CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When we finally all dispersed, a word which here means “go our separate ways to have a wash,” not forgetting first to thoroughly smash what remained of Hangfire’s defunct bomb, we agreed that we would meet up in the evening for a celebratory dinner at Cleo’s refuge in Handkerchief Heights, near the Stain’d lighthouse, just as Moxie and I had discussed back in the Clusterous Forest. It seemed like days ago, but really it had somehow only been hours, and so much had changed. The party that had set off to investigate the Clusterous Forest had been split in half, Carr and Kellar ending up with Hangfire, and even though we were walking on air after our victory over Hangfire’s sabotage plan, Kellar and Carr’s absence was like a deep hole somewhere, one that we tried not to look at and kept stumbling into as a result. Moxie I could tell was particularly down about Kellar being gone, and I regretted the loss of the Carr Carter who had seemed such an intelligent, responsible friend. I regretted someone else’s absence, too, and it wasn’t S. Theodora Markson, who was mercifully absent from the Far East Suite back at the Lost Arms, giving me the opportunity to have a long, lukewarm shower. It was a person whose absence I regretted all the more painfully when I visited Black Cat Coffee that afternoon, to look at the machine run dry of coffee beans and read books hidden in the attic she had once hidden herself in. It hurt, but it was the kind of hurt I wanted to feel. There are some things you don’t want to forget. There are some kinds of pain which feel right to endure. I read sad books for hours in the Black Cat’s attic, and then, as the sky began to turn orange and the evening air began to chill the empty building, I made my way through the streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea to make that rendezvous, carrying a tiny needle in my heart and a yawning hole in my stomach that only Jake Hix’s cooking could fill.
I started to run when I saw smoke in the distance.
A smouldering square of blackened rubble and crumbling wood now lay where Handkerchief Heights had formerly stood. It was a surreal experience, walking up to it through neat avenues of Jake Hix’s vegetable and herb garden, something like visiting the grounds of an old stately mansion, and yet this ruin was clearly recent to a figure of hours. Moxie and Jake were standing dejectedly by the walls, and for a horrible moment I feared a tragedy had befallen. Then I saw a third figure, one whose black-and-white clothes had been dusted by layers of ash to a cinereous shade – “cinereous” is a word which here means “ash-coloured,” by the way – striding about the wreckage and rifling through it with a fire poker. Cleo Knight was searching for anything that might be salvaged from her temporary home and laboratory, but I had seen the effects of such fires before. Fires are greedy. They take everything for themselves and only leave the scraps.
“What happened here?” I asked, in a dry and raw voice.
Jake looked over at me silently, and then back to Cleo. Moxie walked over and answered my question instead. “Hangfire took his revenge,” she said quietly. “I was looking out of the windows of the lighthouse when I saw the smoke, but by the time I had called the fire department and gotten here there was nothing left. Even the official fire department – you know, Prosper Lost and the Talkie brothers – could do nothing but make sure it didn’t spread.” She looked over at Cleo, searching through the remains. “Fortunately, Cleo was out gathering samples when Hangfire struck, but she was wild when she got back, and I still don’t think it’s quite sunk in. I’m glad I called Jake over right after the Talkies.”
“I’m going to start guarding her day and night,” Jake muttered darkly, watching as she rummaged through heaps of ash. “I’m only thankful she was out when Hangfire came calling.”
“Maybe he waited for her to leave,” I suggested.
Jake gave me a raised eyebrow. “What makes you think that?” he asked. “This is Hangfire we’re talking about. He’ll trample anything. Nothing is sacred to him.”
I looked back at Jake’s garden. Vegetables and herbs were growing in neat lines, some of them under little meshes to keep insects away; a few were heavy with plump fruit already, while some were still just tentatively sprouting shoots. It would have been easy to burn them, let alone trample them, and yet they were completely untouched. “Just a hunch,” I said, and then Cleo was wading towards me.
“Everything is ruined,” she said. It was always a little hard to tell with Cleo just what she was feeling. She could have been dejected, or she might just not have cared any more. “All of my equipment has gone. All of my samples are gone. All of my research notes, taking careful record of every measurement and variation and result, are gone. I’m practically back to square one.” She ran a grimy hand through her darkened hair, and the slowness of the movement told me that she wasn’t dejected or apathetic, but rather deeply exhausted. “I’ll even have to rebuild my clustergrease equipment from scratch, yet again – and after the Inhumane Society had been so keen on helping me construct the prototype while I was in captivity. I had been so close to success on my invisible ink, Jake, just so very close. If Hangfire had waited just a tiny bit longer, he could simply have stolen my results. I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand anything anymore,” I said. “I never really knew why Hangfire wanted invisible ink. Maybe his aim was something different.”
Cleo sighed, and sat down on a pile of rubble. Jake sat beside her and put an arm around her; if it made her feel any better, she didn’t show it, but she never did.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t come sooner, Snicket,” Cleo said. “There was something I wanted to show you, but it’s gone up in smoke with everything else.”
I sat down in the grass. Moxie followed suit. “What was it?” I asked.
“A letter,” Cleo replied. “You remember that you asked all of us to talk to our family about the town’s history, Snicket, to find any clues about the Inhumane Society. I got one letter back, signed by both my parents but written in my father’s style, asking me why I asked and telling me not to get involved with anything dangerous, and to leave the town immediately. Obviously, I ignored it… but I also got another letter, just from my mother this time. It looked like she’d written it secretly; she asked that I not tell my father about it.”
My interest was piqued. The last and indeed only time I had seen Ignatius Nettle Knight and his wife Doretta they had been in a laudanum-induced stupor at the hands of Dr. Flammarion; I hadn’t really gotten much of an impression of their true personalities. “What did she say?” I asked.
“It was quite a long letter,” Cleo began, “so I can’t remember it in exact detail. But my mother talked about her childhood in this town, when she was just a normal girl at Stain’d Secondary, when Ink Inc. had just been founded and was roaming the seas with its needleships. My mother wasn’t really writing about herself, though. She was writing about a friend she had, a girl in her class. Her name was Picacea Plover.”
As the saying goes, you could have knocked me over with a feather. “Picacea?” I repeated.
Cleo gave me a slow nod. “She was a girl with dark, wild hair, and a wilder personality, but she got on with my mother well enough. Even when they got older and started moving in different circles – my mother in business and high society, Picacea with environmentalists and freethinkers – they kept in touch by mail. It seems incredible, really, considering that my mother married the town’s golden boy and heir to the Ink Inc. fortune – my father, in other words – whilst Picacea had only grown more suspicious of the company and its motives. With a group of like-minded friends and her boyfriend from out of town, she formed an organisation to protest against Ink Inc.’s activities, and then there was trouble.”
“This organisation,” I interrupted, “wouldn’t happen to have had a name, would it…?”
Cleo nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said, “it certainly did. It was the Inhumane Society.”
“So that’s where the Inhumane Society came from – an origin like that?” asked Moxie. She scratched her head. “It sounds so innocent… um, no offence to your parents and company, Cleo.”
Cleo shook her head. “None taken,” she said, “though it might have been different once. The Inhumane Society started off merely protesting and raising awareness, but as time went by they started getting linked to criminal activities – threatening letters sent to people associated with Ink Inc., break-ins and thefts at company facilities, sabotage of the needleships. The police investigated, but no link to the Inhumane Society was ever proven, though nobody could ever figure out how they had so much information or could break in so cleanly. It was like they had help on the inside, according to my mother.”
I didn’t doubt it. “And then the plan to drain the sea came,” I prompted.
“Not just yet,” Cleo said. “There were rumours of it going around the town, but nothing official had been announced – and those rumours were totally eclipsed when my grandmother was found dead one day, from no clear cause while alone in a locked room. Not long after was the celebratory unveiling of the commemorative statue for my grandmother’s business partner, Colonel Colophon, and you all know what happened there – the statue was blown up, Colonel Colophon was badly injured… and all hell broke loose. There was a witch hunt in town for the people responsible. The Inhumane Society had gone to ground, but even without proof then everyone was sure it was them, and they were probably right. Lansbury Van Dyke made his announcement that he had a list of the organisation’s members and would release it publicly unless they left town and never showed their faces again, and apparently they did. The Inhumane Society was never heard from again…” Cleo looked at us over her glasses. “Until now, of course.”
“And what about Picacea Plover?” Jake asked. “Your mother’s great friend?”
“Vanished,” Cleo shrugged. “Her letters stopped and my mother never saw her again. After that my father revived my grandmother’s plan to drain the sea, using it as an opportunity to isolate the octopi to harvest their ink more easily, and nobody opposed him. As far as everyone was concerned, that was the end of the story.”
“I wonder what happened,” Moxie said, looking over at the ruins. “What made the Inhumane Society become so ruthless, where that Picacea went… and who Hangfire is.”
I thought of an old woman sitting alone in a crooked manor, jumping at shadows, with a bedroom window looking out on a tall dark column of stone. “I don’t know if I want to know,” I said.
Jake looked over my shoulder. “Maybe he knows,” he said, pointing. “After all, he seems to know everything else about this town.”
I looked, and my heart leapt. Walking over from the nearby driveway was Dashiell Qwerty, back to his old self, or at least back to his old fashion choices. He had clearly succeeded in retrieving his clothes from the Mitchums, and as he got closer I heard the distinctive gentle jangling of the many metal ornaments that hung from his leather jacket. His hair looked different, too, but still a wild mess. I guess it had to be just the right kind of messy before he could be satisfied.
“Qwerty!” I exclaimed, and stood up to meet him, but he didn’t come any closer. He just stood at the edge of the garden, looking at the ashen ruin, shaking his head sadly. I walked over to meet him. My friends didn’t follow; perhaps they realised that this was personal. “You said you would come and meet me,” I said to Qwerty. “You said you would explain everything.”
“Everything
I can,” he corrected, still not quite meeting my eyes. “I suspect that it will not be adequate, Snicket, but that is the best I can offer.”
I took a harder look at Dashiell Qwerty. There was something subtly different in his demeanour – as if something was pulling him down, like a set of manacles on his wrists and ankles. Every part of his body and face slumped in place, not making an effort to express anything, and his eyes seemed to be staring at something far away. He looked changed. Worse, he looked beaten. I didn’t understand, as usual.
“But you know all about Cotton Haines, and Ellington Feint, and everything that’s happened here, don’t you?” I pressed him. “You know why this happened, don’t you?” I asked, sweeping an arm towards the wreckage of Handkerchief Heights.
He nodded, slowly, once. “Yes, I do.”
I thought, and asked a cleverer question. “Cotton Haines mentioned something called the Canute Company to me. She said that they defeated a witch long ago. You know what she meant, don’t you? You know what the Canute Company is.”
Again, he gave me a slow, tired nod. “Yes, I do know.”
“Will you tell us?” I asked. “I know it’s important. I suspect it’s at the heart of what’s going on in this town. So will you tell us what you know about the Canute Company?”
He looked me in the eye then, and in each of his eyes I saw a dark pit such as I had seen at the very pinnacle of the Cauldron – empty eyes, save for tragedy and regret. I didn’t think I’d asked the wrong question, but nonetheless, his answer wasn’t the one I had been looking for.
“No?!” I repeated, in a way that I’m sure caught Moxie, Jake, and Cleo’s attention. “No?” I repeated again, still not able to believe I’d heard him right. “But why not?”
Qwerty didn’t answer at first. He looked past me again, at the smoking ruin, and then up to where the smoke still lingered in the sky, palling the fading light of evening with a night-black haze. “Do you know I followed the smoke to find you, Snicket?” he eventually asked. “I thought it was where you would be. It says a great deal about what my assistance is worth if that is the method I have to use.”
Now I understood even less. After everything that had occurred, I couldn’t see why Qwerty was being even more cryptic than usual. “What are you talking about? Your assistance would be invaluable.”
“Only lacking in value, rather than impossible to value,” he replied. “I’ve already said far, far too much. If I hadn’t, the tragedies that have occurred might still have been neither so numerous nor so colossal.”
I shook my head. “I can’t accept that, Qwerty,” I said. “What’s happening in Stain’d-by-the-Sea won’t be fixed by passively standing by and observing.”
Qwerty looked from the smoke and back to me, and this time he really was looking at me, nothing passive about it. He still looked terribly sad, but there was something far more serious, more set about his face, his muscles tense and his eyes hard. He looked like somebody about to make a terrible decision, banking on a terrible risk, and that is exactly what he did when he spoke his next few words to me. “Passively standing by and observing,” he said in a low tone, “is supposed to be my job, Snicket.”
A momentous revelation always feels as if it should be followed by some disturbance in reality to mark its appearance – a thunderclap, or the end of a chapter, perhaps. But not here, though – all that happened was that a frosty tingling ran up and down my spine, an electric shiver of excitement and intrigue. But it wasn’t really a revelation, though. In a way, I had always known; certainly I had always wondered. I had known for a long time that V.F.D. had planted somebody in this town to observe me and Theodora on our mission, and who was more likely to be a member of our organisation than a librarian?
“You probably shouldn’t be telling me this,” I said, “but I’m grateful.”
“What I probably shouldn’t have told you is part of the problem, Snicket,” Qwerty replied. “You may be grateful, but the truth is that I am very terrible at my job. The truth is that I have failed – a failure more catastrophic than even your own, as my failures are my fault and mine alone.”
My sense of comradeship with Qwerty evaporated with his mournful words. I felt confused without knowing how to express it. I didn’t recognise this Qwerty at all. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re not a failure. You’re a wonderful librarian. I’ve always relied upon you, even without knowing you were one of us. And I know you’ve done a perfectly good job at passively standing by and observing, from how much you’ve always known.”
He shook his head right back at me, as if weary of explanations. “Standing by and observing, yes,” he admitted, “but doing so passively – I was never able to do that, not even in my days as an apprentice. Even if V.F.D. ordered it, I could never stand idly by when I saw trouble brewing, and was forever interfering in cases that weren’t my own. Eventually the organisation sent me out here, to the middle of nowhere, supposedly to keep an eye on the inkworks but really to keep me out of trouble – but the middle of nowhere turned out to be the middle of a bigger trouble than they could have known, and I stuck my unwelcome nose right in the centre of it. You don’t know what I’ve done to get my information, Snicket, what dangerous criminals I’ve followed and what secret headquarters I’ve broken into, what enemies I’ve made as a result. Didn’t you ever wonder why they threatened and finally targeted me, making me a scapegoat for their crimes and taking away my library?” He paused to let out a frustrated sigh, and clench his fists at the edge of his sleeves, making his shoulders jangle. “Then you turned up, and it was meant to be your business – but I still couldn’t stand back and call it none of my business. I made trailing your steps an excuse for making more trouble for the Inhumane Society, and I even went so far as to practically give myself away by dropping arbitrary hints to you every time you came into the library.”
“You can’t beat yourself up about that,” I argued. “I didn’t even understand any of those hints until afterwards!”
“It shows just how deficient I was even in my waywardness,” Qwerty said, his voice tired and croaky. “Nearly everything I’ve done has been wanton dereliction of duty. You of all people must know how gargantuan an embarrassment it is for V.F.D. for one of their members to provoke so much trouble that they get arrested. We’re supposed to be a secret organisation.” He scowled at the horizon. It wasn’t much of a scowl, just a tightening of his face like somebody had pinched his nose, but it got the point across. “Though we could never have made use of that advantage in this town. Hangfire has always known about V.F.D. Taking advantage of us is part of his revenge.”
“But how does he know, and why does he hate us?” I asked, trying to retrieve one right question from the torrent that Qwerty had unleashed. “What does Hangfire have against V.F.D.?”
Qwerty’s scowl softened into ruefulness. “You’ll understand very soon,” he said. “That’s my suspicion. Beyond that, I really shouldn’t say any more. Everything I tell you that you don’t learn for yourself is prejudicing your investigation. I’m merely an observer, Snicket. I’m not the gatekeeper of truth.”
“Of course you are,” I replied spiritedly. “You’re a librarian.”
“Not anymore,” he said, and that was when I was presented with a dilemma.
Or, more accurately, a Dilemma. It slowed to a smooth stop on the driveway without scattering even a single fleck of gravel, and as Moxie and Cleo and Jake walked up, the driver’s door opened and Pip and Squeak organised themselves out. From the back seat, a huge pile of leaves curled around the rear door and revealed itself to be S. Theodora Markson, her hair billowing out in even more spectacularly explosive style than usual. It looked like she had given it an extra-thorough wash and blow-dry, so this was clearly a very important occasion indeed. It was at that moment that a gust of wind parted her hair and revealed another person, shorter and slight and wearing a white dress that matched in elegance the car she was still sat in the rear of, and I understood. This was indeed an important occasion. Since the closure of Wade Academy, it was rare for Stain’d-by-the-Sea to be graced with a visit from the aristocracy.
“Regina,” I said with pleasure, approaching the car to greet my old friend from the academy. “What brings you to Stain’d-by-the-Sea?”
My good mood crumbled as she fixed me with the imperious glare she adopted in her most authoritative moments. “Business, L.,” she replied. “Volunteer business. Please climb into the automobile. We’ll talk in private.”
Moxie stepped up from behind me. “What about us?” she asked, fixing Regina with a suspicious look. “We’re volunteers.”
Regina ran an appraising eye over Moxie, Jake, and the ash-smoked figure of Cleo. I couldn’t tell what she thought of them. Regina was a good friend, but we came from such different backgrounds that it was often hard for me to figure her out. At last, she gave a little shake of her head. “You may be volunteers,” she said, “but not with a capital V. This concerns our organisation, not your town, so it is neither of relevance nor of interest to you.”
“You do know that that’s my car,” Cleo said, nodding at the gleaming vehicle Regina was making herself comfortable in.
Regina raised an eyebrow. “Actually, it’s mine,” she said. “If you have one just like it, I commend your taste. My parents forbid me to drive myself, however, so I had to hire these two chauffeurs when I arrived in town. I trust, incidentally,” she mentioned aside to Pip and Squeak, “that my tip was sufficient.”
“One of the best,” Pip assured her, giving a little bow that people who didn’t know Regina very well sometimes felt obliged to give her.
“It sounds like this Titus Groan guy could keep us reading for weeks,” Squeak added.
“Most gratifying,” Regina nodded, then turned back to me. “L., S., D. – into the car, if you please.”
It took me a moment to understand that she meant me, Theodora, and Qwerty. Qwerty didn’t seem surprised, and was already walking past me to glide into the driver’s seat. Theodora looked like she was about to fill the seat and a half she had previously been occupying in the back, but Regina cleared her throat and pointed to the front passenger seat instead, and Theodora curtseyed and bustled around. I gave Moxie, Cleo, Jake, and the Bellerophons an apologetic shrug, and slid into the seat next to Regina’s, closing the door with a gentle thud beside me.
In the front, Qwerty was just staring coolly forwards in the driver’s seat, as if he was no more than a driver himself and had no place in any discussion – though I occasionally saw his eyes flick to us in the rear view mirror. Theodora had twisted around to look at us in the back, though, and I’m sure her ears were pricked up beneath her thick layers of heavy hair. I sometimes wondered if her lack of investigative skill stemmed from a hearing problem. It occurred to me then, though, that I hadn’t heard a greeting from her. She hadn’t acknowledged my presence at all. Combined with Regina’s icy demeanour, and the fact that V.F.D. had sent her personally, I was starting to get the feeling that I might just be in serious trouble.
Regina hadn’t yet spoken, and instead seemed to be arranging her thoughts, so I tried to break the ice with a question. “So how did you get to the town?” I asked. “You can’t have taken your car the whole way, if you had to hire Pip and Squeak to drive it when you got here.”
Regina gave a slight smile in acknowledgement of the observation. “I took a train,” Regina answered. “Or commissioned one, rather, with a carriage for the Dilemma – I don’t like pulling rank, but it couldn’t be avoided. Supposedly I’m conducting an official tour of outlying regions, but really it’s the organisation’s excuse to gather up long-distance volunteers and bring them in.”
“So that’s why you’re here?” I asked. “To bring me in?” I rushed on, heedless of whether I had asked the right questions or not. “They were happy enough to leave me and Theodora here even after our job had supposedly concluded. What changed their minds?”
She gave me a pitying look, as if I had no idea what I was in for, and it turned out that I didn’t. This conversation was to have far-reaching repercussions beyond what it felt like at the time, in the middle of nowhere far away from the events concerned. Regina gave me this look, and spoke four terrifying words. They were, “O. has the item.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Theodora, but it was scarcely louder than my own. It was the absolute worst-case scenario. The item was an invaluable object me and my sister had planned to get our hands on, before I had been sent to Stain’d-by-the-Sea and she had been sent to prison. O. was Olaf, and he was the person who had broken her out of prison, and suffice to say that he was the last person I wanted in the company of either my sister or an invaluable item of incredible interest to my organisation.
“What has he done?” I croaked.
“A great deal of damage, and he’s only just begun,” Regina said, ominously. “He and your sister have gone on the rampage with that thing. Nobody knows where they are or where they’ll strike next, but fires and arguments are breaking out everywhere. All Hell’s broken loose, Snicket. V.F.D. is in chaos, and headquarters are calling back everyone remotely competent to deal with the situation. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why he’s here,” she concluded, nodding at Qwerty, who I noticed hadn’t reacted at all.
I glanced at my friends through the window. They were talking, but I couldn’t hear them. I could see the looks they were giving me, though, and they made me feel guilty.
“So you want us to go back,” I said to Regina. “To stop Kit and Olaf.”
Regina turned from me to look at Qwerty. “V.F.D. thinks you’ve served your time here, D.,” she said. “You’re a capable volunteer, and whatever your past faults, headquarters thinks that at a time like this you’re wasted languishing out at this far end of the world. We’ll need people like you – noble, brave, perhaps even a little reckless – in the days ahead.”
Qwerty gave the briefest of nods. “Perhaps that would be for the best,” he said, his tone deep as a cave, as usual.
“Well, I have to say it’s about time,” S. Theodora Markson said, poking her head around the back of her chair to look in on us. She had assumed her customary tone of inflated self-importance, slightly strangled by the discomfort of her position. Looking closer, it appeared that she had her seat belt on. The engine wasn’t even running. “This backwater is too small for a woman of my talents, and Snicket has spent his whole time gallivanting off on his own rather than watching and learning from the best.”
It had been more than twenty-four hours since I had last seen Theodora. I can confidently say that I still hadn’t seen the best, let alone watched and learned from them. I could have said so, but me and Theodora had come to something of an understanding recently: She didn’t get in the way of my investigations, and I didn’t mention in my official reports how useless she had been. I had to give credit where credit was due, after all. Instead I thought first about my sister, locked in a terrible allegiance with a rogue and a scoundrel, and then about Stain’d-by-the-Sea, with an even more terrible villain casting his dark shadow across it. “I don’t know if I can leave the town like this,” I said. “This town has problems just as dreadful as that my sister is involved in. If you think I can help, I’m all for it – but at the very least you should send a replacement.”
“There won’t be a replacement, Snicket,” Regina informed me.
“Then –” I looked over at my friends again. They’d stopped talking now, and were just silently watching the car. They could only guess at every word spoken, but I wondered how much they could infer from watching our movements. “Then I don’t know if I can go. You could send Jacques, or –”
“Oh, give me strength, Snicket!” moaned Theodora, dragging her hands through her copious quantities of hair as through a waterfall. “We finally get our ticket out of this hellhole, and you rip it up without a second thought? This town’s problems are clearly of its own making, so why not just let them get –”
“There won’t be a replacement,” Regina elaborated, “because you won’t be leaving, L.”
Silence fell upon us. Qwerty’s doleful eye watched me as I gazed upon Regina’s unwaveringly stern expression. In the front, Theodora’s jaw had dropped, and she was turning wild-eyed from Regina to me and back again.
“To be clear, you won’t be leaving either, S.,” Regina added to Theodora. Theodora turned back to the front and sulked in her hair. I could almost taste her bitterness. As for me, I didn’t know what to feel.
“I don’t understand,” I said, a habit I would really have to shake soon. “I’d have thought I would be first on the list. She’s my sister. I know her better than anyone else.”
“That’s part of the problem, L.,” she answered. “Specifically, you are. You are part of the problem. That is the unofficial verdict on you from headquarters, and it’s ultimately why you are here. V.F.D. has been sending its most troublesome volunteers out here, where they can do no more harm, for a long time.”
“But…” I didn’t know how to take that remark. If you are anything like me, I am sure there has been some point in your life at which your teachers have passed a verdict on you that you thought was unfair, but every argument you had against it seemed like it would only make things worse. I didn’t want to take that verdict lying down. I wasn’t part of the problem. That I wasn’t part of the events unfolding away from Stain’d-by-the-Sea was my part of the problem. But I knew that nobody who mattered was listening. I collapsed back into my seat and stared at the back of the chair in front of me.
“Regina, tell me honestly,” I said, wishing I could sink into the Dilemma’s ever-so-comfy seats and wake up to find this had all been a bad dream, “what do you think about everything you’ve had to tell me?”
Regina let out a long, slow sigh, like air escaping from an oxygen tank. “Let me answer that with a question that I think will shed some light on things, L.,” she said. “What, exactly, is keeping you in this town?”
I opened my mouth, and paused. There were far too many answers to that question, and far too few I wanted to give. A villain with a plan so malevolent that a bunch of innocent schoolchildren agreed to go along with it. The fate of a town on the brink of collapse anyway. A girl with eyebrows and a soul like question marks. I didn’t know the answer to her question, not even all the times I asked it of myself, but it was a strange question whoever was asking it, and a stranger reason to ask, and so I answered once again with yet another question – and just like all the other times and all the other people I’d asked it without thinking, it was well and truly the wrong question once more.
“You shouldn’t be asking me that question, L.,” Regina replied, and she shook her head in disappointment. “You should be asking yourself. Here you are in this town, asking all these questions about all these incidents, and all everyone at the academy could ask was ‘Why?’ You made us think, us apprentices and neophytes and field agents, that you had an ideal – a dream and a belief and a philosophy. And you and your siblings had a plan, too, to make that dream a reality. You needed an item to give you enough influence with headquarters to make them change their ways, to go out there and make the world a better place rather than passively standing by and observing its slide into ruin. You were on the brink of breaking with the organisation and pursuing your grand dream, saviours of the world… and then what do you do? You let the organisation hustle you off to the back of beyond, just like your brother, and left your responsibilities behind. You may well have responsibilities here, too, but many who called you a friend are asking if your responsibilities at home should not have taken priority. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to call back at Roche Abbey before my next stop; my mother has been receiving threats. You may leave.”
The interview was over, though it ended so abruptly that it took me a few seconds, blinking in the face of a barrage of criticism that stung badly, to understand. Then I did, and I nodded, once, and got out of the car. Regina was the sort of friend who didn’t sugar-coat her opinions, especially when she was speaking for V.F.D. itself. They may not have done so directly, but they had made Regina carry a very clear message: Keep out of this. You’ve caused enough trouble. Stay in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the troubles of which will spread no farther. I slammed the door, and was satisfied to find that the Dilemma slammed very well, built by people who knew that just once in a while you needed to slam a door really hard to feel a little bit better. I was about to turn away for good, to wallow in my rejection and wonder what on Earth I was going to do now, when I heard the faintest whisper of a noise from the car, and saw the driver-side window hissing open.
“I have something for you, Snicket,” a familiar deep voice said, and Qwerty gave me a familiar knowing look from within the car. His eyes had some of their old shine, the librarian’s gleam that told me he understood everything. “Just before my arrest, I put in an interlibrary loan request with the city library,” he continued, “and Regina has very kindly brought it into town with her. I think you should borrow it, Snicket. Take better care of it than the previous copy.”
He set a book into my waiting hands with a weighty
thump. Once again, I hadn’t seen it coming, even though it had never been a surprise. The book was entitled
Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, and the last time I had seen it it had been collapsing into watery mush beneath the fierce shower of a sprinkler system. I hadn’t known then why it was important, but everyone wanted to get their hands on it, and now I had my hands on a copy once again. Maybe I could finish it now, but I didn’t know what the book would finish. I asked the person who I thought would know best about a book.
“What is it?” I asked Qwerty, looking at the black book.
“The key to Hangfire’s great deception,” Qwerty said. “Read it and be ready, Snicket. Something very dark is coming. Be sure it doesn’t swallow you, or you it.”
I didn’t ask what that last remark meant. I knew it would have been the wrong question. In any case, the window was winding smoothly upwards again, hiding Qwerty behind a reflection of a sky as black as the book. This time, it really was over, and not just for me. At the opposite side of the car, a door opened, and S. Theodora Markson bristled out.
“But your heiressness, not even just to the station?” she pleaded to the car’s interior, but the Dilemma didn’t care, and the door slammed behind her. Then, carefully avoiding Theodora’s feet, it slid away as if pulled along by gentle strings, its headlights flicking on and flooding the road with light as it drew farther and farther away from us. Me and Theodora, Pip and Squeak, Moxie and Cleo and Jake, we all stood and watched it go, until the light from the horizon vanished.
“So,” Moxie said, scuffing her heels as she walked up to me. “What’s the news, Snicket?”
I looked at the place on the horizon where the Dilemma had vanished, but it was lost. Night had fallen. “Help won’t be coming,” I said.
She nodded, and looked out at the night with me. “I had a feeling it would be that way from the beginning,” she said. “Ever since things started going wrong in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. But you know, it’s not true that no help was ever going to come.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
She smiled. “Well, you came, didn’t you, Snicket?”
“For all that’s happened, things would be a lot worse without you,” Cleo spoke up. “I’d be in a dungeon in the Colophon Clinic. Qwerty probably wouldn’t be much better off. In fact, one way or another, we’d all be trapped.”
Theodora sniffed, and gave a shake of her hair. “Instead, it’s just me and Snicket who are trapped here,” she muttered. “I hope you’re grateful.”
“We are, you know,” Jake told me. “After all, you’ve defied your organisation before. You could just walk out of this town anytime, and Hangfire sure wouldn’t stop you.”
“Instead, we’re stopping him,” Pip nodded. “Believe me, it’s an improvement.”
“We were just driving around in circles before you showed up, Snicket,” Squeak nodded. “Now we’re going somewhere.”
“I can’t guarantee that it’ll be somewhere you’ll want to go,” I said. I said it quietly, so as to disguise my shaking voice as the night had disguised my damp eyes. “I don’t know where we’re going, and I don’t know what we’ll find there. I don’t even know if it’ll be worth making the journey.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Moxie said.
“I guess you’re right, Moxie,” I agreed. “Solve the mystery of Hangfire. Solve the mystery of the Bombinating Beast. Solve the mystery of Ellington Feint. We won’t know what to make of these mysteries until we solve them, so let’s go out there and do that. There’s nobody else who can.”
And that is as good an answer as any to the wrong question I asked during this investigation. Why did I ask? Why did anyone? Because we didn’t know the answers. The only way to answer a question is to ask it, even if it’s the wrong question, in the wrong place or the wrong time, to the wrong person or for the wrong reason. But even the wrong questions and all the lies that answer them were bringing us closer to the truth, one heavy step after another, and to the terrible future that awaited us in the world of answers. Maybe it would have been better to run from those questions as fast and as far as I could, especially if I had known what was going to happen to one of the people I was with at that moment, but no matter what I told myself afterwards for years and years, I couldn’t have known. Nobody could know where we would all end up, but like passengers on a hijacked train, sooner or later we would all arrive at our destination. I wanted to be prepared for when we got there.