The Mysterious Benedict Society (7 page)

“What in the world?” he said, turning to look behind him, then in confusion turning round again. At once he realized his mistake. If he hadn’t turned around, he might have kept his bearings, but now he’d lost them. He was in a maze of identical rooms. Everything looked exactly the same in every direction.

His confidence was quickly draining away.

“Now, think,” he told himself. “When you enter a room, its light must turn on automatically, and when you leave, it goes off. But there are light switches by each door. Perhaps if you throw a switch, the light stays on. It might be as simple as that.”

With a quick inspection of the nearest doorway, however, this hope vanished. What Reynie had supposed were light switches were only decorative wooden panels. He was about to turn away and try to retrace his steps when it occurred to him the panels themselves might be important. He took a closer look at one. About the size of a playing card, the panel had four arrows etched into it, pointing in different directions and painted different colors. A blue arrow pointed to the right, a green one to the left, a wiggly-shaped yellow one straight ahead, and a purple one down.

Of course, Reynie thought, feeling foolish. The arrows weren’t for decoration — they were meant to show the way. But which was he to believe? After going round to every panel he was no better off. Four doorways with four arrows each meant sixteen arrows to choose from, and there was no apparent pattern. Reynie racked his brain: Should he follow the green ones? Green arrows on a traffic signal mean “Go.” But perhaps that was too obvious. Perhaps the red arrows were the ones to follow — perhaps that was the trick. Yet that hardly seemed fair. What if he’d been color-blind and couldn’t even tell the difference?

No sooner had this occurred to him than he knew the secret.

Running his finger over the carved arrows in the panel before him, Reynie smiled. The only one you could know by touch would be the wiggly shaped one. What was it that Rhonda had said to Kate? “You should all be able to do it with your eyes closed.” It had seemed she was offering encouragement. Actually she was offering them a clue: Even in the dark, even with his eyes closed, Reynie could feel the panels with his fingers and find the wiggly shaped arrow.

Just to be certain, he hurried around the room, checking the panels. Sure enough, though the other arrows followed no particular pattern, the wiggly arrows all directed him toward the same door — the one whose wiggly arrow pointed straight ahead. Reynie took a deep breath, hoped for the best, and charged through. The next room looked exactly the same, but this time the wiggly arrows indicated the door on his right. He took it.

By the time he’d gone through ten rooms in this way, Reynie had no idea where in the house he was. He might have been at the front door again and would not have known it. Or he might be in the very middle of the maze. And with the walls painted black as they were, if all the lights went out he would be in utter darkness. Suddenly he wondered if they intended to turn the lights out on him as part of the test. The thought started an uncomfortable flutter in his belly. But just as he began to worry, he entered a room and stumbled smack into a staircase. With a shout of triumph he raced up the stairs onto a narrow landing, found the bronze bell Rhonda had told them about, and rang it.

There was a sound of quick footsteps coming down stairs. Then a door unlocked and out came the pencil woman with a stopwatch in hand. She examined it and said, “Six minutes fourteen seconds.”

“Is that good?” Reynie asked.

Without answering, she said, “Please close your eyes and stand still.”

Something about this made Reynie uneasy. Had he done so badly? Was this meant to test his courage? He did as he was told, closing his eyes and bracing himself as best he could.

“Why are you flinching?” the pencil woman asked.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe you were going to slap me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I could slap you perfectly well with your eyes open. I’m only going to blindfold you.”

Having done so, she led Reynie down the stairs again. With her hand on his shoulder, the pencil woman guided him back through the maze into the first room, where she removed the blindfold. Starting the stopwatch, she said, “Please go ring the bell again.”

This time it was easy. Reynie trotted through the rooms, glancing at the panels for guidance, and in a few short minutes had rung the bell again. The pencil woman came up behind him, reading her stopwatch. “Three minutes even,” she said. She led him up more stairs into a sitting room and pointed him toward a sofa.

“Does this mean I pass?”

“We ask you to complete the maze a second time to see if you’ve actually solved it. We need to make sure you didn’t just come upon the staircase by luck. If you’ve discovered the secret, you should be much faster the second time around. Which you were. Therefore you seem to have solved the maze. Therefore you pass. Therefore —” Interrupting herself, she took a cracker from her pocket and ate it very quickly, as if she hadn’t eaten in days and couldn’t wait another moment.

Reynie cocked his head curiously. “But why did you have me go through again when you could have just asked me? I could have
told
you the secret, you know.”

“You’d be surprised how few children have pointed that out,” said the pencil woman as she moved toward the door.

“You mean you wondered whether I’d notice that?”

The pencil woman winked. “And now we know, don’t we?”

She hurried from the room, leaving Reynie alone on the sofa. He was getting used to her abrupt entrances and exits. Still, it was strange to find himself in an unknown house, sitting on this sofa by himself. He looked around the room. The walls were lined with books, many of them in languages he didn’t recognize. In one corner stood an old piano; in another, a marvelous green globe. Reynie went to look at the globe. If the others took as long as he did to finish the maze, it would be some time before he had company. He might as well entertain himself.

But hardly had he given the globe a single spin — he hadn’t even located Stonetown Harbor on it yet — when he heard the bell clanging outside on the stairway landing. It rang and rang, very loudly and with no sign of stopping, and from this he gathered it was Kate at the bell. Sure enough, within a few moments the ringing had ceased and the pencil woman had led Kate into the sitting room to join him. Kate was grinning ear to ear. The pencil woman had a hand to her forehead, as if perhaps all the bell ringing had given her a headache.

“She doesn’t have to go through a second time?” Reynie asked, surprised.

“No point,” said the pencil woman, and left them there alone.

“What do you mean, a second time?” Kate asked.

“I had to finish it twice to prove I’d solved it. But you got through so fast, I suppose it would be hard to do it any faster.”

“Not as long as I have my bucket with me,” Kate agreed.

After turning this over in his mind a few times, Reynie gave up and said, “Okay, what did your bucket have to do with getting through the maze?”

“Well, of course I saw right away that I was in a maze, and I knew that I had to get to the opposite side of the house. So I looked around for a heating vent —”

“A heating vent?”

“Sure. And there in the floor of the very first room I saw one, so I got out my army-knife screwdriver and removed the grate and squeezed down into the heating duct. It was a tight fit, I’ll tell you — had to tie my bucket to my foot and pull it along behind me. Those old ducts run all over the house, but the central duct runs more or less in a straight line to the back, so with my flashlight in one hand and my army knife in the other, I just followed it all the way there, pried up the vent, and popped out by the staircase. I sort of had to bend the grate on that last one. I think maybe Old Yellow Suit’s mad about that.”

“I bet she’ll forgive you.”

“Don’t you think? It’s not like it’ll be hard to fix. Only a little one-by-one grate. Hey, this is an impressive globe.”

For a while the two of them entertained themselves finding places on the globe, but eventually they’d had enough of it, and Sticky Washington had yet to appear. Kate went over to the piano and tried to play it. The keys made no sound. Together they lifted the lid and looked inside. The piano strings had been removed, and in their place were more books.

“These people certainly have a lot of reading to do,” Kate observed. “Oh well, no great loss. I only know ‘Chopsticks,’ anyway.”

Almost twenty minutes had passed, and still no sign of Sticky. Kate began to sort through the items in her bucket, making sure each was in its proper place. She had found an arrangement that kept her things secure and within easy reach, and she was very particular about it. She was the sort of person who liked to be constantly busy, Reynie realized. She hadn’t much use for idleness. Which reminded him of something he wanted to ask her. “You know, Kate, something’s been nagging me. You told us you carry all these things around in your bucket because they’re useful, right?”

“Absolutely,” Kate replied.

“Then why the kaleidoscope? It’s interesting to look through, maybe, but how is it useful?”

Kate stopped double-checking the things in her bucket and gave Reynie a searching look. At last she nodded. “You know, I think I can trust you, I can already tell. All right, here’s the secret.” She took out the kaleidoscope and popped off its colorful prismatic lens. Only then did Reynie see that the prismatic lens had been concealing a different lens beneath.

“The kaleidoscope is a spyglass in disguise,” Kate explained. “It’s a good spyglass and I wouldn’t want anyone to steal it. The kaleidoscope, on the other hand, is rather a bad kaleidoscope. I don’t think it would tempt anyone.”

The very idea of disguising a good spyglass as a bad kaleidoscope made Reynie laugh with pleasure. “It’s terrific!” he cried.

Kate wasn’t sure what Reynie was laughing about, but she was eminently agreeable, and before long she was laughing with him. When Reynie had taken a good look at the spyglass, Kate tucked it away again and flopped onto the sofa. “Do you think Sticky’s ever going to finish? I’m having a fine time and all, but I’m about to drop dead from hunger.”

In answer to her question, the bell rang — only once, and almost imperceptibly, as if Sticky had just tapped it with his fingernails. Through the closed door they heard the pencil woman speaking in her brusque way, then an embarrassed murmur that must have been Sticky’s response. After a moment all was silent again. Again they waited.

“Shouldn’t be long now,” Reynie said. “It’s easy once you’ve figured out the secret. It only took me three minutes the second time through.”

Three minutes soon passed, however. Then four, then five. Not until almost fifteen minutes had gone by did the bell ring again, just as softly as before. A moment later the door opened, and Sticky entered the room with the pencil woman behind him. He gave a great smile when he saw Reynie and Kate, not so much because he’d finished the test but because he was relieved to have company again.

“Congratulations,” said the pencil woman. “You all pass.”

The children cheered and clapped each other on the backs, and when they were done cheering and clapping, they realized that the pencil woman had left them yet again.

“She’s awfully fond of leaving, isn’t she?” asked Kate. “I never saw anybody who left so much. I suppose she expects us to wait again?”

“Maybe Rhonda’s coming for us,” Reynie said.

“I hope so. Otherwise I’m going to have to eat some of these books. Sticky, what on earth took you so long? Didn’t you know how hungry I was?”

Sticky seemed about to cry. He was reaching for his spectacles when he saw Kate was only teasing him. Then he smiled and shrugged. “I had to go through twice.”

“So did Reynie. But he said there’s some kind of secret that gets you through faster. So why did it take you so long the second time?”

“It was a
little
faster,” Sticky protested. “Now what’s this secret you’re talking about?”

“The secret to getting through the maze,” Reynie said. “You know, the arrows.”

“Arrows? You mean the ones on those panels?”

Reynie gave Kate a look of amazement, but Kate replied, “Don’t look at me. I don’t know anything about arrows, remember? I took a shortcut.”

“That’s true,” he said. “Sticky, if you didn’t use the arrows, how did you get through?”

Sticky shuffled his feet and said, “I just kept trying one door after the other, until finally I found the staircase. It was sheer luck.”

“And you found it more quickly the second time? That’s the
really
lucky part, I guess.”

“Oh, no, that part was easy,” Sticky said. “I just remembered how I got through the first time: First I took a right, then a left, then straight ahead, then right, then right again, then left, then left again, then right, then straight ahead, and so on, until I came to the staircase. I didn’t have to waste time scratching my head over those panels, or worrying they were going to turn the lights off, or any of that stuff. I just hurried through exactly as I did before.”

“Exactly as you —,” Kate began, then just shook her head. “That’s incredible.”

Reynie laughed. “You did it the hard way, Sticky!”

“What’s the easy way?”

“Follow the wiggly arrows.”

“Oh,” Sticky said thoughtfully. “That would have been useful to know.”

T
heir supper was served in a cozy dining room with crowded bookshelves on every wall and a window overlooking the courtyard. Redbirds twittered in the elm tree outside the open window, a gentle breeze drifted into the room, and in general the children were in much better spirits, having passed the tests and at last having gotten some food in their bellies. Rhonda Kazembe had already brought them bowls of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, which they’d eagerly devoured; now she set out a great platter of fruit, and as the children reached happily for bananas and grapes and pears, she sat down and joined them.