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 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“
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 squar-ish 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.
The Spiderwick Chronicles: The field Guide-Tony DiTerlizzi & Holly Black
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