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<The Spiderwick Chronicles> Tony Diterlizzi & Holly BlackTHE FIELD GUIDE
Book One Of Five
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Chapter Four
 IN WHICH There Are Answers. Although Not Necessarily to the Right Questions
Jared woke up to the sound of Mallory's screaming. He jumped out of bed and rushed down the hall, past Simon, and into his sister's room. Long pieces of her hair had been knotted to the brass headboard. Her face was red, but bruises that decorated her arms. Their mother was seated on the mattress, her figers tugging at the knots.
"What happened?" Jared asked.
"Just chop it," Mallory sobbed. "Cut it off. I want to get out of this bed! I want out of this house! I hate this place!"
"Why did this?" Their mother looked at jared angrily.
"I don't know!" Jared glanced at Simon standing in the doorway, looking puzzled. It must have been the thing in the wall.
Their mother's eyes got huge. It was scary. "jared Grace, I saw you arguing with your sister last night!"
"Mom, I didn't do it. Honest." He was shocked that she thought he would do something like this. He and Mallory were always fighting, but it didn't mean anything.
"Get the scissors, Mom!" Mallory yelled.
"Both of you. Out. Jared, I will talk to you later." Mrs. Grace turned back to her daughter.
Jared left the room, his heart pounding. When he thought about Mallory's knotted hair, he couldn't contain a shiver.
"You think that thing did it, don't you?" Simon asked as they entered the bedroom.
Jared looked at his brother in dismay. "Don't you?"
Simon nodded.
"I keep thinging about that poem I found," Jared said. "It's the only clue we have."
"How is a stupid poem going to help?"
"I don't know." Jared sighed. "You're the smart one. You should be figuring this out."
"How come nothing happened to us? Or to Mom?"
Jared hadn't even thought about that. "I don't know," he said again.
Simon gave him a long look.
"Well? What do you think?" Jared asked.
Simon started out the door. "I don't know what I think. I'm going to go try and catch some crickets."
Jared watched him go and wondered what he could do. Could he really solve anything by himself?
Getting dressed, he though about the poem. "Up and up and up again" was the simpleat line, but what did it mean exactly? Up in the house? Up on the roof? Up in a tree? Maybe the poem was just something that an old, dead relative was keeping around--something that wasn't going to help at all.
But since Simon was feeding his animals and Mallroy was being freed from her bed, he had nothing better to do than wonder how far"up and up and up again" he needed to go.
So, okay. Maybe it wasn't the easiest clue after all. But Jared figured it couldn't hurt to go up, past the second floor, to the attic.
The stairs were worn clean of their paint, and several times the boards he stepped on creaked so dramatically that Jared was afraid they were going to snap from his weight.
The attic level was a vast room with a slanted ceiling and a gaping hole in the floor on one end. Through it, he could see down into one of the unusable bedrooms.
Old garment bags hung from a clothesline of thin wire stretching across the width of the attic. Birdhouses hung in profusion from the rafters, and a dressmaker's dummy stood alone in a corner, a hat over its knobbed head. And in the center of the room, there was a spiral staircase.
Up and up and up again. Jared took the stairs two at a time.
The room he entered was bright and small. There were windows on all sides, and when he looked out, he could see the chipped and worn slate of the roof below him. He could see his mother's station wagon out in the gravel driveway. He could even see the carriage house and the long lawn that ran down into woods. This must be the part of the house that had the weird iron fencing on top of it. What a great place! Even Mallory would be impressed when he brought her up here. Maybe it would make her less upset about her hair.
There wasn't much in the room. An old trunk, a small stool, a Victrola, and rolls of faded fabric.
Jared sat down, pulled the crumpled poem from his pocket, and read it through again. "In a man's torso, you will find my secret to all mankind." Those lines bothered him. He didn't want to find an old, dead body, even if there was something really cool inside it.
The bright yellow sunlight splashing across the floor reassured him. In movies, bad things seldom happened in broad daylight, but he still hesitated to open the trunk.
Maybe he should go outside and get Simon to come up with him. But what if the chest was empty? Or what if the poem had nothing to do with Mallory's bruises and knotted hair?
No knowing what else to do, he knelt down and brushed cobwebs and grime from the top of the trunk. Heavy strips of rusted metal striped the rotting leather. At least he could take a look. Maybe the clue would be more obvious if he knew what was inside.
Taking a breath, Jared pushed up the lid. It was full of very old, moth-eaten clothes Underneath, there was a pocket watch on a long chain, a tattered cap, and a leather satchel full of old, odd-looking pencils and cracked bits of charcoal.
Nothing in the trunk looked like it was a secret, for mankind or anybody else.
Nothing looked like a dead body,either.
"In a man's torso, you will find my secret to all mankind."
He looked down at the contents of the chest again, and it hit him.
He was looking at a chest. A man's torso would be his chest.
Jared groaned in frustration. How could he be right and still have nothing to show for it? There was nothing good in the chest, and the other lines of the poem made no sense at all. "If false and true can be the same, you will soon know of my fame." How could that be answered with something real? It sounded like a word game.
What could be false, though? Something about this situation? Something about the stuff in the chest? The chest itself? He thought about chests, and chests made him think about pirates on a beach, burying treasure deep in the cool sand.
Buried underneath! Not a false chest, but a chest with a false bottom! Looking carefully, he could see that the inside seemed higher than it should be. Had he really solved the riddle?
Jared got down on his knees and began to push all over the floor of the trunk, threading his fingers through the dust to look for seams that might allow him to pull an unseen compartment open. When he found nothing, he began to touch the outside, pawing over the box. Finally, when he pressed three fingers against the edge of the left side, a compartment popped open.
Excited beyond reason, Jared pressed his hand inside. The only contents were a squarish bundle. wrapped in a dirty cloth. He took it out, untied it, and started to unfold the fabric from an old, crumbling book that smelled like burnt paper. Embossed on the brown leather, the title read:Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You.
The cover was ragged at the edges, and as he opened it, he noticed that it was full of watercolor sketches. The writing had been done in ink, grown smudged and spotted with age and water damage. He flipped the pages quickly, glancing at notes tucked into the volume. These were written in a spidery hand very like the writing of the riddle.
The strangest thing, however, was the subject matter. The book was full of information about faeries. 引用通告引用此项的网络日志
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