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
“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.”
