Post by Dante on Jun 25, 2006 11:02:34 GMT -5
Family Sabotage
On the sixth story, one of the housekeepers removed a disguise, and drilled a hole behind an ornamental vase in order to examine the cables that held one of the elevators in place, while listening to the faint sound of a very annoying song coming from a room just above her.
-The Penultimate Peril, by Lemony Snicket
There was a knock at the door of the hotel room. “Hello?” a voice asked. “Am I disturbing anyone?” There was no answer. A key turned in the lock, and a housekeeper walked into room 266. She began what may have looked to any passer-by like cleaning work – folding sheets, checking under beds, dusting the undersides of the furniture. However, such methods are equally good at locating hidden items.
Susan Eriny had worked at the Hotel Denouement for nearly a month, and uncovered more plots by the day. In the shadowy world of V.F.D., conspiracies were everywhere, and even apparently usual things were in fact unusual. Waiters talked in code, newspapers left out vital details, tea sets contained important secrets, and everybody was spying on everyone else. Disguised as a housekeeper, Susan Eriny made a good spy, although the manager she worked for preferred not to call it that. But what else could one call it? Somebody who sneaks around in disguise, making observations – that was a spy, Susan reasoned, no matter what name you used to make it sound more acceptable.
Discovering nothing suspicious in the room, Susan finished her normal cleaning work and then left, clutching a basket of dirty blankets, heading for the elevator. Before she got there, though, a manager accosted her, springing up as though from nowhere from around a corner. Like his identical brother, the manager was very tall and skinny, and his arms and legs stuck out at odd angles. He was holding two plastic jugs in his thin hands, and spoke to Susan in a low voice.
“These two jugs contain extremely flammable chemicals,” the manager said. “I’ve just recovered them from a hotel room, where they’d been hidden after being stolen from the hotel. We need to put them somewhere where they won’t be found by such people again.”
Susan frowned at the manager’s ever-unfathomable tone, and replied in what she thought was an equally unfathomable way. “I’m on my way to the laundry room right now,” she said. “I could put them there, for safe-keeping. Anyone who didn’t need to know about those chemicals wouldn’t find them, hidden in such an unlikely place.”
“You’re certainly good at thinking up clever schemes,” the manager said, but Susan could not tell whether it was in an approving tone or a disapproving one, merely that it was unfathomable. “You can hide them under these blankets.” The manager leaned a bit closer towards Susan, his eyes darting left and right along the corridor to check they weren’t being observed. “I’m grateful for your assistance, housekeeper,” he said. “Not many people have the courage to help with a scheme like this.”
Susan smiled gratefully, and tucked the jugs under the folds of the dirty blankets. The manager vanished again, and Susan climbed into the elevator, which quickly descended towards the basement.
Susan liked the manager of the Hotel Denouement very much. She’d wandered the world alone for years, searching for a way to fight back against the people who’d torn her life apart when she was a young woman, when her home had burnt to the ground. Eventually, she met people with similar stories, and they all joined together to fight the villains in their lives. Susan had only recently been sent to help out against the villains at Hotel Denouement, and the manager had looked after her, and treated her as an equal. She worried, though, that sometimes she wasn’t talking to the manager at all; his identical brother was a terrible person, the manager had said, who would trick her at any opportunity. Susan wasn’t too sure she hadn’t participated in a few schemes for the other manager, but she’d never had the stomach to tell her friend. Especially since it could have been his brother she was talking to, anyway.
Susan left the dirty blankets and the flammable chemicals in the laundry room, where she was sure nobody could do them any harm, and checked her list of duties. There was only one left for the day: Bring a meal to a captured villain in room 597. The meal and room key were hidden inside an ornamental vase to the right of the elevators on that floor. Susan took an elevator to the fifth floor, and found a tray piled with sandwiches inside it, as promised, along with a small, shiny key. Then, she paced briskly to room 597, and knocked on the door.
“Room service,” she said, in as pleasant a tone as she could manage. “Room service for Mr. Bruce.”
“Yeah, come in,” a loud voice said, and Susan unlocked the door and walked in. The room was empty, save for a short man wearing a plaid coat and smoking a cigar. His leg was chained to one of the room’s heavy beds, so while he could walk about the room, he couldn’t get out of the door. “You guys are real idiotic for keeping me locked up here,” he said. “I’d shout and complain more, but the food sure is good.”
“We pride ourselves on having only the very best chefs at the Hotel Denouement,” Susan said, before thinking of the person who ran the Indian restaurant in room 954, and adding, “mostly.”
“Good food is no excuse for villainy, though,” Bruce said, taking the tray of sandwiches from Susan and starting to eat one. Continuing to speak while he chewed a mouthful of food, he added, “What am I locked up here for, anyway?”
“Your part in the theft of a valuable reptile collection,” Susan said, although the manager hadn’t told her much about Bruce’s crimes. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other duties to attend to…”
“Oh, is that what they told you?” Bruce called, as she turned away from him. “That’s not how it was at all! I was just swooped up by that bearded fellow and that woman, with their eagles! If I had a phone, I’d call my lawyer in an inst –”
In an instant, Susan shut the door on him, and locked it again, before returning to the elevators to return to the basement, where she would hide the room’s key inside a vacuum cleaner. Bruce’s imprisonment worried her, though. The man seemed brash and unpleasant, but not dangerous in the slightest. But she trusted the manager on this – after all, Ernest wouldn’t lie to her, would he?
When her home had been burnt down when she was just a young woman, Susan was distraught at the loss of her parents and her two sisters – not that she’d been around much to mourn them; as the smoke began to fill the house, Susan’s father had pressed a heavy trunk upon her and told her to flee the city, quickly, while he went to find her other two siblings. When Susan returned after a few days, there was nothing left but ash, and an old issue of The Daily Punctilio had reported no survivors to the Eriny fire. Susan had done some investigation of her own, not satisfied with the Punctilio’s reports that the fire had started accidentally, and had discovered the existence of a mysterious organisation named V.F.D., which was connected to many fires that had been set throughout the world. Since then, Susan had been travelling the world, fighting against the wicked volunteers who had caused so many fires, and had formed alliances with other people whose homes had been burnt down, or who had lost family or friends, or who had once been members of V.F.D. but left in disgust at its tactics. Susan had met her best friends working against V.F.D., but her greatest comrade was Ernest Denouement. If only she could better tell the difference between him and his villainous brother, the volunteer Frank…
When Susan arrived back at her room in the basement, 012, she found a note from Ernest tucked beneath her door. “Have lots of important information for you,” she read. “Meeting of V.F.D. at Hotel Denouement in three days time. Meet me in room 021 tomorrow morning and we will discuss over a picnic.”
Susan was concerned. If V.F.D. was meeting here in three days time, on Thursday… She shuddered to think of all the devious volunteers descending on the hotel like a swarm of flies. But she was sure Ernest had some sort of a plan to resolve the V.F.D. situation on land, just as she’d uncovered communications discussing plans to resolve the situation on the sea, and heard of the involvement of eagles freed from V.F.D.’s service being used against them in the sky. She was sure that everything would work out for the best.
---
Susan woke early the next day, and hurried to room 021 for her frank meeting with Ernest. When she got there, she found him standing alone without any kind of picnic basket nearby.
“I thought there was going to be a picnic,” Susan asked, after they had exchanged morning greetings.
“My brother intercepted the picnic, I’m afraid,” Ernest said, “but he won’t intercept this conversation. I’ve intercepted a message for Frank indicating that he’ll be staring out of a window all morning waiting for somebody to drop a stone in the hotel’s pond, to signal the arrival of some more volunteer spies, so he won’t have time to be skulking around here.”
“Was your brother always such a disagreeable individual?” Susan asked.
“When we were young, we were exactly the same,” Ernest sighed. “But one day, when we were four years old, everything changed. Our home burnt down, and V.F.D. took us away to the mountains. Frank stayed loyal to the organisation, but I saw how dangerous they were, and left. We try not to let our enmity get in the way of the management of the hotel, but the volunteers and Frank are always hatching schemes against me, so me and I disagreeociates are always devising plots to avoid harm.”
“My house burnt down when I was young, too,” Susan said. “I lost my whole family in that fire, my parents and my two sisters. I was a lot older than four, though.”
“Let’s not go over painful memories,” Ernest said. “We need to discuss V.F.D.’s meeting on Thursday.”
“You’re right,” Susan said quickly, dismissing all thoughts of her lost relatives from her mind. “What are they plotting?”
“According to a message I found spelt out in fridge magnets,” Ernest said, “then V.F.D. is planning to have an enormous trial on Thursday, to acquit all volunteers and convict all the organisation’s enemies. I understand that one member of the High Court has been corrupted, and now works solely for the organisation.”
“That’s terrible!” Susan gasped. “How did such a noble institution become so tainted?”
“It’s just the wicked way of the world,” Ernest sighed. “Our enemies are infiltrating every organisation in the world, trying to achieve their own ends. Fortunately, I’ve been told by an old… An old associate that the other two judges of the High Court are nobler than their colleague. But that won’t be enough, if V.F.D. manages to come up with enough evidence.”
“Enough evidence?” Susan asked. “How can there be evidence against us?”
“V.F.D. twists everything,” Ernest answered. “They’ll turn every situation to make them seem the noble ones, and accuse us of all sorts of crimes. For quite a while, they managed to plant false stories in the newspaper about us, although the tables have turned on that issue. But it’s also a sad truth that even noble people like us are occasionally forced to do something villainous for the greater good. That’s the wicked way of the world, thanks to V.F.D.”
“That’s terrible,” Susan said. “What can we do to stop this?”
“You’ll be very busy today,” Ernest said. “I need you to go up to room 991 immediately, and watch the hotel’s pond. As soon as you see any ripples in it, ring the bell for the concierge in that room. I’ll be watching the bells, and will try to intercept whichever volunteer spies are being sent to my brother. Be careful, though. Frank will be hiding nearby watching for exactly the same thing, and you must make sure not to run into him – and if you do, try to pretend that you’re just another housekeeper, or somebody working for V.F.D.”
“I’ll do my best, Ernest,” Susan nodded.
“Excellent,” Ernest said. “I’ll contact you later regarding your other tasks for the day. But I know I can trust you to do the noble thing.”
Susan nodded once more, and bid goodbye to Ernest, and then took the elevator up to the ninth floor. Ernest seemed to know what he was doing, but what he had said worried her – V.F.D. was on the High Court, V.F.D. was everywhere, and there seemed to be no escape from their web of intrigue. Susan just hoped that her small contributions to the pond of nobility would make ripples big enough to affect V.F.D. and put an end to their wicked plans once and for all.
---
Susan snuck over to the door of room 991 and opened it, using a key Ernest had slipped to her inside a large grape. The room was one of the hotel’s unused ones, and so the walls were completely bare, save for a small button that linked to the concierge’s bells, and for a shuttered window at the far end of the room. Susan locked the door behind her, and pushed open the shutters to look down on the pond. She thought she could vaguely see three people standing on the far side of the lake, and perhaps another person nearby, but they were too far below her to be seen clearly. The three figures standing by the pond walked over to the others, and then they stayed still. After a few minutes of watching them, Susan realised that they probably wouldn’t move from their positions for quite some time, so she let her mind wander, and recalled more of her dim youth.
She and her sisters Tisiph and Ursula had spent most of their time seeing the sights of their town, or attending parties with their friends – an eccentric group of friends, but the Eriny sisters were eccentric people themselves, still living at home and spending their evenings lounging in the library, reading poetry. The three of them had eventually gotten part-time jobs in a friend’s theatre troupe, making costumes. Not long after that, though, the Eriny parents had told their children the family intended to move away from the city – to the country somewhere, far away from the bustle and dirt of the city, they said, for a better life. The Eriny children had complained bitterly to their parents and friends, but to no avail. A few days later, though, Susan had been alone in the library, when she smelt smoke…
Susan jerked herself back to the present. She could see ripples spreading out across the pond far below, and realised that somebody had thrown in a stone into the pond. She dashed across the room to press the button for the concierge and send her own signal to Ernest that the volunteer villains were on their way to the hotel, and then slipped out of room 991 and into the corridor, locking the door behind her. There was nobody in sight, so Susan hurried to the other end of the corridor to take an elevator down to the lobby. She reached the elevator doors, and was pressing a button to summon one, when a voice spoke to her from behind.
“I wouldn’t take that elevator, if I were you.”
The hotel’s other manager, Frank, had appeared as though from nowhere, and was smiling strangely at Susan from next to the doors of another elevator. Susan felt a sudden chill as she realised she had been discovered, but remembered Ernest’s advise to her. “Why not, sir?” she asked, pretending to be a normal housekeeper and not a spying housekeeper.
The manager, Frank, smiled again. “Recently, I heard that somebody had cut the ropes of that very elevator,” he said. “I wonder who it could have been.”
“So do I,” said Susan quickly. “A removed elevator will be very inconvenient to the hotel’s guests.”
“Yes, it will,” Frank agreed. “Elevators have a brake which stops them from falling even if the ropes are cut, but a stationary elevator is still more inconvenient than a moving one, as I’m sure you know.”
“It must make it very difficult to move around,” agreed Susan. “Should I fetch a sign to put over the elevator’s doors, to show that it’s out of use?”
Frank looked surprised. “That would be very helpful to the guests,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be so helpful – not if you’re who I think you are.” Susan gasped, and Frank leaned closer to her. “Are you?” he asked. “Are you who I think you are?”
Thoughts rushed through Susan’s head. Could Frank have found out that Susan was a spy, working for Ernest? She’d been so careful to cover her tracks… But then again, perhaps Frank thought she was a volunteer, and didn’t expect one of his wicked associates to be helpful to the guests. Or maybe he simply hadn’t expected a mere housekeeper to be so helpful. Susan tried to concentrate through all the possibilities running through her mind, and decided on a safe answer to Frank’s question.
“Of course I’m who you think I am,” she said. “I’m a housekeeper.”
“Yes,” Frank said, and nodded slowly, still smiling mysteriously at Susan. An elevator arrived next to him, and he smiled again, his face as unfathomable as the darkest depths of the ocean. “Going down to the lobby?” he asked.
Susan nodded calmly, and stepped into the elevator. Frank stepped in behind her, and as the doors slid shut, made a movement as though he was going to say something, but then he must have decided against it, for he relaxed again. Soon the elevator had reached the lobby, and when the elevator doors slid open again, Frank slipped out, and was lost in the huge crowd of visitors.
Susan craned her neck to try and see where the villainous hotel manager had gone, but she couldn’t see him, due to the sheer number of well-dressed or shabby, polite or uncouth, friend or foe, fathomable or unfathomable. Susan withdrew to a shadowy back corner of the lobby, looking out for either Frank or Ernest, when a cough alerted her to somebody standing next to her.
The person standing next to Susan looked exactly like Frank and exactly like Ernest, and he had an unfathomable smile like Frank’s and a sly expression like Ernest’s, but Susan could not tell if he was either brother. He seemed like somebody completely new to her, but accustomed to shadowy corners. He glanced warily at the nearby bustling crowd, and spoke to Susan in a low voice.
“Housekeeper, there have been reports that somebody has cut the ropes of one of the elevators,” the manager said, continuing to smile unfathomably and watch the room slyly. “Such reports will soon reach the ears of the guests, and the hotel’s reputation for safety may suffer if we have not already addressed the problem. I’m sure you know how important the hotel’s reputation as a safe place is.” The man paused and looked at Susan for a second, as though expecting her to say something in this, but she remained quiet, and he stopped being quiet. “Housekeeper, a member of the hotel’s staff needs to report to the sixth floor, where the rope is reported to have been cut. You must examine the ropes of the elevator through the hotel’s walls, to check their condition, using this.” The manager paused, and handed a large electric drill to Susan. She took the heavy tool and held it awkwardly in her hands while the manager continued to speak. “Many of the guests do not like to see hotel staff as they go about their duties, as I’m sure you’re aware, and many of them would wonder why a housekeeper is carrying around such a suspicious item. I recommend that you try not to be seen, or try not to be seen as a housekeeper.”
The manager smiled unfathomably at Susan again, before slipping away into the shadows, leaving Susan alone with the drill. Her conversations with the hotel’s two managers were often strange and multi-layered, so that the guests did not become suspicious, but this was one of the most suspicious conversations she had ever had. She could not tell if she had just spoken to Frank or Ernest, or whether this manager was a volunteer or not. In fact, she almost wondered for a moment if it was the legendary third manager of the Hotel Denouement… But that was ridiculous. In all the time she’d known Ernest, unless she’d been speaking to Frank, then neither manager had mentioned having another brother, and it was ridiculous to think that there was some secret volunteer librarian spying on every one of her associates, and cataloguing evidence against them. It was just a fear of shadows, the ever-present shadow of V.F.D. that hung over their lives like a cloud of smoke. Susan shook her head. Still, she needed to perform her duty as a housekeeper. The manager had told her not to be seen as a housekeeper, and she knew exactly what he was talking about there…
---
On the sixth story, one of the housekeepers removed a disguise, and drilled a hole behind an ornamental vase in order to examine the cables that held one of the elevators in place, while listening to the faint sound of a very annoying song coming from a room just above her.
-The Penultimate Peril, by Lemony Snicket
There was a knock at the door of the hotel room. “Hello?” a voice asked. “Am I disturbing anyone?” There was no answer. A key turned in the lock, and a housekeeper walked into room 266. She began what may have looked to any passer-by like cleaning work – folding sheets, checking under beds, dusting the undersides of the furniture. However, such methods are equally good at locating hidden items.
Susan Eriny had worked at the Hotel Denouement for nearly a month, and uncovered more plots by the day. In the shadowy world of V.F.D., conspiracies were everywhere, and even apparently usual things were in fact unusual. Waiters talked in code, newspapers left out vital details, tea sets contained important secrets, and everybody was spying on everyone else. Disguised as a housekeeper, Susan Eriny made a good spy, although the manager she worked for preferred not to call it that. But what else could one call it? Somebody who sneaks around in disguise, making observations – that was a spy, Susan reasoned, no matter what name you used to make it sound more acceptable.
Discovering nothing suspicious in the room, Susan finished her normal cleaning work and then left, clutching a basket of dirty blankets, heading for the elevator. Before she got there, though, a manager accosted her, springing up as though from nowhere from around a corner. Like his identical brother, the manager was very tall and skinny, and his arms and legs stuck out at odd angles. He was holding two plastic jugs in his thin hands, and spoke to Susan in a low voice.
“These two jugs contain extremely flammable chemicals,” the manager said. “I’ve just recovered them from a hotel room, where they’d been hidden after being stolen from the hotel. We need to put them somewhere where they won’t be found by such people again.”
Susan frowned at the manager’s ever-unfathomable tone, and replied in what she thought was an equally unfathomable way. “I’m on my way to the laundry room right now,” she said. “I could put them there, for safe-keeping. Anyone who didn’t need to know about those chemicals wouldn’t find them, hidden in such an unlikely place.”
“You’re certainly good at thinking up clever schemes,” the manager said, but Susan could not tell whether it was in an approving tone or a disapproving one, merely that it was unfathomable. “You can hide them under these blankets.” The manager leaned a bit closer towards Susan, his eyes darting left and right along the corridor to check they weren’t being observed. “I’m grateful for your assistance, housekeeper,” he said. “Not many people have the courage to help with a scheme like this.”
Susan smiled gratefully, and tucked the jugs under the folds of the dirty blankets. The manager vanished again, and Susan climbed into the elevator, which quickly descended towards the basement.
Susan liked the manager of the Hotel Denouement very much. She’d wandered the world alone for years, searching for a way to fight back against the people who’d torn her life apart when she was a young woman, when her home had burnt to the ground. Eventually, she met people with similar stories, and they all joined together to fight the villains in their lives. Susan had only recently been sent to help out against the villains at Hotel Denouement, and the manager had looked after her, and treated her as an equal. She worried, though, that sometimes she wasn’t talking to the manager at all; his identical brother was a terrible person, the manager had said, who would trick her at any opportunity. Susan wasn’t too sure she hadn’t participated in a few schemes for the other manager, but she’d never had the stomach to tell her friend. Especially since it could have been his brother she was talking to, anyway.
Susan left the dirty blankets and the flammable chemicals in the laundry room, where she was sure nobody could do them any harm, and checked her list of duties. There was only one left for the day: Bring a meal to a captured villain in room 597. The meal and room key were hidden inside an ornamental vase to the right of the elevators on that floor. Susan took an elevator to the fifth floor, and found a tray piled with sandwiches inside it, as promised, along with a small, shiny key. Then, she paced briskly to room 597, and knocked on the door.
“Room service,” she said, in as pleasant a tone as she could manage. “Room service for Mr. Bruce.”
“Yeah, come in,” a loud voice said, and Susan unlocked the door and walked in. The room was empty, save for a short man wearing a plaid coat and smoking a cigar. His leg was chained to one of the room’s heavy beds, so while he could walk about the room, he couldn’t get out of the door. “You guys are real idiotic for keeping me locked up here,” he said. “I’d shout and complain more, but the food sure is good.”
“We pride ourselves on having only the very best chefs at the Hotel Denouement,” Susan said, before thinking of the person who ran the Indian restaurant in room 954, and adding, “mostly.”
“Good food is no excuse for villainy, though,” Bruce said, taking the tray of sandwiches from Susan and starting to eat one. Continuing to speak while he chewed a mouthful of food, he added, “What am I locked up here for, anyway?”
“Your part in the theft of a valuable reptile collection,” Susan said, although the manager hadn’t told her much about Bruce’s crimes. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other duties to attend to…”
“Oh, is that what they told you?” Bruce called, as she turned away from him. “That’s not how it was at all! I was just swooped up by that bearded fellow and that woman, with their eagles! If I had a phone, I’d call my lawyer in an inst –”
In an instant, Susan shut the door on him, and locked it again, before returning to the elevators to return to the basement, where she would hide the room’s key inside a vacuum cleaner. Bruce’s imprisonment worried her, though. The man seemed brash and unpleasant, but not dangerous in the slightest. But she trusted the manager on this – after all, Ernest wouldn’t lie to her, would he?
When her home had been burnt down when she was just a young woman, Susan was distraught at the loss of her parents and her two sisters – not that she’d been around much to mourn them; as the smoke began to fill the house, Susan’s father had pressed a heavy trunk upon her and told her to flee the city, quickly, while he went to find her other two siblings. When Susan returned after a few days, there was nothing left but ash, and an old issue of The Daily Punctilio had reported no survivors to the Eriny fire. Susan had done some investigation of her own, not satisfied with the Punctilio’s reports that the fire had started accidentally, and had discovered the existence of a mysterious organisation named V.F.D., which was connected to many fires that had been set throughout the world. Since then, Susan had been travelling the world, fighting against the wicked volunteers who had caused so many fires, and had formed alliances with other people whose homes had been burnt down, or who had lost family or friends, or who had once been members of V.F.D. but left in disgust at its tactics. Susan had met her best friends working against V.F.D., but her greatest comrade was Ernest Denouement. If only she could better tell the difference between him and his villainous brother, the volunteer Frank…
When Susan arrived back at her room in the basement, 012, she found a note from Ernest tucked beneath her door. “Have lots of important information for you,” she read. “Meeting of V.F.D. at Hotel Denouement in three days time. Meet me in room 021 tomorrow morning and we will discuss over a picnic.”
Susan was concerned. If V.F.D. was meeting here in three days time, on Thursday… She shuddered to think of all the devious volunteers descending on the hotel like a swarm of flies. But she was sure Ernest had some sort of a plan to resolve the V.F.D. situation on land, just as she’d uncovered communications discussing plans to resolve the situation on the sea, and heard of the involvement of eagles freed from V.F.D.’s service being used against them in the sky. She was sure that everything would work out for the best.
---
Susan woke early the next day, and hurried to room 021 for her frank meeting with Ernest. When she got there, she found him standing alone without any kind of picnic basket nearby.
“I thought there was going to be a picnic,” Susan asked, after they had exchanged morning greetings.
“My brother intercepted the picnic, I’m afraid,” Ernest said, “but he won’t intercept this conversation. I’ve intercepted a message for Frank indicating that he’ll be staring out of a window all morning waiting for somebody to drop a stone in the hotel’s pond, to signal the arrival of some more volunteer spies, so he won’t have time to be skulking around here.”
“Was your brother always such a disagreeable individual?” Susan asked.
“When we were young, we were exactly the same,” Ernest sighed. “But one day, when we were four years old, everything changed. Our home burnt down, and V.F.D. took us away to the mountains. Frank stayed loyal to the organisation, but I saw how dangerous they were, and left. We try not to let our enmity get in the way of the management of the hotel, but the volunteers and Frank are always hatching schemes against me, so me and I disagreeociates are always devising plots to avoid harm.”
“My house burnt down when I was young, too,” Susan said. “I lost my whole family in that fire, my parents and my two sisters. I was a lot older than four, though.”
“Let’s not go over painful memories,” Ernest said. “We need to discuss V.F.D.’s meeting on Thursday.”
“You’re right,” Susan said quickly, dismissing all thoughts of her lost relatives from her mind. “What are they plotting?”
“According to a message I found spelt out in fridge magnets,” Ernest said, “then V.F.D. is planning to have an enormous trial on Thursday, to acquit all volunteers and convict all the organisation’s enemies. I understand that one member of the High Court has been corrupted, and now works solely for the organisation.”
“That’s terrible!” Susan gasped. “How did such a noble institution become so tainted?”
“It’s just the wicked way of the world,” Ernest sighed. “Our enemies are infiltrating every organisation in the world, trying to achieve their own ends. Fortunately, I’ve been told by an old… An old associate that the other two judges of the High Court are nobler than their colleague. But that won’t be enough, if V.F.D. manages to come up with enough evidence.”
“Enough evidence?” Susan asked. “How can there be evidence against us?”
“V.F.D. twists everything,” Ernest answered. “They’ll turn every situation to make them seem the noble ones, and accuse us of all sorts of crimes. For quite a while, they managed to plant false stories in the newspaper about us, although the tables have turned on that issue. But it’s also a sad truth that even noble people like us are occasionally forced to do something villainous for the greater good. That’s the wicked way of the world, thanks to V.F.D.”
“That’s terrible,” Susan said. “What can we do to stop this?”
“You’ll be very busy today,” Ernest said. “I need you to go up to room 991 immediately, and watch the hotel’s pond. As soon as you see any ripples in it, ring the bell for the concierge in that room. I’ll be watching the bells, and will try to intercept whichever volunteer spies are being sent to my brother. Be careful, though. Frank will be hiding nearby watching for exactly the same thing, and you must make sure not to run into him – and if you do, try to pretend that you’re just another housekeeper, or somebody working for V.F.D.”
“I’ll do my best, Ernest,” Susan nodded.
“Excellent,” Ernest said. “I’ll contact you later regarding your other tasks for the day. But I know I can trust you to do the noble thing.”
Susan nodded once more, and bid goodbye to Ernest, and then took the elevator up to the ninth floor. Ernest seemed to know what he was doing, but what he had said worried her – V.F.D. was on the High Court, V.F.D. was everywhere, and there seemed to be no escape from their web of intrigue. Susan just hoped that her small contributions to the pond of nobility would make ripples big enough to affect V.F.D. and put an end to their wicked plans once and for all.
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Susan snuck over to the door of room 991 and opened it, using a key Ernest had slipped to her inside a large grape. The room was one of the hotel’s unused ones, and so the walls were completely bare, save for a small button that linked to the concierge’s bells, and for a shuttered window at the far end of the room. Susan locked the door behind her, and pushed open the shutters to look down on the pond. She thought she could vaguely see three people standing on the far side of the lake, and perhaps another person nearby, but they were too far below her to be seen clearly. The three figures standing by the pond walked over to the others, and then they stayed still. After a few minutes of watching them, Susan realised that they probably wouldn’t move from their positions for quite some time, so she let her mind wander, and recalled more of her dim youth.
She and her sisters Tisiph and Ursula had spent most of their time seeing the sights of their town, or attending parties with their friends – an eccentric group of friends, but the Eriny sisters were eccentric people themselves, still living at home and spending their evenings lounging in the library, reading poetry. The three of them had eventually gotten part-time jobs in a friend’s theatre troupe, making costumes. Not long after that, though, the Eriny parents had told their children the family intended to move away from the city – to the country somewhere, far away from the bustle and dirt of the city, they said, for a better life. The Eriny children had complained bitterly to their parents and friends, but to no avail. A few days later, though, Susan had been alone in the library, when she smelt smoke…
Susan jerked herself back to the present. She could see ripples spreading out across the pond far below, and realised that somebody had thrown in a stone into the pond. She dashed across the room to press the button for the concierge and send her own signal to Ernest that the volunteer villains were on their way to the hotel, and then slipped out of room 991 and into the corridor, locking the door behind her. There was nobody in sight, so Susan hurried to the other end of the corridor to take an elevator down to the lobby. She reached the elevator doors, and was pressing a button to summon one, when a voice spoke to her from behind.
“I wouldn’t take that elevator, if I were you.”
The hotel’s other manager, Frank, had appeared as though from nowhere, and was smiling strangely at Susan from next to the doors of another elevator. Susan felt a sudden chill as she realised she had been discovered, but remembered Ernest’s advise to her. “Why not, sir?” she asked, pretending to be a normal housekeeper and not a spying housekeeper.
The manager, Frank, smiled again. “Recently, I heard that somebody had cut the ropes of that very elevator,” he said. “I wonder who it could have been.”
“So do I,” said Susan quickly. “A removed elevator will be very inconvenient to the hotel’s guests.”
“Yes, it will,” Frank agreed. “Elevators have a brake which stops them from falling even if the ropes are cut, but a stationary elevator is still more inconvenient than a moving one, as I’m sure you know.”
“It must make it very difficult to move around,” agreed Susan. “Should I fetch a sign to put over the elevator’s doors, to show that it’s out of use?”
Frank looked surprised. “That would be very helpful to the guests,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to be so helpful – not if you’re who I think you are.” Susan gasped, and Frank leaned closer to her. “Are you?” he asked. “Are you who I think you are?”
Thoughts rushed through Susan’s head. Could Frank have found out that Susan was a spy, working for Ernest? She’d been so careful to cover her tracks… But then again, perhaps Frank thought she was a volunteer, and didn’t expect one of his wicked associates to be helpful to the guests. Or maybe he simply hadn’t expected a mere housekeeper to be so helpful. Susan tried to concentrate through all the possibilities running through her mind, and decided on a safe answer to Frank’s question.
“Of course I’m who you think I am,” she said. “I’m a housekeeper.”
“Yes,” Frank said, and nodded slowly, still smiling mysteriously at Susan. An elevator arrived next to him, and he smiled again, his face as unfathomable as the darkest depths of the ocean. “Going down to the lobby?” he asked.
Susan nodded calmly, and stepped into the elevator. Frank stepped in behind her, and as the doors slid shut, made a movement as though he was going to say something, but then he must have decided against it, for he relaxed again. Soon the elevator had reached the lobby, and when the elevator doors slid open again, Frank slipped out, and was lost in the huge crowd of visitors.
Susan craned her neck to try and see where the villainous hotel manager had gone, but she couldn’t see him, due to the sheer number of well-dressed or shabby, polite or uncouth, friend or foe, fathomable or unfathomable. Susan withdrew to a shadowy back corner of the lobby, looking out for either Frank or Ernest, when a cough alerted her to somebody standing next to her.
The person standing next to Susan looked exactly like Frank and exactly like Ernest, and he had an unfathomable smile like Frank’s and a sly expression like Ernest’s, but Susan could not tell if he was either brother. He seemed like somebody completely new to her, but accustomed to shadowy corners. He glanced warily at the nearby bustling crowd, and spoke to Susan in a low voice.
“Housekeeper, there have been reports that somebody has cut the ropes of one of the elevators,” the manager said, continuing to smile unfathomably and watch the room slyly. “Such reports will soon reach the ears of the guests, and the hotel’s reputation for safety may suffer if we have not already addressed the problem. I’m sure you know how important the hotel’s reputation as a safe place is.” The man paused and looked at Susan for a second, as though expecting her to say something in this, but she remained quiet, and he stopped being quiet. “Housekeeper, a member of the hotel’s staff needs to report to the sixth floor, where the rope is reported to have been cut. You must examine the ropes of the elevator through the hotel’s walls, to check their condition, using this.” The manager paused, and handed a large electric drill to Susan. She took the heavy tool and held it awkwardly in her hands while the manager continued to speak. “Many of the guests do not like to see hotel staff as they go about their duties, as I’m sure you’re aware, and many of them would wonder why a housekeeper is carrying around such a suspicious item. I recommend that you try not to be seen, or try not to be seen as a housekeeper.”
The manager smiled unfathomably at Susan again, before slipping away into the shadows, leaving Susan alone with the drill. Her conversations with the hotel’s two managers were often strange and multi-layered, so that the guests did not become suspicious, but this was one of the most suspicious conversations she had ever had. She could not tell if she had just spoken to Frank or Ernest, or whether this manager was a volunteer or not. In fact, she almost wondered for a moment if it was the legendary third manager of the Hotel Denouement… But that was ridiculous. In all the time she’d known Ernest, unless she’d been speaking to Frank, then neither manager had mentioned having another brother, and it was ridiculous to think that there was some secret volunteer librarian spying on every one of her associates, and cataloguing evidence against them. It was just a fear of shadows, the ever-present shadow of V.F.D. that hung over their lives like a cloud of smoke. Susan shook her head. Still, she needed to perform her duty as a housekeeper. The manager had told her not to be seen as a housekeeper, and she knew exactly what he was talking about there…
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