by Holly Black
“Shush,” Jared said.
The three of them crept over to where the sound came from, just as the noise itself changed. Instead of hearing the clatter of little claws scrabbling on wood, they could clearly hear the scrape of nails on metal.
“Look.” Simon bent down to touch a small sliding door set into the wall.
“It’s a dumbwaiter,” Mallory said. “Servants used it to send trays of breakfast and stuff upstairs. There must be another door like this in one of the bedrooms.”
“That thing sounds like it’s in the shaft,” Jared said.
Mallory leaned her whole body into the metal box. “It’s too small for me. One of you is going to have to go.”
Simon looked at her skeptically. “I don’t know. What if the ropes aren’t that good anymore?”
“It would just be a short fall,” Mallory said, and both the boys looked at her in astonishment.
“Oh, fine, I’ll go.” Jared was pleased to find something Mallory couldn’t do. She looked a little bit put out. Simon just looked worried.
The inside was dirty and it smelled like old wood. Jared folded his legs in and bent his head forward. He fit, but only barely.
“Is the squirrel-thing even still in the dumbwaiter shaft?” Simon’s voice sounded tinny and distant.
“I don’t know,” Jared said softly, listening to the echoes of his words. “I don’t hear anything.”
Mallory pulled the rope. With a little jolt and some shaking, the dumbwaiter began to move Jared up inside the wall. “Can you see anything?”
“No,” Jared called. He could hear the scratching sound, but it was distant. “It’s completely black.”
Mallory winched the dumbwaiter back down. “There’s got to be a light around here somewhere.” She opened a few drawers until she found the stub of a white candle and a mason jar. Turning a knob on the stove, she lit the wick off one of the gas burners, dripped hot wax into the jar, and pressed the candle against it to hold it in place. “Here, Jared. Hold this.”
“Mallory, I don’t even hear the thing anymore,” said Simon.
“Maybe it’s hiding,” said Mallory, and yanked on the rope.
Jared tried to tuck himself deeper into the dumbwaiter, but there was no room. He wanted to tell them that this was stupid and that he’d chickened out, but he said nothing. Instead, he let himself be raised into the darkness, holding the makeshift lantern.
The metal box went up a few feet inside the wall. The light from the candle was a small halo, reflecting things erratically. The squirrel-thing could have been right next to him, almost touching him, and he would not have noticed it.
“I don’t see anything,” he called down, but he wasn’t sure if anyone heard him.
The ascent was slow. Jared felt like he couldn’t breathe. His knees were pressing against his chest, and his feet were cramping from being bent so long. He wondered if the candle was sucking up all the available oxygen.
Then, with a jerk, the dumbwaiter stopped. Something scraped against the metal box.
“It won’t go any farther,” Mallory called up the chute. “Do you see anything?”
The dumbwaiter began to move.
Jared wasn’t sure where he was.
“No,” said Jared. “I think it’s stuck.”
There was more scraping now, as though something was trying to claw through the top of the dumbwaiter. Jared yelped and tried to pound from the inside, hoping to frighten it off.
Just as suddenly, the dumbwaiter slid up an extra few feet and came to a halt again, this time in a room dimly lit by moonlight from a single, small window.
Jared scrambled out of the box. “I made it! I’m upstairs.”
The room had a low ceiling, and the walls were covered in bookshelves. Looking around, he realized there was no door.
All of a sudden, Jared wasn’t sure where he was.
Jared looked around the room.
Chapter Three
IN WHICH There Are Many Riddles
Jared looked around the room. It was a smallish library, with one huge desk in the center. On it was an open book and a pair of old-fashioned, round glasses that caught the candlelight. Jared walked closer. The dim glow illuminated one title at a time as he scanned the shelves. They were all strange: A Historie of Scottish Dwarves, A Compendium of Brownie Visitations from Around the World, and Anatomy of Insects and Other Flying Creatures.
A collection of glass jars containing berries, dried plants, and one filled with dull river stones sat at the edge of the desk. Nearby, a watercolor sketch showed a little girl and a man playing on the lawn. Jared’s eyes fell on a note tossed on top of an open book, both coated in a thin layer of dust. The paper was yellowed with age, but handwritten on it was a strange little poem:
In a man’s torso you will find
My secret to all mankind
If false and true can be the same
You will soon know of my fame
Up and up and up again
Good luck dear friend
He picked it up and read it through carefully. It was as though a message had been left here just for him. But by whom? What did the poem mean?
He heard a shout from downstairs. “Mallory! Simon! What are you doing up?”
Jared groaned. It just figured that Mom would get back from the store now.
“There was a squirrel in the wall,” Jared could hear Mallory say.
Their mother cut her off. “Where’s Jared?”
Neither of his siblings said anything.
“You bring that dumbwaiter down. If your brother is in there . . . ”
Jared ran over in time to watch the box disappear down into the wall. His candle choked on wax and sputtered from his sudden movement, but it didn’t go out.
“See?” Simon said weakly.
The dumbwaiter must have showed up, empty.
“Well, where is he then?”
“I don’t know,” Mallory said. “In bed, asleep?”
Their mother sighed. “Well, go on, both of you, and join him. Now!”
Jared listened to their retreating steps. They’d have to wait a while before they snuck back down to get him. That is, if they didn’t just figure that the dumbwaiter had taken him all the way upstairs. They’d probably be surprised not to find him in bed. How could they know he was trapped in a room without a door?
There was a rustling behind him. Jared spun around. It came from the desk.
As he held up the makeshift lamp, Jared saw that something had been scrawled in the dust of the desk. Something that wasn’t there before.
Click clack, watch your back.
Jared jumped, causing his candle to tilt. Running wax snuffed the flame. He stood in the darkness, so scared he could barely move. Something was here, in the room, and it could write!
He backed toward the empty chute, biting the inside of his lip to keep from screaming. He could hear the rustling of bags downstairs as his mother unpacked groceries.
“What are you?”
“What’s there?” he whispered into the darkness. “What are you?”
Only silence answered him.
“I know you’re there,” Jared said.
But there was no reply and no more rustling.
Then he heard his mother on the stairs, a door, and nothing. Nothing but a silence so thick and heavy that it choked him. He felt that even breathing too loudly would give him away. Any moment the thing would be upon him.
There was a creak from inside the wall. Startled, Jared dropped the jar, then realized it was only the dumbwaiter. He felt his way through the darkness.
“Get in,” his sister whispered up the shaft.
Jared squeezed into the metal box. He was so filled with relief that he barely noticed the ride down to the kitchen.
As soon as he got out, he started speaking.
“There was a library! A secret library with weird books. And something was in there—it wrote in the dust.”
“Shhhh, Jared
,” Simon said. “Mom’s going to hear us.”
Jared held up the piece of paper with the poem on it. “Look at this. It has some kind of directions on it.”
“Did you actually see anything?” Mallory asked.
“I saw the message in the dust. It said ‘watch your back,’ ” Jared replied hotly.
Mallory shook her head. “That could have been written there ages ago.”
“It wasn’t,” Jared insisted. “I saw the desk and there was nothing written there before.”
“Calm down,” Mallory said.
“Mallory, I saw it!”
Mallory grabbed his shirt in her fist. “Be quiet!”
“Mallory! Let go of your brother!” Their mother was standing at the top of the narrow kitchen stairs wearing a less-than-pleased expression. “I thought we already went through this. If I see any of you out of your beds, I am going to lock you in your rooms.”
Mallory let go of Jared’s shirt with a long glare.
“What if we need to go to the bathroom?” Simon asked.
“Just go to bed,” their mother said.
When they got upstairs, Jared and Simon went off to their room. Jared pulled the covers over his head and scrunched his eyes shut.
“I believe you . . . about the note and all,” Simon whispered, but Jared didn’t reply. He was just glad to be in bed. He thought he could probably stay there for a whole week.
“Just chop it.”
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 the worst part was the strange pattern of bruises that decorated her arms. Their mother was seated on the mattress, her fingers 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!”
“Who 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 walls.
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 thinking 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 thought about the poem. “Up and up and up again” was the simplest 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 Mallory 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.
Up and up and up again
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?
Not 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
The strangest thing, however, was the subject matter. The book was full of information about faeries.
He just wanted to keep reading.
Chapter Five
IN WHICH Jared Reads a Book and Sets a Trap
Mallory and Simon were out on the lawn, fencing, when Jared found them. Mallory’s ponytail stuck out of the back of her fencing helmet, and Jared could see that it was shorter than it had once been. She was apparently trying to make up for her earlier weakness by ruthless fencing. Simon couldn’t seem to get a strike in at all. He was being backed against the side of the broken-down carriage house, his parries becoming increasingly desperate.
“I found something!” Jared called.
Simon turned his helmeted head. Mallory took that opportunity to strike, pushing the rubber tip of her fencing foil against his chest.
