The Field Guide Read online

  “That’s three to zip,” Mallory said. “I creamed you.”

  “You cheated,” he complained.

  “You allowed yourself to become distracted,” Mallory countered.

  Simon pulled the helmet off his head, flung it down, and looked at Jared. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry,” Jared said automatically.

  “You’re the one that always fences with her. I just came out here to catch tadpoles.” Simon scowled.

  “Well, I was busy. Just because I don’t have a bunch of dumb animals to take care of doesn’t mean I can’t be busy,” Jared shot back.

  “Just shut up, both of you.” Mallory took off her own helmet. Her face was flushed. “What did you find?”

  Jared tried to recapture some of his earlier excitement. “A book in the attic. It’s about faeries, real faeries. Look, they’re ugly.”

  Mallory took the book out of his hands and looked it over. “This is baby stuff. A storybook.”

  “It’s not,” Jared said defensively. “It’s a field guide. You know, like for birds. So you know how to spot the different kinds.”

  “You think a faerie tied my hair to my bed?” Mallory asked. “Mom thinks you did. She thinks you’ve been acting weird ever since Dad left. Like getting into all those fights at school.”

  Simon didn’t say anything.

  “But you don’t think that.” Jared hoped she would agree. “And you always get into fights.”

  Mallory took a deep breath. “I don’t think you’re stupid enough to have done it,” she said, holding up a fist to show what she was going to do to whatever had. “But I don’t think it was faeries, either.”

  Over dinner, their mother was oddly quiet as she slid chicken and mashed potatoes onto their plates. Mallory wasn’t talking that much either, but Simon was going on and on about the tadpoles he had found and how they were going to be frogs in no time because they already had little arms.

  Jared had seen them. They had a long way to go. What Simon called arms looked a lot more like fish zits.

  “Mom?” Jared said finally. “Do we have a relative named Arthur?”

  Their mother looked up suspiciously from her dinner. “No. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering,” Jared mumbled. “What about Spiderwick?”

  “That’s your great-aunt Lucinda’s surname,” his mother said. “It was my mother’s maiden name. Maybe Arthur was one of her relatives. Now, tell me why you want to know all this?”

  “I just found some of his stuff in the attic—that’s all,” Jared said.

  “In the attic!” His mother almost spilled her iced tea. “Jared Grace, as you know, half of the entire second floor is so rotted that if you step wrong, you’ll find yourself in the downstairs parlor.”

  “I stayed on the safe side,” Jared protested.

  “We don’t know if there is a safe side in the attic. I don’t want anyone playing up there, especially you,” she said, looking right at Jared.

  He bit his lip. Especially you. Jared didn’t say a thing for the rest of dinner.

  “Are you going to read that all night?” Simon asked. He was sitting on his side of the room. Jeffrey and Lemondrop were running around on the comforter, and his new tadpoles were set up in one of the fish tanks.

  “So what if I do?” Jared asked. With each crumbling page, Jared was learning strange facts. Could there really be brownies in his house? Pixies in his yard? Nixies in the stream out back? The book made them so real. He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now, not even Simon. He just wanted to keep reading.

  “I don’t know,” Simon said. “I thought maybe you’d be bored by now. You don’t usually like to read.”

  Jared looked up and blinked. It was true. Simon was the reader. Jared mostly just got into trouble.

  He turned a page. “I can read if I want to.”

  Simon yawned. “Are you worried about falling asleep? I mean about what might happen tonight.”

  “Look at this.” Jared flipped to a page close to the front. “There’s this faerie called a brownie— ”

  “Like Girl Scouts?”

  “I don’t know,” Jared said. “Like this. Look.” He pushed the page in front of Simon. On the yellowed paper was an ink drawing of a little man, posed with a feather duster made from a badminton birdie and a straight pin. Next to it was a hunched figure, also small, but this one held a piece of broken glass.

  “What’s with that?” Simon pointed to the second figure, intrigued despite himself.

  “This Arthur guy says it’s a boggart. See, brownies are these helpful guys, but then if you make them mad, they go crazy. They start doing all these bad things and you can’t stop them. Then they become boggarts. That’s what I think we have.”

  “Look at this.”

  “You think we made it mad by messing up its house?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it was kind of wacky before that. I mean, look at this guy”—Jared pointed to the brownie—“he’s not the type to live in a skeevy house decorated with dead bugs.”

  Simon nodded, looking at the pictures. “Since you found the book in this house,” he said, “do you think that this is a picture of our boggart?”

  “I never thought of that,” Jared said quietly. “It makes sense, though.”

  “Does it say in the book what we should do?”

  Jared shook his head. “It talks about different ways to catch it. Not catch it for real, but see it . . . or get evidence.”

  “Jared.” Simon sounded doubtful. “Mom said to close the door and stay in here. The last thing she needs is another reason to believe that you were the one that attacked Mallory.”

  From the Field Guide

  “But she thinks it was me anyway. If something happens tonight, she’ll think it was me too.”

  “She won’t. I’ll tell her you were here all night. And besides, that way we can make sure nothing happens to either one of us.”

  “What about Mallory?” Jared asked.

  Simon shrugged. “I saw her getting into bed with one of her fencing swords. I wouldn’t mess with her.”

  “Yeah.” Jared got into bed and opened the book again. “I’m just going to read a little more.”

  Simon nodded and got up to put the mice back in their tanks. Then he got into bed and pulled the covers over his head with a mumbled “good night.”

  As Jared read, each page took him deeper into the strange world of forest and stream, alive with creatures that seemed so close that he could almost stroke the slick, scaly flanks of the mermaids. He could almost feel the heat of the troll’s breath and hear the rumble of the dwarven forges.

  When he turned the last page, it was late at night. Simon was bundled up so that Jared could see only the top of his head. Jared listened hard, but the only sounds in the house were the wind whistling through the roof above them and water gurgling through the pipes. No scuttling or screaming. Even Simon’s beasts were asleep.

  Jared flipped to the page that read, Boggarts delight in tormenting those they once protected and will cause milk to sour, doors to slam, dogs to go lame, and other malicious mischief.

  Simon believed him—sort of, anyway—but Mallory and their mom wouldn’t. And besides, he and Simon were twins. It almost didn’t count for anything that Simon believed him. Jared looked at the suggestion of the book: Scattering sugar or flour on the floor is one way of obtaining footprints.

  If he had footprints to show, then they’d have to believe him.

  Jared opened the door and crept downstairs. It was dark in the kitchen and everything was quiet. He tiptoed across the cool tile to where his mother had put the flour—in an old glass apothecary jar on the countertop. He took out several handfuls and scattered them liberally on the floor. It didn’t look like much. He wasn’t sure how well footprints would show up in it.

  Maybe the boggart wouldn’t even walk across the kitchen floor. So far, it seemed to stick to moving through the walls. He
thought about what he knew about boggarts from the book. Malicious. Hateful. Hard to get rid of.

  Everything was quiet.

  In their brownie form they were helpful and nice. They did all kinds of work for a plain old bowl of milk. Maybe . . . Jared went over to the fridge and poured milk into a small saucer. Maybe if he left it out, the creature would be tempted to come out of the walls and leave footprints in the flour.

  But when he looked at the saucer of milk there on the floor, he couldn’t help feeling a little bit bad and a little bit weird at the same time. In the first place, it was weird that he was down here, setting a trap for something that he didn’t even know if he would have believed in two weeks ago.

  But the reason he felt bad was . . . well, he knew what it was like to be mad, and he knew how easy it was to get into a fight, even if you were really mad at someone else. And he thought that just maybe that was how the boggart felt.

  But then he noticed something else. He’d left footprints of his own in the flour all the way from the milk back to the hall.

  “Crud,” he muttered as he went to get the broom. The light cracked on.

  “Jared Grace!” It was his mother’s voice, coming from the top of the stairs.

  Jared turned fast, but he knew how guilty he looked.

  “Get back to bed,” she said.

  “I was just trying to catch—” But she didn’t let him finish.

  “Now, mister. Go.”

  After he thought about it for a minute, he was glad she’d interrupted him. His boggart idea probably wouldn’t have been a big hit.

  With a look back over his shoulder at the flour dusting the floor, Jared slunk up the stairs.

  The kitchen was a mess.

  Chapter Six

  IN WHICH They Find Unexpected Things in the Icebox

  Jared rolled over at the sound of his mother’s voice. She was angry. “Jared, you better get up.”

  “What’s going on?” Jared asked sleepily, peering up from the covers. For a second he thought he’d missed school, until he remembered they’d moved and not even so much as set foot in the new school yet.

  “Up, Jared!” his mother said. “You want to pretend you don’t know? Fine, let’s go downstairs so you can see what’s going on.”

  The kitchen was a mess. Mallory had a broom and was sweeping up broken pieces of a porcelain bowl. The walls were painted with chocolate syrup and orange juice. Raw eggs oozed down the windowpanes.

  Simon was sitting at the kitchen table. His arms were covered with the same bruises Mallory had been wearing only a day before, and his eyes were red-rimmed, like he’d been crying.

  “Well?” his mother asked expectantly.

  “I—I didn’t do this,” Jared said, looking around at them. They couldn’t really believe he would do something like this, could they?

  And there, on the floor of the kitchen, next to drifts of cereal and scattered pieces of orange peel, Jared saw small tracks in the flour. They were the size of his little finger, and he could clearly see the imprint of the heel of a foot and a feathering in the front that might have been from toes.

  “Look,” Jared said, pointing. “See. Little footprints.”

  Mallory looked up at him, and her eyes were narrowed with fury. “Just shut up, Jared. Mom says she saw you down here last night. You made those footprints!”

  “I did not!” Jared yelled back.

  “Why don’t you look in the freezer then, huh?”

  “What?” Jared asked.

  Simon gave an especially wet-sounding sob.

  Their mother took the broom from Mallory’s hand and started sweeping up the flour and cereal.

  “Mom, no, the footprints,” Jared said, but his mother didn’t pay any attention to him. Two strokes of the broom, and the only proof he had was swept into a pile of rubbish.

  Mallory opened the freezer door. Each of Simon’s tadpoles was frozen into a single cube in the tray. Next to them was a note written in ink on a piece of a cereal box:

  Not very nice to ice the mice.

  “And Jeffrey and Lemondrop are gone!” said Simon.

  “Now, why don’t you tell us what you did with your brother’s mice?” said his mother.

  “Mom, I didn’t do it. I really didn’t.”

  Mallory gripped Jared by the shoulder. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re about to start regretting it.”

  “Mallory,” their mother cautioned. His sister let go, but the look she gave him carried the promise of later violence.

  “Mom, I didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t think Jared did it,” said Simon, between sniffs. “I think it was the boggart.”

  Their mother said nothing. The look on her face said that manipulating Simon was the worst thing Jared had done. “Jared,” she said, “start taking this trash out to the front. If you thought this was funny, let’s see how funny you think it is when you spend the rest of today cleaning it up.”

  Jared hung his head. He had no way of making her believe him. Silently, he got dressed, then gathered up three black garbage bags and started dragging them toward the front of the house.

  Outside, the weather was warm and the sky was blue. The air smelled of pine needles and freshly mown grass. But daylight didn’t seem to be any comfort at all.

  One of the bags snagged on a branch, and when Jared tugged, the plastic ripped. Groaning, he dropped the bags and surveyed the damage. The tear was large, and most of the garbage had spilled out. As he started to gather things up, he realized what he was holding. The contents of the creature’s house!

  He looked at the worn bits of cloth, the doll’s head, and the pins with pearl tops. In the daylight there were other things he had not noticed before. There had been a robin’s egg, but it was crushed. Tiny slips of newspaper were scattered throughout, each one with a different strange word on it. “Luminous,” read one. “Soliloquy,” read another.

  Gathering up all the pieces of the nest, Jared put them carefully aside from the rest of the trash. Could he make a new house for the boggart? Would it matter? Could that stop it? He thought about Simon crying and about the poor, stupid tadpoles frozen in ice cubes. He didn’t want to help the boggart. He wanted to catch it and kick it and make it sorry it ever came out of the wall.

  Dragging the rest of the bags to the front lawn, he looked at the pile of the boggart’s things. Still not sure whether he was going to burn them or give them back or what, he carried them inside.

  His mother was standing in the doorway waiting for him. “What’s all that?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Jared said.

  For once, she didn’t question him. At least not about the junk pile in his hands.

  “Jared, I know you’re upset about your father leaving. We’re all upset.”

  Jared looked at his shoes in discomfort. Just because he was upset about his father leaving did not mean he had trashed their new house, or pinched his brother black and blue, or tied his sister’s hair to her headboard. “So?” he asked, thinking that her silence meant she was waiting for a response.

  There were other strange things.

  “So?” she repeated. “So you need to stop letting your anger control you, Jared Grace. Your sister works things out when she’s fencing and your brother has his animals, but you . . . ”

  “I didn’t do it,” Jared said. “Why won’t you believe me? Is it because of the fight at school?”

  “I have to admit,” his mother said, “I was shocked to learn that you broke a boy’s nose. That is just the kind of thing I’m talking about. Simon doesn’t get into fights. And neither did you before your father left.”

  He studied his shoes even more intently. “Can I go inside now?”

  She nodded, but then she stopped him with one hand on his shoulder. “If anything else happens around here, I’m going to have to take you to see someone. Do you understand?”

  Jared nodded, but he felt weird. He remembered what he had said ab
out Aunt Lucy and the nuthouse and suddenly felt very, very sorry.

  “Mallory, no!”

  Chapter Seven

  IN WHICH the Fate of the Mice Is Discovered

  I really need your help,” said Jared. His brother and sister were lying on the rug in front of the television. Each one had a controller, and from where he was standing, he could see colors flit across their faces as the screen changed.

  Mallory snorted but didn’t reply. Jared took that as a positive response. At this point, anything that didn’t involve fists was a positive response.

  “I know you think I did it,” Jared said, opening the book to the page about boggarts. “But, honest, I didn’t. You heard the thing in the walls. There was the writing on the desk and the footprints in the flour. And remember the nest? Remember how you guys pulled everything out of that nest?”

  Mallory stood up and snatched the book out of his hands.

  “Give it back,” Jared pleaded, making a grab for it.

  Mallory held it over her head. “This book is what started all the trouble.”

  “No!” Jared said. “That’s not true. I got the book after your hair was knotted. Give it back, Mallory. Please give it back.”

  Now she held it in two hands, one on either side of the open book, poised to rip it apart.

  “Mallory, no! No!” Jared was nearly speechless with panic. If he didn’t think of something quick, the book was going to be in pieces.

  “Wait, Mal,” Simon said, getting up from the floor.

  Mallory waited.

  “What help did you want, Jared?”

  Jared took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking that if our messing up the nest is what got it upset, then maybe we could make it a new nest. I—I took a birdhouse and put some stuff in it.