Spell and Spindle

by Michelle Schusterman

  ALSO BY MICHELLE SCHUSTERMAN

  Olive and the Backstage Ghost

  I HEART BAND SERIES

  I Heart Band

  Friends, Fugues, and Fortune Cookies

  Sleepovers, Solos, and Sheet Music

  Crushes, Codas, and Corsages

  THE KAT SINCLAIR FILES

  Dead Air

  Graveyard Slot

  Final Girl

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Michelle Schusterman

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Kathrin Honesta

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  “Pennies From Heaven” Words by JOHNNY BURKE

  Music by ARTHUR JOHNSTON © 1936 (Renewed) CHAPPEL & CO., INC. All rights reserved. Used by permission of ALFRED PUBLISHING, LLC

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Schusterman, Michelle, author.

  Title: Spell and spindle / by Michelle Schusterman ; illustrations by Kathrin Honesta.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2018] | Summary: Eleven-year-old Chance accidentally helps Penny, a lonely marionette who cannot remember who she is or where she came from, discover the truth of her past.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016039741 | ISBN 978-0-399-55070-6 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-399-55071-3 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-0-399-55072-0 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Marionettes—Fiction. Puppets—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S39834 Sp 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780399550720

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.2

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  For the pessimists, who were right all along

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michelle Schusterman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Cabinetmaker’s Apprentice

  Chapter 1: A Storm Is Brewing

  Chapter 2: A Practical Puppet

  Chapter 3: The Soul-Stealing Type

  Chapter 4: Fish Face

  Chapter 5: A Boy Puppet

  Chapter 6: Nothing

  Chapter 7: A Mysterious Package from an Enemy

  Chapter 8: A Spindle from a Spinning Wheel

  Chapter 9: A Hero

  Chapter 10: Mopping

  Chapter 11: The Puppeteer

  Chapter 12: Ready for an Adventure

  Chapter 13: Endless Patience

  Chapter 14: A Wonderful Big Sister

  Chapter 15: A Much Better Match

  Chapter 16: A Little Risk

  Chapter 17: Spinning

  Chapter 18: Lost Soul

  Chapter 19: Not Déjà Vu

  Chapter 20: The Soul Inside the Princess

  Chapter 21: A Familiar Stranger

  Chapter 22: The Brave Knight

  Chapter 23: Missing

  Chapter 24: Something from Nothing

  Chapter 25: The Storm

  Chapter 26: The First Step

  Chapter 27: Her Puppet Shell

  Chapter 28: Hope

  Chapter 29: An Amazing Sense to Possess

  Chapter 30: Obviously a Trap

  Chapter 31: The Cabinetmaker’s Legendary Chambers

  Chapter 32: The Real Story

  Chapter 33: Unraveling

  Chapter 34: Hollow Wooden Girl

  Chapter 35: Nicolette

  Chapter 36: Thump-Thump

  Chapter 37: Somewhere in That Fog

  Chapter 38: Enough Happy Endings

  Acknowledgments

  There was once a cabinetmaker’s apprentice who built a marionette, and this marionette was not a soul-thieving demon.

  Not at first.

  The apprentice was an exceptionally talented woodworker, perhaps even more so than the cabinetmaker himself. But he was a lonely young boy, and as it does in so many stories, loneliness led to trouble.

  He knew the cabinetmaker’s tools were enchanted with some strange magic. That was, after all, how the old man built such extraordinary cabinets. But the apprentice believed the tools might be used to build something even more extraordinary. Something right out of a fairy tale.

  A life-size puppet so lifelike it was almost real.

  He stole his master’s magical tools and set to work, carving and sculpting the wood, painting the face, painstakingly sewing hair strand by strand. When he finished, he stepped back to admire his handiwork. His marionette was a girl, and a very pretty one at that.

  The apprentice stared into her glass eyes, amazed. She looked so alive.

  The marionette stared back at the boy, equally amazed. He was so alive.

  Something sparked inside her hollow wooden body. Envy, dark and wicked.

  I’m so sad, she told the apprentice, her voice hypnotically sweet. I wish I had a soul like yours, a soul to make me truly alive instead of just lifelike. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

  The apprentice agreed that, yes, it would be more than wonderful, for at last he would have a real friend. But no magical tool, no trick of the trade, nothing existed to help him create an actual soul. That did not stop him from trying, and the deeper he fell under the spell of this demon he had created, the more desperate his efforts became.

  You cannot create a soul for me, the marionette said at last. But you can give me one. Will you?

  The poor boy was so entranced by this soulless demon, he did not hesitate to reply.

  “Yes,” he said, and he took up the cabinetmaker’s magical tools once more.

  He would take out his own soul and give it to his pretty marionette. He just had to figure out how.

  Just one block from the west lawn of the city’s largest park stood an unusual museum. In the many decades it had called this spot home, it had changed names frequently. Some of the city’s residents remembered it as the Miracle Rooms. A few elderly citizens swore it had been called the Memory Theater, while others argued it was actually the Hall of Wonders.

  Its original owner was a famed cabinetmaker, a man rumored to have had the ability to draw magic from wood. He was said to have built one particularly magical cabinet to house all the others: chambers of infinite cabinets filled with his legendary collection of curiosities. The cabinet containing the chambers had been lost in the great fire that devoured much of the city half a century ago, but old-timers could often be heard spinning yarns about its vastness:

  “It was a beautiful oak cabinet, and inside was an endless maze of cabinets, all filled with the most bizarre things you’d ever laid eyes on.”

  “Open one and you might find a display of Minotaur horns or scraps of wood from the Trojan horse. Open anothe
r and you’d be looking at a genuine fairy skeleton!”

  “I was too young to remember, but my granddaddy said he was lost in there for weeks—ate his own socks before he found his way out!”

  Nowadays the little museum housed all that remained of the cabinetmaker’s collection. While children still listened with starry eyes to the tales of its former grandeur, adults merely shook their heads with a mixture of amusement and distaste. Because in this modern age, such dusty old artifacts were called “oddities” at best, and “horrors” at worst. As a compromise, the institution now bore the somewhat sardonic title of the Museum of the Peculiar Arts. But it wouldn’t for much longer, as it had recently been sold, and the new owner had other plans for the building.

  An elderly man named Fortunato had inherited the museum from the cabinetmaker. Fortunato had been orphaned at a young age, and the old cabinetmaker had taken him in. Selling the museum had broken Fortunato’s heart, as it was all he had left of the man he’d called Papa.

  Back when the city had been weak and struggling, poor citizens had been happy to drop a few coins for any form of entertainment. But one great war later, the city was different—a prosperous, booming beast, its ego constantly fed and fueled by its inhabitants, making it more glamorous (and more ghastly) than ever. Few were interested in spending their leisure time inspecting dusty oddities and cursed relics.

  Fortunato lived above the museum, on the second floor. The Bonvillain family lived on the floor above him. Mr. Bonvillain was the museum’s accountant, and when Fortunato informed him the place was closing, he waited until the poor old man was out of sight before dancing a little jig. Mr. Bonvillain felt certain this was a sign that there was something better out there for him. And sure enough, within a week he landed a job at a brand-new bank in the shiny financial district and immediately bought a brand-new house in the suburbs to match. It was, he and his wife told their children, an opportunity to “move up in the world.”

  Constance, his perpetually cheerful thirteen-year-old daughter, agreed. Like her parents, she believed all change could be good so long as you stayed positive about it. And besides, she had been raised to be an obedient young lady who always expressed agreement with her mouth, even if her brain and heart felt otherwise.

  Eleven-year-old Chance was another story. He found his family’s relentless optimism to be a real downer. The suburbs sounded boring beyond belief, the opposite setting for the kind of action and adventure his heroes from comic books and television and radio experienced. He dreaded the thought of giving up his after-school job as Fortunato’s apprentice for something dull, like mowing lawns. Who in their right mind could possibly prefer pulling weeds in some stupid flower garden to handling fantastically grotesque and potentially dangerous objects in the quiet dark of a museum?

  But Chance thought his father was right about one thing: the closing of the Museum of the Peculiar Arts was an opportunity.

  An opportunity for Chance to finally have a real adventure of his own.

  A natural-born pessimist, Chance was greatly misunderstood by his family, who had spent his entire life trying to cheer him up. They mistook his pessimism for sadness or anger. But really Chance was just preparing for the worst. Because at some point, he figured, the worst was bound to come for you.

  Exactly one week before the big move, Chance turned on the family’s old radio and waited for his favorite program. The Bonvillains had a television, too, but Chance preferred imagining scenes playing out in his mind as he listened. Constance sat cross-legged on the carpet next to him, a brochure opened in her lap. Welcome to Daystar Meadows, it read over a photo of a smiling family of four standing in front of a blue house with white trim. Opening Summer 1952!

  “We’ll have a backyard,” Constance said, turning the page. “I could plant a garden. Ooh, look at those white picket fences—perfect for rosebushes!”

  Chance squinted at a photo of a street. “The houses all look the same.”

  “Not exactly,” Constance pointed out. “The paint jobs are different. Dad says ours is yellow.”

  “So when it gets egged, it’ll blend in?”

  His sister giggled. Chance’s parents found his constant negativity worrisome, but Constance seemed to love him all the more for it. She was a good sister, he thought, though exhaustingly upbeat.

  Constance flipped back to the picture of an empty grass lawn and started to list all the possibilities: a garden, a swing set, a pool. But Chance didn’t see what was so great about a backyard when you could have an entire city as your playground.

  “A storm is brewing,” a crackly voice came through the radio speakers, and Chance hastily turned up the volume. “Are YOU prepared for the worst?”

  Constance fell silent at once and closed the pamphlet. Storm at Dawn was a popular program, and Chance’s favorite. Most listeners—like Constance—found the Storm’s constant doomsday warnings to be more amusing than ominous. Chance, on the other hand, thought the character was wiser and braver than anyone he’d ever met in real life. He felt a deep kinship with the Storm and took every episode very seriously.

  “Last time on Storm at Dawn, our fearless and mysterious hero, known only as the Storm, a man possessing the terrible gift of premonition, found himself once again in the face of grave danger as he fell under the hypnotic powers of his archenemy, Madam M, who was desperate to steal the Storm’s powers for herself….”

  Chance leaned forward, listening intently. He had learned a lot from the Storm about what to do in dangerous situations, and he needed all the help he could get. Because in one week the Bonvillains were moving to Daystar Meadows. But Chance was not going with them.

  He had bigger plans.

  As a marionette, Penny had a bird’s-eye view of the interior of the Museum of the Peculiar Arts. She had sat on the top shelf of her curio cabinet for as long as she could remember, back to back with her own reflection, overlooking the maze of glass tables and shelves. She had long memorized the position of each and every oddity.

  The surface of the high ceiling was covered with mounted fossils: glimmering fish and delicate birds, pearly shells and bright corals, even an enormous crocodile, tail curved and mouth agape to show off rows of razor-sharp teeth. All the curio cabinets lining the walls were mirrored, as were the glass tables and shelves taking up much of the floor space, which gave the impression of an infinitely larger collection. There was a healthy mix of phony items with the real ones, though Penny suspected that Fortunato believed each to be genuine: the stuffed phoenix with its blood-red feathers, the locked case of unicorn horns and narwhal tusks, the preserved skeleton of what appeared to be a tiny fairy, its wing bones as fine as hair. The black pearl necklace said to darken the soul of its wearer often attracted the most attention from visitors, while the ancient diary bound in its former owner’s skin, with a lock made of jawbone and teeth, caused most to recoil in disgust.

  Penny’s favorite curiosity was the functional mechanical heart that whistled and ticked and sped up when touched. She would stare at it for hours on end, imagining what it would feel like inside her chest.

  Penny had only ever moved once, at least that she could clearly recall. Years ago a young museum visitor had stood on tiptoes to squint up at her.

  “ ‘Penny,’ ” she’d read, and that had been the moment when Penny realized there was a label bearing her name on the shelf. Then the girl had reached for Penny, accidentally knocking her off.

  The ensuing free fall had been a thrilling few seconds. At least, Penny was sure she would have found it thrilling if she were capable of experiencing emotions. She had hit the floor in a clatter of wooden limbs, and Fortunato had cried:

  “Nicolette!”

  He’d scooped Penny up, examining her closely for signs of new damage. The flustered little girl, after apologizing, had hesitantly pointed out that her label said PENNY, not NICOLETTE.<
br />
  Fortunato’s expression had gone odd. “Her name is Penny,” he had told the girl, placing Penny back on her shelf. “I misspoke. Here, have you seen the cursed necklace yet?”

  He’d led the girl off, neither of them looking back at Penny.

  She had held the name Nicolette in her mind ever since. Why had Fortunato called her that? Could there have been another life-size, lifelike marionette? What had happened to her? Something dreadful, surely.

  Perhaps Penny had once known who Nicolette was. Perhaps Penny had known a lot of things once. Fog clouded her memories from before the museum, and she only caught them in glimpses here and there: a stage, a deep red curtain, long-fingered hands gripping her strings and making her dance. Penny loved to think about dancing.

  But she did not like to think about the long-fingered hands that had held her strings.

  Now that the Museum of the Peculiar Arts was closing, Penny’s time in her cabinet would soon become another memory swallowed in fog. She was certain that Fortunato was going to pack her up and put her in storage along with the rest of his collection. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of eternity in a dark box, but she was a practical puppet and had long anticipated this misfortune. It wasn’t as if anyone would put her in a puppet show, not now. She was too damaged. Her right hand was missing a pinkie, and her left, half a forefinger and a whole thumb. Also, her face was scratched, a small but deep gouge just above her chin.