Unnatural Creatures

Mr. Jabricot let me in through a plain door on the back side of the museum. It opened onto a bland corridor and I followed Mr. Jabricot into it, past doors that were mostly closed. He was wearing his green hat again and a brown tweed jacket with felt patches over the elbows. He looked like a teacher or a librarian and, for some reason, the similarity made me want to laugh.

“So,” he said, “Jenny Haniver. What do you think about her story now?”

“It’s the same thing,” I said. “She gets sewn up. She turns into a monster. She leaves.”

“I think you’re lacking some inspiration.” Mr. Jabricot made two scolding clicks at the back of his throat. “Or, you’re lying. The moral of the story is: you can’t see anything unless you look at it inside another skin. Your friend can’t figure that one out, but I assume you’re smarter than he is.” He patted my shoulder.

I decided that I had been lying, but hadn’t realized it until he made me consider the possibility. I was about to apologize, but Mr. Jabricot opened the door at the end of the hall. The room inside was cold and smelled of plaster, chemicals, and the sharp, uncomfortable scent of strong disinfectant. There were shelves full of tools and bottles and boxes piled with soft scraps that looked like fur. Matthew was sitting on the edge of a long table, poking through a tray of mismatched glass eyes.

“This is Mr. Jabricot’s office. My mom never comes here. She says it’s creepy.” Matthew held a flat gold eye with a slotted pupil up to his face. “I think it’s the most gorgeous room in the world. Every time I come here, I feel like the excitement is going to punch me in the face.”

I sat on the table next to him. Mr. Jabricot moved around the room, returning boxes to shelves and sweeping a dry paintbrush across the bared surfaces. Fur and dust drifted to the floor.

“You really work here?” I asked.

“Of course. I take care of the collection. Patch up moth damage, reset loose eyes, paint on the stripes and dapples when they start to fade. Everything else, I squeeze in around the edges.”

“Like the Jenny Haniver?” I asked. “And the raccoon?” I wondered if the raccoon had been put away in a storage room, or thrown away, or if it were somewhere outside, prowling the halls on nimble, dark-nailed feet.

“Yes,” Mr. Jabricot said. “And this new thing I’m working on. The one I was hoping to show you.” He moved toward a cabinet at the side of the room, but Matthew was off the table and ahead of him, pulling the doors open and gathering in his arms a mound of sable, a sliding, ruddy pile of fur that fell in sheets to the floor and ended in something that dragged and clattered. He held it up to me and then spun around, sliding his arms in, ducking his head under, and coming up again, dressed in a fur coat.

“It’s a manticore,” he said. He smiled so hard that his face went shiny where it stretched over his cheeks and his chin.

He just looked like Matthew in a fur coat. A fur coat with one set of paws dangling from the cuffs and another flopped on the floor. It had a sad, crooked tail with a spike tied to the end of it and a fluffy collar that rose all the way to his ears.

“You look silly,” I said. Matthew rolled his eyes.

“A manticore,” Mr. Jabricot said, “has the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a dragon.” He held up a needle, curved at one end and straight at the other, and threaded it with a strand of something long and dark. Matthew held up his own needle and they began stitching him up, one from the top and one from the bottom.

“It has a terrible voice, like a dozen trumpets,” Matthew said. “It has a mouth full of teeth, three rows of them, like a shark.” As they stitched, the coat shrank. It clung to his back, wrapped around his legs, and pulled his shoulders over so he was bent, then kneeling, then standing on four paws. The claws scraped the floor.

They stitched and stitched. I told them to stop.

Stop, I said. It’s stupid, whatever you’re doing. I don’t believe it, I said. Why is that tail lashing? I can’t believe how stupid I was to come. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them, I won’t be here, you won’t be here, none of this will have happened.

They didn’t hear me.

A manticore’s voice sounds exactly like a dozen trumpets, if a dozen trumpets were playing twelve different jazz scores and all the musicians were deaf and stranded at different points in time.

I opened my eyes.

The manticore was standing on Mr. Jabricot. Its claws pierced the brown tweed of Mr. Jabricot’s coat and its tail swung in an arc that shrank the world down to nothing but the poisonous spike tracing the edge of it. The manticore knocked Mr. Jabricot’s hat from his head, and I could see that the top of Mr. Jabricot’s head was balding, a circle of tender, shiny flesh ringed by short hair as plain as the coat of a mouse.

“Oh no,” Mr. Jabricot said. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

The manticore’s mouth was full of teeth, three yellowing rows of them, and it ground them together as it studied all the soft and delicate parts of the man lying beneath its claws. The twelve trumpets screamed and Mr. Jabricot covered his ears.

The teeth looked terrible shoved into Matthew’s face. They stretched his mouth so wide that his lips couldn’t close over them. They crowded his nose and pressed his chin back to accommodate their three rows, turning Matthew’s face into a different shape. It wouldn’t have been able to laugh, or smile, or twist its lips up at one corner over something it found more interesting than anything else in the room. It didn’t look like Matthew at all.

“Spit those out,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the manticore’s fur. I pulled it toward me, or maybe it pulled me toward it. I couldn’t be sure because Mr. Jabricot struggled up from the floor and ran from the room. He was sobbing; I could hear it underneath the trumpets screaming and doors slamming and the voices of people coming down through the halls. I worked my fingers into a seam, already wearing out and pulling apart. I ripped it and the manticore bit my arm.

“Stop that,” I said. The manticore ignored me, so I ignored the teeth sinking into my arm, the smell of blood, and the aching, blinding pain, and found another seam and ripped that one too. The manticore was unraveling now. Its fur peeled off in long strips. Its teeth fell out, one by one. It let go of my arm and ran for the door, howling in a brassy voice that sounded less and less like a roar.

My arm was bleeding, so I sewed it up. There were needles in a cupboard and I used a piece of hair from my own head. It hurt more than I thought it would, but less than having a manticore’s teeth stuck in your arm. It healed in a week and when my mom asked what happened, I said I had been scratched by a cat.