The Spindlers
Authors: Lauren Oliver
DedicationTo Patrick, of courseâ
And to my sister
,
who has rescued me many times from the dark
,
and for whom I would gladly go Below
.
Contents
The Changeling, and the Letters Spelled in Cereal
Several Falsehoods and One Broomstick
The Queen’s Spies, and the Way Across the Chasm
HE
C
HANGELING, AND THE
L
ETTERS
S
PELLED IN
C
EREAL
O
ne night when Liza went to bed, Patrick was her chubby, stubby, candy-grubbing and pancake-loving younger brother, who irritated and amused her both, and the next morning, when she woke up, he was not.
She could not describe the difference. He looked the same, and was wearing the same pair of ratty space-alien pajamas, with the same fat toe sticking out of the hole in the left foot of his red socks, and he came down the stairs exactly the same way the real Patrick would have done:
bump
,
bump
,
bump
, sliding on his rump.
But he was not the same.
In fact, he was quite, quite different.
It was something in the way he looked at her: It was as though someone had reached behind his eyes and wrung away all the sparkle. He walked quietlyâtoo quietlyâto the table, sat nicely in his chair, and placed a napkin on his lap.
The real Patrick never used a napkin.
Nobody else noticed a thing. Mrs. Elston, Liza's mother, continued sorting through the stack of bills on the kitchen table, making occasional noises of unhappiness. Liza's father continued passing in and out of the room, his tie unknotted and wearing only one sock, muttering distractedly to himself.
The fake-Patrick picked up his spoon and gave Liza a look that chilled her to her very center.
Then the fake-Patrick began to eat his cereal, methodically, slowly, fishing all the alphabet letters out of his Alpha-Bits one by one and lining them up along the rim of his bowl.
Liza's heart sank. She knew, at that moment, what had happened, as well as she knew that the sky was up and the ground was down and if you turned around fast enough in a circle and then stood still, the world would keep turning the circle for you.
Patrick's soul had been taken by the spindlers. And they had left this thing, this not-younger-brother, in its place.
“Mom,” she said, and then, when her mother did not immediately respond, tried again a little louder. “Mom.”
“Mmm?” Mrs. Elston jumped. She squinted at Liza for a moment, the same way she had looked at the instruction sheet that came along with the Easy-Assemble Coffee Table in Mahogany, the one she had had to return to the store after she could not figure out how to screw the legs on.
“Patrick's being weird,” Liza said.
Mrs. Elston stared blankly at her daughter. Then she whirled around, suddenly, to her husband. “Did you ever pay the electric bill?”
Mr. Elston didn't seem to hear her. “Have you seen my glasses?” he asked, lifting the fruit bowl and peering underneath it.
“They're on your head.”
“Not
those
glasses. My reading glasses.”
Mrs. Elston sighed. “It says this is our final notice. I don't remember a first notice. Didn't we pay the electric bill? I could have sworn ⦔
“I can't go to work without my glasses!” Mr. Elston opened the refrigerator, stared at its contents, closed the refrigerator, and rushed out of the room.
Across the table, the fake-Patrick began rearranging the cereal letters on the outside of his bowl. He spelled out three words: I H-A-T-E Y-O-U. Then he folded his hands and stared at her with that strangely vacant look, as though the black part of his eyes had eaten up all the color.
Liza's insides shivered again. She slid off her chair and went over to her mother. She tugged at the sleeve of her mother's nightgown, which had a small coffee stain at its elbow. “Mommy.”
“Yes, princess?” she asked distractedly.
“Patrick's freaking me out.”
“Patrick,” Mrs. Elston said, without looking up from her notepad, on which she was now scribbling various figures. “Stop bothering your sister.”
Here's what the real Patrick would have done: He would have stuck out his tongue, or thrown his napkin at Liza in retaliation, or he would have said, “It's her
face
that's the bother.”
But this impostor did none of those things. The impostor just stared quietly at Liza and smiled. His teeth looked very white.
“Momâ” Liza insisted, and her mother sighed and threw down her pencil with so much force that it bounced.
“
Please
, Liza,” she said, with barely concealed impatience. “Can't you see that I'm busy? Why don't you go outside and play for a bit?”
Liza knew better than to argue with her mother when she was in a mood. So she went outside. It was a hot and hazy morningâfar too hot for late April. She was hoping to see one of the neighbors out doing somethingâwatering a plant, walking a dogâbut it was very still. Liza almost never saw the neighbors. It was not that kind of neighborhood. She didn't even know most of their names: only Mrs. Costenblatt, who was so old she looked exactly like a prune.