The Mysterious Benedict Society (17 page)

“Who’s Mr. Curtain?” said Reynie, who thought it best to give the impression of knowing as little as possible. The less you knew, the less people suspected of you — and perhaps the more they told you.

Jackson sneered, then forced the sneer into a smile. He looked like a red-headed crocodile. “I keep forgetting how ignorant you kids are when you get here. Mr. Curtain’s my boss. He’s the founder of the Institute, the reason we’re all here. Got it?” It was clear Jackson was the sort of young man who considers himself rather smarter than he is, and who is naturally cruel but thinks himself a decent fellow. When the smaller boys didn’t answer him quickly enough, he snapped, “Do you understand me or don’t you? You speak English, right?”

The boys nodded.

“Good. I’ll see you in an hour.”

When Jackson had gone, Sticky switched off the television. “Did you hear that?
Messengers
. We know what that means, don’t we?”

“We’d better find the girls,” Reynie said.

“We’re right here,” said a muffled voice from above them. A ceiling panel slid aside, and Kate Wetherall’s head appeared through the gap. “There aren’t any support beams over your bunk bed, so one of you move that chair over, will you? I’m going to lower Constance down. What are you
doing
, anyway?”

The boys had been on edge already, but at the sound of an unexpected voice directly overhead, Reynie had thrown up his hands as if to ward off a blow, and Sticky had tried, unsuccessfully, to hide behind his suitcase. With a sheepish grin Reynie slid a chair under the gap. A moment later Constance’s tiny feet appeared, then the rest of her body, as Kate, hanging by her legs from a beam, lowered her carefully to the chair. The boys helped her to the floor while Kate secured her rope to the beam and climbed down to join them.

“Don’t bother thanking me,” she said to Constance, who was scowling and brushing insulation from her clothes.

“Why should I thank you? You drag me up into the ceiling, through a heating vent, crawling through spider webs in the dark, across all these hard boards saying, ‘Don’t put your knee there! You’ll fall through and break your neck!’ and ‘Don’t breathe so loudly! Someone will hear you!’ until my heart’s in my throat and my knees are killing me, and you expect me to thank you?”

“Not at all,” said Kate. “I was happy to do it.”

Constance’s eyes seemed ready to pop from her head.

“Did you ever consider just walking down the corridor?” Sticky asked.

“I figured we’d better have a hidden entrance,” she replied, “in case we want to meet secretly. I’ll bet those Executives are always patroling the place. I don’t like them a bit. Jillson made fun of my bucket, and she kept calling us ‘little squirts’ and bossing us around. I thought Constance was going to bite her leg off.”

“I considered it,” Constance said.

“She’s a tough-looking one, though,” Kate reflected. “Six feet tall, arms like a gorilla, and ties her ponytail with
wire
. Probably uses it to strangle kids who cross her.”

“Let’s be sure not to cross her, then,” Reynie said, then told them what Jackson had said about Messengers.

“Jillson told us the same stuff,” said Kate. “So the voice we heard on the television must be some Messenger kid, right?”

“It must be. And it sounds like the other students don’t know much about what the Messengers do — they don’t get these ‘secret privileges’ until they become top students. That means we’ve got to rise to the top, and fast, so we can become Messengers and figure things out as soon as possible.”

“Why don’t we poke around and figure some things out for ourselves right now?” said Kate, who had a passion for poking around.

The others agreed, and so Kate fetched her rope and replaced the ceiling panel, and they set out down the corridor. Hurrying to keep up with Kate, who always moved in high gear, Reynie was almost to the dormitory exit before he noticed Constance wasn’t with them. They all went back. Constance stood just outside the boys’ room, pointing at a patch of mildew on the ceiling and wrinkling her nose. “That’s disgusting! I mean, that’s nasty! I
hate
mildew!”

“Um, Constance,” Reynie said. “We’re in a hurry, remember?”

They set out again, this time keeping an eye on Constance. But aside from being easily distracted, Constance was an intolerably slow walker. When they urged her to hurry, she obstinately refused. When they let her fall behind, she was irritated they didn’t wait up.

“It’s not my fault my legs are shorter than yours,” she complained. “I can’t be expected to walk so quickly.”

“How about if one of us lets you ride piggyback?” Reynie suggested.

“That’s stupid,” Constance said. But in the end she let Kate hoist her up, and in this way, at last, they made it out of the dormitory and into sunlight.

The children decided to follow a narrow, well-kept track of crushed stone that zigzagged up a tall hill by the dormitory. In a few minutes they had reached the hilltop, where they were presented with an excellent view of the island. Its entire terrain was one series of hills after another, some of them gentle rises, some looming peaks.

The children gazed down upon their new school. The Institute’s gray stone buildings were so similar to one another and so closely packed it was difficult to judge precisely where one ended and another began. They were arranged in a rough U shape around the broad stone plaza and were connected by stone walkways and stone steps. Seen from this perspective, with the stone tower rising up just beyond the dormitory, the buildings gave the impression of a fortress rather than a school.

And yet, in the bright sun of morning, the Institute didn’t seem such a forbidding place, not as menacing as they’d imagined; in fact the whole island was rather lovely. The hillsides were a patchwork of sand, green vegetation, and clusters of boulders stitched together by crisscrossing gravel paths. And here and there along the paths, flowering cactuses had been planted in great stone pots. An energetic brook ran down from a nearby hill, following its course over and around the stones, sometimes spilling in miniature waterfalls as it made its way to the island shore, which lay but a short distance downhill from the Institute. Aside from the splash and murmur of water and the distant calls of cliff swallows, the island was remarkably silent, with no children in sight and only an occasional, white-uniformed worker sweeping a walkway or hastening off to some unknown duty.

“I guess everyone’s in class,” said Sticky. He gave Kate a quizzical look. “Why are you getting out your kaleidoscope?”

“It’s a spyglass in disguise,” Reynie said as Kate removed the kaleidoscope lens.

Kate trained her spyglass on the stone tower.

“Look, there’s a window just above the Institute flag. I’ll bet something important’s up there. It’s the highest window on the island. There’s always something important behind the highest window.” She handed Constance the spyglass.

“It’s probably just so they can reach the flag,” said Sticky. “There has to be a way to bring it in and clean it, you know.”

“Maybe,” said Kate. “It would be simple enough to sneak in and find out. The window’s not as high as it seems — not if you were on that hill. First you’d need to get over that rock wall” — she pointed near the top of the hill — “then hop the brook and climb the rest of the way up. The tower’s built right into the hillside, see? With a decent stretch of rope you could lasso the flagpole, then climb up and stand on the pole while you got the window open.”

“You call that simple?” Reynie said.

Kate shrugged. “Simple
enough
.”

“Anyway,” Reynie said, “it’s in plain sight and you’d surely be spotted. I don’t think that’s what Mr. Benedict had in mind when he told us not to take unnecessary risks.”

Kate sighed. “I suppose that’s true.”

Constance, in the meantime, was looking disgusted. “This is a terrible spyglass, Kate. It makes everything look far away.”

Kate turned the spyglass around and handed it back to her.

The children lingered on the hilltop for some time. It was pleasant up there, with the grand view and the breeze, and though none of them said it, they were reluctant to go back down and meet the Executives again. Kate was more reluctant than any of them, not because she feared being caught as a spy (though, like the others, she was nervous about that), but because she hated to stop exploring. Exploring was what she did best, and Kate liked always to be doing what she did best. Not that she was a bad sport; in fact, she was a very good one, and she rarely complained. But Kate had spent all her life — ever since her father abandoned her, which affected her more than she cared to admit — trying to prove she didn’t need anyone’s help, and this was easiest to believe when she was doing what she was good at.

So when Sticky anxiously suggested they head back, Kate couldn’t help heaving another sigh. Everyone else felt like sighing, too, however, so no one asked Kate what hers was for.

Reynie helped Constance climb onto Kate’s back, and the children began making their way down to the dormitory. Kate kept a hopeful eye out for anything unusual, but unfortunately there was nothing to see except boulders and sand and swaths of green vegetation.

Halfway down the hill, Sticky stopped. “
That’s
odd.”

Kate’s eyes lit up. She glanced all around. “Something’s odd? What’s odd?”

Sticky pointed several yards off the path toward a lush green bed of ivy — or something like ivy — covering the ground near a cluster of boulders. “See that ground vine with the tiny leaves? It’s a rare plant called drapeweed that flourishes in thin soil.”

“Oh boy,” said Constance. “A rare plant.”

Kate’s face fell.

“What I was going to say,” Sticky persisted, “is that some of it was planted more recently than the rest. Mature drapeweed develops a woody brown stem, but young drapeweed has tender green shoots. Otherwise they look the same.”

The others peered at the drapeweed, trying to make out the shoots and stems beneath the dark green leaves. It was true: A large patch in the middle was different from the rest, although the difference was so subtle only a botanist — or Sticky — would have noticed it.

“What do you think?” said Constance. “Maybe something’s been buried there?”

“Or some
body,
” suggested Kate. She looked at Reynie. “Shouldn’t we check it out?”

Reynie was pleasantly surprised. He still wasn’t used to other children wanting his opinion. “I think so,” he said after a moment. “But let’s be careful.”

“Careful about what?” Kate said. “It’s a plant.”

“I don’t know. It makes me uneasy somehow.”

“It’s probably nothing,” said Sticky, who began to think he shouldn’t have said anything. He followed the others off the path. “Maybe some of the vine developed fungus and died, and a gardener just filled in the bare spot. Drapeweed
is
prone to fungus….”

The others stopped at the edge of the drapeweed bed. It was about twice the size of a living room rug and — to Kate, at least — about half as interesting. “Looks like a patch of ivy,” she said, hitching Constance higher on her back. “Does it give you a rash?”

“No, it’s perfectly harmless,” Sticky said, walking toward the middle of the bed. Kate and Constance moved to follow him. “I’ll pluck a younger shoot and show you the —”

In the next moment, the drapeweed seemed to swallow him.

K
ate and Constance were two steps behind Sticky when he fell through the drapeweed. If he’d been the least bit farther away, there would have been no saving him. Nor would Sticky have stood a chance had it been any other child lunging to grab him. As it was, with a desperate dive onto her belly, Kate barely managed to snatch Sticky’s hand before it disappeared.

Their troubles were far from over. Kate’s dive to the ground had sent Constance tumbling over her shoulders. In a flash she caught the girl’s ankle before she, too, disappeared — but then the weight of her two catches began to drag Kate forward into the hole.

“Um, Reynie?” Kate called through gritted teeth. “A little help?”

Reynie rushed over and grabbed Kate’s legs.

Hauling Sticky and Constance to safety was an arduous, tricky business (and an unpleasant one, too, as Constance complained the whole time of Sticky’s elbow in her ribs). But eventually Reynie and Kate had dragged them back up onto solid ground, where all four now lay on their backs, looking up at the sky and panting from the exertion.

“Apparently drapeweed isn’t ‘perfectly harmless’ after all,” Constance said.

Sticky looked at her. He wanted to be irritated, but found that he was so relieved to be alive he could only smile.

“In fact it appears to be carnivorous,” Kate said.

Before long they were all chuckling. The danger was past, and somehow the excitement had helped them shed a little of their anxiety. Glancing at one another with satisfied smiles (as if to say, “We did it, didn’t we? Together we did it!”) they rose and dusted themselves off. They gathered near the hole in the drapeweed — though not
too
near — and tried to peer in. All they could see was darkness and trailing tendrils, and even these were slowly being covered up. The flexible stems and shoots thrust aside by Sticky’s fall were stiffening and spreading back into place. Like a footprint in springy grass, the hole would soon disappear entirely.

Kate crawled to the edge of the hole, pushed aside some tendrils and shone her flashlight down into the darkness. “It’s a pit. Twenty feet deep.” She glanced back at Sticky. “Deep enough to break your legs.”

Sticky wiped his forehead. “Thanks for the grab, Kate. I do like my legs.”

“I would thank you, too,” said Constance, “except I wouldn’t have fallen into the hole if you hadn’t dived, so my thank you and your apology cancel out.”

Kate laughed. “Whatever, Constance. As long as I don’t have to apologize, I suppose.”

The children stood by the drapeweed for some time, pondering their discovery. No one could think of any good reason for it to be there. Why had someone gone to the trouble of covering that dangerous hole?