CHAPTER ONE
There was a town, and there was a locked room, and there was a murder. I was living in the town, and I was sitting outside the room, and I thought I knew how the murderer did it. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “If the struggle was so terrible, why wasn’t anything broken?” Instead, I asked the wrong question – four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of one more.
Like too many of the cases I have investigated, the Stain’d Myth Murders began with me in the passenger seat of S. Theodora Markson’s roadster, driving to I-didn’t-know-where at I-haven’t-had-breakfast o’ clock. I wasn’t happy, and not just because of breakfast, which Theodora can’t cook, or the roadster, which Theodora wouldn’t take to a mechanic no matter how much it needed it. I wasn’t happy because I had planned on spending the day the same way I had spent the past few days, waiting by the telephone in the lobby of the Lost Arms in case anyone telephoned for me with news about my sister, stepping out only for meals at the diner across the street, or to visit a sick friend in her home across town. I didn’t know who might phone or what they would tell me, and I wasn’t sure if “She’ll be in prison for the duration” was better or worse than not knowing anything at all. But I had been taught never to be content with not knowing anything at all, and it was one of the few parts of my education I had agreed with, and yet there I wasn’t, avoiding chatting with Prosper Lost to pass the time, and there I was, yawning on ripped leather while my chaperone in an organisation I’m not allowed to talk about rattled me awake over dark and sleeping streets.
I looked at Theodora like I was going to ask a question, and Theodora frowned. There is no right question to ask S. Theodora Markson, in a car or anywhere, not even “What does the
S stand for?”, which she would never bother to answer. But she disliked my habit of asking the wrong questions as much as I did, and had started trying to brush them off like she would brush her hair, which was badly. “No, Snicket,” she said. “We can’t stop for breakfast. We have an important case to investigate, and this time, nothing will go wrong.”
“Has the hot plate broken again?” I asked, referring to the only way Theodora knew to prepare food, while I knew about the diner.
Her brow curled like a marmoset’s tail, telling me that something had already gone wrong. “Breakfast is irrelevant,” she announced, though my previous experiences in solving a mystery on an empty stomach had gone quite badly. “The situation is urgent, Snicket. A man’s life is at steak.”
I wouldn’t have minded being at steak at that moment, but then I realised that she had said “at stake,” and was explaining “that means in danger.” I started to pay more attention, even though Theodora draws conclusions the way I ask questions. There are only two things to do when told that a man’s life is at stake in an urgent situation. One is to look, and feel, serious. The other is to run for help. As I was sitting in a moving vehicle and wearing a seatbelt, I could only do the first thing.
Looking and feeling serious felt like the right thing to do, but it also felt silly when I was sitting down helping nobody. I tried to ask a question that wasn’t the wrong one, for once. “How long until we get there?” I asked.
But Theodora only shook her head, her wild hair batting against my face like wings. “Wrong question again, Snicket,” she said, and applied the handbrake without slowing down. “We are already here.”
As Theodora tried to free her enormous hair from the small leather helmet she insists on wearing while driving, I got out of the car. Stopping in the middle of the road is no way to park a car, but there were worse ways to park a car in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and barely any other cars. The town’s main industry, which was also its only industry, had been on the brink of shutting its doors until recently, when it had finally done so. There was a chance that those doors might open again, as the genius daughter of the company’s owners was trying to invent a new way for the company and the town to make money. For the town’s sake, though not for the company’s, I hoped she would succeed. The town’s trade was in ink, but the ink was chased out of octopi that had been pursued to their very last hiding places, at the bottom of what was once a sea but had now been drained into a bone-dry valley in which giant syringes stabbed hourly into the last watery crannies of the earth where the octopi hid. The ink was vanishing, and more rapidly by the day, and Stain’d-by-the-Sea with it, its shops closing down and its homes boarding up until only the ghost and memory of a larger population remained in town – a town where the same handful of people rattled around day by day, like the colourful balls in a game of pool, until they were knocked out of town and the only ball left was a blank white.
“Here” was a building on a typical street in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The sidewalk was cracked like an egg, with moss spilling out of the empty space like the egg’s yolk, which made me uncomfortable for more than one reason. Farther up, the houses on either side had windows that were empty, mostly of glass but also of life and light, which is sucked out of empty houses like warmth through an open door in winter. The doors either had boards nailed across them or had fallen off their hinges entirely. A few of the roofs had even fallen in, curving inwards like a cup of tea, and through one of the gaps left in the teeth of the skyline I could make out the roof of the Lost Arms, sagging in sympathy. It looked barely five minutes’ walk away, but Theodora had insisted on driving. Maybe it really was urgent.
I looked away from the surroundings and at the building where a man’s life was supposedly at stake. There were wide steps up to the door and a balustrade around them that was chipped and worn, and the windows were all glass and no stones even if they also had no light, and the door had a welcoming look to it, perhaps as it was really two doors, designed to swing open like a pair of arms and usher many people in. It wasn’t the good kind of welcome, though, like someone welcoming you in for a root beer float. It was like a spider welcoming you into its web, or something reaching out of a deep pit. The house was four storeys high to the two of its neighbours, and it loomed, like a monster’s shadow on your bedroom wall – and, indeed, there were shadowy monsters on its wall, at each corner of the house and at the edge of the balustrade, and peeking with broken faces and single claws out of odd pieces of stonework encrusting the house like barnacles. I recognised one of the faces, and its familiar snarl was an ill omen. The Bombinating Beast had caused me trouble wherever it had emerged in the darkest and emptiest corners of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and I didn’t think this time would be any exception.
The next face I saw, though, was more puzzled than puzzling. One of the two doors had opened a few inches, and a girl had poked her head out, looking at me and Theodora with a quizzical expression. Though she was just a disembodied head at that moment, I could tell that she was a few years older than almost thirteen, which was my age, and that she hadn’t been expecting us. She had a bob of sunrise-coloured hair that curved around her face, and eyes that looked sad, or maybe just tired – it was still very early in the morning, which was reason enough to be tired, and reason enough for me to not make out her expression too well in the dim light. She looked like she wanted to ask the question that is in the title of this story, and so would I, soon enough.
Theodora’s hair strode past me, looking flustered in the wind. She was probably annoyed that she hadn’t had chance to ring the doorbell six times, which she does to every doorbell she comes across. If I had to list everything S. Theodora Markson did wrong, the list would reach at least fifty-two places, which was also Theodora’s rank in the list of our organisation’s chaperones by competence, in descending order. “Mr. Lansbury?” she asked, and I wondered if she was still wearing her helmet with its goggles. From behind, I had no way of knowing.
The girl in the doorway glanced behind her, as if she expected to see somebody there, but there was only darkness – which didn’t mean that there wasn’t somebody there. “I am Mr. Van Dyke’s secretary,” she explained.
Theodora turned to me with a sigh. “Get back in the car,” she said. “We’ve come to the wrong place.”
“No, no, this is the right place,” the girl called out urgently. “Mr. Lansbury Van Dyke’s house.”
“Stay out of the car,” Theodora said to me, though I hadn’t moved one step. “We’ve come to the right place.” She turned back again, her hair draping itself over me as she said, “We’ve come to see Mr. Lansbury Van Dyke. It’s urgent.”
“Do you have an appointment?” asked the girl, in the tone of someone who does not expect someone to say yes, and is surprised when they do. It took a few moments of nervous blinking before Theodora’s answer seemed to sink in. “Well, you’d better come in, then,” she said, sounding extremely uncertain as to whether it was better, as she pushed open both of the doors to receive us.
Theodora swept up the stairs without a word, and in moments even the walking hedge of her hair had been swallowed up by the darkness inside the house, as if she had just plunged into a swimming pool, or a bathtub filled with ink. The girl watched her go, and then turned back to me, and, with a polite smile, beckoned.
I took one last look up at the house, and up at a certain face in particular. An early, fiery sunbeam was slithering up the snout of the Bombinating Beast, and its countless pointy teeth seemed to glimmer while its eyes were lost in shadow. It looked like it wanted to gobble me up for breakfast, and so did the house. I couldn’t blame them; I hadn’t had breakfast either. But it made me think of the dark interior of the house as a stomach, an empty one with a craving for the last few people in Stain’d, and the last fewer who had any interest in visiting Mr. Lansbury Van Dyke, for reasons so urgent that neither I nor his secretary knew what they were. I couldn’t see a single feature of the house within, it was all so dark, so I would have no idea where to walk until my eyes adjusted. I might be walking into a vast stomach, or I might just as well be walking into an expensive vase or someone holding a kitchen knife. I didn’t know what I was walking into, when I went into that house. I didn’t know, and if I had, I would never have walked into it at all.