Stealing Magic
Authors: Marianne Malone
The Sixty-Eight Rooms
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 © 2011 by Marianne Malone
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2011 by Greg Call
Photography copyright © by The Art Institute of Chicago. Mrs. James Ward Thorne, American, 1882–1966, E-27: French Library of the Modern Period, 1930s, c. 1937, Miniature room, mixed media, Interior: 16 1/8 × 24 3/8 × 19 1/2 in.
(40.3125 × 60.9375 × 48.75 cm), Scale: 1 inch = 1 foot,
Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne, 1941.1212, The Art Institute of Chicago.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malone, Marianne.
Stealing magic : a sixty-eight rooms adventure / Marianne Malone. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The sixty-eight rooms.
Summary: Chicago sixth-graders Jack and Ruthie return to the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago and once again go back in time while trying to stop an art thief from endangering the miniature rooms.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89872-3
1. Art Institute of Chicago—Juvenile fiction. [1. Art Institute of Chicago—Fiction.
2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Miniature rooms—Fiction. 4. Size—Fiction.
5. Magic—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M29646St 2012 [Fic]—dc22 2011000074
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I
T WAS SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN
when Ruthie Stewart opened her eyes. The room around her appeared strangely dark without the usual stripes of streetlight filtering through the blinds. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, noticing that she was no longer sitting on her nice, soft bed, but rather on the cold, hard floor. She thought she had fallen out of bed, something she hadn’t done since she was four years old. Her eyes began to adjust, and she could make out nothing familiar; she wasn’t even in her bedroom. With an unnatural light coming from above, the walls around her came into focus as shiny and black.
What’s going on?
She wanted to get out of this room—although it didn’t feel like a room, more like a box—but, standing up and turning a full 360 degrees, she couldn’t see any way out. Then a door appeared near the corner, and she wondered how she had missed seeing it. She ran
through it and found herself in an almost identical room, completely empty, with shiny black walls and that peculiar glow from above. This room had slightly different dimensions, and the door she had just passed through seemed to disappear.
Where am I?
she kept repeating to herself.
There must be a way out
.
With increasing panic, she continued to look for doors, which appeared only after she had gone over every wall a few times. Finally she entered a room with white papers scattered all over the floor, glowing as they reflected the odd overhead light. She picked up a piece of paper and saw handwriting—it looked like Jack’s—but she could read only one sentence:
Get me out
. The rest was certainly written in English, but she couldn’t make out any of the other words. At first she could see the letters clearly, but then they became foggy and unfocused. She picked up another piece of paper.
Ah—this one I can read!
But no sooner had she read
Get me out
than the following letters became unreadable. She threw the paper to the floor and tried again and then again. She was becoming more frustrated by the second and was ready to stomp out, but, unlike in all the other rooms, no door appeared through which to leave. All she could think was,
Get
me
out!
Suddenly the light from above seemed to dim, and she had the horrible sense that soon she would be enveloped in complete, claustrophobic darkness. Anxiety spread from deep in her stomach all the way out to her fingertips. Inky blackness surrounded her.
With a jolt, Ruthie sat upright in her bed. She was hot all over and breathing rapidly, so she tried to take a deep, cleansing breath. With her knees pulled up to her chest, she shuddered a little.
She glanced across the pile of stuff on her sister’s desk to see that the clock read 5:15 a.m.—too early to get up. Claire, lightly snoring, looked peaceful as she slept. Moments like this made Ruthie glad she had to share a room. The streetlight coming through the blinds sketched lines on the far wall, crossing over the posters and bulletin board. All this calmed Ruthie, and she lay back down, wondering why she had had such a scary dream. Everything had been so wonderful and exciting the day before.
As she tried to fall back asleep, she pictured last night’s party in her head. The gallery opening of Mr. Bell’s exhibition had been such fun. Ruthie leaned over and felt under her bed for the box in which she stashed important stuff. She lifted the lid and took out the newspaper clipping from a couple of months ago that had first reported the amazing find. She reread her favorite lines:
Ruthie Stewart and Jack Tucker (son of painter Lydia Tucker), students in the sixth grade at Oakton School, made an important discovery in the world of art photography. Collectors in the city may well remember the work of Edmund Bell, famous for his portraits of artists and others in Chicago’s African American community, and
how his work seemed to vanish twenty-three years ago, ending his promising career. While the sixth graders were helping a friend, local book dealer Minerva McVittie, sort through unopened boxes from long-past estate sales and auctions, they came across a photo album. Stewart and Tucker had recently met Edmund Bell at the Art Institute, where he works as a guard, and learned of the lost photos. When they saw the album in a box buried deep in McVittie’s storeroom, they recognized its importance. “This is a one-in-a-million event,” a local art dealer commented. “We can all thank Miss Stewart and Mr. Tucker for not missing the significance of what they’d come across.”
Of course, what the article didn’t say, and what nobody knew but Ruthie, Jack, and Mrs. McVittie, was that the album had not been found in her storeroom. They couldn’t tell reporters the whole truth—mostly because nobody would believe them. How could they explain about the magic they had stumbled upon? First, there was the key that Jack had found, created by Duchess Christina of Milan in the sixteenth century. Second, this key enabled Ruthie to shrink and enter the Thorne Rooms, the sixty-eight miniature rooms in the Art Institute perfectly crafted by Narcissa Thorne more than half a century ago. Third, the magic—which they later learned could work on Jack
too as long as he was holding Ruthie’s hand—let them go back and forth in time. And last, in a miniature sixteenth-century English room, they had found Mr. Bell’s album, shrunk and hidden inside a very old cabinet!
Finding the key and Mr. Bell’s lost photographs had been the biggest adventure of Ruthie’s life; it wasn’t just exciting, it was important. Ruthie and Jack believed that the secret of the key must be protected, so it was a big responsibility to guard this powerful magic. And the whole experience made Ruthie feel that something extraordinary had finally happened to her.
She put the article back and placed the box under her bed again. She rested her head on her pillow, imagining herself back in bed in the room where she had found the album. Closing her eyes, she saw the green silk canopy high overhead, the vines and birds in the patterned fabric, her fingers stroking the smooth sheets. Her breathing slowed, and before she knew it, her mother was waking her for breakfast.