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Post by Dante on Jul 25, 2014 15:48:11 GMT -5
CHAPTER SIX I couldn’t help myself. Perhaps my sister could, but faced with such a statement, I could not remain calm enough not to babble a series of wrong questions. “Who? When? Shouldn’t –” “Quiet, Snicket! It might hear you,” hissed Mitchum. Presumably his hammering was intended to deafen the Beast. “I don’t want you ruining my hard work by luring it back to the scene of the crime.” “The Bombinating Beast struck in the police station itself?” I asked, and could not help peeking through the door. I don’t know what I expected to see. I didn’t want to know. Right now I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, however, which is secretly what nobody wants to see when they peek at anything. “Don’t go creeping about, Snicket,” barked the officer. “Now that we know the masks and the bell no longer deter the Bombinating Beast, we all have to be much more careful. Who knows when it will strike again?” “I don’t even know when it struck last,” I said, “much less who it struck at this hour, or if they shouldn’t have been somewhere else. I probably have at least one more question about the whole situation, too.” Mitchum frowned at me, or maybe it was just his face settling into its usual expression. He sighed, and I could tell he’d been eating egg for breakfast. “If I don’t tell you the whole story right now, you’ll just weasel about town until you find out, won’t you?” he asked. I nodded. The truth should be polite. “Listen up then, Snicket, and hear a bedtime story I wouldn’t tell my own son, for fear he’d never sleep again,” growled Harvey Mitchum. It was nice to know that he had so much consideration for his own son, even if he had none for other people’s. “It happened while me and Mimi were out at old Van Dyke’s place with you, risking our necks in a Beast’s nest – or so we thought. For while we left the police station alone, the Beast made its second attack behind our backs, under our very noses. It crept through two locked doors and swallowed two people whole, and then vanished without a trace, leaving no sign that either it or its victims had ever been there at all.” There were only two doors in the police station, and only two people behind the second door. I could have solved the entire case if I’d only been paying attention. “May I see the scene of the crime, officer?” I asked. Harvey Mitchum sighed again. “You may as well go right in,” he said. “It’ll keep you from bothering me, anyway.” His enormous hand shoved me through the doorway like I was snow in the drive. His head appeared above me and yelled into the police station. “Mimi, can you entertain Snicket for a minute? He’s getting in my hair and my way, and as I’m sure you remember, I have a job to do!” His head vanished, and I heard the door slam behind me with a thud that nearly knocked me flat on my face. This was partly from surprise that a Mitchum would ever get the last word in an argument. The Stain’d-by-the-Sea police station looked, as I’d mentioned, the same as it always did – like one long room lined with filing cabinets and other boring objects that looked more like they belonged in an office, which the police station probably had been, once. But right at the back of this office was a large, square hole in the wall lined with metal bars, behind which was a tiny rectangular space with an even tinier rectangular window crossed by the same bars high up in a corner. Nobody tall enough to reach that window could fit through it, even if it weren’t barred, and right now nobody could fit through it at all as it had been boarded up from the outside. Clearly it could be reached by a stepladder. I wondered if that was important. The barred door of the jail cell was closed and looked locked, and across the room I could see a series of hooks which were all occupied by carefully-labelled keys. Just below these hooks was a desk, and behind this desk was a chair, and in this chair was a boy clinging to his mommy, wailing like a siren at the sight of me. “It’s not the Bombinating Beast again, is it, mommy?!” he shrieked. “Don’t let him eat me!” He stopped crying for a moment and turned his dry eyes to me, and gave me a smile like I was about to walk into a lamppost. “Hello, Stew,” I said. “You don’t need to make your siren noise right now. You’re not in the back of the police car.” “How dare you insult my dear sweet poodle, Snicket!” exclaimed mommy, Mimi Mitchum. “I’ve half a mind to throw you in the cell this minute for scaring him and for being so rude.” “I’m sorry,” I said, not adding “that your son is a poodle.” “But it sounds as if your cell isn’t as secure as it used to be, so perhaps that’s not a good idea.” “It looks like you’re right,” Mimi Mitchum admitted, casting a fearful glance across the station at the small and empty room. “People have mysteriously disappeared in that room, Snicket. Mysteriously disappeared, in unexplained circumstances.” “Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander,” I said, naming two wicked individuals recently arrested for kidnapping and assorted violence. “Those two,” the other Officer Mitchum agreed. “I suppose it’s no great loss to our town, as we were just going to send them on the train to the city for trial there. But it just goes to show that nowhere is safe anymore. If even the police station can’t keep people safe, there’s no point in us trying to defend the town, so we’re just going to board ourselves up in here and wait.” “Until what?” I asked. “Until we run out of food,” Mimi shrugged. “If nobody’s come to save us by then, we’ll just hop in the pickup and drive to the city. My mother’s always asking why Harvey never lets me and Stewie visit her.” Stewie looked disgusted at the very thought, but he wiped the disgust off like a stain and replaced it with his usual mean look. I felt a little bit the same, but for a different reason. It is important to try and do the right thing, even if it’s impossible. The police force should be the last people to give up and hide, not the first. But I hadn’t expected any better from the Officers Mitchum, and much less from their son. Stew wore that nasty look like a tattoo; you might not want to show it to everyone, but it’s hard to get rid of. While Stew’s mother cooed over him, I walked over to the jail cell to inspect the scene of the crime. However, it was hard to tell that any crime had been committed there at all. Lansbury Van Dyke had left behind a body and a certain amount of blood, but there really wasn’t any trace of Dr. Flammarion or Nurse Dander, just a cold and empty plate of undercooked eggs. Even the Bombinating Beast had standards. I grabbed the bars of the jail cell door and pulled. It clanged and didn’t open. I knew from experience that the cell lock was quite easy to pick if you knew what you were doing, but this door was still locked. You can use a lockpick to lock a door as well as unlock it, though I don’t know why you would want to. “You left the cell door and the police station both locked when you left, didn’t you?” I asked Mimi Mitchum. “Don’t call my mommy and daddy stupid!” Stew wailed, his lips curving upwards into a big smile as he looked at me. “At least you stick up for mommy and daddy, don’t you, smoochums,” Mimi sniffed.. “We’re not stupid, Snicket. We don’t let criminals just go running wild after we’ve gone to so much trouble capturing them.” The Mitchums hadn’t captured Flammarion and Dander at all; they had merely arrested them. I let that point slide, but not another one. “I heard,” I said, “that there was a girl locked in the jail cell recently, and she also vanished while you were away.” “That was different,” snapped the officer. “She probably had an accomplice who helped her to escape. A girl like that probably has all kinds of troublemaking friends she can call on whenever she needs them.” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously and piggily at me. “Like you, for example.” “I was busy capturing some criminals at the time,” I reminded her. I would have happily helped the girl, and another girl, escape from their prison cells if I was able to, but Stain’d-by-the-Sea kept on calling me away. “I was just wondering if the locks were really secure.” “We searched those two for lockpicks when we brought them in,” Mimi said, “and found nothing. But in any case, we’ve been taking greater precautions since that girl got out. Why don’t you have another look at the front door, Snicket?” I looked over my shoulder. A cylindrical device, looking something like a latch, had been crudely attached to the inside of the door. I could see a series of small dials on it. “That’s a four-digit combination lock,” Mimi announced smugly. “It can be worked from the inside or the outside, but it only opens when the right number is put in. It’s unpickable, so says the instruction manual here, and nobody knows the combination if their name isn’t Mitchum.” Her smile faded a moment later, into the same worried, harassed frown she had shown when I walked in. “To get out of this police station and leave it like it is, Flammarion and Dander would’ve had to unpick the lock on the cell door, relock it once they walked out, unpick the lock on the station door, guess the combination, walk out, relock the door, and reset the combination lock. You can’t explain that, Snicket, even if we leave out the question of why they relocked everything when they escaped.” I looked from the cell door to the front door to the rack of keys. “Did you take the cell key with you when you went to Van Dyke’s house?” “Why would we need to do that?” asked Mimi. “I left it right here on the hook just behind me, and you can see that it hasn’t budged.” Moxie was right. It’s easy to leave a locked room if you have an accomplice. I knew the answer to this locked room mystery, at least, though I didn’t know how I could possibly explain it to the Mitchums. But they wouldn’t listen unless I could explain the Van Dyke murder, either, and that was a lot trickier. I figured I’d work on an alternative explanation whenever I got tired of imagining invisible murderers who could phase through doors and fly from high windows. Still, there was no harm in confirming the truth before I left. “It’s a good thing,” I said, to one of the two people in the room, “that you weren’t hurt by the Bombinating Beast when it came in. I bet you were so scared that you fainted there and then.” “I-I was just taking a nap!” squealed Stew, his voice squeaking as I squeezed him. “I was so tired from doing my chores that I just fell asleep in this chair and missed the whole thing. But,” he added, looking so sneaky I was amazed that only I noticed, “I’m sure my mommy and daddy can protect me if they stay here and keep me safe for ever and always!” “Of course we will, darling!” cried Mimi, grabbing her son’s face and squeezing it like it was bread dough. “Can you imagine if that nasty Beast saw a sweet little pudding like you! You must have just been too good to eat up, not like that nasty Flammarion and Dander who got what they deserve.” She was wrong. Stew was as bad as the pair of them. Stew had told me as much, once, and then this morning he had been left alone with them. This whole case was like a crossword. I had only a couple of the letters I needed, not enough to guess what answer fitted the whole thing. But I’d work it out eventually. I just needed to pick up a few more letters, and I could fill in the blanks myself. Fortunately, there was a place where most of the letters in town seemed to end up, and it was where I was going next. Right on cue, the telephone rang. “Stain’d-by-the-Sea police station, Officer Mitchum speaking,” Mimi Mitchum said, snatching up the phone and shunting Stew away. Stew sidled over to me, and I sidled farther away. Stew Mitchum liked to kick people, if they didn’t let him pinch them. “You again, Carter?” Mimi said to the receiver, and I switched my attention back to her. A moment later, I got pinched. “What? More of it! And then – no I do not want to come down there and investigate! Here, you can handle this.” This last remark was directed at me. I gladly walked away from Stew and gratefully took the receiver. The Officers Mitchum were actually helping my investigation. I wondered if I was dreaming, and considered pinching myself to check, but Stew did it for me. “Hello? Ms. Carter?” I asked. “Is that you, Lemony? Lemony Snicket?” asked Carr Carter’s voice, and that surprised me. “Are you a member of the police force now?” “No, but nobody else is,” I said, twisting away from Stew and getting the phone cord wrapped around myself I had to grab the telephone to stop it from falling off the table, and something troubled me about it. “What’s going on, Ms. Carter?” “A while after you left this morning, I was working in my office, when I heard it again,” she said, her voice breathy and frightened. “The bombinating, Lemony.” “My friends call me Snicket,” I said. “Where was it coming from? What happened?” “It was coming from Mr. Van Dyke’s office again,” she said. “I didn’t find out what happened until now, as – well, to be honest, I was scared. I still don’t know what that noise is, but the last time we heard it, Mr. Van Dyke died. I locked the door of my office and didn’t come out until long after everything had gone quiet, and I could be quite sure that nothing was lying in wait for me. Then I went and checked the office, and…” I waited for her to pick up her sentence. This is usually the part where people would say “And?”, but it was not like she wasn’t going to finish. “…And the office door was wide open,” Carr said. “The key had been switched to the inside again, and it had been unlocked from there and opened.” I had been tricked over the phone before, but this had the ring of truth. My witness had had to wait until she was sure that the coast was clear, but now she was out. There was a clock on the wall, and it said it was fifteen minutes until lunch. I had somewhere to be. “Nothing else had been moved, and there was no sign that anyone had been there at all,” I prompted her. “Well – yes,” she said. “How did you know?” “An educated guess,” I said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about what happened. Lock the door again, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t go far from the house. I’ll be returning later to search it properly.” “Well, you seem to know what’s going on, at any rate,” Carr Carter said, though she was wrong about that. “I’ll be busy here for days, so you can visit whenever you want.” She didn’t add “and that will make this house less scary,” and I respected her for it. “Alright. I’ll be around sometime this afternoon, Ms. Carter.” “By the way, my friends call me Carr,” she said, and rang off. I hung up the telephone, gave Mimi Mitchum a nod and Stew Mitchum nothing, and walked over to the door. “Hey, Snicket!” a voice bellowed from across the room. Someone was coming to meet me. Harvey Mitchum walked back into the police station, brandishing his hammer in a way which he probably didn’t think was threatening. “Time to leave, Snicket. Go back to your guardian at the Lost Arms,” he said, though I intended to do no such thing. “I’m about to put the last nails in, and I don’t want you to accidentally be stuck in here with the rest of us. Just imagining how annoying that would be makes me think of this one time we visited Mimi’s mother.” “Harvey, how dare you!” cried Mimi Mitchum, and that was all I needed to hear. I could indeed imagine exactly how annoying it would be to be locked up with the Mitchums for days, and it was an awful feeling. It also made me think of my sister, and that filled me with an awful feeling, too, a complicated one that I couldn’t untangle. I could untangle the case of Lansbury Van Dyke’s disappearance, instead. Some of my tutors spoke of a day when all the world’s knots would be untangled and everything would be clear. I wasn’t sure if I believed in that day; if you don’t know what kind of knot you’re dealing with, sometimes trying to untangle it just makes it worse. But I believed there might be a day where I would understand what was going on in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and it wouldn’t be one where Stew Mitchum was poking me for twenty-four hours straight. I walked past Harvey Mitchum and out of the police station. I could hear him banging the door against the wall as I left. It was nearly lunchtime. There was a girl I was hoping to meet, one with the same swirling sea-green eyes and curving eyebrows as I had seen staring at me a few hours ago from the other side of a keyhole.
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Post by Hermes on Jul 25, 2014 16:51:15 GMT -5
Dante, can I just assure you that I am reading this with great interest? I have rather a lot on my plate right now - which should end soon, but I've said that before, and something new keeps coming up - so no time to write meaningful comments, but I hope to do so in due course.
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Post by Dante on Jul 27, 2014 14:48:58 GMT -5
CHAPTER SEVEN In one of the many dark corners of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, one where nobody lived and nobody worked, was a place where a girl I knew lived, and where something worked, though I had never seen another person there. Even though half of the town’s winding lanes looked the same, boarded-up and empty, I was getting used to them. Where the wide, dusty street of Caravan met the narrow, rubbish-strewn lane of Parfait, there was a corner, and on that corner was Black Cat Coffee, a building which looked as fading and ill-kept as all the rest, save that the sign outside it was painted black the ink the town once produced, and the door is left open. This was a good thing, as it was where I had scheduled my meeting. I walked in, and found that all was as usual in Black Cat Coffee. A piano was playing but the room was empty, and only the player piano’s music filled the room, along with a large and complicated machine built behind the counter, covered in arms and funnels and conveyor belts and three buttons marked with the first three letters of the alphabet. Something felt off about the atmosphere in the Black Cat that day, and not just because she wasn’t there. It took me a moment to realise what it was, but with nothing to distract me but the piano, I soon realised that it was the piano itself that was wrong. It sounded out of tune, and seemed to skip a note now and then in the strange, exciting music it was playing. Somebody needed to mend it, but I doubted there was anyone left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea who knew how to mend a player piano. I wondered if the machine that brewed the Black Cat’s special blend was also beginning to rust and stick. I didn’t particularly care for myself; I don’t drink coffee. But somebody I knew did, and would be very disappointed if the coffee, like the ink, dried up and left only its bitter scent behind. Speaking of behind, I checked behind the counter and behind the machine and even behind the piano to make sure that Black Cat Coffee was absolutely empty. It wasn’t that I thought the girl I was here to meet would be hiding there; she had a better hiding place, and I knew where it was. I was more worried that somebody else might be there, spying on us. But since it was just us, I pressed the second button on the front of the machine, and waited a minute while the device produced a heap of sticky dough that it pounded and baked and finally delivered to me as a loaf of bread. I didn’t press the button for a drink. Black Cat Coffee only served one thing, and it wasn’t tea. I pressed the third button on the machine, the one that didn’t prepare me a meal at all. Instead, machinery whirred and clanked above my head, and a long section of the ceiling flipped down, bringing with it a flight of noisy metal stairs. She’d hear me coming, but it was still polite to knock, so I did, rapping my knuckles on one of the steps before I started to climb. “It’s me, Lemony,” I called, though she never called me that. “Are you there?” I hoped so. I believed there were at least two ways of leaving Lansbury Van Dyke’s office, and one of them was the same way I’d left. I’d left her a note there, written on a blank sheet of paper I’d been given, with a pencil I’d also been lent, and dropped there. “Black Cat Coffee, 12 o’ clock,” the note had said, but I’d left the pencil for the same reason I’d loudly reminded the Mitchums to leave the key to the office in the door. The trick I had used to get into the office could also get her out of the office, and it was just the sort of trick she’d know. All you need is a pencil, a sheet of paper, and a key stuck straight into a lock, and you too can alleviate unpleasant circumstances with an invitation to lunch. “Are you up here?” I called, as my head rose to the level of the attic, step by step by rickety rackety step. “I brought some bread.” Another step, another, and I could see all around the attic now. There was a long table stacked with other people’s mail, but not so many other people’s as last time I had visited, for where once there had been separate bundles of parcels, now just a few letters were laid out separately on the table, waiting for their recipients to collect. A few shelves against the wall were half-lined with packets of coffee, one of which had been bitten open by something, perhaps a mouse that had immediately learnt its lesson. There were also a few cupboards of various shapes and sizes littered around. One of them was bigger than it looked, but I didn’t know which one. “I didn’t bring you a cup of coffee, I’m afraid,” I said. “You drink too much of it already. I don’t know how you sleep at night.” Silence. I tore off a piece of the bread as I reached the top. It was better than nothing, and better than quite a lot of somethings, too. I looked around. I suspected that there was a way of closing the attic from upstairs, as well, or else the person I was looking for would have a lot more difficulty hiding here. If there was another button, right now it looked well-hidden. From upstairs, you couldn’t tell who might be creeping up to the bottom of the stairs and listening in on your whole conversation. She would probably know, though – she, who knew all this place’s secrets, and those of other places, too, and other people. Who knew more secrets than a girl the age I thought she was should, and more than I should, and yet hadn’t learned the one secret she had come to town in search of. That was why I was helping her, and in a way, that was why I was here. Solving Lansbury Van Dyke’s murder was the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons, but one of them was that I was sure that, like the trail of crumbs I was leaving on the unswept floor, it was one more clue that would eventually lead to the man I was hoping to find. “Are you hiding here, or am I talking to an empty room?” I asked. I really hoped that it was the former. If a person talks in a room and nobody is around to hear it, they still look ridiculous. “It was asinine the last time we did this, and it’s asinine now. This is murder, not hide-and-seek.” Nothing. I sighed. If she was here, she was hiding in one of those cupboards. I’d have to check each and every one of them. Or, alternatively, I could just search the one that looked like it was bigger than it looked. There was one standing just on the other side of the railing-enclosed gap from which the stairs descended, with barely enough room to open the doors and even less to reach in and take whatever you were looking for. It was dark back there, and the cupboard looked only just too small for a person to hide in. I walked over and opened the doors with difficulty, scraping them against the rail. If somebody had burst out there and then, they’d probably have knocked me over the railings and down to the bottom floor of the Black Cat, and that might just be the end of Lemony Snicket. Nobody did, though, probably because the cupboard was too small to hide in, and contained only a few stacks of mouldering Black Cat fliers and posters. “I wondered if you’d pick that one,” I heard a voice say. “I thought about it once, but it looked too much like a place somebody would try to hide in.” It was a voice I recognised, and a voice I’d been waiting to hear, and the reason I was still here in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Even without turning around, I could already see her, as she lived in my memory; the long, dark hair and pitch-black clothes which cloaked her like a moonless midnight; a green bag hanging loose from her shoulder, the same colour as the green eyes which couldn’t be turned away from when she fixed them upon you; and above them, eyebrows which curved like the question marks in all the sentences I could ever write about her. I turned around, and I didn’t have to remember her anymore; she was here. It was as if she had appeared out of nowhere, though in fact she must have slipped out of one of the cupboards I didn’t search. A cupboard doesn’t have to be small to be bigger than it looks. She looked pleased to see me, or so I liked to think. The truth is, I never knew quite what she was thinking. She was as good at being deceitful as she was at being honest, because she reserved the same smile for both, a smile harder to read than the most difficult books. A smile that could have meant anything. “Ellington Feint,” I said. She nodded. “Lemony Snicket,” she said. I tried to think of something to say, but some people have a way of leaving you speechless without seeming so themselves, even though they too are saying nothing. I had serious things to say to her, but unless you are the police, it is rude to barge into somebody’s home and start talking about murder straight away. I had already mentioned the murder, but I hadn’t been sure that anyone had been listening, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it anyway. I looked around for a way to keep the conversation friendly, but there was only one source of inspiration I could find. “I brought you some lunch,” I said, finally. “I’m sorry, I ate a little of it. I haven’t had lunch either.” “That’s alright, Mr. Snicket,” she said, using a name for me that I liked. “I’m happy to share.” “I could get another loaf,” I said. “I’d rather have coffee, thanks,” she said. “The Black Cat’s supplies are starting to run low, and I haven’t noticed the machine being restocked or serviced for some time. Bread and coffee are all I have, and I’d rather conserve them where I can.” “You’ve only been having bread and coffee?” I asked. “I know a place which serves better food than bread, not to mention better drinks than coffee. They generally don’t charge, either.” Ellington shook her head. “That wouldn’t be wise, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “You may remember that I’m presently wanted by the police in this town. I can’t risk being locked up again. And besides…” Here she looked sadly away, towards a dusty window in a corner of which just one pane had been swept clear by a black-fingernailed hand. “I don’t care to live comfortably while my father remains imprisoned in terrible circumstances. Even bread and coffee are better than the bread and water he must get from Hangfire.” Hangfire, a brutal villain who seemed to be the leader of the Inhumane Society. We’d crossed paths before, and it seemed increasingly likely that I was crossing paths with him again in this case. “What I wanted to speak to you about,” I said, “probably has to do with Hangfire.” “But does it have anything to do with my father?” she asked. “Since Hangfire kidnapped him, I’ve been alone in the world, Mr. Snicket. I left my home and my town and travelled across the countryside, seeking out anyone I could find who might have known where my father was, and they knew nothing. Then Hangfire himself told me to come here, to bring him a statue of the Bombinating Beast in exchange for my father – and I did it, but I still don’t have my father back.” “Hangfire has everything to do with your father, Ms. Feint,” I said, using a name I thought she liked. “From something I heard last time I encountered the Inhumane Society, it seems that your father is very important to your plans. They won’t give him up without a fight.” “They don’t need a fight,” she said. “I’ll do anything to get my father back, Mr. Snicket. I’ve stolen for them. I’ve risked my safety to get close to them. If they asked me to join their society tomorrow, I would do it.” There were times, rare but terrifying times, when talking to Ellington was like carrying a priceless vase on the edge of a cliff. One wrong move, and something beautiful would be ruined forever. “You mustn’t, Ms. Feint,” I urged her. “The Inhumane Society and Hangfire have committed kidnap and murder, and they’re plotting something barbaric. They’re terrible people.” “And my father is a wonderful man,” Ellington countered. “He’s worth doing anything to save, even something wicked – and as soon as he is saved, all the wickedness can stop, and we can return to our peaceful, simple life together.” I shook my head. “The thing about wickedness,” I said, “is that it always starts off being for something worthwhile, and ends up being just for itself.” I fixed my own eye on her this time. She didn’t look away, either, and we stared at each other for a long time, trying, like a girl I disliked from my schooling, to convince the other of our beliefs by the hypnotic power of our wills alone. Neither of us won. Instead, I said, “But in any case, the Inhumane Society haven’t invited you to join, and I don’t think they will. That leaves only one way to rescue your father, and that’s to stop Hangfire.” She nodded, to my relief. “Like you stopped him last time,” she said. “How did you find out about that?” “I overheard. You sent those boys from the taxi up here, to bring back some of the things I’d left in the Inhumane Society’s possession, and they couldn’t stop talking about it. Thank you for thinking of me, Mr. Snicket. I have so few possessions of my own now.” “You’re welcome,” I said, and at last felt the subject was changed. Ellington gestured down the stairs. “Shall we dine in the main room?” she asked. “I would rather we were more discreet about this, given the matter at hand,” I said. “You never know who might be listening. I take it it’s possible to close the stairs from up here?” In answer, she walked over to a dark and dusty corner across from me, and opened a small box that blended into the wall. Behind it was another button, and when she pressed it, the cogs and wheels surrounding the stairwell began to grind into life, and the stairs turned upwards like the hand on a great clock and stopped at the floor. Nobody could just walk in on us now, and once again I could be quite sure that I was alone in a dark and shabby room with Ellington Feint. I brought over a few stacks of fliers and put them on the floor, and when I returned, she’d brought a record player out from somewhere, one she had with her wherever she went; it had a crank on the side and a funnel on top that piped out a song I wanted to know better, one that sounded sad, but only if you listened carefully. We sat down together, in the least dusty part of the room, below a spot of light from the clear pane of the window, and we shared the loaf of bread and we talked.
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Post by Dante on Jul 29, 2014 15:11:23 GMT -5
CHAPTER EIGHT “You must know what I’m doing here, Ms. Feint,” I began. “You were in that room this morning, weren’t you?” “And you were outside it,” she said. “I saw you through the keyhole. I wanted to see if it was someone I could simply slip past, but I know you better than that.” “As you can imagine, I was very surprised to see you there. I asked you a question.” “I remember it,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “But you must know, Mr. Snicket, what I was doing there – what I would be doing anywhere in town.” “You were going after Hangfire,” I said, “and your father.” This time she nodded. “One advantage living in the Black Cat’s attic, besides the steady supply of coffee, is that people’s mail tends to end up here if they don’t want it delivered directly to their homes. The Inhumane Society’s mail is just the same, so I started picking it up myself and reading what they were saying to each other, in case I found any clues to where I could find them.” “It’s rude to read other people’s mail,” I said. “But sometimes it’s necessary to be rude.” “I make sure to carefully seal the letters again afterwards, so they won’t find out that I’m spying on them,” Ellington said. “But yesterday, I found a letter which finally gave me a useful lead. It said that they’d established that Lansbury Van Dyke was writing his memoirs, and that what he had to say about them could be very dangerous. They knew he had the documents hidden in his office somewhere, but had a plan to steal them this morning.” “But the letter didn’t say what the plan was,” I guessed. “If I’d known then what they were planning, I’d have sent the mail straight to the police instead – or better yet, to you,” she said. “But I thought they were only planning theft, not worse. I decided to break into the house myself and steal them first. I’d learn as many of the Inhumane Society’s secrets as I could, and then hold them to ransom in exchange for my father, or for a meeting with Hangfire.” “Holding an item they want to ransom,” I said, “hasn’t worked out well for you so far.” “They can’t hold out on me forever,” Ellington declared. “The more I have that they need, the sooner they’ll listen to me.” “Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but maybe it’s a little like putting your money in the bank. You may not trust the bank, but you know they aren’t going to let anyone else take it. By the way, I suppose you have the statue with you?” “It’s always close to me,” Ellington answered. The green bag, just big enough to contain a statue of a mythical monster, lay at her side, but the strap was coiled around her arm like a snake. I didn’t know if the Bombinating Beast was inside, and I didn’t know if I wanted it. Considering the dangerous situations Ellington was always getting into, her company was a surprisingly safe place. “So you broke in,” I said, changing the subject. “You must be getting very good at picking locks.” “I have been practicing,” she said, as if she’d been playing the violin or the accordion, “though in actual fact, there was a window left open at the back. I’d spent all day finding the address mentioned in the letter, and waited to sneak in at the dead of night, when I thought nobody could be awake any more. But it’s a big house, and I didn’t know where the office was. The only light I had was a box of matches I found in a cupboard here, but it barely cast any light at all, so it took me a long time and sometimes several matches just to check a single room. I crept very slowly and quietly around for practically the whole night, trying not to disturb anyone, because I didn’t know how many people lived in the house, either. The only room that looked right was the very last room in the house; I’d run out of matches by then, but the sun was coming up, which made it easier to search but made me worried that the Inhumane Society would arrive soon.” “They must have,” I said. “It was dawn when I arrived, too. So what was in the room?” “At that time, nothing out of the ordinary,” she said. “A couple of bookcases, a small desk, an office chair. It became obvious soon enough that there was nowhere in the furniture to hide a lot of papers, so there had to be a hidden compartment somewhere, behind a secret door, and I could guess where it would be. There was no sign, of course, of a trapdoor in the floor or ceiling – a person with a house like that doesn’t hide his papers under a loose floorboard or in the rafters – so it had to be in the wall, and there was only one with room for something like a wall safe.” I nodded, thinking back to what I’d shown Moxie on the diagram I’d drawn for her. “Two of the walls have windows in them, and a third has a door,” I said. “Because they’re embedded in the wall, you can tell how thick the wall is between the inside and the outside, which is not thick enough for any kind of hidden compartment. That leaves only the fourth wall – the one between Van Dyke’s office and his secretary’s office next-door.” “That’s the conclusion I came to,” Ellington nodded. “And it’s no coincidence that that wall was covered with paintings and masks and things; it was perfect for concealing any kind of secret opening. With only one part of the room to search instead of six or seven, it was easy to find what I was looking for.” “A secret door,” I said. “It was behind one of the masks on the wall, wasn’t it?” She nodded again, but her eyes were asking a question. “When I first went into that room, I thought I saw a mask on the wall with a green strap to hold it to a person’s head,” I explained. “But when I came back, the green strap was gone. I didn’t remember until later just what it reminded me of. It was the strap on your bag, wasn’t it, Ms. Feint? You got it caught in the door when you went in.” “It was actually visible from outside, then?” she asked, sounding surprised. “I heard voices nearby, and there was nowhere else to hide but in the hidden compartment. My bag got caught in the door when it closed, but I didn’t think I could open it again without being seen or heard.” It was time to start clearing things up. “But somebody did open it, didn’t they, Ms. Feint?” I said. “A fellow intruder.” It was my turn to be surprised. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken in that, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “The only person who used that door was me.” That didn’t make any sense, and I made it clear that I thought so. “But they must have,” I argued. “There was no other way in or out of the room. I don’t know if they were hiding in that secret passage, or if there was a way in or out of the house through it, but Lansbury Van Dyke’s murderer must have entered the room through that door and left the same way.” She looked at me strangely, then. The look was a little bit angry with me, but it was also confused with me, and worried, probably more worried than she would let on. “You seem to have misunderstood the nature of the hidden compartment, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “It’s simply a kind of secure cupboard, with a few shelves and a space at the bottom just big enough for me to crouch in. It wasn’t a room, it didn’t lead anywhere, nobody could have opened it without me knowing, and nobody did so at any time, apart from when I hid in it before and after the murder was committed.” Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like S. Theodora Markson is right about me. When she was at her most displeased, she would accuse me of being disobedient, impudent, a slugabed, a daydreamer, someone who sees conspiracies everywhere, and someone who makes a simple situation far more complicated than it needs to be. The organisation we worked for probably thought the same, though admittedly not because Theodora said so, for with the benefit of hindsight I was by now quite convinced that we had been sent to Stain’d-by-the-Sea to get both of us out of the way, to somewhere where we could do no more damage. But normally I am too big a critic of myself to worry about other people’s criticisms, and yet here I was, flat-out wrong about something I was ignorant of. I had made an assumption without investigating properly beforehand, and now I was back to knowing nothing. And I really should have known better. I think Ellington sensed my distress. That I didn’t say anything for a few minutes and stared blankly at my breadcrumb-coated shoes probably clued her in. “Mr. Snicket?” she asked, leaning closer to me. “I hope I haven’t upset you. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how the murderer had gotten out of the room, because I never had time to look around for exits, only hiding-places. Is it really impossible for the murderer to have gotten in and out?” “It can’t be,” I said. “Because they did. I just haven’t the faintest idea how.” “Would it help if I told you the rest of my story?” she asked. “I also noticed a few strange things about that room, and it might clear some things up for you, even if it doesn’t explain everything.” “Just explaining one or two things would be better than what I know right now,” I said. “Ms. Feint, I would be grateful for your assistance.” “As I am grateful for yours, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “As I was saying, I heard voices in the adjoining corridor, and the only place to hide in the room was the hidden compartment. The designer must have thought about what would happen if you locked yourself in, because there was a button on the inside of the door to open and close it as well. I threw my bag on one of the shelves, tucked myself into the bottom of the compartment, and closed the door behind me, hoping whoever was in the corridor was talking too loudly to hear.” “Why would they have?” I asked. As I said it, a possibility occurred to me, one that explained a lot and yet also blew the case wide open. “If it opened and closed with a button, did it use an electric motor?” “That’s right,” Ellington said. “The button was hidden in a niche on the wall on the outside, and there was a big red button on the inside, and when you pressed either of them, the motor started up. The door was metal and probably quite heavy, which I assume is why it needed a motor to move. When it did, it made this grating, grinding noise, something like a loud insect buzzing.” I put my head in my hands. “Of course it did,” I sighed. I could feel her looking at me quizzically, but she went on. “I had no idea that the strap of my bag had been caught in the secret door; I was more concerned that the sound of it opening and closing would be heard by whoever was coming towards the room, as I was sure it must be. I didn’t even relock the office door behind me. But if Lansbury Van Dyke came in there, he must have had more important things on his mind, like whoever he was talking to. I heard two voices, and I think they were both men’s, but I couldn’t say for sure; the secret door muffled the sound. I certainly couldn’t say what they were talking about, though I was trying to listen in case they knew anything that was important to me.” I nodded in agreement. Eavesdropping is a useful skill to practice, as is not getting caught eavesdropping. You get better at the second before the first, though. “It went quiet soon after that, and I heard the office door close,” Ellington continued. “I couldn’t tell the time in that cupboard, but I don’t think it was long after that that I heard a voice, I think a girl’s, over in the direction of the door. One of the men’s voices I’d heard before said something in reply, and I heard the office door shut again. A minute after that I heard voices again, but in the opposite direction – in the room behind me, which shared a wall with Lansbury Van Dyke’s office. It was the girl who’d spoken in the office, and I recognised the other voice as that chaperone of yours, Snicket, S.” “What you heard must have been Carr Carter showing me and Theodora to Van Dyke’s office, and him turning us out,” I said. “After that, Carr and Theodora talked in Carr’s office, and I sat outside. The murder should have happened sometime after that.” “I have to agree, but I couldn’t tell that anything was going on,” Ellington replied. “The room was totally quiet, no matter how hard I strained to listen. I thought I heard some shuffling going on during this period, but not a voice or a scream or anything like that – there was a thud like something falling, but that was all.” I suspected that was not just all, but everything – but I let her continue, though I’d just about guessed where this was leading. “It just went completely silent after a while, and I couldn’t hear anything at all,” Ellington said. “After I’d been sitting in that cramped space for quite a long time, hearing your chaperone talking away, I was starting to feel very uncomfortable, as if I’d been stuffed into a tuba case. I was worried that the compartment might be airtight, too. I’d come too far to die in a place like that, Mr. Snicket, for no good reason. I wasn’t afraid of what would happen to me outside, just afraid of what could happen to my father if I was locked up again, but there I was locked up anyway, so I decided to leave and face the consequences. So I pressed the button, and the secret door opened, buzzing loudly as it did so.” She stopped, and took a few deep breaths, composing herself. I needed to do the same thing. I’d been holding my breath without realising it, making sure I understood and remembered every word of what Ellington was saying. “I could hardly believe I’d stepped back into the same room,” Ellington said. She was good at stopping her voice from trembling. “Furniture and books and things from the wall were lying everywhere. It was so shocking that at first I didn’t even notice what was even more shocking, which was what was lying in the middle of the room.” She paused again, and this time, I said what she didn’t want to say for her. “A body. A body without a head.” She nodded, and didn’t speak for a moment. “That’s right,” she said at last. “It was horrible. I thought the floor was covered in blood at first, but no, it was just that strange carpet. There must have been a lot of blood, but the carpet stopped it from spreading – but at first it made everything seem even more horrible.” “I didn’t like to mention this,” I said, “but Theodora and Carr heard the buzzing when you left the hidden compartment. And then we all heard a scream.” Ellington looked away. “We are all entitled to be horrified in such circumstances, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I can’t admit to it, but perhaps I screamed; I can’t say that I noticed.” I understood. She had her pride, just like I had mine. “As soon as I saw the body, I was terrified that the murderer might still be in the room,” she continued. “I turned around and around to look, but there was nobody. There was nowhere to hide. But there was a way to escape, so I rushed to the door. The key was on the inside, so I assumed it was unlocked, but then I was scared again when somebody tried the door from outside. I knew, then, that the door was unlocked, but I didn’t think more of it; I just thought the murderer must have left by the window somehow – I hadn’t looked at them at all. But the door, and the fire door next to it, would be easier for me, so I thought that if I could only check who was on the other side of the door, I could see if I had any chance of slipping past them. So I bent down, and I took the key out of the keyhole, and I looked through.” “And at the same time, so did I,” I said. “We have a habit of bumping into each other in the worst places.” “Oh, I disagree, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I think that they’re the best places. I knew the moment I saw you that there was no getting past you, but I also knew that you were the only person who would help me to hide. I put the key back in the lock and looked for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere to hide from someone if they actually came into the room. My only option was to go back into the hidden compartment, wait until everyone left, and hope that nobody found my hiding-place.” “I didn’t have time to find it,” I said, “but if I had, I wouldn’t have done so while there were other people present. But I knew I’d need your help.” “And so you left me a note, and you gave me a hint,” she smiled. “You spoke loud enough for me to hear in the compartment, and I appreciated it. You even left me everything I needed to get out of the room on my own this time.” “It’s an old trick, but it works like new,” I said. I’d said it earlier, too, but it was still true. “We were lucky that the room was set up perfectly for us to pull it off. “Stick a sheet of paper under a door, below the keyhole. Use a thin object to push the key out of the keyhole. If you’re lucky, it’ll fall onto the paper, and you can pull the paper back into the room with the key on it. I learned that one years ago. I learned how to pick a lock, too, but I could never do it very well myself.” “Picking a lock takes quite a lot of time, at least for me,” Ellington said. “What I didn’t have back then was time, much less a desire to stay in the same room as a dead man for very long. As soon as I unlocked that door, I fled down the fire escape, and came here.” “And waited to meet me, as I’d requested,” I said. “‘Black Cat Coffee, lunchtime.’ I wrote it on that piece of paper and left it there for you to read. I didn’t know then whether you could leave the room through the secret door. I thought maybe someone could, but I didn’t know if you could. And now it looks like nobody could.” “And that’s why you needed to see me,” Ellington said. “You needed to know if I could explain what had happened.” “That’s not why I needed to see you,” I replied. “That’s why I wanted to see you. Making sure that you were safe is why I needed to see you.” “You’re very kind, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said, and she smiled at me, a smile that might have meant anything I wanted. “Since my father’s disappearance, nobody has been kind to me except you. I’m glad that it’s you, Mr. Snicket, who is helping me to search for my father.” I was flattered, but I was also worried, chiefly by why nobody else was searching for Ellington. Anyone with plenty of time to search that room would have easily found the hidden compartment, not least because the strap of Ellington’s bag was caught in the door. And yet she had been totally undisturbed. Somebody had asked Ellington to steal a certain statue for him, too, and then had never come to claim it. I wanted to find Ellington Feint, and somebody else absolutely didn’t want to. But it made me think of something else that somebody had wanted to find that day. “By the way, were Lansbury Van Dyke’s memoirs in that cupboard, in the end?” I asked, trying not to make it sound important. Ellington had managed to avoid mentioning it, but it was important to find out. She thought I’d forgotten, and blinked as she thought. “I found quite a few papers in the hidden compartment,” she said, “but of course, I had no time to read them in the office, and no light to read them in the compartment. I brought them back here, but I haven’t finished sorting through them.” That last part might even have been true, I thought. “Are they packed in your suitcase?” “That’s right,” she said. “It’s the safest place for them.” “The safest place for them is by your side,” I said, “so you’d better go and get them. If we leave them here, I’m sure someone will come looking for them, just like they would for the Bombinating Beast if you were ever to leave it alone.” “Are you taking me somewhere, Mr. Snicket?” Ellington asked, with a frown. “I must warn you, I have no intention of risking a meeting with the police.” “The police have abdicated their responsibilities,” I said, using a fancy phrase for “quit their job.” “There’s just me to investigate now – and you, Ms. Feint. We’re returning to the scene of the crime. I want to go back to that house, and I want you to come with me.”
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Post by Dante on Jul 31, 2014 15:23:28 GMT -5
CHAPTER NINE I wasn’t sure why, but on the rare occasions I ran into Ellington Feint in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, I rarely seemed to walk anywhere with her. We would meet up and part ways again without going anywhere together, and when we did, it was usually in a police car. It felt strange, walking with her down the streets of town, but it felt strange because it felt normal. Anything normal was strange in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. You couldn’t just walk down the street with a friend, the street had to be full of derelict houses, and the friend had to be a fugitive searching for her kidnapped father. We couldn’t just stop on the way at a corner café for a root beer float. We had to be in danger. Ellington had put on a long coat to keep out the cold wind that had started blowing around the town recently. I just had my usual clothes, which were either too hot or too cold or too itchy. I was learning to get used to it, and trying not to. You should never have to get used to something unpleasant. Ellington also had her long green bag slung over her shoulder, the one that probably contained a mysterious statue that was worthless to many but very valuable to someone. Her other arm was carrying a small striped suitcase, one which I knew contained a lot of clothes and a lot of papers and a record player, as I had seen them all when Ellington had put the record player away. It looked heavy. I had offered to take it from her some minutes ago, but she had declined, not surprisingly. I had offered to take her bag instead, and she declined that, too. We both knew why. Ellington Feint and the Inhumane Society and I wanted Van Dyke’s papers. Ellington Feint and the Inhumane Society and I wanted the Bombinating Beast. None of us were willing to share. I would have been hurt that Ellington didn’t trust me if I didn’t understand that. Besides, I didn’t entirely trust her either, though I wanted to. It is sad to have to trust someone less than they deserve. It is just as sad to make them carry more luggage than they should have to. For that reason we walked slowly. We had been talking in the Black Cat for a long time, and with how slowly we were walking, the hours of afternoon had been passing by faster than I’d expected. Time seemed to pass quickest in Stain’d-by-the-Sea when you weren’t doing anything. We were just a few streets from the former Stain’d-by-the-Sea Museum of Traditional Art, and Ellington must have known it too, for she spoke up just then. “So, Mr. Snicket, what is it you expect to find here? And what do you want me to do?” “It’s quite simple,” I said. “I’m going to search that room from top to bottom, and I’m not going to stop until I find out how a person could have gotten into and out of that room with all the doors and windows locked on the inside and impossible to reach.” “That doesn’t sound simple at all.” “And yet the murderer managed it in someone else’s house. Whatever he did, it can’t have been anything elaborate – no more secret doors, certainly no hidden machinery. It looks like the murderer may not have meant to pin the crime on the Bombinating Beast at all. I’m sure that things must be simpler than I imagine.” “A simple way of slipping in and out of a locked room unnoticed,” Ellington said, “sounds quite frightening, when you put it that way.” “I hope you aren’t getting apprehensive, Ms. Feint,” I said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of now. The murderer left hours ago, however he did it.” “I’m not apprehensive about the house, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “Quite the reverse. I’m never quite comfortable outside these days. My father loves the outdoors, and so do I, but only from the other side of a window.” “And yet the place you’re staying is so uncomfortable.” “It may be uncomfortable, but I chose it myself, Mr. Snicket, just as I chose to come with you today. It’s important to you to solve a mystery, but the only solution I’m interested in is the location of my father.” “Maybe one of those solutions points to the other,” I said. “If we find the murderer, we’ll be getting closer to your father. I can help you with that, and you can help me with this.” “Maybe you can answer my question, then, Mr. Snicket. What am I doing here?” “You saw the room when it was empty, twice,” I said. “I need to know if there was anything different there to what I saw. The murderer must have left some sign of his method. Anything that changed must be important.” Ellington tilted her head at me. “You mean that carpet, of course.” I tilted my head right back at her. The two of us must have looked like we were looking at each other through a funhouse mirror. “I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I thought it was pretty clear by now that I don’t have a clue what’s going on. What’s this about a carpet?” “But I mentioned before, Mr. Snicket, how strange it was,” she said. “I assumed you knew. It wasn’t there before Lansbury Van Dyke’s murder.” “Yes it was.” “No, it wasn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “If it had been there when I first entered that room, I’d have looked right under it for a hidden trapdoor. I’d have remembered something so garish and troublesome. But the floor was bare. That’s why I mistook it for a pool of blood later, Mr. Snicket – because I never saw it in that room until it had a dead body on top of it.” “Lemony Snicket!” We’d turned a corner, and the moment we did, somebody shouted to me. It was the right street, but nobody would have been the right person. It was Carr Carter, standing on the steps of the former museum, waving at me. She was some way off, but I could tell already that it was not a friendly wave. It was the kind of wave you wave when you are drowning in the ocean. And Carr Carter sounding worried was more familiar to me than Carr Carter sounding friendly. Ellington was still half-hidden by the corner. I had only a moment to make a dangerous, wrong, right decision. It was a decision I hesitated to make, so it was considerate of Ellington to make it for me. “I’ll sneak around the back, and see if I can see anything,” she said, and I was glad just to have to nod. I could have shaken my head, but she’d have ignored me. Something was going on in that house, we had both realised, right that very moment. I had been fooled once from the inside, but I didn’t think somebody could both fool me on the inside and Ellington on the outside. I had been right to ask her to join me, though I would shortly revise that opinion. Ellington was already slipping over an adjacent fence, but I took the more public route down the street to join Carr Carter on the steps. “What’s happened?” Carr glanced nervously through the dark, open door. “The same as before,” she said. “The same as all day. I was sitting in my office, and once again, it started bombinating…” Of course. That made sense. The murderer had finally returned to the scene of the crime to get what he came for, since he hadn’t accessed the hidden compartment when he murdered Van Dyke. Why he didn’t, when the snagged strap of Ellington’s bag must have made it perfectly obvious, was another mystery entirely. Speaking of which, there was something I had to check with her, first and foremost. “We spoke on the telephone earlier, didn’t we? I was at the police station at the time.” She looked puzzled. “Yes, of course we did. You don’t have a short-term memory problem, do you?” I shook my head, but didn’t go into detail. With a master mimic causing trouble in town, I always had to ask in person if I’d really been talking to the person I thought I was. “The murderer might have been back in the house, but you needn’t worry about the buzzing,” I said instead. “You must have heard it three or four times today, right? But all those times, judging from when I heard it, it only lasted about five seconds. And that’s because –” “It didn’t, Snicket.” “What?” “Just now, it started buzzing, through the wall of my office and in that room… and it didn’t stop. It was still going when I ran out.” That flat-out made no sense. The buzzing was made by a hidden door with an electric motor. It opened or it closed but either way it only took the same amount of time each time. Jamming it would just make the buzzing stop, not continue. Was someone playing games, pressing the buttons to activate the door over and over? “This is beyond a joke,” I said, angrily. I was tired of this mystery changing whenever I thought it was taking shape. “Come on. We’re going to that office.” “But the murderer – !” “If there’s really anyone there, we can just run away,” I said. “If I’m going to be scared of something, I’d rather understand it first.” I pushed my way in and ran through the gloomy room to where I remembered the stairs being. I couldn’t hear anything just then, but that didn’t mean there was nothing there. If the murderer wanted to scare Carr Carter out of the house, he had another thing coming, and that was me. Twice as many witnesses as he’d bargained for inside, and one more outside – Ellington. We had him cornered this time. No more slipping away before our eyes. There were a lot of stairs, and they kept on going around dark corners. Moxie must do this every day, I thought. Carr Carter was right behind me. It’s easier to confront danger when you have company, and I was glad she hadn’t backed down, or I might have had to as well, especially after what happened on the penultimate floor. I was just running past the musty and cracked windows and heading for the last stairway when I heard it – a muffled buzz, not like an insect buzzing, but more like some vicious implement, like a chainsaw. I also heard something else, subtler, louder. It was something moving on the floorboards above my head. When I say “something moving,” you probably wonder what I meant. Footsteps, perhaps, or some vague shuffling. It was neither. It was exactly like something slithering across the floor. I stopped dead, and Carr bumped into my back. I scarcely noticed. I was too busy looking at the ceiling, as if I expected to see through the floorboards and see what was making that hideous noise – or maybe see whatever it was melt through the floorboards and come snarling down at me. The buzzing lasted just a second this time, and then there was silence. And then I flinched as it repeated again, and the slither went crawling off across the floorboards. “What in tarnation…” Carr whispered, at my ear. She took a step past me, staring up at the ceiling like I was, her face white. “Snicket, what was that? What on earth was it?” “We can’t just stand here,” I said, though it looked more attractive than moving on. You don’t have time to be scared now, Snicket, I told myself. Remember all you’ve learnt. Get scared later. But it had to be later sometime. I knew that one day it would, and then I would be in the greatest trouble of my life. But for now I had to be brave even if it didn’t feel sensible. There’s no such thing as a Bombinating Beast, I told myself. It’s just a statue. It’s just a story, told to scare children. You are a child, Snicket, a nasty voice in my head reminded me. But Carr Carter wasn’t, or not quite, and she started to creep slowly forwards, like a thief in the house where she worked, like she didn’t want to be heard. I was okay not taking the lead. It was another thing I’d been taught not to do if it wasn’t necessary. Stay back and stay in the shadows. If other things can hide there, so can you. The stairs creaked like an aeroplane with each step. The gallery at the top floor overlooked the floors below it, and from the stairs I could see the corridor above start to take shape, the door of Carr’s office, the space outside it where I’d sat, the corner where three corridors met and nothing had moved. There was an almighty buzz and something black and shiny slid around the corner and out of sight. Carr grabbed my arm, and there was nobody’s arm for me to grab so I grabbed the bannister. I didn’t have an arm left to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming, but that would have been too easy a solution to this mystery. Don’t worry about the black creature slithering around, Snicket, that passes through walls and bites people’s heads off. It’s just a dream, and you don’t have to solve anything. As if. This was reality as cold and hard as the Bombinating Beast, and there was nobody else to solve it. That was what was frightening. There are times when you will believe in anything, even a Bombinating Beast. I would have believed anything at that time, that moment, just as I believed the evidence of my own eyes. “It went towards the office again,” Carr whispered. “You saw it, didn’t you, Snicket? Just what is going on in this town?” I had no idea. This town was all wrong. A town without people, an ocean without water, a crime without a murderer. The town was full of questions, and not an answer among them, not to the biggest questions, not to the vast question mark that hovered over the town like a dark cloud, like a vast shape widening and widening until its curls encircled the whole town and dragged it out of sight. Some people say there are some questions too terrible to answer. I hadn’t learned that yet, though one day I would. For the most mysterious things, some people are drawn to them like moths to a flame. I was one of them. I just couldn’t resist. My body tried to resist, but I couldn’t. I was a few hesitating steps from the top of the stairs, and I took them, and Carr too looked like she wanted to go on and run away all at the same time. Whatever that shape was, it had zipped around the corner and down the corridor that led to Lansbury Van Dyke’s office, or the fire escape. Ready to turn and run at any time, I tip-toed to the corner, every squeaky floorboard and footstep a blunder, and slowly leaned around to peek towards the door of the office. As my eyes revealed sliver after sliver of the corridor, its dusty windows, its uneven floorboards, the cobwebbed fire escape, I started to make out something black and rough and shiny just poking out of the open doorway to Van Dyke’s office. The buzzing started up like a roar and the shape leapt out of sight. There was a crash and angry thuds and an almighty bang as the buzz echoed with a ferocious grinding of jaws that made me retreat a few steps from the corridor where the office door was swinging shut before my eyes. And then just as suddenly as it had begun, the buzzing stopped, the thrashing crashing noises too, and all I could hear was the slow creaking of the door and the wind outside and the murmur of a distant automobile. Normal sounds, like I had just imagined the cacophony inside the late Lansbury Van Dyke’s office. I gave it a good few seconds to half a minute to be sure. Then I walked down the corridor to the office. The door had swung shut – not closed, but just ajar. There wasn’t a key in it. I gave the door a push like it might bite me, and looked inside. Empty. The office was empty, just as I’d left it, hours before. It was in chaos, but that, too, was just as I’d left it before, save that the long-cold coffee mug had been thrown a few feet away and had cracked into two pieces. As I’d observed earlier that day, because the door was in the corner of the room, you could see the entire room from the threshold, and see that there was nothing and nowhere to hide. A few pieces of flimsy furniture that had been pushed or knocked about. An office chair too big for a child and too small for an adult. A man-shaped shape beneath a white blanket, on a square red carpet fringed with curvy decorations. Three windows, all shut and all bolted. No sign of the secret door. I pushed the door open a little wider, and it banged on the wall a moment before it should have. The key had been stuck back in the inside. “Empty? …Empty again?” Carr appeared beside me. She looked pale, almost sick, looked around the room with disbelief. “But I just don’t see how…” “Nor me,” I admitted, and I admitted it quietly. I was having a little difficulty catching my breath. It was running away like I wanted to. There were things inside this room that I wanted to find, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find them now. Or what I’d find if I went looking. Where had it gone? Had that dark shape once again vanished into thin air, twisted between the walls, passed through ceiling or floor like it was nothing? Or was it still lurking somewhere inside that very room – inside the hidden compartment, or pressed impossibly thin in some unseen space, or simply turned completely invisible, hovering before my face even at that moment? “That’s it. I’ve had enough. We’re leaving, Snicket,” Carr said, and it wasn’t as abrupt as it sounded. It made sense. I wanted to look around – or rather, I needed to – but I was obeying her before I even thought about it. Besides, I had someone waiting for me outside. I had to go and see her, of course. I couldn’t just leave her. It was a convenient excuse, all the more so because it was true, but still, there I was, being dragged away from that room, from the heart of the mystery, all over again. Carr had me by the arm and was only just not running. She didn’t stop until she reached the lobby, when she actually ran to the door and pushed me out, and slammed the door behind her so fast she almost caught her fingers in it. I could hear her keyring rattling in her fingers as she desperately searched through it for the right key, heard it clatter clumsily in the lock, heard her finally breathe long and hard as the lock clicked and the danger, whatever it was, was locked away. Then she collapsed onto the steps beside me. I wasn’t tired, but my brain was. I didn’t know what to think any more. “I’m never going back there,” she said. “Never. I don’t know what that was, and I don’t want to know. My friends were right to leave town. This place is doomed. I don’t want to be here when it finally collapses. Not if there are…” She wrestled with her tongue for a moment. “If there are I-don’t-know-whats crawling around.” “There’s no such thing as a Bombinating Beast,” I said. “Then what was that?!” she demanded. “It was black and shiny and slithered about and made a horrible buzzing sound and it murdered my employer. It bombinated. It was a beast. That’s bad enough for me. Don’t think just because my employer worked me from dawn ‘til dusk and kept himself shut up in his office all day that I disliked him.” “Don’t you want to know how he was killed?” She shook her head. “I just want to know how soon I can hitch a ride out of town.” I didn’t know if she meant it. Her heart wasn’t in it, like the heart wasn’t in the town. I’d taken lessons on controlling fear. I’d done very well, because I had the most fear. Other people had done well for different reasons. Everyone should take lessons like that, but it doesn’t seem necessary until your employer is mysteriously murdered practically right next to you. “I still think everything can be explained, though I don’t know how right now,” I said. “There are still some things I can look into. I have to go and meet someone now, but I meant to talk to you while I was here. Is there anywhere I can meet you later?” She shook her head again. “When I’m not packing, I’ll be eating dinner.” “If you’ll be busy, you don’t have to make dinner yourself,” I said. “Do you know Hungry’s?” “The diner?” she asked. “I’m not too fond of that old sourpuss, Hungry Hix.” “I don’t see much of her around the place,” I said. “If I did, I wouldn’t eat there so often. I dine there with a few associates most mealtimes. If you’ll join us, we can put our heads together and see if they can find a way out of this mess.” She gave me a long look, then, less uncertain than calculating. She was older than me, I remembered. It is sometimes hard to accept that someone younger than you can be right when you’re wrong, which is why adults and children often don’t get along, or so I liked to think when I got into an argument with my teachers. But Carr wasn’t much older than me, so it was an easier decision, even if she looked like she was thinking quite hard about it. “Alright,” she said. “It’s not like I can get out of town before tomorrow anyway. I’ll stop by Hungry’s later and see what you have to say, Snicket, though I doubt you’ll catch the crook.” “I don’t promise to,” I said. “That’s not my job. Explaining what’s unknown is.” “You have a harder job in front of you than mine,” Carr said. She looked tired as she stood up. “Any human being who can plan all this must be barely human at all. Good luck, Snicket.” She walked down the steps and away, without a single backward glance at the house behind me. I took a backward glance pretty much immediately, and slipped around the side of the house, calling out and looking for the person I’d left there. It took me three circuits around the building before I accepted that Ellington Feint had vanished.
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Post by Dante on Aug 2, 2014 15:24:57 GMT -5
CHAPTER TEN Ellington Feint had a tendency to vanish once I turned my back, but not in such circumstances. When there was danger, she was dependable and kept a cool head. She was afraid of wildcats, I remembered, but not monsters. That didn’t mean that monsters were afraid of her. What if, I asked myself – the oldest wrong question in the world. What if something terrible happened when I left her? What if she fell prey to whatever wicked force escaped from that room? What if this is your sister over again? I knew exactly what my sister would say to that, and probably Ellington, too. Be rational, Snicket. Calm down. Think about this logically. Ellington Feint was coming here, and now she has gone. What are the explanations? 1. She’s still here, but hiding. I’d circled the house three times, calling her name, and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her, nor any reason she could hide. If she wanted to hide from me, I probably wouldn’t find her, but I had no idea why she would. I ruled that one out. 2. She was taken away by force. That was more plausible. She’d snuck around the back to see if she could see anything, and there was a high chance that something had indeed been there to see, outside the house. There was something in there, something shiny and black that slithered. It must have come from somewhere, and it probably went somewhere, too, and there was a good chance it had left Lansbury Van Dyke’s office the same way the murderer had that morning – however that was. There was a lot Ellington might have seen. What she saw might explain everything. That wasn’t really the question, though. The real question was whether it would be possible for her to be taken by force. Ellington had run like the wind once before to steal the Bombinating Beast from me, and she was very good at hiding and watching people without their knowledge. There was something else, too, which was the way the Inhumane Society persistently avoided her. They had their fingers in every pie in town, and that probably included the Van Dyke case. If they saw Ellington lurking around, would they really try and grab her, or would they just beat a hasty retreat? And that was if Ellington let herself be seen at all… 3. She left of her own accord. I was remembering a time only a few days before, when I had been researching something at the library with a friend of mine, and had seen a suspicious woman walking away. I’d had to leave the library to pursue her without even having the time to tell Moxie Mallahan where I was going and why, and she was quite annoyed when she found out. But I hadn’t had a choice. If I’d delayed at all, that woman would have vanished into the innumerable hidden spaces of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and I’d never have cleared up the case of kidnap that I had recently solved. Urgency trumped politeness. Ellington knew it was important to solve this case. She’d come sneaking around back here in case anything suspicious happened. Something suspicious had happened. Now there was no sign of either anything suspicious, or Ellington. Conclusion: The villain had left, and Ellington had trailed them. I’d heard an unusual sound – unusual for this town, anyway – while pursuing the supposed Bombinating Beast inside the old museum, one which suggested that a getaway was being made. Ellington would have had to hurry. Now I’d have to hurry to catch up. The windows of Lansbury Van Dyke’s office and the fire escape next to them faced out the back of the house. The whole place was enclosed by a tall wooden fence, but it was broken by an unobtrusive metal gate that opened out onto a side road, which was probably once useful for staff parking and taking deliveries. A dilapidated automobile that clearly hadn’t been used in a long time was parked under layers of bird droppings and just across from where the winding metal fire escape stairway met the ground. The automobile hadn’t been driven in a long time, but a couple of flattened weeds next to it told me that another vehicle had recently been parked beside it, and the unobtrusive metal gate had been dragged wide open for a vehicle to pull in and out whenever it liked. There was a good chance that something had been parked there just a few minutes ago, and had driven off since. Had Ellington gone with it? I suspected so, as right in the middle of where the something had parked, a few small objects had been scattered like litter or birdfeed on the ground. They were small and brown and looked like a kind of nut or seed. You have probably heard the fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel, two unintelligent children who are abandoned in the woods by their wicked stepmother and spineless father. They try to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them to lead back to their home, but the breadcrumbs are predictably eaten by the forest animals, with the result that Hansel and Gretel have wasted both their time and their scant provisions. I didn’t think there was much danger of me or Ellington meeting that fate. I don’t like coffee grounds, and most birds share my taste. Ellington couldn’t get enough of them, and, as I had learned before, had a habit of carrying them around with her, in case she should happen upon a mug and a boiling kettle in the wilderness. She had found something useful to do with them this time, which was to throw them away. I could see a few more lying over by the gateway. She had left a trail for me out of coffee grounds. I just hoped it didn’t lead to a witch’s house, even if it was made of gingerbread. The gate led out into the street, and a few scattered coffee beans told me which direction to turn. It didn’t look like there was anything in particular to find that way in town – the Mallahan lighthouse, the pen-shaped skyscraper of Ink Inc., all were in the other direction. That was what I expected. In a town like Stain’d-by-the-Sea, there are plenty of places no one ever goes which are perfect for hiding things. If the criminal escaped in a car, Ellington must have had to run fast to even have a hope of keeping up. But then again, the roads were full of potholes, and Pip and Squeak had told me that there were some roads that they avoided altogether, so dilapidated they were, or likely to collapse into the water-bored caves beneath the town. My only hope was to follow the coffee beans. I had the easy job. But I still had to run. The criminal or Ellington – I didn’t want to let either get away from me the way they had. Ellington had flung a handful of coffee grounds down whenever she had turned a corner. She had the advantage of being able to cut through some narrow alleyways, too. The route she took, like what she was following, was a winding one, just in case anyone had been looking down the street at the wrong time for the culprit. It was a long one, too. I had lost my watch quite some time ago, and the identical, empty streets of the town were impossible to measure either distance or the hours by. All I had were the gradually diminishing heaps of coffee grounds dropped, sprinkled, finally reduced to single individual beans as they dwindled, like octopi, and all the coffee they might have made was all the ink no longer produced, a black line painted through the town running thinner and thinner until it stopped. I stopped. I had reached the end of the line. The last bean was lying on the ground beneath my feet, and there were no more. The road had come to an end near the edge of town, where the rocky slopes overlooked the empty and wild plain where the sea had once been. Something like immense, crumpled lengths of metal and concrete had been rolled from the shoreline and down into the bottom of the valley, and I realised that this had once been the town’s docks, where boats had come and gone on their errands, bringing in goods and catches of fish and sending out countless bottles of ink. Those boats now lay on their sides in the dirt, lopsided gravestones of all shapes and sizes, rusting away without a reason to be. Around and about, various industrial buildings were built, some wide and round like great drums and others covered in all manner of funnels and pipes and delicate skeletal scaffolding, a lot of which was falling apart. A fading insignia of a glowering octopus told me that these premises had once been used by Ink Inc., probably for ink processing and bottling, and now they were used for nothing. One of them might have been used for something, though. The last bean was like a single grain of sand next to the enormous warehouse it, and I, stood before. The walls and roof were all made of corrugated iron, rusting like Theodora’s roadster and wrinkled like my shirts, and a pair of tyre tracks cut through the dirt and right through the doorway, a lopsided metal shutter that no longer fully reached the ground. There was a gap between it and the dirt floor, a gap just large enough for a child to wriggle through, if he didn’t mind getting his suit dirty. I had never liked this suit anyway. Soon I was standing in the warehouse. It looked slightly better on the inside, but only because I could see less. The only light in the place came in a few dim beams cutting through jagged holes in the roof and walls, like idle spotlights announcing the grand entrance of a tumbleweed or a heap of pipes. Most of what had been in the warehouse had been taken elsewhere, leaving just a wide open space covered in years’ worth of filth. Winding tracks wove in and out of the patches of light, and off into a dark, dark corner where all the light could show me was the outline of a bulky, shapeless form more than twice my size. One that was twitching irregularly, with a crackling sound of breath. One of these days I will start wearing a long overcoat, even in the hottest days of summer, because one of these days I will finally learn that a mystery is easy to solve with a few vital items. A lockpick, for one. A bottle of root beer, perhaps. But anyone in my line of work would be best advised to bring a flashlight with them, and I had not. One day it would get me into a lot of trouble, not bringing a flashlight with me, but today it only got a lot of trouble into me. I had been subjected to so many strange and impossible encounters over the course of the day that it was getting harder and harder to question them. To be honest, I’d had enough of it. I had no idea what I was looking at, but I was going to just march up and find out, which can be a good way of catching your enemies off-guard. Certainly someone was caught off-guard, as I marched right up to the large, rustling object and grabbed at it. It came away in my hand like a heavy sheet, which in fact it was, I realised – a tarpaulin, which had been hastily thrown over something to cover it. That made it pretty obvious exactly what the something was and exactly why it was rustling. With a good tug the whole tarpaulin came pouring off like water and pooled around me in a great rustling heap, revealing the shadowy edges of a truck and a dark-haired girl whose green eyes flashed at me. “You startled me, Mr. Snicket,” she said, a black-fingernailed hand to her chest. “I had no idea you were there. You could have been anyone.” “You must have known I was coming, though.” “I was quite sure. But I was also quite busy.” She looked back at the truck. It had a small square driver’s cab and a large square container, which she had been fiddling with something at the back of. “I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Snicket. I had to leave in a great hurry.” “I guessed as much,” I said. “You saw this truck drive away from the crime scene, and pursued it. You even left a trail that only I would know to follow. I couldn’t have done better.” “That’s not the only thing I saw, though,” she said. She glanced at the truck again, and I saw what I hadn’t seen in the gloom the first time, which was that her eyes were anxious. “If I may ask you, Mr. Snicket – when you went inside that house again with that girl, what did you see?” It was my turn to look anxiously at the truck now. “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Something long and black and shiny. Something that shuffled along the floor at a tremendous rate – and whenever it moved, it bombinated.” “I don’t know what that word means.” “Well, you should know. You have with you a statue of something that supposedly bombinated.” “I don’t care what it did, supposedly or otherwise. Does ‘bombinating’ mean ‘buzzing’?” I nodded. “So you heard it too.” “A minute or so after we parted ways,” she answered. “I’d never heard anything like it. It was like a swarm of bees or the whirr of some dreadful saw. It was coming from the direction of the house, which was where I was going anyway, but it made me nervous as I ducked through gaps in the fences around the adjacent buildings. The buzz came and went a few times – but the last time, the loudest of all, was just as the back of Van Dyke’s house came into view between the other houses. That’s when I saw it.” If somebody says “it” without you knowing what “it” is, you probably don’t want to know. I asked anyway. “It?” She looked at the back of that truck again before she spoke. “I was in that room earlier today, Mr. Snicket. I came down that fire escape. So I know that I was definitely looking at the right place and the right room. So please, don’t ask me if I was mistaken when I tell you that, when I set eyes on the back wall of that office from the yard next door, something was flying down from it.” I couldn’t help myself. Once again I repeated one of her words like that made it the right question. “ Flying?” “Or gliding, perhaps, moving down through the air at a tremendous speed. I only caught a glimpse of it, it moved so fast, but it was just as you said – something that was black and yet with a rough back that gleamed in the light, and long, like a shark or an alligator.” It was cold in that warehouse, and she shuddered. “I haven’t the faintest idea how it got out of there. Even from so far below I could see that the wall was unmarked and the windows were shut. The roof above it wasn’t missing any tiles, but the angle was all wrong for it to have come from above. It definitely came out of that office where the man was murdered, Mr. Snicket, but to do so it must have swum through the wall like it wasn’t even there.” I didn’t answer that. I didn’t trust the evidence of my own eyes that day. I wasn’t going to trust the evidence of anyone else’s even more, no matter how green they were. I simply answered, “And then?” She frowned. “And then… the thing dived down below the fence between the buildings, and I couldn’t see it any more. But the buzzing stopped, and I heard a slamming noise. Then another, and suddenly there was the sound of a vehicle starting up. I quickly stepped up a stack of crates to get to the top of the fence, and saw this truck pulling out of the back lot. That more or less told me that whatever was going on was a lot less sinister than it seemed – or maybe a lot more. Either way, I thought that, if I followed it, I might learn more about the Inhumane Society. I didn’t have time to make sure you were following, so I dropped some coffee grounds to show you where I’d gone.” “I’m glad they didn’t go to waste,” I said. Ellington gave me a frosty look before she continued. “After that, there’s not much to tell. I followed the truck as best I could, running to keep up with it as it rumbled as quickly as it could down these crumbling roads and tight corners. By the time I was down to my last coffee bean, I had just distantly seen it vanish in the direction of this warehouse. By the time I got here, the place was deserted and the driver was long gone, but I could tell it was the same truck under this tarpaulin. I ducked under the tarpaulin to take a look at the back without being noticed if anyone came back.” “You were more noticeable than you thought,” I said. “You startled me, too. Have you looked in the back?” “It’s padlocked,” she said. “I can pick padlocks, and I made a start, but I keep on stopping, and wondering if this is what I should do.” “There’s no such thing as a Bombinating Beast,” I said. “But there are such things as murderers,” Ellington said, “and murder weapons, and ingenious devices devised to do people harm. Whenever the newspaper mentioned things like that, things like the war, my father would warn me against them. He hates violence.” “Then let’s put an end to whatever ingenious device the Inhumane Society has cooked up here,” I said. “The two of us have been more than a match for their previous schemes. Ms. Feint, if you would care to open that padlock, I would appreciate it.” It didn’t take her long. She really had been practicing. I wondered what else she had been practicing, in her days alone with nothing to do except brood over her missing father, in the captivity of the Inhumane Society. Reading people’s mail, for one thing; I’d have to be careful if I ever wanted to send or receive a letter in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Not long ago, she’d disguised herself as part of a clever plan, too, though she couldn’t disguise her voice like Hangfire could. Some of these things I could do, too, but they weren’t things any young person should have to learn. But for one reason or another, one organisation or another, we’d had to learn. I wondered, too, what else we would have to learn in the future. The padlock clicked open, and Ellington cautiously pulled the back doors of the truck open. The light was even dimmer inside the enclosed metal container, but there was just enough to glint irregularly off something lying within, a long serpentine shape, with black and scaly skin that looked tough as beaten metal… “I’ve had quite enough of this nonsense,” I said, and reached in with both hands to grab the thing. It seemed to collapse in my very hands, crinkling up with a loud rustle like paper, and when I pulled, it was like I was holding a thin and stretchy skin wrapped around something much heavier, that dragged slowly as I hauled on the sticky material tearing in my hands. I reached forward and grabbed the whole thing round the middle, feeling its smooth cylindrical shape beneath the folds of the skin it was in, and then Ellington was picking up the other end and the both of us were awkwardly carrying it out of the van, and throwing it into one of the pools of half-light glowing on the warehouse floor. Something else was dragging along behind it, too, something heavy that fell to the ground with a clunk and scraped slowly along as we pulled. Ellington kicked it over into the light as I tore through the last of the wrapping around the heavy cylindrical object, and we stood and looked at our prizes. We looked for quite a long time. “Tell me, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington asked at last. “Is that the one from the dead man’s office?” She was pointing at one of the items before us, but it wasn’t the electric motor attached to a long spool of strong cable, which looked like it had been taken from a piece of industrial machinery or some sort of rescue vehicle. It wasn’t the grimy hook that had been used to attach the cable to one end of the large, cylindrical object, and it wasn’t the black garbage bags that had been taped up to cover that object in a rough, shiny skin. Instead, it was the heavy cylindrical thing inside those black garbage bags that had caught Ellington’s eye. I shook my head at her. Back at Lansbury Van Dyke’s office, a blood-red carpet with mythical monsters dancing around its edges lay beneath a dead man’s body beneath a stained white sheet. So what on earth was a second carpet doing here, identical to the first, rolled into a cylinder with the Bombinating Beast peeking out at us over and over from its fringes?
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Post by Hermes on Aug 2, 2014 15:55:50 GMT -5
I sincerely hope, Dante, that I will be able to say something meaningful about this soon. I did think I was advancing in understanding, but then Chapter 9 completely confounded me.
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Post by Dante on Aug 2, 2014 16:05:32 GMT -5
I take that as a great compliment.
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Post by Dante on Aug 4, 2014 14:55:42 GMT -5
CHAPTER ELEVEN The evenings and nights were getting earlier, and the lights were on inside Hungry’s diner. An old bell above the door rattled as me and Ellington walked in. There were a few people in there who I recognised and was glad to see, not including the owner. The owner was Hungry, but apparently not right now, and she spent a lot of time out or in the back room these days. Her nephew was in charge, and he and the other people in the diner looked pleased to see me, too, and then uncertain when they saw Ellington. “Jake, Pip, Squeak,” I said, nodding first to the boy at the counter, and then to the two taxi drivers. “Good to see you all. Jake, how’s Cleo these days?” “The same,” the shaggy-haired chef replied, referring to his scientist sweetheart. “Never happier than when she’s working too hard and too late.” “Sounds a bit like you, Snicket,” Squeak said. “I’ll try to take that as a compliment,” I replied. “Jake, let me introduce Ellington Feint. Pip, Squeak, I think you’ve already met.” “We sure have,” Squeak said, sounding less friendly than before. “You still owe us a tip, Feint.” “I’m sorry,” she said, smiling in a way which made the obligation seem theirs. “I’ve had too much on my mind to do any reading lately.” “I find a little reading helps to clear my mind at times like that,” Jake Hix said, frowning at her between washing glasses. “Good evening, Miss Feint. Nice to put a face to a name I’ve heard a few things about.” “And what have you heard?” I asked, maybe a little too defensively. Jake straightened up from the sink, and looked at her. “That trouble finds you wherever you go.” “Trouble doesn’t find me,” she said. “I go looking for it.” Jake frowned at her. “I’m not sure anyone looking for trouble in this diner is welcome.” “I’m not looking for trouble right now,” Ellington replied. “I’m looking for a meal, or at least a cup of coffee.” Jake’s frown gave up and broke into a laugh. “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” he said. “Take a seat. I’m making pancakes, with cheese and leftover stock. Better than it sounds.” “I believe you, Jake,” I said. “You’re welcome, Snicket,” he said, frying up. “I doubt anyone here can pay, of course, but the practice pays for itself.” “Not to mention the conversation,” Pip added. “And on that note, maybe you can give us that tip now, Feint.” “Any book you like,” Squeak said. “Qwerty’s good at getting them from all over, even the really old ones.” Everyone was looking at Ellington, but she still slipped into a corner table. The light had gone above it, and she looked like she belonged there. It was tougher to see how hard she was thinking. “My father used to read stories for me every night, ever since I was little,” she began. “He was incredible at doing the voices. I remember one book he was reading to me quite a while ago – it was about a princess who lived on a mountain far away from her father. The mountain was inhabited by all these nasty goblins, who wanted to kidnap the princess and start a flood that would wash the other humans away. One day she went exploring in the mountains anyway, and met a brave miner boy there.” I’d read a lot of stories like this. “Let me guess,” I said. “The brave miner boy rescues her and defeats the goblins?” She looked at me, and I could see her eyes glittering, but I couldn’t tell what expression was on her darkened face. “Oh no, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “Quite the reverse. She rescues him.” The bell clattered again, and I never heard the rest of the story, at least not from Ellington. It was Carr Carter, looking in like she wasn’t sure if she should be there, and then nodding at me like I’d kept an important appointment. Hungry’s was heaving that day; five customers, and not one of them with a cent in their pockets. No wonder Hungry Hix spent her time counting beans. “Hello again, Snicket,” she said. “You too, Jake. I didn’t know you were working here.” “Long time no see, Carr,” Jake said, flipping pancakes with only half an eye on the pan. “I guess we’ve both been busy.” “You two know each other, I take it,” I said. I should have figured. They were both about the same age, and lived in a town without much company. “We went to school together,” Jake explained. “At least, until our school closed. Then it was either get a job, or move out of town. Well, the town’s not much, but it’s still home.” “If I’m honest, I was just saving up to make a better start out of town,” Carr admitted, seating herself at a table nearby. “Now all I’ve got are more memories I can’t shake, and my stepfather’s place in the city.” “Maybe we can put some of those memories to rest,” I said. “I think I can wrap this case up tonight.” “I thought you were going to wrap it up by lunchtime,” Squeak reminded me. “I had a bad lunch,” I said, eyeing a coffee Jake Hix was brewing up. “Good company, though.” “Let’s try and make it a decent dinner first,” Jake told me. “Save the rotten bits for after you’re done eating, Snicket. I don’t want anyone getting soured on a fine set of pancakes.” “Alright,” I agreed, “then let me tell you about a strange and fascinating book concerning the adventures of a geometric shape.” Talking about literature – which almost invariably becomes arguing about literature, but in a friendly way – is my favourite way of spending a mealtime. I’d already spent two mealtimes that day talking about murder, which was twice as many as I’d have liked, and two more than anyone should have to accept. Time spent with friends is too precious to always waste on something so serious, and nobody looks serious when trying to talk with their mouth full – but I have always believed that not a second is wasted if it’s spent reading or talking about reading. By the time the last crumb had been wiped from each mouth and the last flake of grated cheese retrieved from each fork, each of us probably had a fairly generous helping of prospective library books to fill our empty plates. “I still think, Mr. Snicket, that a ghost is more interesting than a man in a sheet,” Ellington concluded, finishing the last of a lemon muffin Jake had turned out a batch of while we were busy with the pancakes, “but we must agree to disagree, or we’ll be here all night.” “If that’s what it takes to crack the case,” I said, returning to my original subject, “then I’ll be here all night anyway.” “Some coffee would help to keep you awake,” Ellington said, her eyes smiling enigmatically. She had persuaded Jake to leave a mug of coffee for me on the counter. I hadn’t touched it. “I don’t need coffee to have a sleepless night,” Carr said. “I admire your persistence, Snicket, but I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly account for all those strange incidents that have happened today.” “That’s probably because you’ve not heard the whole story,” I said. “None of us knows the whole story, of course, and we never will, but it’s more interesting if you hear just enough to fill in the blanks for yourself. I think we’re more or less approaching that point with the mysteries we’ve encountered today, once you take a step back and look at all the evidence.” “That’s easy for you to say, Snicket,” Pip said. “All we do is drive around town. We pick up dribs and drabs and a few good library tips, but frankly, we haven’t a clue what’s going on.” “Yeah, and I hadn’t heard about any of this until Pip and Squeak came in earlier,” Jake said. “News usually spreads fast in a small town, but Stain’d is practically a ghost town by now. Even a murder takes a while to get around.” “All of us are missing one piece or another,” I said. “Partly that’s accidental, but let’s not fool ourselves – this is also the killer’s plan. So let’s start by putting together every piece we know, and by the end, this mystery might just seem barely mysterious at all – despite the fact that it’s actually more like four mysteries.” I ignored the groans of exasperation from my audience as I outlined the four mysterious events of the day. 1. Lansbury Van Dyke is murdered in a locked room which the killer couldn’t have gotten in or out of. 2. The prisoners Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander vanish from the Stain’d-by-the-Sea police station’s cell. 3. There was a mysterious buzzing noise in the room again and the door was found unlocked from the inside despite having been locked on the outside. 4. A strange creature was seen rampaging through Van Dyke’s house before apparently passing through a solid wall. “All of these mysteries,” I said, “seemed completely impenetrable to the people who first encountered them. But with investigation and reflection, they’ve started to give up those secrets, to the point where I can solve three of them right now. I’ll deal with them in reverse order, and then we’ll see if we can apply what we learnt about the later mysteries to the first and most perplexing one. “Mystery the fourth: The problem of the Bombinating Beast. Carr Carter was working alone in a room next to Lansbury Van Dyke’s when she heard a loud, persistent buzzing noise. Frightened after what had happened earlier in the day, she ran out of the house, and into me, as I was just coming over to investigate various things. We returned, and heard a repeated buzzing, accompanied by the noise of something sliding across the floor. Advancing slowly towards the scene of the crime, we saw a long, black object slide down the corridor and into Van Dyke’s office, where there were a couple of loud crashing noises, and the door swung closed behind it. When we investigated, the mysterious object had gone, and the door key was on the inside of the door despite the door having been locked on the outside again after the third mystery. “On just those facts, this really does sound like a legend of the supernatural, the sort of thing Ellington Feint likes – but Ms. Feint was the key to solving this mystery. She saw the object appear outside the room and vanish along with a truck that sped from the scene. She tracked it, and the two of us found, inside that truck, a motorised wheel of cable hooked onto a roll of carpet wrapped up inside black garbage bags. The carpet, incidentally, was identical to the one in Lansbury Van Dyke’s office; that’s important, but we’ll get back to that later. What’s important right now is that the problem of the Bombinating Beast is absolutely solved on this evidence. “Carr Carter was busy working alone in her office. Her desk is at the far end of the room, so when she’s working, she can’t see what’s going on outside her office. Anyone who’d seen that room even once would know that, and that makes it easy for any intruder to sneak around on the top floor without being noticed by her. “Lansbury Van Dyke’s murderer also wanted to steal a specific item from within his house, but for reasons I won’t get into right now, had been unable to do so earlier. He needed to get into the house again and recover it, and used the success of the apparent attack on Van Dyke by the Bombinating Beast as an opportunity to stage a further, more convincing intrusion by the Beast to frighten and bewilder the people of the town – and more importantly, to cover up a completely different buzzing noise in Lansbury Van Dyke’s office that would reveal too much. With abandoned resources littering the town, and Carr Carter easily avoided, the murderer had everything he needed to arrange his sham Beast. “By rolling up the carpet and wrapping it in black bags, he had a reasonably convincing ‘Bombinating Beast’ for anyone who didn’t look too close – long, serpentine in shape, seemingly black and scaly thanks to the shiny and crinkly bags. By hooking a cable on a motorised spool to the carpet, he could be a long distance from the Beast whilst still being connected to it, and then running the motor would reel the Beast in whilst making a suitably intimidating buzzing noise. He’d have set this up a while beforehand and brought the device to the back of Van Dyke’s house in the truck. He could have moved it all to the top floor by dropping it at the top of the fire escape, going back to the ground floor and breaking in there, and then just walking to the top floor and opening the fire escape from inside to bring the Beast in. Then he’d have shifted everything into Lansbury Van Dyke’s office – unlocking it from the outside, and swapping the key to the inside in case he needed to protect himself from an unexpected interruption – and then stretched the cable way out so there was plenty of slack. He could ditch the Beast itself at a point far along the gallery on the top floor where the cable wouldn’t pass by Carr’s office and be seen, and then all he needed to do was to start up the motor in Van Dyke’s office to bring the Beast buzzing through the house towards him. Carr naturally associated the mysterious, frightening sound with the murder, and it was enough to drive her from the house. “That was all well and good for the murderer, who now had time to search Van Dyke’s office for his prize in peace. He got unlucky, though, when Carr ran into me on the street. We both headed back into the house, the murderer heard us, and got to use the more elaborate aspects of his illusion. He’d probably already escaped down the fire escape while we were heading upstairs, but he’d dropped the motor down to the ground through Van Dyke’s office, where he could run it from the back of his truck. From there, he could use the motor like a fishing rod, gradually drawing the Beast in – and leading us on. Turning the motor on and off every few seconds gave us time to catch a glimpse of his Beast sliding around without being able to get our hands on it or tell what it really was. Once the murderer figured we’d probably seen enough, he’d have reeled the whole thing back in, drawing the Beast back into Van Dyke’s office – knocking into the door hard enough to bounce it off the wall and close on itself again – and from there into the open air, where it simply fell down to the ground and could be stuffed into the back of the truck. The murderer could then drive the truck to the edge of town, hide it, and nobody would be any the wiser to the truth behind the incident. If Ms. Feint hadn’t been on the scene to follow the truck, we’d almost certainly never have found it, and never have solved this mystery. Instead, we solved it easily – and the so-called Bombinating Beast was simply bait on a line.” “Not to criticise, Snicket,” Jake interrupted, “but there’s a hole in your theory, and that’s a hole in the wall. You talked about the murderer running this cable from the truck through the old man’s office and reeling his bamboozling Beast into the office and outside. But you haven’t answered the question of how the thing got outside – with a solid wall in the way!” “That’s right, Snicket,” Carr affirmed. “The windows were closed and bolted when we arrived. There was no sign of the wall having been tampered with.” “And I didn’t see anything on the outer wall to suggest foul play,” Ellington added. “But the fake Beast definitely fell from the wall of Van Dyke’s office.” I held up my hands. “You’re right. That I haven’t solved – I don’t know how the fake jumped from inside Van Dyke’s office to outside. But I’m not committed to solving that now – I just want to deal with all the puzzles unique to the last of the four mysteries.” “Teleporting from inside a room to outside ain’t unique?” Squeak asked. “Not in this case,” I said, “because the murderer had done it himself earlier in the day. Twice today something that was definitely inside that room vanished from there without a trace, and I don’t think that can be a coincidence. I’ll bet that the murderer used the same method both times, it having worked so well earlier in the day. Wherever the cable passed through the wall, and pulled the Beast with it, is also where the murderer left the room after murdering Lansbury Van Dyke. Which should suggest a few things about the method the murderer used to escape the room, come to that.” “Like what?” Pip asked. “That he flew down like a bird?” “That the way out is a hole that runs right through the wall, something you can run a cable through,” I said, “and which leads directly outside at the top-floor level and closes on its own. That rules out anything like a hidden elevator or dumb-waiter. In fact, it points to exactly one thing, though I don’t know how he fixed it. But we can worry about that later. Next we should be moving onto mystery the third: The problem of the haunted room.” “You should write ghost stories, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said. “You have a knack for making something quite simple sound terribly mysterious and intriguing.” “Thanks, but I prefer volunteer work,” I said. “But you’re right that the solution to this mystery is very simple.” “Impossibilities aren’t child’s play to everyone, Snicket,” Carr frowned. “Surely this is the same mystery as the previous – I hear a repeated bombinating in Mr. Van Dyke’s office, and once it’s quiet enough to be safe, I go to investigate and find the room unlocked from the inside where before it was locked from the outside –” “A feat you saw me perform myself, in reverse, earlier today,” I pointed out. “There’s little difficulty in transferring a key from the other side of a locked door to your own side.” “So someone was inside the room?” Carr asked. “But –” “This is old news to myself and Mr. Snicket, so let me provide a quick summary,” Ellington interrupted. “Inside that office is a hidden compartment, the door of which is opened with an electric motor. By a stroke of bad luck, I had been hiding in there for some little while without being able to leave. Once I was sure the coast was clear, I opened the compartment – the door to which buzzes, thanks to its electric motor – used a pencil and paper to retrieve the key from the outside of the door, unlocked it from the inside, and fled down the fire escape. No mystery – just me.” “No mystery – just me.” I didn’t say as much, but that was a little lie in itself. There was always mystery where Ellington Feint was concerned; her life was a mystery, her thoughts, her actions. She was a mystery, but it wasn’t my job to solve it. Carr, for her part, looked aghast. “Are you telling me that you were hiding in Mr. Van Dyke’s office? So you –” “Don’t misread her, Carr,” I interjected. “Ellington had nothing to do with the crime, and in fact has spent all day making life more difficult for the murderer. What I’m more interested in is how you never knew there was a secret door that made a buzzing noise in your employer’s room.” Carr was taken aback, and stumbled over her words like they were stones in her path. “I – I don’t know,” she said, and her eyes flashed off to look into the distance. “I suppose – could it be that he was suspicious of even me, and…” “And, I imagine, would occasionally send you off to make tea, or deliver a letter, or some errand of that nature?” I asked. “Something that would get you far enough away from the top floor that he could open the hidden compartment and remove or replace the memoirs he kept in there without you hearing the door.” “Why, yes,” Carr said, her eyes still elsewhere, rifling through her memories. “I never thought about it before, but even when he let me into the house every dawn and sent me home every dusk, he would send me to fetch drinks as soon as I arrived or just before I left. Those were more or less the only times I saw him at all, at those gloomy hours, so he would look too imposing and mysterious for me to refuse. Difficult though it is to make a cup of tea with most of the lights turned off.” That was very interesting, but not for the reasons Carr thought it was. I mulled it over as I ignored the quietly cooling mug of coffee beside me. “One last question, Carr – when did you first see that red carpet in your employer’s office, incidentally?” “Oh, just this morning, when I showed you to his office,” Carr said, looking relieved to have an easier question. “Obviously, it looks suspicious now, but I didn’t even think twice about it - my employer mentioned something about a salesman when he let me in, and he was always acquiring new items from the town’s past. The Bombinating Beast pattern on that carpet I’m sure would have appealed to him.” “And not just to him,” I said, thinking about where I had seen carpets like that not so long ago. “At any rate, I hope we’re all agreed that mystery the third is solved satisfactorily.” “Maybe the how, but not the why,” Jake said, giving Ellington a sharp look. “Let’s talk about some of the why, then,” I said, “as we discuss mystery the second: The problem of the empty cell.” “Oh, even I’ve heard about this one,” Jake said. “Two criminals vanished from the police station while the Mitchums were out, right? Well, I wouldn’t have thought it was too hard to jailbreak that place.” “Maybe harder than you think,” I suggested. “The Mitchums installed a new combination lock on the station’s front door. Unpickable – to get out, you had to know the combination.” “Well, that’s surprisingly sensible,” Jake admitted, “though I don’t know why they didn’t just put it on the cell instead.” “Maybe Jake baked the jailbirds a cake with a file inside,” Pip suggested. “His cooking’s so good it’s criminal,” Squeak agreed. Jake rolled his eyes, and probably wasn’t the only one to do so. “The bars looked normal when I looked the place over,” I said, “but consider the facts. The Mitchums had just been called out to Van Dyke’s place to investigate the murder. They’d left Stew behind at the police station to protect his innocence.” Snorts of derision echoed from the Bellerophons’ table. “When the Mitchums got back, the criminals had vanished, but the front door and the cell were still locked, and Stew claimed he’d been asleep the whole time. Can anyone really call this a mystery?” “Not if you don’t go trusting little thieves like Stew Mitchum,” Jake said. “Before this Hangfire guy moved in, he was the town’s biggest troublemaker, though now he’s small fry.” “More like a big fish in a small pond,” I said. “Don’t underestimate the importance of the only child of the police officers in town. He more or less admitted to me once that the Inhumane Society had gotten to him. Having been left alone in the police station with two of its members, there was only one thing Stew would have or could have done.” “Let them out and feigned ignorance,” Ellington said. “Really? The police officers’ son?” Carr asked. “Surely they would suspect?” “You ever met the Mitchums, Carr?” asked Jake. “He’s a rotten apple, and they’re dim bulbs. Between them they make a pretty lousy lunch date.” “The how of this mystery is no mystery at all, save for how I’m ever going to convince the Mitchums of what happened,” I said. “But what’s more important, like I said, is the why – why such a convenient situation ever arose.” “Why Stew was left alone in charge of the police station?” Pip asked. “Right,” I agreed. “If you ask me, that sounds like part of a very elaborate plan – to kill two birds with one stone.” “There’s an expression Stew uses all the time,” Jake said. “I think he means it literally, too.” “Forget about the literal interpretation,” I said. “Think about this: Killing one man both to prevent him from revealing your secrets, and to let two of your associates out of jail.” “We went to a lot of trouble to catch them, too,” Squeak complained. “You sure about this, Snicket?” Pip asked. “You think it’s that Inhumane Society gang stirring this town up again?” “I think,” I said, “that I need to make a phone call. Jake, do you have a telephone in here?” “In the back,” Jake said, jabbing a finger over his shoulder at a door I’d never noticed before. “Go right ahead; my aunt’s not here to complain about the bill.” “Much obliged,” I said, and slipped behind the counter and through the doorway. It led to an office so little I could have sworn I could touch the ceiling. A telephone sat in a pool of flickering light on the edge of a desk covered in bills and increasingly threatening letters demanding payment of those bills. I shifted a heap of them from an office chair and dialled Moxie’s number. “Hello, Mallahan residence,” she answered. “Mr. Mallahan’s representative speaking.” “Knock it off, Moxie, it’s me,” I said. “Though you can give your father my regards, if you see him.” “You knock that off too, Snicket,” she said, though she sounded pleased. Right afterwards, she sounded a lot sharper. “Wait, I forgot – how do I know this is really you, Snicket?” Someone sounding like me had called her once before and sent her off on a wild goose chase, so it was a fair question, and I gave her an unfair answer. “If you like, I can call Ellington Feint in here to verify my identity.” I could practically hear her lip curl. “Alright, alright, you win, Snicket. Only you could be that rude. Still, I’m glad to hear from you. It means you haven’t been getting yourself into too much trouble.” “Wrong again,” I said, “but I’m still in one piece. How about you? Have you found any new information in the archives?” “You first,” she said. “I know you, Snicket. The moment I tell you something interesting, you’ll leave me with some cryptic comment and hang up.” That was fair enough, too. I gave her the summarised version. It took several minutes. When I was done, she stayed silent for a moment, and then let out a tragically long sigh. “Bored already?” I asked. “Bored with being stuck inside when I could be in the middle of all this again,” she replied. “Give it time. I’m sure there’ll be another dreadful crime before long, and I’ll make sure you’re involved.” “Is that a promise, or a threat?” “Depends on what the papers say. You’re the journalist, Moxie. Maybe it’s old news, but I’m sure you’d still like to report it.” “Now you’re talking, Snicket,” she said, with a little more of her usual drive. “The Colonel Colophon connection was right on the money. I looked up the papers around the time of the explosion where Colophon got burned, and amid all the other furore was a public challenge by Lansbury Van Dyke, to the Inhumane Society.” “That sounds brave of him,” I said. “He was brave. If Colonel Colophon didn’t exist, Lansbury Van Dyke would be the town hero. The only difference between them is that Van Dyke was more of a dashing adventurer, and he’d picked up a mixed reputation before he and Colophon joined the war. Anyway, he accused the Inhumane Society of being responsible for the explosion, and said it had been a bomb they’d planted in the construction site for Colophon’s commemorative statue. He admitted he couldn’t prove it, but warned that he’d release a list of names of everyone in the Society unless they disbanded and never caused any trouble again.” “He’d have ruined their reputations. If Colophon was the town hero and the townsfolk thought they knew who was responsible, there’d be a riot.” “There were plenty of riots and false accusations anyway. It was tearing the town apart. Only someone like Lansbury Van Dyke could get away with saying he knew who was responsible without naming names. My mother doesn’t sound too happy about it in her article, but Van Dyke had a strong sense of fair play. It might even have worked, as the Inhumane Society seems to have more or less vanished from the news from that time.” “And all these years, Lansbury Van Dyke has been sitting in his museum with a list of terrible villains’ names in his head,” I said. “And now the Inhumane Society are back, and he’s dead. Their return to town was only discovered a few days ago. If they didn’t get to Van Dyke soon, he could ruin them and their plans over again.” I felt like pacing the room to think, but when I twisted the chair to stand up, the telephone cord started to wrap around me and nearly pulled the receiver off the desk. It started to give me an idea, but Moxie was still talking. “So they got to him?” she asked. “Without a doubt,” I said. “I just wonder if he ever wrote any of those names down. Moxie Mallahan, you’ve been of great assistance once again. I’ll drop by tomorrow morning to tell you how it all worked out.” “How what all worked out, Snicket?” “Cracking the case,” I said, and before she could protest, I had said a quick goodbye and put the phone down. I’d make my apologies tomorrow, but it was getting very late, and I had somewhere I needed to be, somewhere risky to be. There was an envelope nearby on the desk, and after a moment’s thought, jotted a few words down on the inside before sealing and addressing it, and then writing my own name over the join so I could tell if anyone had opened and resealed it. I’d post it on the way. It didn’t look like I had time to unravel mystery the first with the gang in the next room, but there was still something they could help me with. I opened the door back to the diner. “Pip, could you come in here for a minute?” “Me?” Pip asked. “Bouvard Bellerophon, if you prefer.” “No need to get like that, Snicket,” he said, straightening up and shrugging at the other four. He joined me in the office, and I shut the door. A minute later, I called through the door again. “Carr, could you join us for a second as well?” I heard her footsteps tap around the counter, and the hinges squeak as she opened the door. “Who are you telephoning, Snicket?” she asked as she walked over to the desk. “Can I assist you?” “You already have,” I said, and she jumped as I stepped out from behind the door. The reason she jumped was because there was somebody sitting in the office chair, wearing my hat and my jacket and with a phone pressed to their ear, but it wasn’t me. “I’m sorry for tricking you, Carr, but I had to prove a point.” She looked dazed as we wandered back out of the office, me trading jackets and hats with Pip again. I wondered if she understood what I was getting at. “What were you doing in there, Mr. Snicket?” asked Ellington, walking up and leaning over the counter. “Demonstrating something you know well, Ms. Feint. Disguising yourself as someone else is a lot easier than you might think, if the conditions are right. The right clothes, the wrong light, an excuse for covering your face – like being on the telephone, for instance. There were at least two things wrong with the telephone call Lansbury Van Dyke was making, if I’d only been paying attention. I think it’s pretty obvious how the murderer got into that room now, at least.” “But – but that’s preposterous,” Carr exclaimed. “And it doesn’t answer the main question! How could a grown man be hidden in a room where there was nowhere to hide?” “It sounds impossible when you put it that way,” I said, “until you realise that the murderer didn’t have to do that at all. He had smaller challenges.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Squeak. “It means there’s something I need to go and look at before I can solve mystery the first – call it the problem of the disappearing man,” I said. “With the other three mysteries solved, I’m pretty sure I know how it was all done now, but it would be irresponsible not to verify it first.” “You can’t just leave us hanging like that, Snicket,” Jake said, looking hurt as he collected the plates. “It’s like snatching a book from our hands a couple of chapters before the end.” “It’s more like the end hasn’t been written down yet,” I said. “I’m going to go and get it down in black and white. But if Carr or Ms. Feint would care to tell you the whole story, you should be able to figure it out – how he must have gotten in, how he must have gotten out, and how a man could have been hidden in that room.” I was heading for the door now. I could see that the streetlamps were starting to turn on in the shady side of the street. Pip and Squeak poked their heads up over the back of the adjoining seat. “At least give us a hint, Snicket!” Squeak moaned. I hesitated. “Alright. Think about what the murderer brought into the room and what he took out of it. Think what you could do with a carpet, or even two carpets. Think about the furnishings of the room, and the layout of the house. If you come to the same conclusions I did, I’ll know I’m right.” Jake gave me an annoyed look from over a pile of dirty dishes. “Forget hints – who’s the murderer, Snicket?” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Hangfire, of course. We probably all assumed that anyway, and nobody else could have pulled it off. Now, I really have got to go.” “Can’t you at least tell us which way he got in and out?” Pip called, as I pushed open the door. I stopped in the doorway, and shrugged. “He walked in through the door. And he jumped out through the window.” “But –” I never heard the rest of Carr’s question. I was already gone, the door swinging and the bell clanking and the shadows growing until they’d soon fall over the whole town. I should have been going to bed, but instead I was going somewhere that would probably give me nightmares.
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Post by Hermes on Aug 5, 2014 14:22:30 GMT -5
Well, I have caught up with it at last, and many of the mysteries have already been solved. (Have you read The Nine Tailors? There's a nice passage where Lord Peter says he has solved everything except for one detail, and when asked what the detail is says it's the murder.) The Stew thing was obvious in retrospect.
But as to the murder, I think I can work out quite a lot of it. (I'm assuming here that Ellington is telling the truth, since if she isn't we've no basis on which to deduce anything.)
There was no carpet in the room when Ellington arrived.
However, there was one when Carr arrived to start work, and Mr Van Dyke said it had been delivered by a 'salesman'. Also, the IS seems to have a supply of such carpets.
Ellington heard voices in the office before Lemony and Theodora arrived. She did not hear voices after they came, though she did hear the sound of things being moved.
No one, except Ellington, entered the room and looked around before the body was discovered; they just looked in from the doorway.
It is possible, as I mentioned earlier, to misidentify someone when seeing them in dim light.
That answers a lot, but not how the murderer got out, which remains a mystery to me. Likewise how the Bombinating Beast got out later - which E actually saw, and still thought it was impossible.
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Post by Dante on Aug 5, 2014 15:56:34 GMT -5
By the way, while I don't like to respond to comments directly on the story while it's in progress - partly as I don't want to prejudice its interpretation, and partly as I think a story that needs the author to explain it outside the bounds of the narrative has not been told well - I do just want to say that I appreciate your comments, Hermes. They are very interesting.
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Post by Hermes on Aug 5, 2014 16:10:23 GMT -5
Thanks, Dante! I quite understand that you would not want to comment.
One other thing worth mentioning is why the murderer did not look in the wall compartment - presumably because he recognised the strap of E's bag, and did not want to meet her (which, if he's Hangfire, he canonically doesn't).
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Post by Dante on Aug 6, 2014 16:41:17 GMT -5
CHAPTER TWELVE Traipsing around Stain’d-by-the-Sea from place to place, and getting comfortable discussing mysteries with friends, takes a lot more time than it seems to at the time. Time seems not to pass at all when walking, and passes all too quickly when talking. I hadn’t realised how late it was, but the darker season had crept up on me like night had on day, and it would be a long time before the days would be as long again. The unreliable light of the often shattered, sometimes bent and broken streetlamps cast irregular shadows, and left me feeling like some small sea creature, perhaps an octopus, being chased through the shadows of the sea by something long and sharp, like a tooth, or a needle. The kind of organisation that trains you to follow people trains you to know if you’re being followed. I’d heard the footsteps, and was relieved that they weren’t a man’s, heavy and long of stride. In fact, I recognised exactly whose footsteps they were. I turned a corner and waited for Ellington to catch up with me. “I thought you were too quiet as I was leaving,” I said as she rounded the corner. “Concerned for my welfare, Ms. Feint?” I admired immensely that she didn’t even look flustered. “Of course I am, Mr. Snicket. Solving Hangfire’s puzzle might put you in danger.” “So you came after me.” “That’s right.” “But not to keep me out of danger.” Every time I saw it, that smile might have meant more and more. “You’re beginning to understand me, Mr. Snicket. I go looking for trouble. At the heart of the trouble is my father.” “I know. And that’s why I didn’t want you to come with me.” She raised her eyebrows at that, and they looked more than ever like question marks questioning my every move. “But why? Mr. Snicket, you have always devoted yourself to helping me to find my father. Why would you keep me from him?” “The Inhumane Society have been keeping you from him. Hasn’t it occurred to you that the reason why they won’t take the Bombinating Beast from you is because they can’t afford to give up your father?” She was standing just outside of the streetlamp’s light. Her shoes glittered, but the rest of her was lost in the gathering dark. “I won’t let Hangfire renege on his promise.” “He’ll do anything he can to avoid fulfilling it. Your father is central to their schemes, Ms. Feint. They can wait for the Bombinating Beast. “And what about you, Mr. Snicket? Will you renege on your promise?” I was stood in the lamplight, so she could clearly see me shake my head. “Never. I’ll find your father and do my best to free him. It doesn’t matter if I’m in danger.” “You think I might be?” “Who knows what they would do if you refused to take no for an answer. If you tracked them down so far they couldn’t run anymore.” “You think they might capture me?” I looked away. I tended to keep my hat pulled down low, but I wanted even less for her to see my eyes. “Something like that.” “So you won’t let me come with you, in case you meet Hangfire.” “He probably won’t be there if you come. But I don’t want to risk it.” “I can look after myself.” “But you don’t want to,” I said. “You’re searching for your father, so that you and he can go back to the life you had before he disappeared.” A voice can be as sharp as a dagger. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” “I didn’t say there was,” I said. “But it might not be possible.” “Mr. Snicket, you don’t know anything about my life.” “And you don’t know anything about mine,” I replied. “But part of my job is to get people out of danger and keep them out. Please, Ms. Feint. Don’t seek out Hangfire while he has murder in mind. You won’t like what you find.” The first answer I had was the blowing of a cold wind down the street. It caught Ellington’s hair and blew it into curling tangles that caught the edges of the lamplight, like an octopus’s swirling tentacles just glimpsed by a predator’s eyes. “And what about you?” she asked at last. “What if you find Hangfire?” “Last time that happened,” I said, “he tried to defenestrate me.” “How barbaric.” “Right afterwards he jumped out of a window many storeys up. He survived by abseiling his way down, but I don’t think that’s how he did it this time. I’m hoping he won’t try and kill me this time, either. That’s why I prepared some insurance.” “Insurance?” “It’s a word which means ‘a way of guarding against or compensating for an unfortunate event in the future,’” I said, “and it also means this letter. You may as well have it. It’s addressed to you anyway.” I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and gave it to her. She smiled at the carefully written address on the front, looked quizzically at my name scrawled over the back, and flashed a thumbnail towards the fold. “Don’t open it!” I said, quick as snakebite. “It’s insurance. You aren’t meant to open it now. I’d planned to post that so you wouldn’t get it until morning.” “Why shouldn’t I open it until then?” “Because I was going to come and take it back if I didn’t need it.” “And if you did need it?” “Then I wouldn’t be coming for it,” I said. “The point of the letter is so that won’t happen. I’ve written something inside that’s meant to stop Hangfire in his tracks if he tries anything. But I can’t let it fall into anyone else’s hands either.” “You gave it to me just now.” “And like I said, if I’d posted it, I’d have gone over to the Black Cat to make sure you never got it. What’s written inside is a telephone number that’s meant to be top secret. It’ll put you in contact with my organisation. If anything happens to me, you can tell my organisation and they’ll come down on this town and Hangfire like a ton of bricks. They don’t approve of people murdering their apprentices.” Ellington nodded, and looked at the envelope like it was made of gold, or like the numbers of that phone number would seep through the envelope and reveal themselves to her if she only stared long enough. “It’s a good plan,” she said. “My question is, why you aren’t calling them anyway.” It was a good question; the right one. It didn’t have a good answer. “They won’t listen to me unless I’m dead.” That got her attention, caught her hard enough to pull her into the lamplight, and look at me with worried, pitying eyes. “Why ever not?” “My organisation and I don’t see eye to eye. There are a few of us, like me and my siblings, who believe in the things that they stand for but not in the way they do things. You probably know what it’s like when you try to start an argument with someone older than you.” “Did they come down on you like a ton of bricks?” “They split us up. My sister they have under careful observation. My brother they sent to the back of beyond where he can’t do anything.” “And you?” “They did the same to me.” “So that’s why you’re here,” Ellington said. “But you can do something.” “I can,” I said. “It’s important work, and it’s good work. It’s the sort of thing I wanted my organisation to be for. If I could go back to that day and choose for myself whether to stay or go, I don’t know what I would do. Come here and do what we’re doing now, or stay with my sister and do what I meant to do.” “You’ve mentioned this before. You said something about a tunnel and a museum. It sounded like you were trying to steal a valuable item again, like the Bombinating Beast.” I nodded, and she asked, “But what would that item do?” “The same thing as the Bombinating Beast,” I said. “It would help us win. Win the argument, and save the world. That was the plan, but I don’t know what the plan is any more. I’m at one end of the world, my brother’s at the other, and my sister’s in jail.” “And is there nobody else who can help her?” “It doesn’t matter if there is,” I said. “It should have been me, and I failed. I can’t fail here, too.” Ellington gave me a long, sad look. “I understand,” she said, quietly. “My father kept me safe for so many years, living with me in the middle of nowhere, far from anyone he knew. I would feel ashamed not to be the one to rescue him.” “What matters is that he is rescued,” I said. “Praise or blame is of secondary importance.” “Then, you have your job, and I have mine,” she said, firmly. “You’re here to solve the mysteries. I’m here to find my father. Those have been the same thing sometimes, but not always.” “And that’s why we should part here,” I said. “I’m going to solve a mystery, but that mystery has nothing to do with where your father is. I’ll solve that mystery when I can, but this mystery I’ll solve right now.” She nodded. “If that’s so, Mr. Snicket, then when can I open this envelope?” She held it between two black and pointed fingernails. I looked at it, then up at the sky. “I don’t know if you have a watch, Ms. Feint, but I don’t. If all is well, it shouldn’t take me long to do what I’m going to do. I’ll be at the Black Cat before dawn.” “You mean, in the middle of the night.” “In fairness, it’s the way I’m used to doing things.” “I know that,” she said. “That’s the time when we first met, after all. Until the next time, then, Mr. Snicket.” “Until the middle of the night,” I said, and the two of us turned and walked away, each heading in the opposite direction, but both the same way: Out of the light. Into the darkness. Into some dark and empty corner of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I decided I’d better get to my destination while there was still light enough to see, and went. The former Stain’d-by-the-Sea Museum of Traditional Art sat between two broken lampposts, which made the museum look like a missing tooth on the town’s bruised jawline. It could have just picked itself up and wandered off and nobody would know any better, much less care. Even I didn’t care. After everything that had happened, I never wanted to see the building again, and intended to never see it again after the next few minutes, which I would spend inside it. Being inside it was a lot like not seeing it, so that was okay. The orangey fringe on the horizon was too weak even to illuminate the carving of the Bombinating Beast which, I was sure, still grimaced out at me from somewhere high up the wall. I couldn’t remember whether Carr had locked the door when we had left, but when I tried it, the door was open. That was easier than getting in and out through the open window at the back, like Ellington had, and like Hangfire probably had too. Even the darkness inside wasn’t so bad, as I’d already walked through that same darkness twice that day. I could pretend it wasn’t night, and that nothing spooky was going to jump out at me, like a haphazardly-placed coat stand. With the light the way it was, I could only take the stairs one step at a time, as I slowly spiralled up the empty, rattling house, keeping my hand always on the bannister or brushing against the wall to tell me the way, making my way towards the place where this mystery had begun. I reached the top floor, and the last of the sunlight from the west and the soft snow of moonlight showed everything just as I had left it, only darker. I really would regret not bringing a flashlight one of these days. The silence made it feel like I shouldn’t be there, either, and every thudding fall of my worn-out shoes and every creak of the worn-out floorboards made my worn-out body feel like it should be anywhere else. Soon enough it will be, I told myself. All you need to do is go into that office and move that one thing and then you can be certain, and the mystery will be solved, and you can forget there was ever such a person as Lansbury Van Dyke. As if I could. This was more or less pointless. Proving how Hangfire murdered Van Dyke and escaped wouldn’t bring him to justice. It was just one more tiny and ineffectual move in the game he was playing, between himself and Stain’d-by-the-Sea, that I had so rudely interrupted one hour. The office door was still ajar from where Carr and I had left it. It was at the wrong side of the house for there to be any light from the sunset. I pushed the door open and walked in. The first thing that jumped out at me – thankfully, not literally – was the pale blankness of the sheet lying in the middle of the room, the all-too-visible form of most of a man more visible beneath it than I would have liked. When I was a small child my brother once dressed up in a bedsheet to convince me that he was a ghost, and even though he looked terribly ridiculous, I am told that I cried for hours, although I don’t remember it. A ghost in a bedsheet is the silliest kind of ghost, and yet I could not suppress the image of that horrible, savaged shape rising up beneath its muffling sheet, and staggering towards me with mittened hands outstretched and grasping. I could do without giving my own imagination tips on how to give me nightmares. I tried to ignore the sheet and everything else as I walked into the room, tried not to look around but to keep my eyes fixed wholly and solely on what I had come here for. I violated one of my own most important principles, and paid for it. I really should have noticed that someone had dragged the office chair across the room. I really should have noticed that they had set it upright in the far corner where the shadows were deepest. Carr had locked the front door, and I really, absolutely, unambiguously and definitely should have noticed that someone was sitting waiting for me. I was only a few paces into the room when he moved. He had been expecting me, and moved like quicksilver, which is something that supposedly moves very fast, to lunge across the room while I was still turning slowly towards the noise of him getting up. My eyes were on his chair while he was crossing the room, and my eyes were crossing the room while he was locking the door, and only when he stopped to face me did my eyes meet his. There was no mistaking him for a ghost. I hadn’t expected him to be wearing the mask. It was black as everything about him, black as his long coat and his boots and the hat that shaded his non-face and the long cane he held in one hand, with a tiny growling monster capping the cane, its face matching the elaborate, crudely-carved leer of the mask that covered his face with spiked scales that curved upwards like horns. He was black as a silhouette, like his real body was somewhere else, and this awful, huge dark force standing before me was magnified from a smaller man standing in the light. I had never gotten a good look at his face, but there was no mistaking that it was Hangfire. “You’re a desperate, interfering fool, Snicket,” he said, in a snarl of a voice like a beast or a goblin. “Not an inch of this town has anything to do with you, yet still you’re here, meddling in every event when you could have run back to your home and done something useful.” He advanced a step as I retreated a step. His cane tapped on the floor beside him, but he wasn’t leaning on it, he didn’t need it. He had it for something else. I looked around. Windows locked, door locked, and not a secret passage to speak of. There was no running away from this one, though I reserved the right to keep on retreating until my back hit the wall. “I can do something useful here,” I argued, though maybe it was the wrong time for it. “And you can, too. There’s something you can do that will let the two of us walk away in peace.” He took another slow step forwards, unhurried. “I won’t give you another chance,” I said. “What could I possibly do for you, Snicket? What would I want to do that you would also want?” My back hit the wall sooner than I thought. It was a bookcase, packed with uncomfortable irregularly-sized spines digging into my own spine. No more retreats. I only had words now. I looked him in the eyes that shone in the thin slits of his mask. “Give up Armstrong Feint.” He stopped in his tracks. It was a long shot, impossibly long. But I had to try. It was only fair to Ellington that I try. I had promised to stay in Stain’d-by-the-Sea to rescue her father. If I could do that, I was sure the Inhumane Society’s plan would be defeated. If Armstrong Feint could be saved, everyone could be. It was the perfect plan. It was too perfect. The man in the mask gave me a pitying snarl, and shook his craggy head. “Impossible,” he said, without any emotion in his low, cold voice. “That is the one thing I will not do – I cannot do.” “I didn’t think so,” I said. “But you know that I had to ask.” He didn’t answer, at first. Instead, he slid the long black cane through one gloved hand, and laid a powerful grip on its head with the other. He twisted the bestial head with that hand like he was snapping its neck, and a blade like a shaft of moonlight hissed from the other end of the cane. Many canes conceal swords like that, and it is a nasty trick. He held it like a sword now, the sharp edge of the blade pointed at me. “Believe me, Snicket,” he said, in a whisper of a voice, “this will hurt me much more than it will hurt you.” “You don’t want to do that,” I said, trying to speak over the sound of my heart throbbing as if it was hovering next to my ear, which it might have been soon enough. “No,” Hangfire said, as he took one more step forwards, and began to lift the sword. “The reason is,” I said, trying to choke out the words with breath as elusive as truth in a newspaper, “because I’ve written Ellington a letter.” He didn’t hesitate, exactly. He stopped, but he was as certain as he had been. As mirthless a laugh as any I’d heard coughed out of his mask. “I know all about that letter,” he said, “and I know all about your organisation. My eyes and ears are everywhere, Snicket. I do not fear that letter. I do not fear your weak and frail organisation with its idiots of chaperones and passionless tyrants of leaders. Do you think I would have ever considered inviting you and your chaperone here as my tools if I was even the slightest bit afraid of you?” The laugh became actually mirthful now, genuinely if barely entertained at the thought. “Let your organisation come down on me like a ton of bricks, Snicket. Let them do their worst. But you will be dead, and so will be this town.” “It’s a good thing,” I said, “that that’s not what I really wrote.” Hangfire raised the sword again. “Your last will and testament, no doubt.” “Actually, it was your true identity.” He stopped dead. Still as the man lying under the sheet. It was like he’d suddenly been transformed into the statue of the monster he was imitating. His sword didn’t even twitch in his hand, didn’t advance, didn’t retreat. But his eyes, the eyes I saw clearly behind his mask, widened like he’d been struck, and I knew I was right. “You don’t know that,” he said at last, his eyes fixed right on mine, sucking out the truth. “You’re bluffing, Snicket. You don’t know anything.” “You confirmed it just now,” I said. “Why would it matter if Ellington Feint knew your true identity? Why would that frighten you? That could only possibly be the case in one situation. There’s only one person you could possibly be if Ellington learning your identity is a threat. I’ve been suspicious for a while. Now I’m certain.” Hatred stems from fear. I could see both in his eyes, trembling with fury as they burnt into me. If looks could kill, his would, but his sword could and he didn’t move it an inch. “Has she read the letter?” “She’s under instructions not to read it unless I don’t return by the middle of the night,” I said. “If you kill me, she’ll read it. If you kidnap me, she’ll read it. If you do anything to stop me, she’ll read it. There’s only one way to really stop her from reading it, and you know what it is.” Hangfire blinked first. He glanced just aside, just enough to look out of the window and see how late an hour it was. “I asked you once before,” I said. “Give – up – Armstrong – Feint. I don’t want to tell her about you, but I will, if you don’t do it.” “It would destroy her.” “I know. But I won’t have to do it. Because you’re going to give up. And then we’ll both walk out of this town and never return.” He lowered his sword, and stood glowering in the nothing light. Like the statue of the Bombinating Beast, he curved, he was turned inwards, looking inwards, at himself, at what he could do. Even to this day, I still think he considered it. Gently and carefully, thoughtfully, he twisted the head of his cane and slid the sword back into its safe wooden housing. I hadn’t been breathing, and I sighed with all the relief I felt. I thought it might just be over. The next thing I felt was his black-gloved hand gripping my throat like a vice. His mask pressed into my face, his feverish eyes an inch from mine, a deep and bottomless green that swirled like a vortex of dark and tangled seaweed. “Do not imagine, Snicket – do not imagine for one moment – that you can possess an advantage over me. You will go back to Ellington, Snicket. You will take that letter from her. You will never, ever tell her the truth. Because if you do” – he pressed my neck to the wall so hard I almost fell unconscious, could almost have fallen straight through the wall and plummeted to the ground in a hail of unread books – “there will be nothing to stop me from finding you and tearing you, with my bare hands, into a jigsaw so tiny that nobody could even pick up the pieces. This is my only warning.” He let me go, and I didn’t know anything other than that. My vision had almost gone, and my breathing almost had. I coughed and choked as I tried to draw in breath, tears trickled from my eyes as if I’d already heard about my sister, and I couldn’t do anything except lie on the floor, like I’d collapsed from all the weariness of the day, or from the terror of all the fear I had put off until the future, like it had suddenly collapsed upon me like the insupportable weight of the world on the shoulders of a giant shirtless man in an old story I once read. Hangfire could have done anything he wanted to me in that moment. He didn’t. I don’t know what he did, though I can guess. By the time I had recovered enough to know what was going on around me, he had vanished. I hauled myself to my feet, still coughing, and blinked my eyes into focus. I turned them from one end of the room to the other – no Hangfire hiding behind the small office chair, no Hangfire under the thin desk, no Hangfire behind the bookcases. The hidden compartment was shut. The door was locked, with the key on the inside. The windows, too, shut and bolted. And yet, he had gone. Vanished once again from a room with no exit. That was the myth, anyway. I figured I probably knew the truth, and now was the time to find out. I took a few weak steps over to one of the windows, lifted the bolt out of its notch and slotted it into its casing, then pushed the window open. It tilted like a cat flap, and my sore head peered out of it, and looked to the left, though there was nothing to see by now, not even Hangfire. Then I let the window fall shut, and solved the mystery.
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Post by Teleram on Aug 7, 2014 12:28:28 GMT -5
It's almost finished already? Man I really need to get on these, I only read the first 3 chapters then kinda lost interest (no offense).
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Post by Dante on Aug 8, 2014 14:59:10 GMT -5
CHAPTER THIRTEEN “Don’t leave me in suspense, Snicket,” Moxie said. “So how did he do it?” It was the next day, though what day it was didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was that the rain was holding off, the sun was pushing the shadows away, and that Moxie and I were each enjoying a croque-monsieur, a grilled ham and cheese sandwich usually from France but today from Jake Hix and Hungry’s, and subsequently reheated in Moxie’s oven. I’d taxied over with the sandwiches as an apology to Moxie for how she couldn’t be in the loop with this mystery, but judging from the fact that she’d ditched her sling, she would probably be quick off the mark when our next mystery came along. I wondered if I should have told her about Hangfire’s brutality towards me, but I had already made my decision by wearing a high collar that morning. “Let’s start from the beginning,” I said. “After our encounter at the Colophon Clinic recently, Hangfire had two problems. One was that two of his trusted associates were in jail, and the other was that the Inhumane Society’s return to town had been made public. Lansbury Van Dyke had played a role in shutting down the Inhumane Society before, and if he spoke up again this time, Hangfire and his associates would be finished because they could no longer operate in secret – the Mitchums would round them all up and ship them out of town again. When Hangfire has a problem, he solves it with a crime, and he realised that both of these problems could be solved by a single crime – one that would help cement his dominance over the town, to boot.” “Murder Lansbury Van Dyke,” Moxie said, and she shook her head. “What kind of terrible person sees people like they’re just rocks in his path that he can kick aside?” “That’s probably why they call themselves the Inhumane Society,” I said. “They won’t let anyone stand between them and their ambitions.” “Whatever those ambitions may be,” Moxie sighed. “We still don’t know that, either.” “We know enough for this case,” I replied. “Hangfire could easily have just broken into Van Dyke’s house and killed him in his sleep, like he could have just broken into your lighthouse and taken the Bombinating Beast by force, but he prefers to work from the shadows, and he devised a shadowy method of murder that I’m sure he hoped would keep me and the Mitchums racking our brains for weeks – and out of his hair. He must have cased the joint in advance – it wouldn’t have been hard to break in to scout it out – and realised that the location was perfect for trickery. His plans couldn’t have worked in any other room – it had to be that office. The room being an office probably inspired the major component of his plan – an impersonation of Lansbury Van Dyke, first in writing in the form of a fake letter to Theodora requesting her help in tracing threats against him, and then in person right in front of me.” “So it was Hangfire pretending to be Lansbury Van Dyke who met you!” Moxie exclaimed. “I always thought that made sense.” “Hangfire’s taken roles before, so it did occur to me that he might have done the same this time,” I said. “With the right clothes and a wig, it was probably surprisingly easy – and he also chose dawn for the time when me and Theodora were to meet him, which meant that there was so much dawn sunlight shining in our eyes we couldn’t see him properly in his role as Van Dyke, and even Van Dyke’s secretary, Carr Carter, was fooled. Hangfire can imitate voices perfectly, so that sealed the deal – we saw what we expected to saw. But it was the telephone that really tipped me off. It would be easier to impersonate Van Dyke if he could conceal his face in some way – like by holding a telephone up to his face. That’s why Van Dyke appeared to be answering the phone when me and Theodora first saw him. But didn’t you notice that he must have been holding the receiver in an unnatural way? He was standing next to the desk with the telephone on it, with the desk on his left, and the receiver pressed against his right ear. If you try and stand like that, you’ll have the receiver cord wrapped either around your front or your back, and be in danger of pulling the telephone right off the desk. Nobody would answer the telephone like that. But of course, Hangfire had to – because he had to be standing in front of the window so that we couldn’t see him properly, but he also had to be holding the phone with his right hand and with his right side facing us, because Lansbury Van Dyke, was Carr pointed out when we examined the body, was missing one of the fingers on his left hand from an old war injury. So all of that pointed to an impersonation – not to the body of Lansbury Van Dyke being swapped for someone else’s, but for somebody else posing as the living Lansbury Van Dyke. Hangfire probably took Van Dyke’s head from the room to make sure that nobody could compare his appearance accurately to the man we’d all seen in the office.” “That’s not the only reason to be suspicious of that phone call business, either,” Moxie said. “From everything you’ve told me, there’s another clue.” “You spotted that too?” I asked. “A very clever observation, if you got that right, Moxie.” “We journalists have to be used to such ruses,” Moxie shrugged. “He’d supposedly been on the phone before and after you came in. But the Feint girl was hiding in that hidden compartment the whole time – and she never heard him talking on the phone!” I smiled. Being a detective is a bit like being a journalist. I was neither, but Moxie could be either one day. “You’re probably wondering exactly how Hangfire got close enough to kill Van Dyke, too. After all, you can’t just walk into someone’s house dressed as them without arousing suspicion. Well, Ellington heard two people talking who then came into the office, and Carr said that Van Dyke had mentioned something about a salesman when she arrived at his house that morning. I think Hangfire probably called bright and early, before Carr turned up for work, and posed as a salesman wearing a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. For his murder plot to work, Hangfire needed to bring two carpets into that room, so he probably told Van Dyke he had an antique Bombinating Beast carpet to sell – and he’d have had the roll of carpet with him to prove it, though it would actually have been two rolls rolled up together, most likely. Van Dyke, we know, was after more Stain’d artefacts, so he’d have welcomed Hangfire in – if Van Dyke had ever known Hangfire’s true identity in the past, and known that he was a member of the Inhumane Society, too much time had passed and Hangfire had disguised himself too well for Van Dyke to recognise him. Hangfire probably timed his visit to very carefully, making sure Van Dyke would soon have to let Carr in, hoping that Carr wouldn’t be aware there was anyone in the house – and timed the invitation to Theodora so she would turn up with me quite soon after that, too. Once Van Dyke came back from letting Carr in, Hangfire must have lured him up to his office – those were the voices Ellington heard approaching and coming into the office – and if either Hangfire or Van Dyke heard the buzzing made by the secret door in the office when Ellington hid, neither of them did anything about it; maybe Hangfire used it as a distraction. Either way, Hangfire got Van Dyke into the office – that was how he got into the room, of course, by simply walking in long before I’d arrived on the scene – laid one of the carpets on the floor to show it off, and killed Van Dyke on the carpet, cutting his head clean off with his sword-cane. “That was the easy part; after that, Hangfire had to work at break-neck speed to be ready before Theodora turned up with me. His hat, coat, and cane he probably dumped out of the window so that they wouldn’t be seen. That left Hangfire in his disguise as Lansbury Van Dyke. But it also left the real Van Dyke’s body on the floor, bleeding away on the carpet. Hangfire needed a way of hiding those, and more importantly, a way of hiding them that meant they could be left in the office later – so no throwing them out of the window, too; that would also have been too risky, as a hat and coat left in a back alley is no cause for suspicion, but a dead body is. That’s also why Hangfire didn’t just throw the head out of the window to conceal it. No, Hangfire needed to conceal both pieces of Van Dyke’s body in that room, in such a place as nobody would see them. “I imagine that his original plan had been to simply stuff them in the hidden compartment – he’d have guessed where that was, of course, but he couldn’t risk stealing Van Dyke’s memoirs before killing him in case Van Dyke noticed. But on the day, Hangfire was in trouble – he could tell from the green strap caught in the wall panelling where the secret door was, but he also knew that Ellington Feint was almost certainly hiding inside. Hangfire couldn’t afford to meet her, as he’d be forced to surrender her father.” I had kept Hangfire’s secret, as promised. Not telling Ellington meant not telling anyone, especially not a journalist. I just hoped Ellington wouldn’t discover it on her own. She had refused to give up Lansbury Van Dyke’s memoirs when I had returned for the letter the previous night, which she had at least surrendered, but with a curious expression on her face. It didn’t occur to me until I was halfway down the street that the contents of the envelope could be read just by holding it up to a streetlamp. “Hangfire couldn’t steal the memoirs with Ellington in his way – he’d go back later to look for those, as we know – but it also meant he couldn’t hide the body. But Hangfire had probably considered that the hidden compartment might not be big enough, for example, and made a back-up plan – a way of hiding a grown man’s body in a room where there was nowhere to hide anything. That would have been a perfect part of his plan, too – one more impossibility to puzzle us. But have you figured out what made it easier? Why he didn’t have to hide a grown man’s body at all?” Moxie looked at me, thoughtfully, and nodded slowly. “I think I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “Hangfire had several reasons to do everything in this case – including the way he killed Van Dyke. He didn’t have to hide the whole body – the head and the body were in separate pieces!” “Exactly, and that gave him the edge he needed,” I said. “The head was easy – all he had to do was put a mask over it and hold it under his arm, the arm he had facing away from us when we went into the room. Using a Bombinating Beast mask was a convenient coincidence later, but probably also appealed to Hangfire’s vanity, as he’s been collecting all kinds of items to do with the Bombinating Beast. He’d have to take the mask with him so that we wouldn’t notice the blood from the decapitated head upon it, but he’d probably have stolen it anyway. So that was Van Dyke’s head taken care of. “That just left the body – but with the head removed, it was much more manageable. I went to the library this morning and looked up rigor mortis, which has to do with a dead body going stiff – and it turns out that that doesn’t happen until a few hours after death. Before that, a dead body can be moved into different positions – curled up, for instance. Without a head sticking out, it can be contorted into a much more compact shape with a much smaller profile – and held in that profile if you have something to tie it up with, like a rope or tape – or, perhaps, a carpet, one I noticed the first time I saw the body was big enough to wrap the body in. That would also soak up a lot of the blood from the wound and prevent it from getting anywhere, which would otherwise leave a tell-tale mark revealing where it was hidden. The carpet was the perfect way of hiding the body, which was why Hangfire brought it. Once Hangfire curled the body up and wrapped it in the carpet, then from the right angle, it would have just looked about as big as a large box, perhaps, and could be hidden in anything that could conceal a large box – or behind anything that could conceal such a shape, just so long as it was wide and flat enough, and Hangfire took advantage of a truly common object in order to achieve this. Remember when I described my first view of the office? I said that Van Dyke was standing as if he’d just gotten out of his chair – but I never actually saw him do that, I just assumed it. It was because he stood that way that I assumed it, and so I also I assumed, like anyone would, that the chair was completely empty – but you wouldn’t know, as I didn’t know, because as I said, the chair was facing the desk, which meant its back was to the door square-on. If Van Dyke had actually only just stood up, it would’ve been facing to the side, but for Hangfire’s trick to work, the chair had to be exactly where it had been carefully positioned. If the chair had been even slightly turned, we would have seen a large bundle of carpet on the seat of the chair – a bundle which was in fact the wrapped-up body of Lansbury Van Dyke.” “That’s horrendous,” Moxie said, and I agreed with the expression on her face, “and clever. I once read a book in which a body was hidden inside a chair, but I didn’t think you could pull that trick with an office chair – it’s just a thin back and seat. An adult’s body would have legs and arms and a head hanging over the sides. Treating a man’s body like that to hide it is the kind of brilliance only a monster could come up with.” “That’s the worst part about Hangfire,” I said. “He’s not just a violent, ruthless brute – he’s a violent, ruthless, clever brute. He even realised that he’d need two carpets. Of course, he could just have turned Lansbury Van Dyke’s body out onto the floorboards – but somebody would have eventually asked why there was so little blood, that being because it had all soaked into the carpet Hangfire had taken away with him. Hangfire’s only choice was to leave the carpet. But that meant he needed a second, clean carpet to put out for when we first walked into the office, so that when we saw what was apparently the same carpet later, we wouldn’t assume it had just popped out of nowhere with the body, which would have clued us in to how it was used. That’s why Hangfire brought two carpets, and after locking the office door behind us, he’d simply have rolled up the clean one and thrown it out of the window – using it later for his fake ‘Bombinating Beast,’ of course – and leaving behind the carpet he killed Lansbury Van Dyke on in exactly the place and state it should have been. He couldn’t get his hands on the memoirs, but he faked a ransacking to throw us off, shuffling the furniture about quietly in case it attracted attention, which of course meant he couldn’t break anything or cause serious damage – but it tricked us, all the same, just like every aspect of his plan tricked us. It was the perfect plan.” “Hardly perfect, Snicket!” Moxie cried. “You still haven’t explained how he got out of that room! Obviously, there was some gimmickry with the window – you’ve told me that much –” “Not gimmickry, exactly,” I shrugged. “More of a serendipitous design choice. I’d figured that the window must have been how the sham Beast escaped the room later in the day; as soon as I knew it had been reeled in on a cable, a window was the only opening in the room that the cable could have been pulled through. I could tell just from seeing them that the windows opened outwards, too. With the cable holding the window just ajar, the Beast would be pulled into the room, up the wall, would have pushed the window open the rest of the way, and let it slam shut behind them – one of the crashing noises both me and Ellington heard every time something left that room. What I couldn’t figure out was how the windows could still be locked from the inside even after someone or something had just gone through them, and that was why I went back to the house last night, to test them. And of course, the solution was obvious as soon as I tested them – in fact, it was a possibility I’d read about in that locked room lecture in the library just that morning! You see, the windows were locked by a vertical bolt that slotted into a niche at the bottom of the window frame. You had to lift the bolt and slot it into its casing to open the window – but if you slammed the window shut, the bolt would be knocked out of position and would fall right back down into its niche again!” “So the window automatically locked whenever you closed it, like a latch?!” demanded Moxie. “Nine times out of ten,” I said. “I tried it.” “For goodness’ sake, Snicket!” she moaned. “If you had just tried the window earlier in the day – you had two separate opportunities!” “I didn’t say that I had the perfect plan,” I said, “and I didn’t say that I never get anything wrong. I just try to get things right in the end, and though it took me all day, I did.” “But wait,” Moxie said, with one last desperate question, “what about the drop? How did Hangfire jump out of the window and survive a multi-storey fall?” I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “He didn’t have to,” I said. “Do you remember the diagram I drew, Moxie? Of the room, and the layout of the entire floor? Don’t you remember what’s right next to Lansbury Van Dyke’s office – and what I’d have seen if I walked over to the left-hand window and looked out of it and to the left?” Moxie groaned, and put her head in her hand. “The fire escape,” she said. I nodded. “The fire escape. It descends one level to the right before turning back to the left – so it’s just a short jump away from the left-hand window, and half a floor lower, too. For someone reasonably athletic, it’s a relatively easy jump from the window to the edge of the fire escape – and then the window falls shut and locks itself behind you.” I spread my arms, like a conjuror, or Qwerty revealing the library. “And that’s how Hangfire committed the murder.” Moxie let out a long breath, looking out along the horizon. Then she returned to her typewriter and started tapping into it one-handed, as she had been doing throughout my narration. “The end,” she said, hitting the last key with a flourish. She looked over at me. “For this case, anyway – but it’s not the end, is it, Snicket? You couldn’t bring Hangfire in. Learning how he did it doesn’t affect anything.” “It does affect something,” I pointed out. “I dropped by the police station this morning, and managed to convince them of my story. Of course, they wouldn’t come out to listen to it until I convinced them of how Flammarion and Dander had gotten out of the cell, but fortunately, I had all night to think about that.” Moxie blinked at me. “What on earth did you say to convince them that Stew was the culprit?” “I cheated,” I said. “I didn’t. I came up with an alternative explanation, and even managed to demonstrate it. Mimi Mitchum mentioned that the combination lock on the station door had come with an instruction manual, and they’d kept it in the station. The instructions listed a generic default number for the combination lock, and the Mitchums had used that rather than changing it to a number of their own. As I pointed out to them, anyone could have passed Flammarion and Dander a lockpick through the cell window, which they could use to unlock and then relock the doors to conceal their means of escape, and then all they had to do was look in the instruction manual to get the right code for the combination lock and escape.” “I’d like to have seen Stew’s face when he heard that,” Moxie smiled. “My work does have some compensation,” I said, smiling too at the memory – but not for long. “It's work that is never done, though. What worries me now is the next time.” “You mean, next time Hangfire tries something?” “This was never intended to be a supernatural murder,” I said. “The Bombinating Beast aspect happened purely by chance – a stolen mask, a door that made a buzzing sound. But Hangfire made hay out of it – Stew Mitchum, too. They leapt on this supposed attack by the Bombinating Beast and did everything they could to get people to believe it. I’m worried that it might have inspired Hangfire for some future crime.” “So what you’re saying,” Moxie said, and she didn’t meet my eyes while she said it, “is that it’s all her fault.” I stiffened. These conversations with Moxie were always awkward. “I presume you mean Ms. Feint.” “All of this happened because she was recklessly tearing up the town,” Moxie argued, her cheeks growing pinker as she warmed to her theme. “Every time she meddles, she makes things worse. You know it, Snicket.” “She’s searching for her missing father!” I snapped back, because Moxie was right. “What would you do if your parents went missing?” Moxie scowled at me, a sad scowl that reminded me of when we first met. She had been crying then, and looked like she was remembering crying now. “I have, Snicket,” she said. “My mother left to work for another newspaper, and I barely hear from her. And the father I looked up to has been replaced by a man who says it’s pointless to even get up in the mornings. I’ve already lost them, Snicket. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get them back.” I had been unfair, and I knew it. I had been wrong. But I, too, was remembering the people who were missing in my own life, and who I did not know when, or if, I would ever see again. My parents, living distantly, humbly, somewhere far from me, who had given me up to do something better than I had been born for; my brother, sent off into the Hinterlands, where telephone calls were as rare as a friendly face; my sister, sat in a cold jail cell for who knows how long. I looked away from Moxie, and scanned the horizon as if they might appear there – as if my sight could zoom miles over the land like the most enormous pair of binoculars and see them off in what passed for homes in the distance. I looked for them in the shapes of the hills and I looked for their faces in the windswept patterns of seashells in the valley and I looked for their silhouettes in the half-seen shadows of the Clusterous Forest. I looked for them at the very apex of the lighthouse and at the very nadir of the road leading up to it, and to my surprise, I saw someone. I was so shocked that I dropped my croque-monsieur. I hadn’t expected to see him at all, and yet there he was, waiting for me and smiling. Moxie saw me looking, and looked as well. “Who’s that?” she asked. “I’ve never seen him before.” “You wouldn’t have,” I said. “He’s from out of town.” She gave me a look like she wanted to dissect me. “A friend of yours, Snicket?” “No,” I said, and I got up, left my lunch on the ground, and walked away from Moxie, down the winding road and towards him. He’d seen me coming, and showed no signs of coming to meet me, but he was definitely waiting for me to come to him. He looked just as I remembered, a memory I could never forget. My steps quickened as I got closer and closer, as he grew clearer and clearer, his smile growing wider and more shark-like, like Stew Mitchum’s, like the Bombinating Beast’s. There was no mistaking it; I only knew two people with an eyebrow like that. I marched right up to him and asked him the question in the title of this story. Olaf laughed, right in my face. “I could ask you the same thing,” he sneered. “The apprentices all told me you were off on some important mission in this dump, and yet I find you here snacking with girls. What would your sister think, Lemony?” “What my sister would think is no concern of yours,” I told him. He raised an eyebrow, or rather, one end of his single long eyebrow at that. “Oh? The same sister you’ve been telling everyone else to look up to. The same one who’s meant to be working with you and your brother to change the ways of our silly organisation. Oh, I care what she thinks, Lemony. I’m clever enough to get on well enough, unlike you, but I want to see some changes around here too. What your sister says matters. No, it’s what you think that’s worthless out here, wasting time in this ghost town when you should have been with your sister, grabbing that item we all want to get our hands on and using it to do whatever you like. Because of you, Lemony, your sister was thrown in prison! That’s why nobody cares what you have to say any more.” The worst kind of enemy to have is one who is always right and always knows the right thing to say to make you feel all wrong. I hated the way Olaf made me felt, and the things he made me want to do. My job, as I read it, was to make things right, and he was a person who made things wrong. But he was still one of us, and he still had the awful news I’d been waiting for. “Prison?” I asked, and I just resisted reaching out to grab his lapels and shake him like a piggy bank. “For how long?” He shrugged his lanky shoulders. “A generous sentence, considering the crime,” he said. “A mere few days.” There was something hidden in what he said, a joke he wasn’t telling me the punchline to, like everything he said. He liked jokes, mean jokes, and he liked having all the answers. “So few, for stealing from the museum?” I asked. His smile curved ever upwards again. I had taken the bait. “That’s all she served, but that’s not all she was sentenced to,” he said. “There were many who said for sure that you would try to break her out the moment you heard about it, but what was the point in waiting for you? One could wait forever for you to answer their pleas.” He looked me in the eye, and I was reminded that, even though I was standing a little farther up the road than him, he was still taller than me. “So I took the liberty, and gave her her liberty.” “You did?!” I was as astonished as if Hangfire really had given up and retired to tend to a bird sanctuary. “You broke her out?” “I know a thing or two about getting in and out of locked rooms,” he said, nonchalantly. “A pretty young girl in distress… doesn’t that tug on your heartstrings, Lemony?” It did, and I immediately regretted it. “Why?” I asked. I believed he was telling the truth, but I didn’t believe he would do a selfless thing. “What did you want to get out of it? Did you want the item, or –” “You never could see anything from another person’s point of view, Lemony,” Olaf sighed, shaking his head pityingly. “What kind of noble motive would make you happy? What would make you think I was anything but selfish?” He gave me a glare which I felt, for once, was real. “I did it because I wanted to, Lemony – the same reason anyone does anything.” I clenched my fists. I hate violence, but there are some people I hate more than that. “I’m not going to be grateful for your egotism.” “Complicated words from a simple boy,” he retorted. “Don’t worry, Lemony. I don’t need your gratitude. Your sister was more than grateful enough in your absence.” “Get out,” I ordered him. “Get out of this town, now. Get out, or –” “Or nothing,” he smiled, and he turned his back on me. He was daring me to do something, anything, and no matter what I did, even nothing, I would feel like a coward. “It’s been entertaining talking to you, Lemony, but I have important places to be – visiting my old chaperone, for one. She’s been having all sorts of problems with you, her letter said.” I gaped at his receding back. “You mean Theodora?” I called at him. “S. Theodora Markson?” He laughed, the laugh echoing away down the empty valley. “You didn’t even know that?” he called back. “You don’t know anything. You probably don’t even know what the S stands for.” I watched him go, saying not a last word, no sound reaching my ears but the crying winds of the valley and the odd lost cackle – Olaf’s, or someone else’s – drifting into my ears from far away. Out before me, the rooftops of Stain’d-by-the-Sea stretched out – grey, dirty, caved in. Every street was empty, every building hollow. I had thought the town was simply draining out, but it was more than that. There was a poison in that town, a fatal one, gradually killing it stone dead – turning those streets and buildings into cadavers, consuming what life was left, feeding itself and its empty hate. I knew what it was, but I hadn’t stopped it. I knew who Hangfire was, I knew what he was doing, I knew how he did it, but I didn’t know how I could stop him. I didn’t know if anything I did was useful or right. But, right or wrong, I had made a promise. I had made a promise to that girl, in this town. I didn’t know if I could make things right in this town, but the only way to be truly wrong was not to try. I took one look at the empty valley and then turned towards the town, and followed the only road back into it, and back into the maze of questions.
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