The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey

Sticky crossed his thickly padded arms. “This is unacceptable, Kate. You need to go right back up and put on your birthday present.”

“Absolutely,” Reynie said. “You’re outvoted, Kate. We all suffer together.”

Kate was rubbing his canvas sleeve to see how it felt. She whistled and gave him a pitying look. “Sorry, but mine was much too small for me, so I cut it up and made my pouches out of it. Did I show them to you?” She eagerly flipped open her bucket’s lid. “It was very sturdy material, so —”

“You showed us already,” Sticky said in a defeated tone. “What was your present, anyway?”

“Mine? Oh, it was a vest. With fringe.”

Reynie eyed her suspiciously. “Was it really too small?”

“Well,” said Kate with a sly smile. “It was going to be.”

The day was still quite young when the station wagon and the sedan pulled away, their eager occupants half- rested but well fed. Moocho Brazos stood in the farmyard waving goodbye until the cars had disappeared beyond the hill. Then he sighed and stroked his mustache sadly. He was much attached to his exuberant young friend, and with Kate gone the farm seemed dull already. With a melancholy shake of his head, Moocho headed off into the orchard, where a number of trees required tending.

And so it was that the young man who arrived on a scooter a few minutes later was met by an empty farmyard.

The young man dashed first to ring the doorbell — he rang it several times — then to the barn, where he discovered a hen depressing a lever with its beak to fill a tiny wagon with grain. He was startled by this sight, but he quickly overcame his wonder and renewed his search for the addressee of the telegram he carried. As he headed out behind the barn (it would be some time before he tried the orchard), the young man — an employee of the town’s general store and wire service — was hoping that someone, at least, would be here. His job was to deliver the telegram to “anyone on the Wetherall farm.” There was no telephone here, he knew, which explained the need for a telegram. The old store owner had told him this was the first telegram they’d been asked to deliver in many years. And a very curious, very urgent one it was. It read:

CHILDREN YOU MUST NOT COME STOP TOO DANGEROUS STOP CALL ME AT ONCE AND I WILL TELL YOU THE NEWS STOP OH IT IS BAD NEWS INDEED STOP REPEAT DO NOT COME BUT CALL AT ONCE AS I FEAR FOR YOUR SAFETY STOP WITH LOVE AND REGRET RHONDA

Beyond the glass, or Windows for mirrors

The drive to Mr. Benedict’s house in Stonetown would take several hours, but they had hardly been on the road twenty minutes before Reynie, in his mind, was already there. He was daydreaming. In the front seat of the station wagon, Miss Perumal’s mother was humming to herself, unaware that her voice resounded throughout the car. Miss Perumal was suppressing a smile. And beside Reynie in the backseat, Kate and Sticky were catching each other up on their lives. Having arrived earlier than Sticky and being a better correspondent than Kate, Reynie already knew everything the other two were telling each other now. The fact that Sticky had briefly had a girlfriend, for instance, until she broke up with him for remarking upon her pulchritude. (“She didn’t believe me when I told her it meant ‘beauty,’” Sticky said. Kate shook her head. “It’s always best to stick to small words. If you’d said that to me, I’d have punched you.”) Or the fact that — unlike Miss Perumal, who considered Reynie unusually mature for his age and was contemplating his enrollment in college — the Washingtons had forbidden any such possibility for Sticky, to whose emotional wellbeing they were especially attentive now. (“I’ve told them again and again that I can handle it,” said Sticky. “But they aren’t budging.”)

As his friends talked, then, Reynie let his thoughts wander ahead of the station wagon to the house in Stonetown — with its familiar ivy-covered courtyard and gray stone walls — and, of course, to Mr. Benedict himself. Reynie could see him now: the perpetually mussed white hair; the bright green eyes framed by spectacles; the large, lumpy nose; and, of course, the green plaid suit he wore every day. To those who didn’t know him, Mr. Benedict might well look like a joker. The thought made Reynie indignant, for the man was not only a genius, he was exceptionally good — and in Reynie’s opinion, good people were decidedly rare.

Mr. Benedict himself had disagreed with Reynie about this. Reynie remembered the conversation perfectly. It had occurred some months after the children returned from their mission to the Institute, when Reynie had still lived in Stonetown. Despite Mr. Benedict’s countless pressing duties, he had arranged for a visit with Reynie, as he did every week. (Kate, by this time, had gone to live on the farm, and Sticky had returned to live with his parents in a city several hours away. Of the four children, only Constance — whom Mr. Benedict was in the process of adopting — would remain in Stonetown, for Miss Perumal was moving their family to a larger apartment in the suburbs, where Reynie could have his own room and, equally important, a library within walking distance.) After Reynie moved away, these weekly conversations with Mr. Benedict had become impracticable, and he recalled them now with fondness — even reverence.

On this particular occasion, Reynie had found Mr. Benedict alone in his book-crowded study. As usual, Mr. Benedict had greeted him with great warmth, and the two of them had sat down together on the floor. (Mr. Benedict had a condition called narcolepsy and was subject to bouts of unexpected sleep, often triggered by strong emotions. In those rare instances when he was not fretfully shadowed by Number Two or Rhonda Kazembe, he protected himself from painful falls by keeping low to the ground.) As had happened so many times before, Mr. Benedict had discerned immediately that Reynie had something on his mind.

“Though as I’ve previously remarked,” Mr. Benedict said, smiling, “this is not such a feat of deduction as it might seem, since you, my friend, always have something on your mind. Now tell me what it is.”

Reynie considered how to begin. It was all so complicated, and he could find no good starting point. Then he remembered that Mr. Benedict always seemed to intuit what he meant, whether or not Reynie had managed to express it properly. And so he said simply, “I see things differently now, and it’s . . . it’s bothering me, I suppose.”

Mr. Benedict gazed at Reynie, stroking a bristly patch on his chin that he’d missed with his razor. He exhaled through his lumpy nose. “Since your mission, you mean.”

Reynie nodded.

“You mean to say,” said Mr. Benedict after reflecting a moment, “that you’re disturbed by the wickedness of which so many people seem capable. My brother, for example, but also his Executives, his henchmen, the other students at the Institute —”