The Perilous Journey (4 page)

Sticky’s puzzlement faded, replaced by anxiety. Though he readily expressed his admiration of this sharp-taloned creature now regarding him with shining black eyes (“
Falco peregrinus,
” he said, nodding as he backed away, “impressive bird… swiftest of predators…”), he was not at all keen to make her special acquaintance. As casually as he could, Sticky took a cloth from his shirt pocket and removed his spectacles.

Reynie smiled to himself. He was quite familiar with Sticky’s habit of polishing his spectacles when nervous, and seeing him do so now was unexpectedly satisfying. There was a unique pleasure in knowing a friend so well, Reynie reflected, rather like sharing a secret code. Also, it was nice not to be the only one afraid of Kate’s bird.

“Don’t worry, Madge,” Kate was saying as she fed the falcon a strip of meat, “I’ll be back before you know it.” And after she’d sent Madge aloft again, she clucked her tongue and said, “Poor thing, did you see how fidgety she was? She knows I’m going away. I think it makes her nervous.”

“Oh yes,” said Sticky, with a doubtful glance at Reynie. “Poor thing.”

Reynie patted Kate’s back. “I’m sure your little raptor will be fine.”

Moocho Brazos had prepared a sumptuous meal, and dinner was a boisterous, satisfying, happy affair, with everyone chatting at once and platters constantly being passed this way and that. For dessert Moocho served his much-anticipated apple pies — six of them, in fact, although that number seemed less extravagant once Moocho’s own appetite was taken into account.

After the dishes were washed, the pleasant tumult died down and the talk fell away. Everyone was overcome with drowsiness. It had been a long day for all, and another full day awaited them. The children were determined to stay up regardless, but though only a year ago they had been on a secret mission making life-and-death decisions, now they were subject to the dictates of their guardians — which meant bathing, bidding one another good night, and going to bed.

“Oh well,” Kate said through a yawn. “We’ll be up again soon. The rooster crows at sunrise, you know.”

And indeed it was the sound of crowing that woke Reynie the next morning. He sat up blearily — he’d slept on a pallet on the floor — to see gray dawn beyond the window and Miss Perumal sitting up in bed, smiling at him.

“Today’s your big day,” she said. “I know you’re excited. You didn’t sleep until after midnight.”

“You were awake?” Reynie asked. He’d been so involved in his thoughts that he hadn’t paid attention to Miss Perumal’s breathing. Obviously, though, she’d been paying attention to his.

“I’m excited, too,” Miss Perumal said. “I know you’re going to love your surprise.”

There was something about her expression that gave Reynie pause. She was happy for him, he could tell — but there was something else, too. It reminded him of the day she had driven him to take Mr. Benedict’s tests, when she had felt convinced he would no longer need her as a tutor. Her eyes, now as then, reflected a mixture of pride, expectation, and a certain sadness. But they were family now, and Reynie knew nothing could induce Miss Perumal to leave him. So what was she musing about?

Miss Perumal’s eyes suddenly changed. With a little laugh of surprise, she turned her face away from him, and when she turned back she’d adopted a scolding look. “I forget how good you are at reading expressions,” she said. She waggled a finger. “You mustn’t study things too closely, Reynie, if you don’t want to spoil your surprise.”

Together they roused Miss Perumal’s mother — whose slumber had been unaffected by the rooster’s crow, but who was always susceptible to foot-tickling — and after she’d come awake laughing and calling them villains, they all set about getting ready.

With a feeling of resignation Reynie put on the shirt Number Two had sent him last month for his birthday. He knew it was a token of her affection, but he still couldn’t look at the shirt without wrinkling his nose. Number Two’s apparent conviction was that good fashion meant matching one’s clothes to one’s skin tone (her own wardrobe consisted almost entirely of yellow fabrics that accentuated her yellowish complexion), and so naturally she’d thought this muddled, flesh-colored shirt would suit Reynie perfectly. It did fit him — sort of — but Reynie couldn’t have imagined an uglier shirt, or for that matter a less comfortable one (it was made of canvas, “for durability,” Number Two had written), and he wore it now only because he expected to see her today.

“You, too?” Sticky muttered when Reynie met him in the hall. Sticky was wearing a light brown shirt made of some kind of thickly padded material — his torso appeared to have swollen — and he was perspiring heavily despite the morning’s chill air. (Reynie recalled that Sticky’s birthday was in January; no doubt the shirt had seemed more suitable then.) “They made me wear it,” Sticky said, jerking his thumb toward the room he’d shared with his parents. He looked Reynie up and down. “Do you realize you look like a tote bag?”

“At least I’m not
puffy,
” Reynie said. “Let’s go find Kate.”

They hadn’t long to look. Before they could start up the stairs, Kate came sliding down the banister. To their disappointment she was wearing blue jeans and a perfectly normal shirt. She landed beside them with a delighted grin. “Why, you both look so handsome! Are you going to a party?”

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

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 —”

“Everybody,” Reynie said.

“Everybody?”

“Or… or almost everybody. I certainly don’t think that about you — or about any of us who’ve come together because of you. And there’s Miss Perumal and her mother, of course, and a few other people. In general, though…” Reynie shrugged. “I thought with the Whisperer out of commission — with Mr. Curtain’s hidden messages no longer affecting people’s minds — well, I thought things would start to seem different. Better. But that hasn’t happened.”

“You aren’t doubting what you accomplished, I hope.”

Reynie shook his head. “No, I know we stopped terrible things from happening. It’s just that I hadn’t expected to start seeing things — to see people — this way.”

Mr. Benedict made as if to rise, then thought better of it. “An old habit,” he said. “I occasionally feel an urge to pace, which, as you know, is ill-advised. If I dropped off and brained myself against the bookcase, Number Two would never let me hear the end of it.”

Reynie chuckled. He was well aware of Number Two’s fearsome protectiveness.

Mr. Benedict settled back against his desk. “It’s natural that you feel as you do, Reynie. There is much more to the world than most children — indeed, most adults — ever see or know. And where most people see mirrors, you, my friend, see windows. By which I mean there is always something beyond the glass. You have seen it and will always see it now, though others may not. I would have spared you that vision at such a young age. But it’s been given you, and it will be up to you to decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse.”