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decorative screen, was a curious chair, and that this chair, too, was somehow linked to the terrible machine.
    At least, this was what the guards thought they knew.
    The truth was that the chair was the machine itself. The guards’ imaginations had reached in the wrong direction—a reasonable error, for their imaginations had little to guide them. The chair appeared simply to sit there, quiet and still, behind the decorative screen in that cozy chamber. Doing nothing. Threatening nothing. With its curious red helmet attached to the seatback, the chair resembled an old-fashioned hair dryer—an eccentric piece of furniture, certainly, but a harmless one.
    This was the Whisperer.
    And for the moment, in the hands of Mr. Benedict, the Whisperer
was
harmless. Indeed, under Mr. Benedict’s care the Whisperer had been made to seem as inoffensive as possible; it had even been made to do a certain amount of good.
    Unfortunately, despite Mr. Benedict’s best efforts and intentions, the Whisperer was soon to pass from his care. When it did, the fates of a great many people would once again be pulled along behind it, like leaves trailing in the wake of a speeding vehicle. And the very first to be so affected—and among the most important—were these four children now enjoying the fresh air under the watchful eye of Ms. Plugg.

Real and Official Matters

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    T he rest of the winter passed more or less without incident: Sticky celebrated a housebound birthday, missing yet another optometrist appointment; the ever-exploring Kate discovered what she believed to be new nooks and crannies (she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what a cranny was); Reynie learned a new chess opening and tried parting his hair on the opposite side; and Constance completed an epic poem about pig drool. But none of these events counted as news, exactly, at least not the sort the children so earnestly wished for.
    There had been no word on Mr. Curtain’s whereabouts, no hint of progress in the authorities’ search. Nor were there any developments on the home front, for when the children had approached Mr. Benedict about Mr. Bane’s suspicious absences, he had said they were quite right to wonder about it but that he would be imprudent to speak of it further. And so they were left to speculate not only about Mr. Bane, but also about Mr. Benedict’s reasons for maintaining silence on the matter.
    Speculating grows wearisome eventually, however, and even secret society meetings lose appeal when there’s nothing new to discuss (especially when the members have already spent too much time together). Time passed slowly for the children, therefore, with lessons every weekday, endless rounds of board games and cards, and never a foot set off the property. Until one day, just as spring was mustering itself for another appearance, something finally happened.
    The day began normally enough, with newspapers after breakfast. As usual, Sticky blazed through all of them (Mr. Benedict subscribed to several) while Reynie and Kate traded sections of the
Stonetown Times.
Whenever they finished a section they would pass it to Constance, who glanced at the headlines and drew mustaches and devil horns on people in the photographs. The children were allowed to linger over the papers as long as they wished, but they seldom lingered long, for the older ones looked forward to their exercises and lessons, which offered a welcome change of pace, and Constance ran out of pictures to deface.
    On this morning Sticky finished even more quickly than usual, then hustled off to find Number Two, who was letting him use her computer to access the Stonetown Library catalog. He was in the process of memorizing it, had already spent hours scrolling through the records, and today he hoped to finish. It had been tedious work, but it would make his future research more efficient, and Sticky was excited.
    “I would have thought Mr. Benedict had every book in the world,” Kate