people who feed on other people’s pain, on their fear. On blood, even.”

In the silence, Cordelia felt a terrible hopelessness. She found suddenly that she was on the verge of crying. Maybe Elizabeth was right. Maybe the SNP was the Society for National Protection, made of people who wanted to clean the cities of anything or anyone unfamiliar or strange. If so, it was too late. Too late to save the hufflebottom and the squelches, too late to save her father.

What was the point of saving the monsters only so they could be hunted and despised? What was the point of trying to protect their lives from a world so full of monsters, it demanded that monsters exist only to have someone else to blame?

Her mother had been right and wrong at the same time. Monsters belong in our family tree, she had written, in the introduction to her manuscript. But she should have said: We belonged in theirs.

“I’m sorry,” Professor Natter said. “You didn’t come to talk about old fables.”

“They’re not fables,” Cordelia blurted out. “And they’re not myths. Monsters—werewolves and pixies and goblins—they’re all real. They exist.” The words burst out as if someone had punched them out from her chest, and left her breathless and a little dizzy. Professor Natter was staring at her intently, his bushy eyebrows linked firmly together above his nose in a conference of concern. Still, she didn’t stop. “There are over one thousand species of monsters that we know of. There used to be ten thousand, before they were hunted or uprooted or fished out of the ocean on hooks. The really big dragons went extinct with the dinosaurs, but even a medium-size North American black-ridge is plenty big when it’s breathing fire in your face.” Once again, she blinked away tears. An image came to her of her mother, vanished into a vivid mass of jungle leaves that absorbed her with only the faintest hiss. A lost cause. A hopeless battle. A fool’s errand.

“I know—I know you probably think I’m crazy,” Cordelia said, a little more quietly, swallowing down a stubborn mass of grief. “I know you probably won’t believe me—”

“Believe you?” Professor Natter interjected, before Cordelia could finish. And he actually laughed. “Of course I believe you.”

Cordelia searched his face for a trick and couldn’t find one. “You—you do?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Just because something is fantastical doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Most true things are fantastical. The world’s existence is itself extremely improbable.

“And yet, here we are, with hot chocolate and regret for missing marshmallows and, in my case, a stack of undergraduate papers that entirely misunderstand the modern political relevance in the great French fairy story ‘La Belle et la Bête.’” He smiled, and this time the story reached all the way to his eyes and warmed them to the color of caramel. “And this morning, three children flew right to our doorstop—or rather, our bell tower—in a hot-air balloon. Magic, it turns out, is the most commonplace thing in the world. And do you want to hear the most magical thing of all?”

He leaned forward and laced his fingers together on his desk. Cordelia saw that he was missing his left thumb and wondered whether that, too, had been chewed away by a bullet.

“I saw terrible things during the war. I have seen terrible things since. But I saw wonderful things, too. Acts of bravery and sacrifice, selfless compassion, senseless generosity. I saw them on the battlefield, and I have seen them since.”

Cordelia was holding her breath. Even the dust motes turning in the sun seemed to have momentarily stilled their revolution.

“You see, child, when I said that monsters walk among us, I meant of course that they walk inside of us. They are born in the human heart, when it is starved of what it needs. A starved heart is a terrible thing. It learns to scream. It learns to bite. It grows fingers to point blame at something for its own hunger. Still, it starves.”

Cordelia felt the touch of understanding, like the ripple of a wave that hadn’t broken on the surface yet. She thought of all the monsters she and her father had tracked over the years—cancer-riddled or bleeding, weak from starvation or fever, agonized by invisible wounds. Once, it had taken them twelve hours to subdue a vastly emaciated dungaroo. Every time Cornelius tried to approach, the dungaroo used up its energy trying to attack. Finally, it was too weak to do anything but die, and Cornelius had performed an emergency surgery, right there in the open marshes, in the fading evening light, to try and save it. The operation had revealed intestines blackened with poisonous chemicals—for weeks, its food supply had been poisoned by runoff from a newly opened paint factory. They might have saved it even a few hours earlier, by applying a paste of charcoal and ground birch, or even removing the dead bits of intestine and patching them together with tissue from the dungaroo’s own tail, which would regenerate over time.

But the agonized dungaroo did not know how to tell the difference between what brought pain and what offered relief, and so it had died.

Once, a diggle had lashed out and missed cutting Cornelius’s throat by inches, when he was only trying to set a bone. A growrk had taken a chunk out of his ankle. Digbert the dragon had set his hair ablaze; thank God Digbert was nearly blind by then, as they were sure he’d been aiming lower.

And yet weeks later, Digbert whimpered when Cornelius left the room. The diggle ate carefully from Cornelius’s palm, mindful of every one of its razor-sharp scales. And the growrk, the one that had taken a chunk out of his ankle, had until its peaceful death from old age slept wrapped around Cornelius’s head like a turban, with its long, heavy, deadly tail draped protectively around his chest.

“Monsters feed off many things. Pain. Greed. Fear. But hearts, all hearts, hunger for only one. Feed hearts with love, and many of them—most of them, in fact—make a miraculous recovery.” Professor Natter was speaking directly to Cordelia now, and at last a single word drew to shore, out of the wave of all her memories and fears. It broke across her consciousness. It was, for a second, as large as the whole ocean.

“And the best news of all?” Professor Natter’s smile split his face into radiance. Cordelia couldn’t believe she had found him ugly at first. “Unlike in the case of the common zuppy, there is absolutely no blood required.”

“Wait a second.” Gregory straightened up in his chair. “How do you know what a zuppy eats?”

“How do you know what a zuppy is?” Elizabeth chimed in. “Cordelia didn’t say a word about them.”

Elizabeth and Gregory were right. She had named werewolves and pixies and goblins. But not zuppies.

Professor Natter’s smile was on the march: by now, it had conquered half his face.

“I told you I’d never seen a werewolf, and that’s true,” he said. “But I never said I hadn’t seen any living species of the kingdom Prodigia. The scars on my cheek were made by a bullet, true.” He held up his left hand, showing off four long fingers, and the stump where a thumb had once been. “But you haven’t yet asked what happened to my hand.”