The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages, page 30
The front of Crawlings’s suit pants grew very dark, and he tried to frown but found he could not.
Tai gasped. “Did Mr. Crawlings just wet himself?”
“Unfortunately,” said Sticky with a shrug. “It’s no surprise. Consumed in such quantities, the formula would certainly have that effect. It isn’t meant to be drunk at all, in fact, but injected, and only in a fraction of that amount. I suppose we should help him lie back so that he doesn’t strike his head on the floor.”
Together he and Reynie did just that, leaving Crawlings to stare at the ceiling for a few moments longer, still wondering when his genius would come galloping in to save the day. But alas, his genius was delayed indefinitely, and what arrived instead was a long-lasting slumber, followed by a long-lasting residency in the KEEP.
It was a fine late morning to be on the roof. Clouds moved swiftly across a fair blue sky, streaming after one another as if called home and eager to arrive. Beneath them a falcon could be seen gliding in graceful arcs. The patio had been swept clean, the railing mended, and one of the previously mangled tables, likewise put to rights, had been positioned in the middle of the patio and covered with a lace-trimmed tablecloth. On the table stood a vase of fresh-cut roses, a smuggled teapot, four smuggled cups and saucers, and an assortment of smuggled necessaries such as teaspoons, honey, sugar, and milk. A light breeze ruffled the rose petals, a few of which drifted pleasantly down to settle on the tablecloth, and the pleasant clatter of cup and saucer accompanied the pleasant chatter of four fast friends.
An extravagant lunch was due to be served in the dining room in less than an hour, but the Society was enjoying a private, pre-lunchtime patio party, which Kate delighted in referring to as their PPPP. Nor could they stop laughing, for they all wore their finest clothes, and the very idea of their being so properly dressed while having a tea party on the roof was impossible to bear with straight faces. And indeed, that had been the point. Every time Sticky, in his houndstooth blazer, raised a teacup to his lips, a fresh round of snickering commenced. Reynie, in his tweed jacket, couldn’t ask for honey or milk without prompting snorts and guffaws. The sight of Kate, in her elegant black dress with long sleeves and high collar, was more shocking than funny, but to be repeatedly shocked simply by glancing at one’s friend was funny enough on its own to provoke endless merriment.
Constance, for her part, was in her usual green plaid suit. But the fact that she had refused to sit in one of the folding chairs, had insisted, rather, that the others haul—of all things—the Whisperer out of the attic and place that formerly terrifying mind-control machine at the table, so that she now sat daintily perched at the edge of an oversized metal chair with a red helmet affixed to its back, sipping her tea like royalty on a throne—well, it was too much. Her friends could hardly look at her without spewing their own tea or choking on it, and they soon learned to manage the timing of their sips.
“I can’t shake the feeling,” Sticky observed, “that we’re pretending to wear nice clothes and have a tea party on the roof. Yet we actually are.”
“If it felt natural to us, it wouldn’t be nearly so entertaining,” said Kate. She kept touching her hair, which she had pulled up and fixed in place with tiny decorative combs, and nervously touching it again now, she said, “This business is going to have to come down soon, though.”
“I challenge you to make it all the way through lunch,” Reynie said.
Kate narrowed her eyes. “You had to go and make it a challenge. Crafty of you, Muldoon.”
The way the PPPP had come about was this: The Washingtons and the Perumals had felt that if they were going to meet Mr. Benedict’s oldest friends, and Rhonda Kazembe and her husband were making a visit, too, then they ought to recognize the special nature of the occasion and wear suitable clothes. Neither Sticky nor Reynie had felt enthusiastic about the prospect, but when Milligan had referred to his three-piece suit as “one of his favorite disguises,” Kate had snorted and clapped her hands and announced that she had it in mind to wear a dress. Upon hearing this and receiving Kate’s preposterous party proposal, the young men caught the spirit, helped each other tie their neckties (which Kate later retied for them), and laughed all the while. Constance had found none of this as amusing as the others did, but even so, she had yet to properly complain. In fact, she had rarely been in a brighter mood.
“Speaking of challenges,” Constance said now, “you do all realize how difficult it’s been waiting for your explanations, don’t you?” Returning her cup to its saucer, she scooted back in her seat, drew up her knees, and wrapped her arms around them.
“You have been impressively patient,” Sticky said, and the others nodded.
The truth was that Constance had had little choice. Though she’d finally recovered from her sickness—which had taken a full day, even with the help of Sticky’s fruity concoctions—they had all been constantly busy and (more to the point) never alone. Constance had been forced to settle for promises of full explanations to be given at the first official meeting of the Society. Yes, she had been tempted—more than once—to fish around in her friends’ minds for details, but she had nobly resisted the temptation and saw no need to mention it to anyone.
“Let’s start with the Scaredy Katz?” Kate suggested, and Reynie and Sticky signaled their agreement. “The weird way we went about things, Constance, was mostly because of those jokers. They were so good at sniffing out traps, you know. We had to do everything we possibly could to convince them that the KEEP wasn’t a trap. Then Tai and the Listener came into the picture, and things got doubly hard.”
“As you said, Constance,” Reynie said, “it’s a good thing we’ve had so much practice keeping our most secret thoughts to ourselves. The trick for us was to keep hidden what we already knew, but to let slip just enough for McCracken to feel convinced of the situation. Thanks to the Listener, he knew that Mr. Benedict was sending us clues and informing us of the supposedly poisoned tea he’d drunk—”
Constance’s eyes widened. “That’s why you had me tell Dad that we weren’t going to take any risks, even though you knew McCracken wouldn’t believe me!”
Reynie tapped his nose. “McCracken would expect us to try to throw him off our trail. If we didn’t at least try, he would have been suspicious.”
“And later,” Constance said, thinking back, “when you and I faced him at the barrier—he said he knew that we’d been trying to solve some kind of riddle. You were probably glad!”
Reynie grinned. “I was. One more convincing detail, right? The harder the situation looked for us, the less it would look like a trap to them. We needed to know as little as possible. But we trusted Mr. Benedict to have done everything he could to give us the advantage. He knew what we were capable of—and, well, he is a genius, after all.”
“We knew what we were capable of, too,” Kate said. “And that includes you. What you did back there at the safe room—we all imagined you could do something like that. So did Mr. Benedict, of course. We were trying to protect you by keeping you out of things, but believe me, it definitely boosted our confidence to have you there. It made the rest of us safer.
“Speaking of which,” Kate went on, giving Constance a shrewd look, “I happen to know now what you really did for me—what you did for all of us.”
Sticky turned to Reynie. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
Reynie shook his head. They both looked expectantly at Constance, who merely shrugged and rested her chin on her knees, and then at Kate, who was shaking her head with a look of admiration.
“When I was trapped with McCracken and company,” Kate explained, “I asked Constance to inform Mr. Benedict of the situation. I thought there might be some chance he could help me out, you know.” (Here Sticky and Reynie nodded knowingly.) “At the time, I just thought he wasn’t able to, for whatever reason, or that Constance hadn’t been able to get through to him.
“But I learned from Mr. Benedict just this morning that she did get through to him,” Kate said, looking at Constance with an expression of mock disapproval, “and he told her that he could protect me, but that doing so would make me miserably sick for a while—and not just me, but also you boys and Tai—and he asked her if the situation was dire enough to warrant that. She told him never mind.”
Now it was Reynie and Sticky’s turn to look admiringly at Constance.
“Really?” Sticky said. “You did that for us, even knowing how sick it would make you?”
“You are something else, Constance,” said Reynie. He put a hand over his heart.
“Something else and then some,” Sticky said, echoing the gesture.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Constance, who looked very pleased to be acknowledged in this way, “any of you would have done the same thing for me, and you know that you would. Also, I overestimated how much I could help Kate! I thought I could take them all out, but I only managed a few. What if something had happened to her after that?”
“Yes, it was a very shameful performance,” Kate said, furrowing her brow. “You only disabled the most powerful Ten Men with your mind.” She laughed. “Maybe deep down you had a tiny speck of confidence in my abilities. What do you think about that?”
“Maybe,” Constance said with a roll of her eyes. “But how was it that Dad could have helped you, anyway? He was stuck in that security suite. Could he have pushed a button and released some kind of gas, maybe?”
The other three all tapped their noses.
“Thanks to Sticky,” Reynie said. “I mean George. Sorry.”
Sticky cleared his throat. “You know what? I’ve been thinking about this. I would rather you three call me Sticky. I’ve never gotten comfortable with your calling me George.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Kate said, refilling everyone’s cups from the teapot. “I’ve had the hardest time remembering.”
Reynie looked uncomfortable. “To be honest, for me the challenge has been how it’s been making me feel—like I’m talking about a different person instead of one of my best friends. I’ve wanted to do it for your sake, and I still will if you change your mind. I think it would be easier now. Before, I already felt like I was losing you in some way. Something in me kept wanting to blurt out the old name, maybe to resist what I feared was happening. I really didn’t mean to, though. I’m sorry about that.”
Far from being annoyed by this revelation, Sticky was touched, and he assured Reynie that there was nothing to be sorry about.
Constance, for her part, did feel annoyed. She was having a hard time keeping up with what to call Sticky when she wanted to provoke him.
“No,” Sticky was saying, “I think when I meet new people, I’ll introduce myself as George, but you can all, you know, stick with Sticky. I don’t have to be one or the other. I can be both.”
“Oh, like Mr. Cole said,” Kate observed. “You aren’t becoming a different person. You’re becoming more persons.” She frowned. “More people? Is it persons or people?”
“Technically—” Sticky began, but Constance cut him off.
“Technically, it was my dad who said that,” she said peevishly, “and Mr. Cole was just quoting him. Nothing against Mr. Cole. But also technically, George”—this she said with a satisfied smirk—“you haven’t explained about this gas for which, evidently, we owe you our humble thanks.”
Sticky sighed. The gas, he explained, was the result of one of their special projects: He had seen duskwort under a microscope. He had learned enough about it before it disintegrated to embark on a series of productive experiments. With the brilliant input of Mr. Benedict and Rhonda, Sticky had made significant progress in the development of formulas that would diminish the unfortunate effects of narcolepsy and other sleep disorders.
“And why did no one tell me about this?” Constance interrupted.
The others laughed and rolled their eyes.
“This was around the time,” Reynie explained, “that you began saying that if you heard another single word about chemistry, you would scream an endless scream. You wrote a threatening poem about it. The title, if I remember correctly, was ‘The Endless Scream.’”
“Oh, right!” Constance said, her expression turning fond as she recalled her poem.
“After that we discussed it rather less around you,” Sticky said. “And then we found even more reason for secrecy, because when my research led me to the formula for a unique sleeping gas, Mr. Benedict requested that I share the formula with him and Rhonda and then never mention it again. Well…” He shrugged. “At that point we all knew he intended to use it at the KEEP.”
“Since then,” Kate said, “we’ve never discussed it. We knew it needed to be kept an ironclad secret. But we all understood that it was a potential part of the trap.”
Constance narrowed her eyes. “So those emergency security measures Dad went to implement had to do with the sleeping gas. If he was the only one who knew about it, he was the only one who could use it against the Ten Men.”
“Exactly,” Kate said. “And first he had to mix up a fresh batch from the formula. The gas loses potency within a few days. Sticky, tell her what you named it.”
“I do feel rather proud of that,” Sticky said. “It’s called KeepSleep, and—”
Constance groaned.
“It’s called KeepSleep,” Sticky repeated doggedly, “and Mr. Benedict, Rhonda, and I are the only ones in the world who know the formula. I’ve never written it down. We agreed that it was too dangerous to risk its falling into the wrong hands.”
“It poses no mortal threat,” Reynie explained, “but it will knock you out for at least a day or two, unless you’re injected with the antidote. Either way, when you wake up, you will definitely feel terrible for a while. So we knew that Mr. Benedict would use it as a last resort, or only in specific circumstances, to protect us. Once we had the Ten Men trapped inside the barriers with us, though, we also knew that we’d won, because if things went badly enough, Mr. Benedict could just disperse the KeepSleep, and everyone would be knocked out—including the Ten Men.”
“But how would that make things better?” Constance said, her brow wrinkling. “Wouldn’t everyone just wake up eventually and be in the same situation?”
“As for that,” Sticky said, “everyone wouldn’t be knocked out, actually. The safe room would be, well, safe as long as the barrier was down, and I wouldn’t be knocked out, either, because I injected myself with a special formula ahead of time. Unfortunately, having that in my system meant that exposure to KeepSleep would make me incredibly sick, but at least I’d be conscious, which would allow me to revive you all with the antidote.”
“The serum!” Constance cried.
“Right,” said Kate. “That whole business about poison was a ruse, and we knew it as soon as we saw it in Mr. Curtain’s letter. When you thought Sticky was down in the Blab mixing up the antidote to this fictional poison, he was actually preparing the antidote to KeepSleep—enough to revive all of us if things shook out that way—and injecting himself with his special counteractive formula. He’d already volunteered to be the one to do that.”
“I thought you all didn’t discuss it,” Constance said.
“Not recently,” Reynie said. “We discussed it back when we realized that the KeepSleep would be part of the trap. We made certain decisions and then did our best to hide it all away in the backs of our minds.”
From Constance’s expression it was unclear whether she was about to chide them or thank them, but before she could do either, a screeching sound interrupted their conversation, followed by the telltale rattle and clank of the platform. The trapdoor fell open, and presently the smiling face of Mr. Benedict rose into view, followed by the rest of his body, smartly attired in a lavender suit.
“Don’t get up, don’t get up!” he cried, throwing the lever and stepping nimbly from the platform. “Why, how dashing you all look!”
Despite his admonition, everyone but Constance rose to greet Mr. Benedict, and they all exchanged compliments with him and inquired about the state of lunch preparation below.
“Moocho’s profound lasagna is almost ready,” Mr. Benedict told them. “The table is set, our guests are soon to arrive, and your parents are all wondering where you are. I’ve been dispatched to alert you. But I also wished to thank you. I’m delighted enough that John and his wife will be here, but to learn that you also arranged for Violet to come? What an occasion!”
“We didn’t do much ourselves,” Reynie said. “It was Captain Noland who agreed to bring her from Paris.”
“Indeed, and as a guest of honor on his wonderful ship! I certainly owe Phil a debt of gratitude as well,” Mr. Benedict said. “But you all had the idea, and you made the invitations and the arrangements, and I will be forever grateful.”
Reynie, Sticky, and Kate tried to return the expression of gratitude—after all, they insisted, they had so much to thank him for, too—but Mr. Benedict would not be swayed from his course.
“Do you know,” he went on, his bright green eyes growing brighter still with tears, “I haven’t had all of my closest friends and family in the same room since I was a boy, when, incidentally, I had no family, and my closest friends numbered exactly two. To have all of you together today, well, I can hardly begin to express how much it means to me. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime gift. Once in a lifetime, my friends.”
Mr. Benedict took out a lavender handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes, and blew his nose. Then, ducking beneath the Whisperer’s red helmet to kiss Constance on the top of her head, he added, “And it’s still a marvel to me that I can allow myself to experience a pure emotion without the risk of falling asleep. For that I thank you again, my dear.”
Constance briefly patted his shoulder. “You’re welcome again. Also, Dad, it’s super awkward when you cry in front of people, you know.”
At this, Mr. Benedict laughed his distinctive laugh, rather like the nickering of a horse, and Constance said, “That’s only slightly better.”
