Ben squeezed the door shut. He took a huge deep breath and felt his heartbeat slow down a fraction, only for it to start racing again a second later.
He was in the lobby area of the shul and right there, in front of two big doors, were three people. Two of them were men wearing suits. The third was a woman in a blue dress and big white hat.
The doors led into the main shul area where the bimah and ark were, and where the congregation sat.
Thankfully, all three of the people had their backs to Ben, but he had no idea if they were humans or aliens. For all Ben knew, they could be the three aliens who had been stationed at the back of the shul.
Ben looked around. To his right there was a staircase that led up to a balcony. It overlooked the shul, and it would be the perfect place for Ben to see everything that was going on.
The floor of the lobby was made of stone, so Ben was pretty certain he could make it to the bottom of the staircase without making any noise. He started creeping toward it. Each step felt laced with danger. It was as if he was on stepping stones and crossing a lake bubbling with red-hot lava.
He got closer and closer to the staircase, until he was just two steps away. He wanted to jump onto it, but he kept his focus and was just about to take his penultimate step when …
“What are you doing?”
Ben turned to his right. All three of the people were looking at him. He tried to read their faces. They seemed to be asking him a genuine question, but he was certain that things could turn nasty if he gave the wrong answer.
“Everything’s fine outside now, false alarm,” said Ben, trying to sound as confident as he could. “But I thought I’d check up here just in case.”
Ben was guessing that if they were aliens, they wouldn’t be able to tell whether he was human or alien either. He really hoped he was right.
The three of them looked at him for a second, then the one who’d spoken said, “Good idea.”
Ben nodded and was about to head up the stairs when the woman said, “I’ll go up the other staircase and check the other side.”
Ben really didn’t want company up there. Even though the woman would be on the balcony on the other side of the shul, she would probably look over at him and see what he was doing.
“I’d better make it look as if I’m really checking,” said Ben to himself.
He made his way up to the balcony and was relieved to discover that it appeared to be empty. In order to see properly what was going on downstairs, though, Ben would have to go right out to the middle of the balcony, and that was risky. Alien Mom, Dad, Ant, and Carla were almost certainly somewhere downstairs and if they looked up and saw him, he could be in big trouble.
Ben glanced across to the balcony on the other side of the shul. Sure enough, the alien woman was there. She looked over and saw Ben. He pointed down to the ground to tell her that he was going to check around under the seats up there. At least, he hoped that was what she understood by his gesture.
Crouching down, Ben shuffled like a frog in thick, gooey mud to the seats in the middle. There was a small wall running along the balcony and Ben’s head was just out of sight, but he knew he would have to look over at some point in order to see what was going on downstairs.
“Come on, Ben,” he said to himself. “You haven’t come all this way for nothing. Let’s do it.”
Inch by inch, he began raising his head. In a matter of moments he would finally see what was going on in the shul below.