the mysterious benedict society and the riddle of ages

Preoccupied as he’d been with urgent matters, however, Reynie had given the signs little thought. He had been aware, for the last thirty seconds or so, of something different in the house. But when it came to noticing things-noticing things, understanding things, and figuring things out-“average” could hardly describe him. His ears were not particularly sharp indeed, his hearing, like almost everything else about him, was perfectly average: He had average brown eyes and hair, an average fair complexion, an average tendency to sing in the shower, and so on.

Yet Reynie’s ears had detected an unfamiliar tread. Instead, he sat at his desk in an attitude of attention, staring at the door, wondering who in the world could be standing on the other side.įor a stranger to be lurking in the hallway should have been impossible, given the fact of locked doors, security codes, and a trustworthy guard. From his study window Reynie might easily have been looking out upon that tree or those flowers, or he might have lifted his gaze to the sky, which on this fine spring morning was a lovely shade of cobalt blue. The door, currently closed, belonged to his study on the third floor of one of those houses-in this case a gray-stoned edifice half-covered in ivy, with a magnificent elm tree in its courtyard and, surrounding the courtyard, an old iron fence quite overgrown with roses. In a city called Stonetown, on a quiet street of spacious old houses and gracious old trees, a young man named Reynie Muldoon Perumal was contemplating a door.

The mysterious benedict society and the riddle of ages