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Post by Dante on Jan 5, 2015 3:45:05 GMT -5
CHAPTER THREE I’d never imagined that Kellar Haines would be cooped up at the Wade Academy or the Mallahan lighthouse if his family home was right here in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I’d assumed that Kellar and his mother were from out of town, but it had bothered me that Hangfire would have reached out and snatched a family who had nothing to do with the town where all of his activities were centred. What I’d just learnt meant that Hangfire might have had a motive for choosing them. It also meant that Kellar had kept something from me. I wanted to ask why neither he nor his mother had been associating with his grandmother before now, but before I could ask, we were out on the steps of the police station, and we were running into another friend of mine. “Kellar, there you are,” Moxie Mallahan began, as Kellar was ejected from the station door with a too-firm push from his father. Then she stopped, as his father slid out of the door at her. I noticed that he and the doorframe were roughly the same size and shape. “It’s getting late for a girl your age to be out on the streets,” James Haines said, as he looked way, way down at her, at the bottom of the town hall’s steps. “You a friend of Kellar’s, or what?” As I slipped out of the police station behind him, I saw his eyes narrow again, and he looked back and forth from Kellar to Moxie with that same cunning look I’d seen a couple of times before. “Oh… Oh, I see how it is.” “Moxie Mallahan, The News,” Moxie quickly introduced herself, pulling a calling card out of her hat and handing it in the direction of James Haines. Moxie was a reporter from a long line of reporters, but had set up her own reporting institution since her family’s paper had closed down. She always had a calling card to hand, considering it vital to her self-respect as a journalist, and had recently printed out a considerable number of these cards for the rest of her associates, too. I had a small stack in my pocket. Kellar would have had some, too, before his clothes were changed. These calling cards had, on one side, the holder’s name, and below it, their title. Mine read LEMONY SNICKET, and, APPRENTICE. On the other side they had something else that I wasn’t quite so sure about. James Haines looked at the card carefully. “Oh, you’re the Mallahan lass. I’m surprised they’re still around.” Chuckling to himself, he flipped the card over. “Hey, what’s this symbol?” “It’s an insignia,” I said, before Moxie could answer. I hoped that James Haines wouldn’t ask for a definition of the word. He didn’t, but he frowned at the card. “Buncha kids, banding together under some symbol… no good ever came of that before,” he muttered. But then he shrugged his shoulders, and shoved his large hands into a pair of tiny pockets, letting the card fall right onto the ground by his side as if he’d already forgotten it. “So, Ms. Mallahan, you’re a friend of Kellar’s, huh?” “I’m an associate,” Moxie said quickly. “I hadn’t seen him today, and I figured, if he’d gotten into any trouble, the police might know about it.” “Nah, they don’t know anything,” James Haines said. “There’s been an incident, sure, but I’ll be keeping an eye on Kellar from now on, so he’s not likely to get into any further mischief. Much though you’d like to, eh, Kellar?” he added, giving his son a hearty slap on the back, or maybe just a heart-stopping one. Moxie cringed. I guessed that she didn’t know if this was meant to be friendly or an assault. “And you are, sir…?” she asked. “Why, his father, of course,” James Haines said, looking slightly hurt. “I’m walking him home to his grandmother’s. He’s had a rough day.” His expression softened slightly. “Aw, if you’re a friend of Kellar’s, I’ll let you walk with him a way. Then this Snicket kid can walk you back to your lighthouse.” “I can walk myself, but I’ll take you up on that kind offer,” Moxie said. I noticed her fingers twitching, and could tell that she was already dreaming about typing up everything she was about to learn – though her familiar portable typewriter was, alas, no longer available. “I’d like very much to talk to all of you. All three of you,” she said, giving me a significant look. I thought I had an inkling of what she meant by that, but it would have to wait – probably until James Haines stopped paying attention. He led the way through the deserted streets at a brisk pace that was far too much for Kellar, who still looked like he’d only just woken up after getting very little sleep, and probably too much for me as well, but I had an excuse: Me and Moxie were helping to propel Kellar along, holding him by the arms so he didn’t have to take all of his own weight. When I’d first met Kellar, he’d struck me as the kind of person who was embarrassed to have to be in a dependent position, but he’d relied on me to try and work out his clues that he and his mother had been engaged in a terrible ploy by Hangfire, and I had let him down by not understanding. I hoped it wasn’t costing him too much to lean on me again. He didn’t look me or Moxie in the eye as he related his story for what was probably yet another time, after the Mitchums and his father had probably already squeezed it out of him. It wasn’t a very good story. He’d been walking through town, and just when he passed a dark alleyway, he felt a hand fall from nowhere upon his shoulder – and, the same instant, a deep, stinging pain in his neck. From then on, he couldn’t say for sure what had happened; he had the faintest impression of being jostled about, dragged from place to place, and at last was vaguely conscious of being at the train station and on the train, where the Mitchums had caught him. But he had no idea of how he had gotten there. I’d asked him the same question me and Moxie had pestered him with too many times already, which was whether there was anything else he remembered at all, and he only sighed, and gently shook his head. “I’m trying to look back, but it’s like there’s nothing there,” he said, “like a misprinted book with pages missing in the middle. It was like I was in a trance.” “You must have been drugged,” Moxie said, “probably with laudanum.” “Or,” James Haines said, and this was one of the times he had stopped, tapping his feet and fidgeting irritably on the sidewalk to wait for us, “in a trance.” “A trance?” I repeated, as we walked up to him. “Like he’d been hypnotised?” “Yeah, something like that,” James Haines said, looking slightly impressed. “Some powerful person caught him, made him gaze into her eyes – and imposed her will upon him for as long as it was needed.” “‘Her’?” Moxie asked. “Do you have a suspect in mind? Who is it?” “Wrong question, Mallahan,” James Haines answered. He folded his arms, and set off down the road again, not looking at us. “Not who, but what.” I looked at Moxie, and she looked at me, and we both looked at Kellar. “What, then?” I asked. Kellar shook his head. “Snicket, what you have to understand is… is that my family was a very old one in this town. That ended when my parents moved with me and my sister out to the city when we were small, but my father, and especially his mother, know a lot about this town’s… traditions. Its stories.” “Its myths?” I asked, thinking about a book of local mythology I had read in the library what seemed quite a long time ago. Kellar nodded. “My grandmother’s full of them. She used to scare me and Lizzie with all kinds of dreadful stories when we lived in her house, but I don’t remember them now. It was a long time ago.” He looked down the road, at his father’s retreating back. “Just between us, I’m not sure I want to meet her again,” he whispered. “She didn’t have to tell stories to scare me.” I understood. The sort of person who leans over a cradle to terrify children probably isn’t very nice the rest of the time. “Do you want me to try and make an excuse to get you back to the lighthouse?” Moxie asked Kellar. “We can probably cook something up.” Kellar turned if anything a little paler, and glanced over at his father. “I wouldn’t dare risk that. I don’t know what you think of my father, but he’s cleverer than people expect. He’d see right through it.” Kellar looked at his father’s back again, huge shoulders poking away at a fading suit jacket as he began to vanish over the horizon. “My grandmother will probably be kept busy with him,” he said. “She dotes on him. She’s the son she always dreamed of. But my mother was married before, and my grandmother’s never really forgiven her, or us, for that.” Moxie frowned at that, and looked off into the distance. “Families are difficult,” she said, and I agreed. “Which reminds me, Snicket, that I have something to tell you, about that question you wanted me to ask.” Kellar didn’t ask what the question was. He knew. I had asked all of my associates recently to enquire with their relatives about the history of this town – to investigate, as carefully as possible, whether their families knew anything about Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s past that might help lead us to Hangfire and the Inhumane Society. At the time, Kellar’s family had been far away. But Moxie lived with her father, and he’d run the town’s newspaper. There was no one better to ask for the town’s deepest secrets. “And what did he say?” I asked. Moxie looked at the ground. “He didn’t answer,” she said. “He just sighed, and turned over in bed. When I pressed him, he said the town’s past was too troubled to burden me with.” We all exchanged glances. That sounded like exactly what we were looking for. “You have to ask him again,” Kellar said. “It’s not that simple,” Moxie said. “He –” She paused suddenly, and looked around, but not at anything in particular. “Say, Kellar,” she said.. “Where does your grandmother live, exactly?” We’d been looking at Kellar rather than our surroundings, so we hadn’t noticed the buildings thinning out on the street edges, growing shorter and farther apart until even the ground beneath our feet turned to grass. An overgrown dirt track veered off from the road at the dead end we had reached, framed by a few wild and shaggy trees as it curved gently downhill. Downhill, though, there shouldn’t have been anything. We had reached the edge of town. The buildings no longer followed us, and laid out before us was the vastness of the drained valley where the sea had once lain, years ago – a dry and sandy wasteland that ended only at the distant cliffs of the mainland. Far off, I could see something worse than that wasteland – a wild jungle of whirling and grasping weeds rippling in the weed as though they were undersea, vast clutching tentacles of seaweed bristling like a forest of enormous, clammy blades of grass. It was the Clusterous Forest, and nobody knew, so far as I was aware, how it had survived the draining of the sea that should have been what sustained it. James Haines was way ahead, wandering down the track like it was second nature to him. It started to turn away around the hillside, and he turned too, and called back to us in a bellow. “Hurry up!” he roared. “You wanna get caught in the rain? Come on, step it up!” He stepped it up and stepped down and down, following the line of the track as it took him around the hill and out of sight. Kellar reached out and pointed after him. “Down there,” he said, in answer to Moxie’s question. “I suppose an old family isn’t complete without an old family home.” He blinked, and looked up at the sky. “It’s not raining, is it?” he asked. “To be honest, I think it would be refreshing.” “Not a drop all day,” Moxie said. I looked up, and then I looked behind us. “Not so far,” I said, “but look at what’s coming.” We had been so engrossed in our conversation that we had been crept up on, not by someone following us in the streets – though for all I know, any number of persons could have been doing so – but by a vast, dark wave. It wasn’t a wave in the vanished sea, but a wave in the sky, a vast curtain of black cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon, presiding over distant hazes where rain must already have been pouring down, smudging the distant hills and buildings. It hadn’t been there when we had left the police station, but we had been walking for a while. It would probably catch us in a few minutes. “Are you up to a run?” I asked Kellar. “No,” he said. “But it’s downhill. I’ll manage.” “Then let’s run,” I said, and we did. Kellar didn’t have a hat or a jacket to keep him dry and warm. I could have lent him mine, but then I would have had the same problem, like an answer to a wrong question. It didn’t often rain in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, which I guess partly explained why the seabed was so dry, and had never reflooded, though I suspected there was another explanation as well. I didn’t have an umbrella or a waterproof jacket or anything except a natural instinct to take shelter. I would take it wherever I could get it, and it was starting to look like that was going to be Haines Lodge. Chased by the first few raindrops flung after us by the approaching clouds, we scurried down the hill and along the tree-lined walkway, venturing farther away from the darkening town and towards the wild and lawless country that stood between Stain’d-by-the-Sea and civilisation. I hadn’t been to this edge of the town before, and I saw that it literally was the edge, the hillside sloping downwards to jagged and crumbling clifftops that formed a vast and crooked wall against the absent sea. It looked like fingers of the land that were reaching out and interlocking with the fingers of the sea, but those fingers had gone, and now the land reached out for nothing, its cry for help unanswered. The trees along the driveway thinned out as we ran nearer to the seabed, and then at last, at the midpoint between the level of the town and the dead sea floor, past the last tree on one side and a tall pillar of rock that stood isolated from the cliff edges on the other, cut off by long-ago erosion, I saw a light glowing ahead, in a nook shielded from the greying day. The grassy path gave up entirely and gave way to pale sand that was growing wet beneath my feet, and on the brink of where the waves would have lapped, right in the centre of a beach in a bay nestled between grim stone crags, was Haines Lodge. Imagine yourself as I was, then – young, confused, lost in the middle of a mystery growing more baffling and vicious with every step I took, roaring clouds showering me with heavy drops of rain, thunder distantly whispering my name. Running, as if for my life, holding a friend with me, feeling his weight on my shoulder, his desperation, going somewhere he didn’t want to go. Descending through a wilderness, towards a wilderness, warped and ridged cliffs of pitch-black stone forming the gateposts to a rocky plateau surrounding a pool of slate-grey sand, slapping wetly beneath my feet, prints melting away behind me as the rain obliterates them. If, for whatever reason, you have imagined this experience, maybe you can understand why the house I saw looked like the dark mansion from every flickery old horror movie, every book read under the bedclothes at night. Emerging straight from the sand like the shredded posts of a jetty long torn away, three stories of dark wood, visibly rotting away, moss crawling all over it, a pointed roof shedding tiles like a snake sheds its skin. It was the corpse of a house, hollow, like a paper lantern or a pumpkin, a ghoulish, skull-like face glowering out of its cracked windows and mouldering timbers. It had a distinct lean, a few angles to one side, leaving the door and all the windows crooked, one side wedged into the mud-like sand, another pulling free like a tooth from a gum. James Haines was standing in the open door. A faint light glowed behind him, and he waved his arm wildly, hurrying us on, like something worse was chasing us than just a storm. Wet and muddied, we reached the house and stumbled into its mouth. Gasping, we found ourselves in a wide lobby. To my relief, the house looked much less frightening on the inside than it did on the outside; it was still in need of a repair that it was quite beyond, and I could feel the lean of the floor tugging me away towards the wall, but I could tell as I dripped that it was dry, and warm, probably from a fire built up inside a generous hearth. I wondered if Kellar’s was the kind of grandma who poured warm milk and baked cookies for her guests, and I looked around the room more closely, as I brushed the water off myself, to try and get an idea of what kind of person lived here. I saw a painting on the wall that was fading into nothing but depicted a man in old-fashioned clothes with what looked like a black square in his hand that might have been a book. I saw framed photographs of ghost-like figures, blank-faced in pale clothes, their features washed away by the march of time. I also saw a gun. It was mounted in pride of place on the centre of a wall, polished not quite to a sheen but certainly not left untouched for years and years – an old thing, almost like a bent cylinder in shape, with twisted shapes of metal curling around its side that were almost elegant, that made it almost more of a sculpture than a functional weapon. I never liked seeing a weapon, especially a gun, put up on a wall like a work of art. Maybe you know why. A door at the end of the room opened. A flare of light cast a long silhouette across the floor like a flood of water, pouring from the feet of the woman stood in the doorway. The shape of the silhouette was the shape of a grand old lady, in a long and sombre dress, her hair tied away in a bun, leaning with one hand upon a cane. I thought I recognised her for a moment, but I was just confusing her with somebody else I had met in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, an actress pretending to be a wealthy old family’s matriarch, a word which here means “an old woman who is in charge and lets nobody forget it.” The woman I was looking at now was clearly the real thing. “James, my boy,” she said, pottering into the room. I got a better look at her face as she slowly approached, tapping with her cane for each step, and her face reminded me of a particularly dried-out raisin. It was a very pleased raisin, though. “And dear Kellar, too, in such a smart little uniform. What a lovely surprise. I can’t believe you left it a whole year before visiting.” “Actually,” Kellar said, not meeting her eyes, “it’s more like –” “Right, right, a whole year, how rude of us!” James Haines interrupted, almost stepping over Kellar in his haste to push forward. “A whole year, definitely no more than that, definitely not lots more, ha ha ha. Well, the important thing is, we’re here now!” “Yes, I know, James. I’m not blind yet,” the elderly woman tutted, her pleasure turning very abrupt in a moment. She inclined her wizened face downwards, and pointed it at me and Moxie. “And this must be little Lizzie. How you’ve grown.” She reached forward with an emaciated hand and pinched Moxie’s cheek. She was too dumbfounded to react, and with her face being pulled about probably couldn’t have denied the identification very well. Without letting go, the old lady turned and devoted the full attention of her beady eyes to me. “And you, my dear little… erm… other boy. You’re a very healthy size for a young lad.” “Actually, Mama,” James Haines said, rubbing his hands together nervously, “these two kids are just Kellar’s friends. Snicket and Mallahan, they’re called.” His mother let go of Moxie’s cheek. Moxie rubbed at the pink spot left behind, but didn’t get an apology. “Mallahan, eh?” mused the matriarch. “Dot Sallis still keeping you people in line, I hope.” “Let me introduce my mother,” James Haines hurriedly said. “You two, this is Cotton Haines, the most beautiful and respected woman in Stain’d-by-the-Sea.” Cotton Haines chuckled and slapped playfully at her son’s face. It looked like she hit him quite hard, but he didn’t say anything. “You flatterer, James. You always did know how to charm the ladies, didn’t you. Speaking of which, come through to the sitting room. I have a guest whom I’m sure you’ll be pleased to meet.” She turned on her heel and tapped her way back through the door she had come through, giving me a good view of her cane as she did so. I had a particular interest in this cane, or thought I might. I had recently encountered a number of objects made of a particular all-black wood, and which seemed to be the objects of Hangfire’s interest, for reasons I didn’t yet know. I had seen a small statue of a terrible creature that seemed to be at the heart of the story, and a cudgel and a mask and a bench, and a cane much like the one I was looking at now, but despite what I had expected, this cane wasn’t made of the black wood. Actually, the whole thing looked like faintly tarnished metal. It had probably been quite an expensive gift once upon a time. I wanted to ask Kellar about his grandmother, but it seemed unlikely that we would get a moment alone any time soon. James Haines was following directly behind his mother, and looked back only to give us a terrible frown and to gesture with his hand for us to hurry up. I did so, but I gestured for Kellar to go through first, to create a good first impression. I didn’t know the Haines family, but I knew there was one other member of the family in town, and I didn’t like to think what would happen if me and Moxie had to share a sofa with Sharon Haines, a woman who had tricked and lied to me and who had kidnapped Moxie and held her prisoner with a large number of other children in an abandoned school. As it happened, though, I was quite wrong about Cotton Haines’s guest. The sitting room was, in some ways, everything I had imagined. There was the wide stone hearth, piled high with logs and burning merrily, even if the logs were learning slightly to the one side of the fireplace just as the whole house leaned, and even if I suspected that fire had been stocked and lit by someone other than Cotton Haines. In the centre of the room was a low, long table, perfect for setting one’s cup of steaming tea upon, even if the carpet had been bunched up at one end to stop the table from sliding away, and even if the tabletop was covered in rings left by generations of people failing to use a coaster. In a corner by the fire, laden with cushions and blankets, was a rocking chair that I had no doubt had been bought straight from an emporium in the town exclusively devoted to such things, and around the room were several sofas, threadbare and with cushions hollowed from long use but still warmer and comfier than any seat I had seen for hours. Somebody else was already enjoying the warmth and comfort of these sofas from a spot just on the opposite side of the fire to Cotton’s rocking chair, where a long metal poker was leaning against the wall next to a rack of logs, sipping a cup of tea and almost spilling it in surprise when she saw the four people who walked in, each seemingly more surprising than the last. “Look who the cat dragged in,” Cotton Haines was saying, as she stumped over to her rocking chair. “All these surprise visits are spoiling this old lady. Say hello to your brother, Carr.” I don’t know which of us was most surprised to see the other. I’d met Carr Carter a little while ago, whilst investigating a seemingly impossible murder case, but she must have been lying low during all the recent trouble at the Wade Academy, and it had been all too easy to forget that she was still in town. Certainly I didn’t remember her being related to Kellar Haines, and as Kellar smiled at her more freely than I’d seen him smile at anyone before and then turned back to introduce her to us, I said as much. “We’re already acquainted,” I said. “Hello again, Carr. I didn’t know you were a member of the Haines family.” “Then you must be even dopier than you look, if you don’t mind my saying so,” James Haines replied for her. “Wasn’t the name ‘Carr Haines’ enough of a clue for you?” It wasn’t. Her name wasn’t Carr Haines, or at least, she’d never used it before. Carr had reddened a little at this statement, her cheeks flushing a little darker than her fire-matched hair, and she broke in on the conversation before anyone else could say anything. “Good to see you again, Snicket, Moxie,” she said, raising her teacup welcomingly. “I didn’t know you were friends with my half-brother and stepfather. I didn’t even know they were back in town.” She pronounced the words “half-brother and stepfather” very carefully. Now that I thought about it, I faintly recalled her mentioning a stepfather before. “We’re all back for work, just like you,” Carr’s stepfather answered her. “Kellar and Sharon because they have work. Me because I don’t. Crazy times when this town has more jobs for the taking than the city, eh?” “Well, I call it shameful times,” Cotton Haines said, wriggling herself into her rocking chair and beginning to draw blankets over herself. “This town has a proud history! It should have had a proud future! And it would have, if people had only stuck to poor Ingrid’s plans.” She sighed, and then she beamed around at her son and grandchildren. “At least I have the pleasure of growing old in the bosom of my family.” “You two may remember,” Carr said, addressing me and Moxie, “that I’m presently engaged in secretarial work for Mr. Lansbury Van Dyke.” “Dear Lansbury,” Cotton interrupted. “What a gentleman, just like my dear departed Hopkins. I wonder what that old rogue is up to these days?” “I had no idea until just today that Cotton and Mr. Van Dyke were old friends,” Carr went on. She was looking me very carefully in the eye. “But then I came across some old letters he’d received from her, and that reminded me of how much I missed poor Cotton, out here alone in her house. I immediately came over to see her to talk about old times.” “It’s a shame Lansbury couldn’t visit, but you’re a fine girl for coming over in his place,” Cotton said to her. “Almost like a real granddaughter.” While Cotton Haines cooed over her grandchildren, I thought over what Carr had just told me. I figured I’d caught the real drift of what she had just said. She’d carefully referred to Lansbury Van Dyke in the present tense, even though he was dead, which told me that she didn’t want to upset her grandmother, or not-grandmother – I wasn’t clear yet on just how their family was arranged. But she’d also hinted that her visit to Cotton wasn’t just about old times at all, or not in the way she presented it. This was research into the mystery going on in the town. Lansbury Van Dyke had also been an old friend of Colonel Colophon, a man venerated by the town as a war hero. Both had connections to an event in the town’s past, where a violent explosion had interrupted a ceremony to unveil a statue in Colophon’s honour. The explosion was attributed to the Inhumane Society, and Lansbury Van Dyke had threatened to expose its members unless they ceased their activities. That was years ago, but both Colophon and Van Dyke had been murdered weeks ago by Hangfire. Cotton Haines was one more connection to those people and to the town’s past – and thus, to Hangfire’s motive. She’d been wise to visit, and I’d been fortunate to come with Kellar, too. Cotton Haines could be a treasure trove of information, if we only asked the right questions. “I’m quite interested in Lansbury Van Dyke,” I said to Cotton, choosing my words carefully. “He sounds like a fascinating figure. How well did you know him?” “Oh, the four of us had been friends since childhood,” Cotton replied, looking pleased at the attention. “Carr, get up and go fetch that photograph on the wall of the lobby, third from the left. Chop chop, there’s a good girl.” As Cotton continued to harangue her, Carr’s expression didn’t change as she walked out of the room, rummaged in the entryway for a few moments, and then returned with a framed photograph showing what looked like a large group of children, although the picture was so aged that they might as well have been mannequins. “Look, here we all are,” Cotton said excitedly, pointing wildly at the picture. “There’s me, in the middle, the prettiest then and now. The rather plain girl I’ve linked arms with is Ingrid Nummet Knight, or Inkrid, as we preferred to call her. And the tall sporty-looking boy is Cyrus Colophon, and Lansbury is the cheeky lad next to him.” She waved Carr over and squinted at the picture. “Hmm. I can’t make them out, but I know my late husband, Hopkins, is in the back there somewhere, and Dot Sallis, and what’s-his-name, Ingrid’s husband – she made him take her surname, you know, scandalous in those days.” “You’re all dressed in the same uniform,” Moxie said, leaning forward to look closer at the faded picture. “That’s the Wade Academy uniform, girl. Don’t they teach you anything these days?” Cotton retorted. “Yes, the cream of the crop, we were. The whole town looked up to us our whole lives, as they should. We were the life and soul of this town.” The fire crackled and rustled and cast strange shapes across her face, reflecting in her glistening eyes, wide and empty. Cotton Haines’s voice had grown very low, almost a whisper, and I could tell she was no longer looking at the picture, nor at anyone in the room. She was looking at a long-vanished scene, probably hearing music that hadn’t been played in years, hearing voices that spoke no more. “The life and soul of this town,” she repeated. “Yes, that’s how it was. Our little society threw the grandest parties, gave the most inspiring speeches, made this little town a hub of holidaymakers and high society, a hive of industry. Even when the war came, Cyrus and Lansbury rose to become incredible heroes, and I was practically running the town, and Ingrid was coming up with her great plan for her company’s next step. We were all poised to make a great deal of money.” The thought of a great deal of money clearly made her very happy, and yet here she was, living alone in a rickety old house on the wildest and most desolate edge of town. Maybe that was why her eyes clouded over, and her brow furrowed into what was clearly a frown so familiar that it was how her face naturally rested. Or maybe it was something else. “Or we would have,” she muttered, “if that troublemaking girl hadn’t turned up.” “A troublemaking girl?” I asked, alert. I couldn’t help myself. My ears were used to pricking up at any mention of such a girl, because it usually meant a very particular person. But it was impossible. Cotton Haines must have been talking about events that took place some decades ago. It couldn’t be Ellington Feint. I could practically hear Moxie rolling her eyes beside me, but mine were fixed on those of Cotton Haines, waiting for an answer. An answer that never came. “Well, enough of that!” roared James Haines, leaping from his seat and bustling around the table to his mother’s chair. “No use crying over spilt milk, eh, Mother? It’s all in the past!” “I suppose you are right,” Cotton Haines said, and she pulled her eyes away from the photograph. Her son clasped one of her hands and she beamed with pleasure, whilst with her other hand she automatically waved the photograph in Carr’s direction, and Carr once again rose from her seat and, with the photograph, ventured into the lobby again. “I think it’s stopped raining,” Carr said, as she returned to the room. “I looked through the window, and the sky is clear; the Moon is lighting up the whole bay.” “The sand looks so smooth on nights like these,” Cotton Haines said. “Draw the curtain, James, and we’ll have a look.” Her son wrenched open a flimsy pair of nearby curtains, almost bringing the curtain rod down on himself as he did so. Moonlight revealed, in pale greys and darker blues, a wide band of sand running for a few metres away from the house before meeting rocky shelves that stepped down into the valley. In the distance, I could just see the tips of the Clusterous Forest waving and sparkling. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Cotton asked. “Our ancestors picked a wonderful spot to build our home. Nobody else in Stain’d-by-the-Sea realised what valuable real estate all these sandy beaches represented.” “It’s certainly a wonderful view,” Moxie carefully replied. “I prefer our lighthouse, though.” “Hmph, that lighthouse is at completely the wrong end of town,” Cotton sniffed. “But still, at least you understand the pleasures of looking out over the Clusterous Forest on a clear day and seeing Zanclean Dam shining in the distance.” “What’s Zanclean Dam?” I asked. Cotton and James Haines gave me a disgusted look. “Disgraceful,” Cotton muttered, while her son shook his head. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t really sorry. If you never asked about what you didn’t know, you would never learn anything. “I’m new in town.” “Zanclean Dam is what separates this valley from the ocean,” Moxie explained. “The sea that Stain’d-by-the-Sea and Offshore Island used to be in was bounded by a curving mainland shore on all sides, and connected to the ocean just by a small gap between two fingers of the mainland that didn’t quite touch. Zanclean Dam was built to make them touch and to prevent the sea from refilling when Ink Inc. drained it. I was very little at the time, so I barely remember it being built.” “I remember every day of it,” Cotton Haines said, proudly. “Seeing Ingrid’s plan realised was truly awe-inspiring.” “Excuse me,” Moxie asked, “but I thought it was her son, Ignatius Nettle Knight, who had the sea drained.” Cotton scowled at her. “He did the hard work, I suppose,” she said. “But it was Ingrid’s plan, through and through, and her son never understood the true genius of it. I suppose that might have been Ingrid’s fault, though… She was too cautious to confide everything even in her friends, let alone her son, and so there was nobody left to fulfil her dreams after she was murdered.” “Murdered?” I exclaimed, and James Haines winced. He had been looking more and more uncomfortable every time I glanced at him, as though embarrassed by what his mother had to say, but I couldn’t let this slide. “I’d never heard about this.” “Me neither,” Moxie said. “I read a few details about her death in an old newspaper once, and it said that she died of natural causes.” “Yes, the police had to tell people that,” Cotton Haines replied, and once again, her expression had that frown to it – more than a frown, now. Beneath her brow, her glassy eyes had become ice-cold. “Natural causes – but really, they were anything but natural. The police had no way of explaining how she could have just fallen down dead in a locked room with no other entrances or exits, but I do. Especially since I know that her notes were later stolen from the crime scene, along with –” “Now, really, Mother, is this the time for all these gloomy stories?” James Haines interrupted yet again, adding a forced “ha ha ha” to try and raise spirits. Fake laughter is one of the world’s least amusing things. “You’ll give these kids a bad impression of this town’s history!” “Oh, I would never want to do that!” Cotton insisted, and she sounded genuinely shocked. “It’s just that some truly sad and infuriating things have happened.” “And some wonderful things,” prompted James. “Like maybe the birth of your beloved son…?” “Oh, James, don’t think I’d forgotten you, my dear little boy!” cried Cotton, and reached up for a hug with her enormous son. I looked away, at Moxie instead, who was also looking away. Such scenes are all very well in your own family, but not in front of someone else’s. “You too, Kellar!” James Haines cried. I cringed for Kellar, and sympathetically looked away as he shuffled over to his father and grandmother for a group hug. Me and Moxie exchanged polite nods with Carr, who I noticed wasn’t invited. “It’s so good to see you again, little Kellar,” Cotton Haines was saying. “How you’ve grown.” A moment later, though, her tone of voice had changed. “Kellar. What’s this mark on your neck?” “Grandmother –” “It looks like a bruise. You haven’t been getting into fights, have you? Or –” “It’s nothing,” James Haines insisted. “Just a little youthful rough and tumble –” “That looks like a witchprick,” Cotton Haines said. I looked back over at that. Cotton Haines had twisted her grandson’s face away and was peering intently at the mark on his neck. It looked like a bruise to me, but then again, I didn’t know what a witchprick was. It didn’t sound very nice. “Grandmother, what’s a… a witchprick?” Carr asked. Cotton Haines’s voice was cold and serious as she replied, and she did so in all seriousness, despite the words she spoke. “It’s the mark left behind by the witches of Stain’d-by-the-Sea,” she said, “after they have attacked someone.” Nobody spoke. The rustling of the fire was lower, now, and its flames lolled helplessly against the blackened logs. The moonlight, I saw, no longer shone outside. “I’ve read a little about Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s witches,” I said. “Apparently they were supposed to have ink in their veins instead of blood.” “There’s no ‘supposed’ about it, out-of-town boy,” Cotton shot back. “Those witches were very real. They were a treacherous coven that conspired against the poor people who founded this great town. Throughout the ages, they hid themselves among the population, but at night they went about their evil and abnormal acts. Their nails were as black as their hearts, and they were shaped like quill pens, and whenever they wanted to drag someone away, they would stab that person with their nails and inject poisonous ink into them.” I didn’t know what ink would do if injected into a normal person’s veins. It probably wouldn’t be very good for them, though. I didn’t know why I was thinking about this. Witches didn’t exist. “What made them witches, exactly?” Moxie asked. “Did they have magical powers, like the ones in that book with the colourful shoes and the city made out of precious stones?” “They had all kinds of magical abilities,” Cotton Haines replied. “Because they didn’t have normal bodies, they could perform unnatural, freakish feats, like jumping long distances and climbing up sheer walls unaided. But it was the ink in their veins that lent them their greatest power.” “Did they leave indelible fingerprints for the police?” I asked. This time, I was the one trying to be funny when I didn’t really feel like it, and I got the glares I deserved. “Quite the reverse,” Cotton Haines intoned. “They could use a special, rare property of ink only found in that from Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It allowed them to fade from view and become invisible.” I didn’t say a word. Nobody did. Even Carr and Cotton, who had no idea of the events that had transpired earlier that day, said nothing. But a glance went around the room, and a shudder passed with it. James Haines’s face was drawn stiff in a dreadful grim mask, but I’m sure mine was simply horribly, horribly confused. I didn’t want to believe that Cotton Haines had just said what she had said. I didn’t want to see that look of fear written plain as day across Kellar’s face. I didn’t want to think something that was impossible. But the world kept on asking me to. The world kept on throwing impossible puzzles into my lap, and daring me to solve them. I was only an apprentice. This should have been left for an adult, a member of my organisation who knew what they were doing. But the only two adults in the room quite clearly believed every word that had just been spoken, without the slightest hesitation. Cotton Haines creaked her head slowly around, turning from one face in the room, to another, to another, until she had seen that she had everyone in the room in her thrall. Then she opened her mouth and said one more thing. “It is also said,” she said, “that, while invisible, the witches are also intangible, and can seep through walls and windows as if nothing was there at all.” It was the last thing she said before everything changed. In a way, none of us were surprised to hear a noise high above our heads. It was as if something had been held there for a long time, waiting for the moment to drop, waiting for the moment when we were most vulnerable, most suggestible, when we would believe anything, when anything might mean anything, and in its own way, it was a relief. We no longer needed to be in constant worry, constant tension, over whether something terrible was about to happen. Finally, something terrible had begun. Above our heads, somewhere in the upper floors of the Haines Lodge, there was a crash, something falling, and something breaking. Even then, I was dimly aware that it was the first strike of the witch.
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Post by Dante on Jan 7, 2015 4:14:42 GMT -5
CHAPTER FOUR “That noise came from upstairs,” Cotton Haines said. She was staring intensely across the room and at the ceiling, and looked as surprised as she did angry. Outraged would have been the right word. She had been shocked, but not into submission, not yet. “Has someone broken into my house? How dare they. How dare they!” With surprising swiftness, she levered herself from her seat on her iron cane, her blankets tumbling to the floor around her. In moments she was cutting past us all, striking the floor with her cane as if she wanted to cause it a physical injury, and was out the door. If I had heard a mysterious crashing noise in my house when I didn’t think there was anyone up there, I would have been a little worried, and even more so if I was a frail old lady. But Cotton Haines had the force of outraged dignity and countless ancestors at her back, and with them on her side she knew no fear. More to the point, she had four children and a burly son at her back, too. I scarcely had time to register the anxious and confused faces of my associates before we were out of our seats and following Cotton Haines. We weren’t the sort of people, I am happy to say, to leave an old woman to face an intruder alone, no matter how many abstract concepts that woman had to support her. I had an abstract concept of my own to support me – a way of dealing with fear whenever I felt it, which was increasingly often. I would tell myself, very firmly, that I would get scared later. But I was starting to worry just when that later might be. I couldn’t say, in that sudden hustle, which of us left the room first and in what order, as it just felt like we were a single unified and somewhat unwieldy gaggle of children, pouring out of our seats and into the hallway. Right outside the sitting room was a staircase leading to the next floor of the house, with Cotton’s three footsteps stamping up it at an impressive speed. We followed suit, and slowed down when she did, too. We didn’t speak with her, though. We were just there to listen to what she said as the next floor of the house came into view. “That’s Hopkins’s study!” she was saying, huffing and puffing for breath with every fierce step. “You brutes! Vandals! That room’s not been unlocked for years! I’ll have you thrown in jail! I’ll have you thrown –” She stopped at the top of the stairs, in the middle of a long corridor. Straight in front of her, I saw as I climbed up behind, was a doorway, and the door was wide open. Dim light from the corridor washed into the room and picked out a heavy wooden shape, probably a desk, and a glittery window behind it. I couldn’t see any intruder from where I was standing, which was just to Cotton’s side, and quite a bit lower, since I was thirteen years old and she was probably six or seven times that. But Cotton clearly saw something, and saw it all too clearly. I could see, from the thin arm she raised, straight as her cane, and the trembling boney finger she pointed from it, that she was looking right at somebody, and that somebody had stolen all of her bravado. That somebody terrified her. “It’s you,” she whispered. “Oh dear saints, it’s you! How could you be there?” One of her feet shuffled backwards, scuffing along the floor until it hit the wall behind her. “You should be in the Cauldron. You really are a witch. James! James, get her!” At that moment the house exploded. Or at least, that’s what it felt like to me. Just over my ear an almost deafening blast, like a barrel of dynamite or a word you can’t take back, burst into existence in a flash of light and sound. It was an indescribable eruption through which I only barely heard a high-pitched scream and shattering glass, and I recoiled as if I’d been hit myself and stumbled to the floor. The window in the study had gone, and standing above me was James Haines, and his hand was smoking like a dying fire. His hand and arm were outstretched like his mother’s, but he was clutching an old-fashioned firearm taken from the wall in the lobby. In its aftermath there was only silence, save for the old house’s gentle creaking. It was Moxie who first asked one of the myriad questions that waited unspoken in the air around us. “What just happened?” she said. “Mrs. Haines, just what did you see?” Cotton Haines looked less petrified, a word which here means “frozen still like a statue,” and was leaning heavily on her stick, and breathing equally heavily. Her eyes were still fixed upon the room that James Haines had just fired a shot into. She hadn’t looked away the whole time she’d been there. “A figure,” she said, forcing the words out between gasps. “A face. A terrible face, blazing with unnatural light, glaring malevolently at me out of that room.” “A woman’s face?” asked Carr, stepping up to the top of the stairs and standing beside her step-grandmother. Cotton Haines’s eyes slid slowly away from the room to rest upon Carr, her eyes trembling in her sockets. “An impossible face,” she whispered. I stepped forwards myself. I hadn’t seen anything, and I still didn’t, but I wanted to. If anyone had been in that room, either they were hiding, or… well, the “or” didn’t bear thinking about. I slipped past Carr and Cotton and stood at the edge of the doorframe, peering around the darkened room as best I could without setting foot inside. There were a couple of bookcases against the walls, the desk with a quill pen lying atop it, a plush and comfy chair with a threadbare cover. I couldn’t see behind the desk. “You’re looking in the wrong place,” Cotton’s voice whispered, closer to my ear than I would have liked. “You won’t find anyone in there, no.” I looked back at her. “But you saw someone in there.” She gave me a slight, weary shake of her head. “Not in here,” she said. “The face I saw was on the other side of the window.” I whipped my head back. The window stood closed and smashed, a huge jagged hole punched through its centre. There was nothing out there now, but there might have been a window ledge or something to climb up outside. I stepped into the room, remembering to get scared later of things which climbed up walls and looked through windows in the middle of the night, and as I got closer I felt broken glass crunch under my feet, and something wet, too, like rainwater. I ran my fingers along the edge of the desk to guide me, not asking why nobody had turned on the light, including me. I knew why. It felt too much like a signal – an advertisement. Besides, I could see that it had turned to late evening, if not to night outside. If the light were on then the window would just reflect the inside of the room. I recoiled as my fingers brushed something wet on the edge of the desk. I held them up to the dim, monochrome evening light and saw something dark on my fingertips. “Stop hesitating!” hissed Cotton. She’d have gotten along well with a friend of mine from school who had a similar attitude. “Don’t muddle about my husband’s office, boy! Look out of the window.” Stepping into the shadows behind the desk and looking out through that window was one of the last things I wanted to do at that moment. I would honestly rather have put my head into a guillotine. I reached the rear of the desk. Several of the drawers were ajar, with the edges of old pieces of paper sticking from the cracks. There was nothing behind the desk but a chair neatly tucked away. Nothing stood between me and the window glass, not even the glass itself, a few fragments still crunching under my shoes. The window was firmly fastened, and looked like it had been for years. Unlike another window I had encountered in a recent case, it had an old-fashioned latch involving a long lever with several holes on it that bolts on the window frame slotted into, and I didn’t see any way of fixing it to shut properly from the opposite side. As slowly as I dared, I poked the top of my head through the too-snug hole in the window glass. The rain had stopped, which was something. There was just enough moonlight struggling through the clouds to illuminate the ground for probably miles around. A couple of metres away were the shelves of rock that sloped away to the cliffs and down into the valley. I was on the overhanging side of the leaning house, which made the window ledges and cracked wood panelling useless to anyone without proper climbing equipment, and directly beneath me was the sand that encircled the entire house to form a border about three metres wide. A few shards of glass caught the moonlight on the sand below, but they were the only features disturbing its otherwise flat, plain appearance. The sand was totally unmarked around this entire side of the house. There was no way anything had crossed it, and no way anything had climbed up the wall, either. There was no good way to say it, so I said it the simplest way there was. “There’s nothing there,” I said. “What do you mean, nothing?” Carr asked. Nobody else seemed quite willing to cross the threshold into the study. They were quite comfortable out there in the corridor. “I mean it like most people mean nothing,” I said, and explained about the sand and the window and the lean of the house. “There’s nothing to indicate that there was ever anyone in here, and certainly not out there.” “Apart from the noise up here,” James Haines pointed out, “and the fact that the door’s wide open after being locked up for years.” I stepped out of the study myself. My hands itched to close the door behind me, but I was a stranger in the house. It felt like a private act, just to close a door behind me, especially one that was sacred to a person’s memory in some way. But I still wanted it shut. I thought about this instead of what James Haines had just said, and didn’t answer. “What’s that on your fingers?” Cotton interrupted sharply. “Boy! Show me.” I hadn’t quite forgotten, but I’d tried to. I held up my fingers, and we all looked at them under light. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Blood, I suppose, and I’m not so sure that it wouldn’t have been better if it had been. But what was there was, in more than one way, the only thing that could possibly have been there. “It’s ink,” Moxie said. She looked up at me, but I didn’t have an answer either. “Like the witches’ –” Kellar began, and stopped the way people do when they’ve said the wrong thing. Sometimes the wrong thing to one person is the right to another, though, or even both. Cotton Haines stretched out a trembling hand, a claw-like hand, towards Kellar, and let it stand on his shoulder by the nails alone. Then she nodded. “Like the witches’ blood,” she said. She still looked shaken, but now there was something else in her eyes as well as fear. Her voice was calmer, too. It was vindication, I realised. To her, the myth has been proven. “James, my boy,” she said, in as cold a voice as any I’d ever heard, “you got her.” James let his arm and his gun fall to his side. I hadn’t quite realised that he’d still had it aimed out at the window, all that time, defensively – offensively to me, as for part of that time my head had been in the way. “I thought I did,” he said, nodding slowly. “It’s good to have proof.” Kellar looked at his father, surprised and worse. “You saw it as well?!” he asked. “Of course I did,” James Haines snapped. “Or else I wouldn’t have fired, would I?” “I didn’t see anything,” Carr said, adding carefully, “but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything there.” “You weren’t tall enough to see over the desk,” James Haines said. “Simple.” “But there wasn’t anything there,” I insisted. “Nobody could have gotten in or out of that office through that window.” “You say that,” James replied, with that faintly cunning smile beginning to spread across his lips again, “but you heard it, didn’t you? I fired – and she screamed.” “That was –” I began, and hesitated again. I looked around at the people with me. “Not me, Snicket,” Moxie said. “Nor me,” said Carr. Kellar shook his head. “I’ve never screamed in my life,” Cotton said, sounding as affronted as if it were true. “Wasn’t you, was it, kid?” James Haines asked, bending down to look me in the eye. “N-no,” I stuttered. James Haines made me almost as nervous as everything else in that house. “You don’t think it was me, then, do you?” he asked, in mock reply. I didn’t dignify his question with an answer. It was a rhetorical question, which is a lot like a wrong question. It’s a question that shouldn’t need to be answered. “So where does that leave us then, kid?” he asked, again rhetorically. “You’ve got all of us bunched up in this corridor here. You’ve got a room that’s been locked for years mysteriously unlocking and making noise. You’ve got me and my mother looking into that room and seeing a face behind the window. You’ve got me firing at it and it screaming and leaving ink all over the floor. You’ve got no body in the room or on the sand and nothing to show anyone had crossed it since the rain stopped a while ago and no way of climbing up to the window if they did. Yeah, you’re right, kid. Nobody could have gotten in or out of that room through the window. So the only explanation – the only one – is that it was something that isn’t somebody in the normal way. Something that can leap long distances and climb surfaces like no human, something that can move through glass like it’s air, and something that bleeds ink. Something, let’s remember, that’s already attacked two people and turned them invisible today. Answer me this, little Snicket lad. If that wasn’t a witch – then what was it?” “Maybe,” Moxie said, “that’s the wrong question.” James Haines tried to raise one eyebrow, and managed it by raising the other at the same time. “How do you mean?” “Maybe the question isn’t what it was,” Moxie said, “but who it was. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Haines?” Cotton Haines was still leaning on both the wall and her cane, but she had recovered enough of her dignity to answer as if a question was an affront. “To what do you allude, Ms. Mallahan?” “I couldn’t help but hear what you said when you saw that witch,” Moxie said, and we all knew that she was treading on thin ice indeed. Too many steps, and she’d be flailing in deep water. “I got the impression that you recognised her. So my question is: Has this witch ever troubled you before?” I didn’t give Moxie enough credit as a journalist. She was getting good at asking the right questions, and she asked the right question at that time, while I didn’t. She looked at Cotton Haines, and so did just about everyone else, including James Haines, who I was uncomfortable to see fingering his firearm nervously. Cotton Haines looked at Moxie, and she looked suddenly very tired, and all her many years. “Yes,” she answered. “There was a witch in this town, an invisible and inhuman witch whose coven worked for many years to destroy all that was good. To look at her, you would think she was just a normal person. But she planned to use her evil powers to unleash a monster upon Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and destroy this town’s dreams. But her nightmare came to an end in the Cauldron many years ago, thanks to the Canute Company.” Some people have a way of answering questions in a way that only means you have to ask more questions. It is called life, and it only gets worse from here. “What’s the Cauldron?” asked Moxie. “What’s the Canute Company?” asked Kellar. “Why are you telling us this?” asked Carr. “Should you be telling them this?” asked James Haines, in a whisper louder than the wind that was blowing icy air into the house through the shattered window. On reflection, I shut the door after all. The Haines family clearly had bigger things to worry about. It took Cotton less than a second to choose whose question to answer, and as expected, it was her son’s. “All the children of this town should know of the deadly dangers facing it, so they can rise up against them,” Cotton said, her voice firmer. The colour was returning to her face, and she gripped her cane with far more confidence. “It’s time to gather the old crowd together again, to face this terror down and defeat it once and for all. Carr!” she barked, at her stepgranddaughter. “Run over to Van Dyke’s house! Wake him up and tell him to get Cyrus Colophon and meet me here.” Cotton Haines forced a smirk to her thin lips, and I knew in that moment that her self-belief and self-confidence were absolute. “We’re going to go witch-hunting.” All of which would have made a wonderful ending to a chapter, if this account were called All The Witch Questions by Cotton Haines, but unfortunately, it is not. This is an account, preserved for posterity, preserved in the hopes that humanity will learn from its mistakes, and more specifically from mine, to record all of the terrible questions I researched in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and all the mysteries I failed to solve until it was almost too late. Cotton Haines had risen higher in her own mind than she had ever stood before, but there was no way to avoid bringing her back down to earth, and it was a long, long way down indeed. Carr looked left and right and up and down and at everyone she could to avoid meeting Cotton Haines’s eyes, but eventually she had to come out with it. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Cotton.” Cotton scowled. “Well, why not? Is it because it’s cold and dark? This boy can go with you if you’re frightened.” “It’s true that I’m a little bit concerned about whatever it is my stepfather just shot,” Carr said, and I remembered how frightened she had been during my investigation of the first of the Stain’d Myth Murders, quite some time before. “But there’s another reason I can’t go and get Mr. Van Dyke. I’m afraid that he is dead.” “No,” whispered James, but Cotton didn’t look as if she’d quite heard. She continued to stare at Carr with an expression of mingled anger and confusion, blinking stupidly in the dim light. “Colonel Colophon,” Carr went on, finishing the job while bracing herself for what could not possibly be a good reaction, “is also dead.” James’s eyes widened, revealing that they were every bit as enormous as the rest of him. He looked wildly at me and Moxie, and we nodded, as respectfully as we could. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Carr concluded, and looked at the floor. James Haines let out a long spurt of breath, fountaining through his pursed lips like he was spitting out poison. “…Dead?” Cotton said, at last, as if she were simply saying “At the grocery store?” “I don’t see how… when did this…” “It was recently,” Moxie interrupted, helping Carr to find the right words to let Cotton down gently. “It was… very sudden.” “I believe Colonel Colophon fell from the window of his tower room at the Colophon Clinic,” Carr said, as gently as she could. “I’m sure he didn’t suffer.” “But… but this is horrible,” Cotton said. She looked so frail, as if a single breath of wind would blow her away. “That Cyrus could… And Lansbury, what about Lansbury?” “He…” Carr began, and hesitated. It was a lot harder to sugar-coat Lansbury Van Dyke’s death. I had seen it. I would never stop seeing it. “He died in his office a few weeks ago. I found his body while working one morning.” That was technically true, and I commended Carr for it. If Cotton Haines had to be informed of her old friends’ deaths, the least one could do was make it easier for her. Unfortunately, what was technically true was also the wrong thing to say. The death of Cotton Haines’s friends wasn’t an easy thing at all – not on their own, and especially not taken together with the strange things I had seen that day. Hangfire was active. His gaze had turned to the Haines family, and wherever his eyes lit up behind his mask, people died. That was why I had to step in, with the wrong right answer, when Cotton Haines finally summoned up the strength to ask her next question. “Was it natural causes?” she asked, and her knuckles were white on the head of her cane. “No,” I said. “And it wasn’t accidental, either – for either of them. Colonel Colophon and Lansbury Van Dyke were murdered.” Cotton’s free hand clawed out desperately for something to grasp onto, anything. She seized onto her son’s arm with a pincer-like grip that I was sure must have hurt him, her nails digging deep into his brawny wrist, the way you hold onto something if it is the only thing stopping you from falling to your doom. “So it had already begun,” Cotton gasped, looking as terrified of me and of the world as of a witch. “Her revenge. She killed Ingrid, she killed Cyrus and Lansbury, and tonight she came to…” “Colonel Colophon and Lansbury Van Dyke weren’t killed by a witch, or even a woman,” I said. I had to be very clear on this point. Hangfire had good reason to choose his victims, but Cotton Haines was the link between them. She knew them like she knew herself. And so long as she didn’t get lost in inexplicable fantasies, she could be the key to explaining Hangfire and the Inhumane Society, and bringing them to justice. “They were murdered by a man named Hangfire.” “Hangfire,” Cotton repeated in disgust, shaking her head. She was still trembling, and now she slid down the wall to sit on one of the stairs leading to the next floor of the house. “You can’t fool me. Nobody has a name like that.” “He doesn’t,” I agreed, “but that’s because he chose that name to hide his real one.” Almost immediately, I knew I’d said something wrong. Cotton stopped trembling and went still. James and Kellar looked from her to me in reaction. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Moxie, and I hoped she hadn’t realised that I’m letting on more than she thought I knew. I could feel Carr’s eyes on my back, too. It’s a few moments before I realise the error I’ve made. “To hide his real name,” Cotton says, and suddenly there was a very sly look in her eyes that was startlingly familiar. Like mother, like son; it was the same look I’d seen on James Haines’s face a few times, when he thought he knew something other people didn’t. It wasn’t necessarily something that made them happy, that knowledge, but there was a kind of pleasure to them in knowing. “Are you suggesting, young man, that this ‘Hangfire’’s true identity is a secret?” I hemmed and hawed and stalled as long as I could before answering. I avoided giving the right answer, which was yes. Instead, I gave the wrong answer, which was also the wrong question. You know the one I mean; it is the one that appears in the title of this story, the one I have already asked in this account, and the one I will ask again before this account is closed. “If Hangfire’s true identity is a secret,” Cotton said, and her eyes had narrowed now to dark slits that I could barely see, hidden by her white brows, “then how do you know that he is even a man?” How did I know? I knew because I knew what Hangfire really looked like. I knew because I had seen his face a couple of times, even if it was a face so carefully crafted and so ordinary that I could never recognise it again. But more than any other reason, I knew because I knew Hangfire’s true identity. There was an answer that fitted the question, a wrong question because the answer was such a terrible one. I couldn’t let on that I knew that answer, though. And because I couldn’t let on, Cotton Haines had the better of me. Not just of me, either. She was winning over some of my associates, too. “Cotton has a point, Snicket,” Carr said, appearing from behind me. She put a hand on my shoulder. Like a secret, it was heavy. “Hangfire’s a master of disguise. I’ve seen him at work, remember?” she pointed out. “Why wouldn’t it be possible that he is actually a woman? The very fact that he’s disguised himself as men before now could just be an even more enormous disguise.” “He never lets anyone see his face, ever,” Kellar said. “Nobody knows what sort of face he has. But if you saw his face close up, maybe you’d know for sure. Has anyone ever seen him that close?” Moxie put a hand on my shoulder, too. It was meant to be reassuring, but I also knew it was a way of letting me down gently, too. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s still too early to make assumptions.” “It’s not too early at all,” Cotton Haines said. There wasn’t a drop of blood in her face, and her hand on her cane trembled wildly, but her voice was certain, certain of something terrible. “There’s only one person it can be, only one person who makes absolute sense. A woman who set out many years ago to destroy this town’s future with every terrible weapon and every suspicious ally she could lay her hands on.” Her voice grew higher and higher, becoming a shriek as she built up to her dreadful conclusion. “That woman is a witch, she was put in the Cauldron for being a witch, and she survived to take her revenge because she is a witch, and the witch’s name is Picacea –” “ENOUGH!” bellowed James Haines. It was loud enough to shock me right out of my train of thought, to stun his mother in the midst of a frenzied rant, and to deserve capital letters. “You kids,” he said, his voice ice-cold, every floorboard creaking beneath him as he loomed over me and my associates, “are frightening my mother.” I think we all looked at the floor rather than meet his eyes. I can’t be sure if everyone was, though. I was too busy looking at the floor. He was right. We had all gotten worked up in a conversation about a frightening mythical woman who Cotton Haines really believed in, and about a frightening and very real man who I wish I could disbelieve. I was ashamed. Also, I believed that James Haines had enough of a sense of honour not to strike somebody who wasn’t looking at him. “And you, mother,” he said, his shoes swinging around but his voice growing much smoother, “are frightening yourself.” “But James,” whined Cotton’s voice, “we saw her –” “A hallucination,” said James Haines, “or a prank or a trick of the light or whatever it’ll take for you to get some sleep tonight, mother. You forget that you’re an old lady. You need your beauty sleep.” She was an old lady, but she still had some of the petulance of the child she had once been. “But what if she climbs up to my room, James?” Cotton retorted. “Up the walls like a spider and in to catch me? Then you’ll be sorry!” James laughed. “You’ve got more chance of being caught by the monster under your bed,” he said. But, more sombrely, he added, “I’m going to stay up all night tonight, and if I hear the slightest sign of trouble in the house, any kind of a scream or a fight or whatever, I’ll come running. I’ve got a trusty deputy who’ll make sure I can keep this house in order.” “Wow… Thank you, Dad,” said Kellar, beaming up at his father. “I promise I won’t let you down.” “Huh? Oh, yeah, it’s good to have you around too, son,” James Haines breezed, “in case my gun jams or anything. Now, Carr, help me get my mother to bed. You kids should go to bed soon, too,” James Haines said, gesturing casually at us with the barrel of his gun, “since it’s way past your bedtime.” “Actually, we don’t live here, Mr. Haines,” Moxie pointed out. “Me and my associate were just visiting.” “But you can’t walk home in the middle of the night, given the circumstances!” Cotton cut in. “Not when a witch is prowling –” “Not when anything could be prowling,” James Haines interrupted her. “What if the bell were to ring? As a father, I can’t let you take that risk. Of course,” he added, as an afterthought, “we’ve no telephone here, so you will be basically stranded. Your parents will just have to worry.” Moxie and I looked askance at each other. Given our circumstances, that seemed unlikely, or at least no more likely than usual. James Haines could probably have lifted his mother single-handed, but he ushered Carr over, and each of them supported Cotton Haines on one arm. She looked as light as a feather, wrinkly and weightless like a balloon that has been left in a cupboard for a long time. Practically picking her up, James and Carr led Cotton slowly up the stairs, the creak of the floorboards under James’s feet marking time. Then they vanished up on the highest floor, and left me and Moxie alone with Kellar. We looked at each other awkwardly. It had been a strange day. “I should apologise,” Kellar said, looking embarrassed. “You didn’t pick a good time to visit my family.” “On the contrary,” I said. “I think we picked exactly the right time.” “It’s clear that something very sinister is going on,” Moxie said, “involving your family, Kellar.” He winced. “I promise it’s a coincidence,” he insisted. “I know me and my mother have worked for Hangfire, and she still does… but it’s just her. I don’t know anything about what happened at the train station earlier today, and I don’t know anything about what happened here tonight. And I can’t imagine that any more of my family could be involved with Hangfire’s plans.” “You can be involved without even knowing it,” I said, thinking of the times Hangfire had taken advantage of my presence, too. For all I knew, it could be happening right as I spoke. “But speaking of your family, how exactly are you related to Carr, if you don’t mind my asking? She told me her name was Carr Carter.” “It was,” Kellar replied. “That was her father’s surname. When she was very young, her parents split up, and her mother married my father, so Lizzie and I are her half-siblings.” “And good half-siblings, I’m sure,” Moxie smiled. “I hope so,” Kellar sighed. “She’s always kept herself to herself, and I don’t know if that’s who she is or because she actually feels left out. My stepfather even let her move back to town about six months ago to go to school here.” “Families can be difficult,” I said, and looked up to where I imagined Carr might be above the ceiling. “My siblings are twins. They try not to act like it, but it’s hard to forget.” “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Moxie said, and I remembered that she, too, was left out of this issue. “Let’s talk about the important things instead. Kellar, this is your house, your family. Is your grandmother reliable? What about your father? Who’s this witch we’re meant to be so scared of? What’s the Cauldron? And what do you think about all this?” Kellar smiled. “I think I can only answer one question at once,” he said. Moxie tapped her foot. “Okay, how about just the Cauldron, then?” she said. “I already asked about that earlier, and nobody answered me.” In every list of questions is one you want to answer the least, and that will always be the one you end up answering. Kellar beat about the bush as much as he could, but he had to get there in the end. “That’s probably because it’s not very nice,” he replied. He glanced at the closed door to the office, and then ushered us through another door just along the corridor. I was pleased and surprised to find that it was a library, with every wall barring a couple of windows covered in bookshelves. The bookshelves weren’t all completely filled or even stocked at all, and the books themselves were old enough to be losing their jackets and crumbling away. The scent of dead books filled the air. It was a little sad, but it was still a library. It needed, I thought, Dashiell Qwerty’s attention, and then I was sad all over again. Kellar was leading us to a window that faced the same way as the office window. Like that window, the lean of the house meant that we were tipped ever so slightly towards this window, which itself was directly over the sand, and it made me queasy. “Do you know what a stack is?” he asked. “On the way here, you probably saw that one part of the cliff that’s disconnected from the land, just there,” he went on, pointing way out over the sand and rocks. I knew what he was talking about, and I could just make it out against the deep blue sky, a finger meeting the finger he was pointing. “That’s the Cauldron,” he said grimly. “There’s a hole at the bottom in which seawater got in when there was still a sea, and over many years it entirely hollowed out the centre of the stack, and finally the roof caved in, creating a huge tube of solid rock which flooded at every tide. It could have been a popular spot for divers, but instead the town elders, way back before the town had things like mayors or libraries or a formal justice system, decided that it would serve another purpose. For that purpose, they put a big iron grate over the hole, with hinges so it could be opened and a heavy bolt positioned so it couldn’t be opened… at least, not from the inside.” I didn’t like where this was going. It sounded like a prison, and Moxie said so. She hadn’t realised that that was the point. “It seems that, at the time, there was a big scare in Stain’d-by-the-Sea about witches,” Kellar went on. “That was true in a lot of the country in that age, but when the witch hunt reached Stain’d, the locals added what you could call local colour to the witch legends, and the result was what my grandmother told you about earlier. The witches were famously said to meet at midnight on new moons atop the Cauldron to brew up more of the terrible ink that ran in their veins, but in the fight against witchcraft, it was reclaimed for a purpose that was much worse. You see, since the witches just looked like normal people, the elders devised a test to prove who was a witch and who wasn’t. At low tide, people suspected of being witches were locked into the bottom of the Cauldron, and then the elders would march up the outside of the Cauldron – there’s a sandy path winding around it in a spiral – and waited all day to see what happened.” “What did they expect to happen?” Moxie asked, confused. “People would just swim up to the top.” “Wherever you go in the world, lot of the people who used to be accused of being witches were impoverished old women who lived a simple life,” I told her. “It’s unlikely that many of them would be able to swim. Even if they knew how, they would have to swim for hours to survive from low tide to reach the top at high tide. And bear in mind this would be icy-cold water.” Kellar nodded sadly. “Snicket has it right,” he said. “Barely anyone ever pulled off that feat, and most of the bodies of the supposed witches were pulled from the Cauldron at low tide again and pronounced innocent before being given a half-decent burial. And anyone who did manage to survive such an ordeal could only be a witch, to have that sort of strength in water.” “But that’s awful,” Moxie said. I wasn’t sure if she quite understood, or if she understood too well. “Either people die, or they’re witches.” “What happened to the witches?” I asked, though I thought I probably already knew the answer. Kellar looked away. “They waited until low tide, and then pushed them right back in from the very top,” he said. “According to my grandmother, records show that no witch ever survived the fall from that height.” “So being accused of being a witch was just a death sentence?” Moxie exclaimed. “I think it’s the same all around the world,” Kellar said quickly. “It’s not just this town’s problem.” “But it’s still a problem!” Moxie retorted. “You can’t call something justice if it’s just murder.” “People think it’s not justice if they don’t find a culprit,” I said. “And they don’t think it’s justice unless someone gets hurt.” Moxie gave me a pained look. “I hope I don’t have to become as cynical as you are about justice, Snicket,” she said quietly. I sighed. “So do I,” I said. By mutual consent, we changed the subject to the fact that five more people than she expected were sleeping at Cotton Haines’s house that night – her son, grandson, and stepgranddaughter, and two friends of the latter two. Kellar said that he thought there would probably be enough rooms, if his father really planned on staying up all night, and said he’d show us to them. Before I went, I thought about selecting a book from the library for some bedtime reading, but on closer examination, every single book was about witches. It was a whole library on witchcraft, or rather on detecting and fighting witchcraft, with volumes from around the world. It struck me that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that Haines Lodge was situated so close to the Cauldron. The family had probably been involved in executing witches for a very long time. I wondered what stories Cotton had been told as a child by her grandmother, and whether they had stuck with her this long. How many scary stories around the world involve faces pressed up against dark windows, after all? Probably everyone has heard one, or dreamt one, or imagined one in the dead of night when thinking about looking out through their window. I wondered why a sudden face was such a terrifying thing. I suppose a friend might have telephoned first before shoving their face against your window and waiting for you to open the curtains. I wasn’t afraid of going out in the town and its surroundings at night, or not because of a witch, anyway, but I had a feeling that my place was there, in Haines Lodge, to catch up on the town’s history with Cotton Haines. Even then I was still learning basic facts about Stain’d-by-the-Sea and its local geography, which I shouldn’t have had to if S. Theodora Markson was a better chaperone, but one of the advantages of a poor chaperone is that in this instance she both went to bed earlier and got up later than me, so she would be unlikely to miss me that night. I was less sure about Moxie’s father, but I didn’t want to pry into her family life. Kellar’s was uncomfortable enough for one day. A good library makes you want to stay up all night, but a poor library has the reverse effect. Pretty soon I was yawning, and the yawn passed around the room like a bad cold. I felt like going to bed more than I was willing to admit, and Moxie and Kellar were clearly tired, too, but what sealed the deal to send us to our rooms was James Haines hammering on the library door and ordering us upstairs so he could patrol the ground floor. I wouldn’t say he marched us up the stairs at gunpoint; it was more like gunwavingaround. I didn’t want to find out how he enforced his curfews, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t be a soft touch. Carr was waiting for us at the top of the stairs. “Well, let’s hope that’s the end of that,” she said, glancing nervously along the corridor towards where I understood Cotton’s room to be. “My stepfather’s gone to patrol the ground floor with his gun all night, so I hope we’ll have no more trouble.” “I don’t know if that makes me feel any safer,” Moxie said. “You should be fine so long as you don’t try to sneak downstairs for a midnight snack,” Kellar said. “There’s a bathroom around the corner if you need a glass of water, though.” The corner he pointed to was past one more flight of stairs, which I guessed led to an attic. Everyone wants to explore the attic, but perhaps not in the dark. “How is your grandmother?” I asked Carr. “She’s not my grandmother, Snicket,” Carr reminded me. “And I think she’s calmed down. I got her to bolt her door when I left to make her feel more secure. She’ll go to bed and sleep this witch silliness off, and hopefully, so will I. I don’t like scary stories.” “Not even The Mysteries of Udolpho?” “That’s the one where the girl’s evil uncle locks her up in a castle, and there’s something terrible behind a black curtain, isn’t it?” Carr asked. “I tried reading that at the library when I was a child, but I was too frightened to finish it, and we left town shortly after that. I’d go and check it out tomorrow, if you recommend it, but I understand that the library has been destroyed, so that’s that.” She wasn’t quite right about the library not being destroyed. It had merely been relocated by me and as few associates as I could afford to let in on the secret. Once all this was over, I hoped people would be able to use it again, but until then I couldn’t risk someone attempting to destroy it in another arson. I shrugged and looked apologetic. “A lot seems to have been happening while I’ve been keeping to myself keeping Lansbury Van Dyke’s papers in order,” Carr continued. “I guess we all have a lot of catching up to do with each other,” Kellar said. “I didn’t know you knew Lemony, and I guess you didn’t know he and Moxie knew me.” “It’s another fragmentary plot, right, Snicket?” Moxie asked. “Everyone’s involved in their own mysteries, but one of these days you have to bring them all together to solve the case.” “You’re right,” I said, “but I don’t even know just what case there is here yet. I need to think some more about it.” “Sleeping on it will help,” Carr said. “I always find that the solutions to my problems have run off to tomorrow and are waiting for me when I wake up.” “We’ll join them soon enough,” Kellar said, suppressing a yawn. “Being drugged isn’t a very nice way to spend a day, and I should put this tiredness to good use.” He waved a hand at four doors I could see along the corridor. “These are all bedrooms. Now, who can get which…” “I’ll take my mother’s room,” Carr volunteered. “Kellar, you should sleep in your father’s.” “Oh, that makes sense,” Kellar nodded. “Then I guess Moxie can have Lizzie’s room, and Snicket can have mine.” I would draw a map later, to help me to understand the confusing events that took place that night, but in short, Kellar was sleeping next to Cotton’s room, then Carr next to his, Moxie next to hers, and me last in line. I had spent a lot of my life sleeping in dormitories, and more recently in the same room as Theodora, so goodnight etiquette in this situation was a bit lost on me. Moxie was an only child, so the same was probably true of her. And having strangers sleeping in your house is a strange thing in itself. The four of us more or less just drifted away from each other, over to our respective rooms, to try and get some sleep in strange beds on a strange night. I didn’t have any pyjamas, and while I wasn’t definitely expecting something to happen then I thought there was a good chance something might happen that would require me to get out of bed in the middle of the night, so I just took off my hat and jacket and laid them down on a small table, and then laid myself down on a small bed and tried to get to sleep. It didn’t work, or not very well. Sleeping after an exhausting day is one thing, but sleeping after a less exhausting but quite confusing day is difficult. My brain was too busy trying to puzzle out solutions to the mysterious incidents I had witnessed that day, and, even harder, trying to piece those solutions together into a larger plan. Hangfire’s schemes were often immense and complicated. What did he have to gain by kidnapping Dashiell Qwerty, or scaring Cotton Haines? And what did their own mysteries mean, all the hints they dropped and events they’d been involved in? I turned these questions over and over in my head, examining them from so many angles that I stopped really thinking about the answers, just the questions, the words, repeating them over and over again with different voices and different emphasis to see if they suggested a new answer. But no answer came, and that just made me all the surer that I was once again doing the wrong thing, and asking the wrong questions. Meanwhile, Haines Lodge creaked creepily around me, and I slid ever so slowly along the bed until my head was being bent upwards against the backboard. I sighed. It was intolerable. I didn’t have a watch, owing to a misfortune and owing to never having seen a watch shop in Stain’d-by-the-Sea and owing to never having any money, and since I didn’t want to owe any watchmakers any money even if they existed then all in all I had no idea how long I had spent trying to sleep. It was dark, at least, too dark to see a watch or to see anything behind the curtain I decided against twitching aside. I sighed. Alright, I said to myself. Let’s do it your way, the way you wanted to do it all along. Forget about sleeping, just get yourself out of this room and be ready to take action if anything happens, no matter how scary. I got up. I slipped on my jacket, and pulled my hat down over my head. Then I cracked open my bedroom door and almost got knocked in the face by Moxie. She jumped, and frowned at me. “Snicket!” she hissed. “It’s a good thing you’re up. It might have happened.” I was as instantly alert as I could be after a sleepless part-night. “What might have happened?” I asked. “We don’t know,” Moxie said, and beckoned me along to the other end of the corridor. Kellar and Carr were standing there, not far from the door to Cotton’s room. “We thought we heard something,” Kellar whispered. I wasn’t sure why we were whispering all of a sudden, but the atmosphere had changed. We weren’t awkward children in a strange and confusing house any more. We were behaving covertly, because we suspected that something sinister was happening. We were whispering in case anything came to get us. “Something woke me up that I can’t quite remember, but I think I heard something strange,” Kellar went on. “It took me a while to look out of my door, as it was a bit frightening, but when I did, I thought I saw something shadowy slip away around the corner.” “Maybe someone got up for a drink of water,” I said. “Did anyone do that?” Moxie asked, looking around. Nobody raised their hand. “I thought I heard something too, though it might just have been Kellar creeping about,” Carr said. “I followed him, and when we realised we were both up, we thought we had probably get you two up, too – just in case.” “I’m glad I was the last person you thought of.” “You’re the cleverest person here, Snicket,” Kellar said. “You needed more sleep than us.” “I didn’t get any.” “Anyway,” Carr broke in, “it’s all quiet now, but I want to check on Cotton. It’ll be worth waking her up to know that she’s okay.” “Are we waiting for anyone else?” I asked. “We’re waiting to feel safer in numbers,” Kellar replied. I remembered a time when four of my friends had been taken away by Hangfire right in front of my face. Safety in numbers is an illusion, but it’s a pleasant one. I nodded, and we walked the last few steps towards Cotton’s room. Carr gestured to Kellar, who steeled himself. Waking up your family in the middle of the night is in its own way even scarier than what scares you. “G-grandmother?” he stalled, whispering her name as he slowly brought his balled hand closer to the door. He knocked, and the door creaked back a few centimetres on its hinges. It was unbolted and open. There are moments in your life, shared or not, when something happens that is so shocking or horrid that you cannot help but freeze, and ask yourself, your brain, your eyes and ears, over and over again if it could really have happened, if it could really be true. It was too much for us even to say “Oh, no,” even though those two words summed up our every thought, every muscle. Kellar’s fist shook. He couldn’t open that door any farther, even if he wanted to. He didn’t have to, though. The door opened into the lean of the house, and the force Kellar had given it was enough for it to keep on moving with the force of gravity, creeping ajar, and open, and open wider, all of its own accord, as if being slowly pulled open by some terrible slow creature behind the door that could take as much time as it needed to come and get us. The lights of the corridor shone into the dark room. They picked out a wide room, an abandoned-looking and threadbare-looking room, with a long red carpet on the floor, and a bureau with a round mirror, and a tall wardrobe, and a pair of thick curtains directly opposite with fancy cords, and a wrought iron double bed with lacy covers that hung far down and onto the floor. There was nobody in the bed. Cotton Haines’s room was entirely devoid of life, and devoid of her.
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Post by Dante on Jan 9, 2015 4:48:18 GMT -5
CHAPTER FIVE I couldn’t believe my eyes. Cotton Haines’s empty bedroom defied sense. Of course, there are plenty of perfectly good reasons for someone not to be in their bedroom at that hour, such as going to the bathroom, fetching a drink or midnight snack, or attending their job as a night watchman, but the combination of circumstances was too sinister for words. She had been confronted that night by an apparition which terrified her. She had bolted the door of her room. She had no business wandering about in the middle of the night when most people would just have hidden themselves under their bedclothes, or fled the building before even getting there. A chill seemed to breathe from the room as I stared into it. What was going on? Still, she could just have gone to the bathroom. I said as much. “I’ll check,” Kellar whispered, and took a few steps down the corridor. I heard the bathroom door creak, and the light click on. Then they clicked and creaked in reverse, and Kellar’s footsteps, slightly more sluggish, returned to the rest of us. “She isn’t there, is she,” Moxie said. The answer was so obvious that it wasn’t even a question. Kellar shook his head, and we looked at the room, and its long shadows, hiding every nook and cranny where Cotton Haines should have been. “She could have gone downstairs for a midnight snack,” Carr said. “Then she won’t mind if we take a look at her room,” I said. “Everyone pick a wall. Look for any sign of trouble.” I didn’t want to know what kind of trouble I was expecting. I hoped no kind. I would even have accepted Cotton Haines springing out of the wardrobe yelling “Surprise!” and wearing a party hat. As everyone else dispersed through the room, I wandered slowly towards the carefully-drawn curtains and tried to avoid opening them. One step towards them… “The bolt on the door has been slid right back,” Carr said, examining the lock. “No jiggery-pokery there; Cotton must have left this room of her own accord.” Two steps to the curtains… “But her slippers are still here, below the bureau,” Kellar said, pointing to a pair of slippers exactly as fluffy as you are imagining. “She wouldn’t leave her room in her bare feet at this time of night.” A third step… “There are scratch marks on the floor around the bedposts, like it’s been shoved about a bit,” Moxie said, and then let out a tiny gasp. She had drawn back the rumpled bedclothes, and on the pillow, right where the side of someone’s neck would rest, was a smallish splash of darkening red that still looked damp. A fourth step, and there they were, the fancy curtains with trailing cords that doubtless hid a wide, clear window. And on the other side of that window… Well, it is harder to be truly scared among friends. I swept the curtains aside as swiftly as I could, not knowing what I might see on the other side. What I saw was a window latched shut with the same kind of latch as the other windows in the house. What I saw on the other side was, thankfully, nothing close, just a wide border of damp sand, still glinting with shards of glass from the broken office window directly below, that separated the house from the rocks of the former shore. There was not a mark or a print to be seen on that sand, and if there were, it would instantly have been revealed by the moonlight, which gleamed over every cleft and crack and hole in the rocky expanse and traced the short scramble across the stones that led to the Cauldron. I saw it clearly silhouetted in the moonlight, a tall, slightly tapering shaft of rock that rose high up over its surroundings, with the barest glimpse of a winding, sandy trail that spiralled all the way around its outside and must have led all the way up to the top. There was nothing sinister to be seen, and yet the Cauldron itself was all the scene needed to be sinister, knowing as I now did that it was an immense monolith of death, a giant gravestone for people falsely accused of the wildest imaginary offences by a deranged mob. It reminded me of why my organisation had had to become secret. A witch-hunt doesn’t have to be for a literal witch. Anyone who seems to know more than they should is a danger to the ignorant. I wondered if there was anyone like that nearby at that moment. I wondered, as I stared at the Cauldron, and then I stared again, blinked, tried to be sure of what I had just seen. I had seen a shadow turn a corner at the edge of the path around the Cauldron, and then vanish into the shroud of shadow it cast. Someone was climbing up to the top of the Cauldron. “There’s someone there,” I said, to my three associates. “There’s someone there, on the Cauldron, walking up to its mouth. “At this hour?” Moxie exclaimed, looking over. “Who could that be?” Kellar and Carr joined us. “That could be the wrong question, Moxie,” Kellar said, as he squinted out at the tower of stone. “What’s the right question, then?” Moxie asked. Carr looked out at the Cauldron, and her expression was grim. “Why,” she said, and it was both a question and an answer. “Let’s find out,” I said. I felt suddenly decisive. I’d spent the day standing around staring in befuddlement at impossible things. It was time to rush in and investigate. It was time to try and stop something terrible, rather than let it happen and explain later. “Come on, let’s go now. We’ll get Mr. Haines on the way.” “Wait, are you sure?” Carr asked. She looked from me to the Cauldron and back again. “Are you sure it’s not –” “Carr, you must remember the Lansbury Van Dyke case,” I said. “The impossible mystery where we met that turned out to be very possible. That’s not a monster or a witch out there, it’s a person. It’s a person, and your stepgrandmother looks to have been abducted. We have a duty to investigate.” Carr glanced over at the window, and then at her half-brother, and nodded. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. It had happened before, in my very first case in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and maybe if I hadn’t jumped to conclusions then I could have solved the whole case, the big case, before the kidnappings and arsons and murders that followed. Maybe Cotton Haines was sleepwalking and had gone stumbling into an empty room of the house. Maybe she’d stabbed herself in the neck too. I didn’t think so. We could search the house any time we liked, if we liked, but if we left it too long, whoever was prowling up the Cauldron, and their grim purpose, would vanish for good. We hurried down the stairs to the middle floor of the house. The door to the late Hopkins Haines’s office was still firmly shut, as I had left it, but I could picture on the other side the shattered window, the shadow of the Cauldron in the distance. We didn’t hurry down the stairs to the ground floor as we didn’t want James Haines to leap out and shoot at us, but we called for him urgently, and he came running. “What are you kids doing?” he asked, as he clumped up the stairs towards us, his huge legs making two steps at a time look like child’s play. “What’s all the screaming in aid of?” “Grandma’s missing from her room,” Kellar explained urgently. “There’s blood on her pillow,” Moxie said. “Possible signs of a struggle, too.” “Bearing in mind what happened to Kellar, this could be a kidnapping,” Carr suggested. “And somebody,” I added, “is walking up the Cauldron.” James Haines opened and closed his mouth a few times, words failing him until at last he managed to exclaim, “What in tarnation!” “Tarnation,” in case you are wondering, is like “damnation,” but more polite. “She couldn’t have gotten out of here! I’ve been patrolling the ground floor all night, and the front door’s been locked since we got here.” I looked James Haines in the eye. “I expect there’s no way anyone could’ve gotten in here, either.” “There isn’t,” he muttered. “The key’s still in the door, and you’d have to break a window… It’s not possible.” “But,” Carr said – how a person can grow to hate that word – “maybe we’re thinking in terms of the wrong kind of possible.” Her voice sank very low, almost to a whisper again, as if she was delivering a terrible warning in the midst of danger. “Maybe the kind of possible we’re used to thinking of is wrong, and the elders of this town’s past were right. Because, if any kidnapper were invisible, lighter than air, it would be very possible – too possible.” “I don’t believe that,” I replied. “I can’t.” If what she was suggesting was true, then the whole world didn’t make sense – even less sense than it already made. If the world didn’t make sense, then everything that my organisation had worked for, everything that I had worked for, meant nothing. I have never liked some of the ways my organisation goes about its work, but I admire their work. Nobody could possibly volunteer if they didn’t. “Then –” Moxie looked at me. “If it’s not possible to enter or leave, then we must be wrong. Mrs. Haines must still be in the house.” I wasn’t so sure. Everything that had happened that day – or, since I didn’t know the time, perhaps the previous day – all of it seemed like part of Hangfire’s plot. It had all of his hallmarks. Ingenious plotting. Confusion. Terror. Impossibilities meant nothing to him. If that was him out there, carrying Cotton Haines up to the top of the Cauldron for some dreadful purpose, I couldn’t be in the least surprised. Even if it was impossible, he could find some treacherously sneaky way. Not everyone shared my feelings. Moxie, Kellar, and Carr were wavering, but if I was right, we probably didn’t have time to waver. No, we surely didn’t have time to waver one way or another. We had to make a choice. The wrong choice at that moment was better than doing nothing at all. “Maybe after all we really should search the house,” Kellar said. “Grandma could just be lying injured somewhere –” An enormous hand slapped down onto his shoulder. James Haines’s shrouded eyes burnt down at his son. “Kellar,” he growled, “I don’t know what I believe. Never have. But I’ll tell you something I know, and that’s that for years your grandmother has been terrified of someone, or something, coming after her like this. When you were still a baby, and your grandfather was still alive, I heard her talking to him once, about the nightmares she had – nightmares of someone grabbing her, tearing her out of the house, taking great leaping bounds across those dead stones and up to the top of the Cauldron. And…” He shook his head ruefully. “It wasn’t just nightmares, either. There were people she was afraid of, real people that made her hide away in this house so she wouldn’t ever risk seeing them on the street.” His voice rose higher, his words tumbled out faster, his speech reminding me of the rant his mother had gone on earlier. “Don’t ask me ‘how,’ or any other stupid wrong questions like that. This is my mother’s nightmare come true! I can’t stand here and let it happen, whether it’s happening or not!” He turned abruptly, and went marching down the stairs, gesturing wildly for us to follow. “Come on. We’re going to the Cauldron. Then we’ll see what’s real and what’s just a myth.” We gave each other concerned looks, trading them like stories, and followed. Outside, the world was dark and cold. It would have been a peaceful night, if it were not for the sinister events transpiring; they lent that tranquillity a sense of suspended malice. The Moon glowed huge in the sky, as if it was approaching us with its own slow and unstoppable pace, hurtling through space to crush us like a cosmic croquet ball. The moment James Haines tore open the front door, I’m sure we all noticed that the sand around the front of the house too was all smooth and clear, without the faintest impression of a footprint, our own prints from when we arrived washed and smoothed out by the mercifully brief rainfall. The Cauldron was off to the side of Haines Lodge, and we ran with unrelenting, lung-searing speed, only barely keeping up with James Haines’s long strides. Thankfully, even he was forced to slow down once we reached the rocks, which were wet with rain, the ghost of the seawater that once lay atop it. Out of the shadow of the Cauldron, we could pick our way carefully along the boulders and shelves of rock without falling and breaking bones, but that shadow grew ever nearer, even more vast than the great chimney we were pursuing. Once, as I traced the shadow’s edge, right in front of me the shadow of the person climbing the Cauldron flitted into view and then merged with the greater shadow once more. They were near the top, but we were barely near the bottom. Closer to, the Cauldron wasn’t quite so obscured in its own shadow, and it was possible to make out its true appearance. It was something like a drill of rock, tapering slightly as it rose, with perilously steep sides that it would be terribly dangerous to fall from. Where it rose out of the rocks, a bank of sand and a few tall dry weeds had been left behind by the sea, leaving part of the Cauldron shored up by a small lake of sand of its own several metres wide, much like Haines Lodge. This sand crept up a ridge of rock coiled around the Cauldron like a snake, forming a narrow path of sand and mud that turned up and around the great pillar of rock until it finally reached the very top, overlapping itself many times upon the way. Also like Haines Lodge, the sand around the Cauldron was wet, and any footprints trodden in it in the past couple of hours would be immediately apparent. I knew this as there was indeed a trail of footprints, narrow shoeprints not far apart, that appeared where the rock turned to sand and proceeded alone up the path, where the only destination was the Cauldron’s mouth. James Haines had brought a small lamp, and as he shone it onto the path, shadows dipping into the deep footprints, his lips curled into an unpleasant grin. “We’ve got her. Whoever’s up there, they haven’t come down yet. They’re trapped between a rock and a hard place.” Being trapped between a rock and a hard place is a lot like being trapped between a pit and a chasm. Neither are places you can go through, and the only option left is to await capture by whoever is chasing you. Of course, if it was Hangfire up there, and not some mysterious woman, he did have another option besides capture, and that was the terrifying violence he was known to inflict. Sometimes it is useful to have a man like James Haines around, if there is someone even more volatile and dangerous nearby. “I’ll go first,” James Haines said, shifting his lamp so he could crack his knuckles threateningly. Willingness to injure oneself to make a point can be quite intimidating, but I was distracted by something that his lantern flashed onto as it swung from his arm. Just off the edge of the sand there was a small niche in the edge of the Cauldron, perhaps a cave sunk into the rock. I approached it, skirting the edge of the sand as I did so. It wasn’t dark inside the hollow, but rather, I could see the faint glinting of moonlight. Kellar spoke up hesitantly behind me as I went. “Snicket, not that way,” he said. “That’s…” “That’s a hole where water flooded into the Cauldron,” Carr said, steps behind me. “It’s grated off, of course. There are bad vibes in that place.” James Haines had shone his lantern into the hollow as I stepped into it. I could hear him grumbling patiently as I approached the grate that was now apparent. It was like a very old prison door, made up of criss-crossing bars on a sturdy hinge hammered deep into the rock wall. A large metal plate covered up much of one half of the grate, and in the centre of it was a heavy, rusty-looking bolt that also slotted into the stone wall. It looked secure enough, secure enough to murder people. Unless someone had very long arms bent at a very strange angle, it couldn’t be unlocked from the inside, condemning anyone thrown in their to a cold and watery death. I wondered what had happened to their bodies, and whether their bones lay, abandoned and cold, mouldering into pieces on the stone floor of the Cauldron. Morbid curiosity got the better of me, and I squinted through the bars, at what little the light of the lantern reached. That was when I had my curtain moment. That was when I got one of the shocks of my life, a horror waiting on the other side of a veil where I hadn’t quite expected it. I’d encountered something like this in a previous case, where I had looked through a keyhole and found an eye on the other side looking back at me. What I saw on that night at the Cauldron was far worse than any eyeball, though. I would have traded it for all the eyeballs in the world, including my own, that I might not see. There really was a body in there. In the half-light of moonlight reflected countless times off damp rock, and what few beams of the lantern penetrated the grate, I could only make out its general shape – sprawled on its front, head turned thankfully away from me, a hint of limbs twisted and broken. A thin wetness poured away from it and began to pool among the rocks. I stumbled back, disgusted and choking. I had neither smelt nor tasted anything foul, but I needed fresh, cold air to gulp in in great gasps, as if I had been submerged in deep water. The monochrome patterns of the rocks formed mockeries of the shape I had just seen. “Snicket? What was it?” I heard Moxie ask, from what seemed far away. The bright light of the lamp hurried past me. “Hells alive!” I heard James Haines roar, which, unlike “tarnation,” didn’t really mean anything, but everyone is permitted a few moments not to make sense when the world falls apart around them. I glanced back, and saw him wrench open the old bolt of the door without apparent difficulty, and hurry inside. Kellar and Carr followed him. Moxie moved to join them, but I caught her sleeve, and she looked at me first. Perhaps, from my corpse-pale face, she understood what awaited her inside that dungeon. It wasn’t raining inside the centre of the Cauldron, but it felt like it should have been. Horror mingled with bitter failure poured down upon me in a torrent. Once again, I had failed to save anyone. I had failed to warn the Haines family of the terrible danger they were in, and this was the result. Cotton Haines was dead, and horribly, brutally so. I will refrain from noting down the exact details that are imprinted on my brain even now, and simply say that it was obvious that the fall had killed her. It looked like every bone in her frail body had broken. A rictus of unutterable fear was spread across her face forever. And a terrible black mark had spread across her neck, seeping through her veins. This pathetic thing in a cold, damp pit was the end of a human life. The future had never looked so dark. Hangfire, I said to myself. You did this, didn’t you. I don’t know how, and I have only the faintest idea of why. But I have to stop you. I have to, before there’s nobody else left. James Haines slowly, ever so slowly, bent low over his mother’s body. With a gentle touch I had yet to see from him, he closed Cotton Haines’s eyes. It didn’t make her look peaceful. But it made her look less accusatory; made me feel less guilty. James Haines was trembling, and his own eyes were damp with tears, and perhaps that is why it felt like it was raining. It is very hard not to cry in sympathy. We were all crying, and trying not to show it. “Whoever did this is going to pay dearly,” he whispered. “Just as they made mother’s nightmare come true, I’ll make their worst nightmares true, too…” “The culprit must still be up there,” I said, glancing involuntarily upwards, to where a circle of dark sky was visible, enclosed in the shadowy ring of the Cauldron. “If you find them, then…” I wanted to finish my sentence, but couldn’t. I was afraid of James Haines. He was still trembling, but what I had taken at first for sadness I now saw was fury – sheer suppressed rage. I wanted to tell him not to resort to violence – that the best blow he could strike against his mother’s murderer was to foil their plans. But I was afraid that, if I said so, he might do something violent to me as well. He still had the old gun at his side, and his knuckles were white from his brutal grip. “Don’t ask me what I’ll do, kid,” he whispered. He was looking upwards, too, and I think avoiding looking at me. “The more I think, the angrier I get. I don’t want to lose control and lash out at anyone else, but boy, do I want to.” We were all looking upwards at that point. There was nowhere else to look – not at Cotton Haines’s body, not at the dangerous James Haines, not at anyone else as our feelings were too raw. Our sadness and shame was a private feeling. I didn’t want to intrude on anyone or to be intruded on myself. But because we were all looking upwards, we could see that someone else had been intruding on our emotions. What I had taken for a shadowy spur of rock at the top of the Cauldron suddenly dipped and vanished. “What was that?” cried Kellar. “Not what – who,” Moxie said, straining her eyes upwards. “Whoever’s up there was watching us!” “They should’ve been watching their own back!” James Haines growled. “We’re going up there! We’re going up and –” And he paused, mid-stride, and looked back at his mother’s body, which he was leaving behind. His face twisted and buckled as competing emotions fought over him. “I’ll take her,” a voice interrupted the moment. It was Carr, and she was looking sadly down at the body. “James, I’m the next oldest. I can probably carry her home. I… I think she might have wanted that.” Carr looked at her stepfather, and gave a weak smile. “And frankly, I’m too afraid to see who’s up there. Especially if it’s…” “A witch?” suggested Kellar. “Hangfire,” said Moxie. Carr shook her head. “I don’t even want to know.” She turned away from us, and bent down to Cotton’s body, and once again, I didn’t want to intrude. I wanted to intrude on someone else. And so did James Haines. “We’re going up the Cauldron,” he said, as he hurried out of the cavern too fast. “It’s a dead end for the killer. They’ve nowhere left to run.” “Should we really be doing this?” hissed Moxie to me as we followed, and Kellar looked at me pale-faced, the same question on his lips. James Haines tramped a line of footprints right through the sand to the path up the Cauldron, and started following our predecessor’s, obliterating them with his huge feet, as ours muddied the trail yet further behind him. “I think we should see who it is,” I said. “There’s a high chance that it’s Hangfire. This could be our one chance to bring him in, and it might take all of us to stop him from slipping away.” “If you corner someone in a place like this, they’ll get mighty slippery,” James Haines growled. The narrowness of the path had forced him to slow down and sidle along the rock. It was comfortable enough for me to walk normally, as a child, but I don’t know if I’d have felt the same if it was windy. “If my mother wasn’t old and drugged, you’d have needed three people to drag her up here. One adult and three kids will have to be enough to drag someone down again.” “Be careful,” I said. “Hangfire is a thug and a murderer. He won’t hesitate to turn vicious.” “Sometimes, in this life, you have to turn vicious yourself to do the right thing,” James Haines said, his head turned away from me, poring over the thin track leading up the Cauldron. “That’s what my mother taught me.” I didn’t answer, just concentrated on the path as the sand turned to thick mud and the footprints we followed vanished beneath four more pairs of feet. I wasn’t sure whether or not to agree with him. I definitely believed that you couldn’t afford to be only passive in this life, letting the actions of everyone else in the world sweep you this way and that like the tide or a gale. This was a big quarrel I had gotten into with my own organisation, a quarrel which had recently seen my sister sent to prison thanks to our devious plan and the organisation’s resistance. I thought we had to be active if we wanted to change the world. But I didn’t like to think of it as being vicious. I hoped that I would never do a vicious thing, but I couldn’t be sure whether I could be made to do one, by someone else or, in the worst-case scenario, by myself. We were approaching the summit of the Cauldron now. It was barely a metre above our heads, just another turn of the path away. If the murderer had peeked over the outer edge of the Cauldron at that moment, we would have met them face to face and seen immediately who it was. Instead, it was all quiet. I could just glimpse the trail of footsteps continuing ahead of James Haines. The murderer hadn’t attempted to come down, but for someone trapped and with nowhere to run to, they were awfully quiet. I don’t know if I expected the sound of pacing footsteps, or a shouted warning, but there was nothing, not even the whisper of a breeze. “We’re almost there,” James Haines grunted back to us. “Brace yourselves. The murderer might try anything… even some supernatural witch trick. But I’d like to see the witch who can survive a bullet.” I didn’t answer. There was a sound, after all, a hard, regular thumping. It was my own heartbeat, pumping as if it had only minutes left. It was a poor omen, but I was tired. It was a long walk up the Cauldron. I hadn’t dared to look down. But soon, there would be only down to look. The mud beneath my feet gave way to thin, rough grass, and we were there at last. The rim of the Cauldron – a narrow strip of bristly growth that ran in the shape of a ring around a wide, dark hole. The craggy and irregular edges of the Cauldron were crumbling away in places, and in others hard edges of rock stuck out into the abyss, like teeth in a round mouth, all part of a huge, serpentine monster gullet that terminated in a hard stop very far below. It reminded me a little of the Mallahan lighthouse, the tower headquarters of Ink Inc., the turret of the Colophon Clinic – lonely, uninhabited spots, though with incredible views of far around, surveying all of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the drained valley around it and the Clusterous Forest, and, I supposed, on a clear day, Zanclean Dam in the far distance, keeping the sea out of Stain’d-by-the-Sea and the empty in. But the rim of the Cauldron only drew the eye inwards, and downwards, and so it was a few moments before I could pull myself away and realised the true state of affairs now that we were at the Cauldron’s brink. There was nobody up there. There was not a soul or a trace of a soul atop the Cauldron. There was no person to be seen and no sign that anyone had ever been there. It was just a lonely ring of barren waste, and a deep and treacherous pit, and yet again, I found myself blinking again and again at the scene before me as if clearing my eyes would clear the veil of illusion from it. But there was no illusion. The only people at the top of the Cauldron were myself, Moxie, and Kellar and James Haines. Even the footsteps of the murderer had been totally destroyed by our four-person stomp upwards. “What…” James Haines began, and stopped before he could even get to the tarnation. Even his fury had vanished. “Where did they go?” demanded Kellar. His brow furrowed in incomprehension. “Where did that person go? There was someone up here, we all saw them!” “We all saw their footsteps, too,” Moxie said, shaking her head in confusion. “They didn’t come back down again. And since we saw their silhouette up here right before we came up, we know they can’t have walked down again backwards in their own footsteps or something silly like that.” I bent down by the mouth of the Cauldron, and looked down. It made me sick to do so. Standing on a cliff edge makes me feel like someone might come and push me off. The walls of the Cauldron were rough and ridged, but many storeys high. It would have taken professional abseiling, a word which here means “climbing down rocky cliffs with lots of complicated equipment and safety materials,” to get down there, and there was no shadow of a person climbing down, nor, thankfully, any sign of another body in the dim circle of light far below. James Haines fell to his haunches and sat down with a thump. “I don’t believe it,” he said, staring off into the distance. “No – I didn’t believe it, even after seeing it with my own eyes. But now I do. Now I know, all those years, my mother was right.” “About what?” I couldn’t help but asked. Kellar answered for him, slow and shocked. “About witches, Snicket. About myths. About impossible enemies pursuing you from shadows, from the corner of your eye. Because there’s only one way anyone could possibly have slipped past us and gotten away from here without us seeing, and that’s if the murderer could vanish from sight and become invisible.”
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Post by gliquey on Jan 9, 2015 12:54:46 GMT -5
(There's a small typo in Chapter 5: "...were still a baby, andyour grandfather...")
So Cotton was the murder victim, and the question "Why take someone far away to be murdered when they could have been killed in their bed?" now makes sense, although we're a long way from an answer. This certainly is more complicated than ?a: the victim died in Chapter 2 there, while we've waited until Chapter 5 for this one. The murder's connection with the train disappearance is also a mystery, although "the second of the Stain'd Myth Murders began with [Snicket] sitting in a stationary taxi" makes it certain that there is a direct link. But why? Did Qwerty and/or Feint contribute to the murder in some way? Or was the train disappearance a way for Hangfire to test out some sort of method later used for the killing?
I presume Chapter 6 will contain "[Snicket] asked to hunt down the witch" - I wonder whether this is an informal thing (like James Haines simply asking Snicket if he'll help) or a proper investigation case that Theodora will be hired for. Theodora has been unusually absent even for her, but surely she'll at least hear about the murder.
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Post by Hermes on Jan 9, 2015 18:18:50 GMT -5
I am incredibly busy right now, but just want to say that I am still reading this with interest. Also, a one-word comment on Ch. 3: Chekhov.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Jan 10, 2015 4:18:47 GMT -5
This is seriously getting better as the chapters progress!
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Post by Dante on Jan 10, 2015 8:47:48 GMT -5
I'm glad that you're all enjoying the story; thank you for commenting.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Jan 10, 2015 11:17:48 GMT -5
I'm glad that you're all enjoying the story; thank you for commenting. I have a question to ask you: Is this story realistic or fantasy?
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Post by Dante on Jan 11, 2015 3:48:31 GMT -5
I'm glad that you're all enjoying the story; thank you for commenting. I have a question to ask you: Is this story realistic or fantasy? My motivation for continuing the series was to write a story more realistic than the direction canon ATWQ is going on. Maybe not much more, but my aim is for my "impossible crimes" to have explanations that could (just about) happen in real life. In other words, no magic or monsters - whatever might appear to be the case.
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Post by Dante on Jan 11, 2015 4:45:42 GMT -5
CHAPTER SIX We returned in silence to Haines Lodge, following the blur of our own former footsteps. Five people – or four and a witch, or a ghost, or a human-shaped unicorn for all I knew – stomping up the narrow path to the Cauldron had left the path a rut in which no footprints could any longer be made out. Even that trace of the murderer had vanished. The trail had gone cold, and now none of us had any idea where to look for the murderer. It was the perfect escape. And even if I suspected I knew the man responsible, he had gone up in smoke so effectively that there was no laying a hand on him – not here, and certainly not in Wade Academy, which by this time was a veritable fortress. With a schoolful of obediently drugged children and treacherous allies, I couldn’t touch Hangfire even if I could convince the Mitchums to bring him in, which I had no intention of even trying. As far as I could tell, Hangfire had gotten clean away with it. But that was nothing new. He still walked free even after all the other crimes he had committed or orchestrated. I wasn’t going to stand for that, though. But since my opportunity to catch him red-handed had vanished as completely as the culprit himself – or herself, a not entirely unconvincing voice nagged at me – then I didn’t know where to start. I was back to square one. Square one was Haines Lodge. As I, along with Moxie and Kellar and James Haines, trudged slowly along the rocks of the former shoreline, the building rose into view, square and topped with a crookedly angled roof to match the crooked angle of the house itself. I could see the windows of Hopkins Haines’s office and Cotton Haines’s room, one window shattered and the other as blank as the rest, leaning over the three metres of sand that surrounded the house. The sand was pristine but for the rough muddle of hurried and widely-spaced footsteps from where we had all run from the house after the vanishing murderer, and also from where, I supposed, Carr had returned to the lodge, bearing its owner’s body in her arms. Carr was waiting for us at the front door. She looked as exhausted, physically and mentally, as the rest of us, and took stock of our empty hands. I use “empty hands” chiefly figuratively, to mean that we hadn’t captured the villain and weren’t dragging him wrestling through the sand, but also as none of us was holding anything. Even James Haines had, flying in the face of firearm safety, shoved his gun into the pocket of his trousers, the better to ball his fists and grab futilely at the air. “Bad news?” she asked, as we arrived at the door, and began to stomp sand from our shoes around the doorway. “Very,” Moxie sighed. “I’m afraid it wasn’t a question,” Carr said. “Come in. I’ve put Cotton in her room… and I’ve put the kettle on. I think we have a lot to talk about.” The house was a lot colder, I noticed, than it had been when I arrived. The fire in the sitting room must have gone out, and while the house had made concessions to modern electrical lighting – probably to avoid burning down from a carelessly-dropped candle – the heating was a different matter. In the kitchen, Carr had stoked up a fire in a stove, and the kettle was beginning to steam above it, the vapour clouding a thin and grimy window up at the top of the room, where nobody was likely to look through it even if it was clean. I noticed that this window would be directly below that of the office and the bedroom where the mysterious events of that night had taken place, and I wondered if that was important. We filled Carr in on what we had found at the top of the Cauldron, which was nothing, as the four of us who were children worked on whipping up some hot drinks to warm our cold and empty bellies. James Haines we gave leave from his post as responsible adult, considering the circumstances, and he sat on a tiny stool that strained under his weight, looking silently down at his hands. He had lost his mother forever, and none of us had lost anything quite so enormous, quite so permanently. Kellar had, at least, convinced him to put the gun back up on the wall, where I had noticed a line of shiny bullets, one missing only, lined up on display below it. A gun of its age was practically an antique, I realised. It was from back when guns could only hold one bullet at a time. I wondered if it had even been loaded at all at any time since James Haines had shot the supposed witch in the window, and I wondered if that was important, too. Carr kept glancing nervously at window. “So the murderer vanished from somewhere they couldn’t possibly have escaped from?” she asked. “That sounds familiar, Snicket. And it should sound familiar to you, too.” “If you mean the Lansbury Van Dyke case,” I said, though she obviously did, “I should remind you that that turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation, just as this case will. And probably the same culprit, too, who is not a witch.” The idea of Hangfire zooming through the air on a broom was too ridiculous for words. I kept on picturing it, though, as it kept at bay a different image, one of a crooked, shrouded figure, crawling slowly up the wall like a spider, sliding silently through a window as if it was mere water, raising a single, pointed black nail… “I’m afraid this is even worse than the locked room back in the Stain’d museum,” Carr said. “You understand, don’t you, that the murderer escaped from not one place they could not possibly have left, but two?” “You mean this house,” Kellar said, and he looked at the window, too, and at the shadowy doorways that led to the rest of the darkened house. Having the lights on in the kitchen only made the shadows all the darker, all the more impenetrable and permanent. “That’s right,” Carr nodded. “After I got back, and had placed Cotton’s body in her bed, I went around the house, looking through all the windows searching for lines of footprints in the sand to show where the murderer could have gotten in or out of the house.” “And?” Moxie asked. She was tapping her fingers against her thighs, as if her typewriter was resting there. “Where was it?” Carr looked at her, and took a long sip of tea before she answered. “Nowhere,” she said. “The sand around the entire house is undisturbed, save for where we all rushed out of the front door earlier, and we saw then that there was nothing to see. The murderer may have left prints going up the Cauldron, if only one way… but they didn’t leave prints going either into or out of this house.” It almost wasn’t a shock to me. I’d had a terrible feeling that something like that might be the case, and had tried to avoid thinking about what it could mean. There was no avoiding it now, though. What Carr was relating was only what I’d seen with my own eyes already – no footprints where footprints should have been. A murderer who walked on damp sand without leaving their tread – or jumped over it, I supposed. Or flew over on their broom. Keep thinking about the broom, Snicket. Keep thinking about it, and not about the shiver running around the room. But it’s so much harder to get scared later when you are scared all the time, and later keeps on coming. “That’s impossible,” Moxie was saying. “Nobody could get in and out of this house without leaving some mark in the sand, unless they used some trick.” “Well, the rain earlier erased our footsteps from when we got here this evening,” I pointed out. “Maybe it rained again, and swept away the murderer’s footsteps as they snuck in and out.” “Not an option,” grunted a low, quiet voice. James Haines had been sitting quietly a little way away from us, in a corner of the kitchen where the shadows fell over him. We had instinctively drawn closer and closer to the stove, but he hadn’t budged an inch. “You forget, I’ve lived in this house for most of my life. I know full well that, when it rains, no matter how heavily, it drums on the sides of this house like something’s tapping on the walls. Used to keep me awake at night when I was your age.” His eye caught the light as it passed over me, and vanished again. “I also spent the night patrolling this floor, looking out through the windows for anything suspicious. So I’d have seen the rain. I’d probably have seen anyone trying to break into or out of the house, too.” “Then maybe it’s a timing trick?” Kellar suggested. “The murderer could have crept into the house much earlier in the day, and bided her – um, his or her – time, and that’s why there are no footprints in.” “Not a bad idea,” I said. “That’s the one that would keep me up at night, though,” Carr shivered. “But how about getting out?” “The killer could, if they were really good at sneaking, have gotten around this floor without me noticing,” James Haines growled, his voice still low, even and emotionless, “but there’d be nowhere for them to go. The windows are locked. So was the front door, with the key on the inside.” “There are ways of turning keys from the wrong side of doors,” I said. “You can use something like a pair of tweezers to do it – or so I’ve heard.” “Maybe,” Kellar said, “but there’s no way of standing on sand without leaving a mark.” “Maybe there is?” Moxie suggested. “The murderer could have worn some sort of snowshoe…” “That’s even sillier than a witch,” I said. “And wouldn’t work, either,” Carr pointed out. “Even in an absolute best-case scenario, you’d still leave a trail of thin footprints leading off over the sand, and it would be very visible when there’s not a mark elsewhere. And have you seen our footprints? They sank quite far into the sand. It’s deep, and it crumbles so easily.” “Then maybe we just didn’t notice the mark until later,” Moxie went on. “The killer could have hidden somewhere – inside the house, or even behind the door – and disguised their own footprints in our trail when they left…” She trailed off as she realised the flaw in her theory. “But they would still have had Mrs. Haines with them, wouldn’t they?” she said. “We took a straight line to the Cauldron. Nobody could sneak around us and get there first without being seen – let alone get to the top first.” “And whoever we saw going up the Cauldron was there before we even left the building,” I said. “No dice, Moxie.” “Then what does that leave us?” Kellar asked. “I guess jumping is out of the question – for humans, anyway.” “I think it is possible to jump three metres, even without a run-up,” I said. Some of my associates at the academy had been very enthusiastic about athletics, and would practice dangerous stunts I wouldn’t even try, like climbing down a rope as it was unravelling. “Not credible,” James Haines interrupted. “Can’t jump over the sand from the rock as there’s nowhere to jump to – or from, going back. The ground floor windows don’t open, like I said. And higher than that, you’d break your legs even if you could get past the sand, which you couldn’t. Unless you’re telling me this Hangfire’s a professional athlete with robot legs or something…” “I hope I’m not being rude, but this makes me think it must be quite inconvenient sometimes, living in a house built on sand like this,” Moxie said. “When the sea still remained in the valley, surely the house must have gotten flooded rather often?” “Never!” barked James Haines, thumping the sideboard beside himself. “This house is firmly waterproofed, far better than you’d think to look at it. My ancestors knew what they were doing when they built this house, believe me. Why did you think the ground floor windows didn’t open?” The front door struck me as more of a problem in case of a flood, but perhaps it had some kind of rubber water seal I hadn’t noticed in the darkness. Perhaps also it had been let go after the sea had been drained; given the state of the whole house, I wouldn’t have been surprised. A whole fortune would be needed to fix it up. “So, how did you get in and out of the house in a flood?” asked Moxie. “You could have brought a boat up to the walls, but what then?” “I never really thought about that,” Kellar said. “But I was too young to remember the sea being here.” Next to him, Carr nodded and shrugged. “You two are wimps,” James Haines sneered, with scarcely a trace of geniality. “The island life hardened you up to challenges like being wet and hungry. Not that getting in and out of the house from a boat was hard, of course. We just used the ladder.” I couldn’t stop my eyebrows from leaping up in realisation. On someone else’s face, it would probably have looked very expressive, but I have never liked my eyebrows. It is part of the reason why I wear a hat pulled down over them. “You have a ladder?!” I exclaimed. “Where is it? That would explain nearly everything!” I was starting to get quite excited, and Moxie and the younger Haines half-siblings looked more alert too. But there is nothing to quash excitement like a low, humourless laugh, such as echoed from James Haines’s motionless mouth at that moment. “Yeah, that would be easy, wouldn’t it?” he mocked. “Do you think I’m stupid, kid? Do you think I never thought of that? Well, get a load of this: The ladder broke years and years ago. Snapped in half, and one half was washed away in the tide. What’s left doesn’t even begin to cross the sand, even laid flat, let alone at an angle. Lean it up against the wall, and it’s barely taller than the ground floor of this house. It’s tossed away behind the house with a bunch of other tools we never used right now.” “Oh.” It was a very small noise which came from my mouth. Even if you don’t have the right answer, it hurts to be caught out in the wrong one. James Haines saw my downcast face, and maybe saw himself in it, too. “Don’t beat yourself up about it, kid,” he muttered, downing his tea and then adding something from a bottle to the cup. “It was a good idea. It was just the wrong one.” Kellar looked up, clearly deep in thought. “Maybe it wasn’t the wrong one, though,” he said slowly. “The killer didn’t have to use our ladder. They could simply have brought their own! A longer, unbroken one!” Moxie seemed keen, but something about that idea didn’t sit right with me, and sure enough, Carr soon had an objection – or rather, a question, and a familiar one, at that. “Why?” she asked. “Isn’t that rather an elaborate plan for an outsider to have hatched, for no particular reason?” Kellar frowned. “But it would have let them get past the sand –” “Why would they even need to?” Carr said. “None of us were meant to be here tonight. The killer would just have knocked on the door, done their job, and been away, and nobody might have found out for a long time. Even if someone came to Haines Lodge any time soon, it would be easy to disguise their footprints – just rub over them as they left, or wear different shoes. I don’t see why someone would have brought a ladder.” “When you put it like that, the murderer might as well have sent a poisoned letter – or fired a gun through the window,” I said, glancing at James Haines. “We have to take it that the murderer probably had to improvise a little, so let’s rule out anything being brought to Haines Lodge that we don’t know about yet.” “That sounds like kind of flimsy reasoning,” Moxie frowned. “But sure, okay. We can all make up some magical technical solution, but that’s meaningless if there’s no evidence that it actually happened.” “Well, then we may as well ask why the murderer did cross the sand without leaving prints,” Kellar replied. “It just doesn’t seem natural.” “Perhaps that means that it was actually highly natural,” Carr said, “in a way we simply don’t understand.” “Natural,” muttered James Haines, taking another gulp from his teacup. His tone was bitter, and his words slightly slurred. He must have been very tired. “Bleating about what’s natural is just getting you nowhere – just so many impossible solutions to an impossible situation. Carr’s closest to the truth, though… because the only answer to something impossible is something super-natural…” He lapsed into silence again, and so did the rest of us. The kitchen, the circle of chairs around the crackling stove seemed smaller now, as the night drew on, and on, timeless in a world where I didn’t have a watch. It felt more like being in a cave, or a deep forest, than what daylight would eventually reveal to be a simple domestic kitchen. It felt like a place out of a myth – a place where anything could walk out of the darkness. Sealed and locked windows. Faces hovering in mid-air, over unmarked sand. A woman vanishes from a house with no exits – patrolled, locked, every trace of a footstep recorded. James Haines was right. We weren’t getting anywhere. We were sitting around a dying fire talking when we didn’t know anything, because it was better than moving. It was better than acting. Because what we weren’t ready to admit to ourselves was that we had broken a rule I had set for myself. We had gotten scared now. We had gotten scared of something we couldn’t see, couldn’t even begin to guess the movements of. Ultimately, we had forgotten the cardinal rule of shadows: They are beneath us. They aren’t worth fearing. What we can know and understand is worth fearing, but perhaps that is why it is so easy to be afraid of the unknown: It is a fear that knowing the truth might just be worse. A house is a silly thing to be afraid of, though, unless it was built according to poor safety standards and liable to collapse. Which, come to think of it, Haines Lodge probably was, but it didn’t feel like it was going soon. Either way it was a reason to explore the house before the chance was gone forever. “If we’re learning nothing sitting here,” I said, “then let’s not sit here. Let’s get out there. We never did look around the house, but maybe the murderer left traces.” “Daylight might be a better time for that, Snicket,” Moxie said. “But on the other hand, I doubt any of us will get any more sleep tonight,” Carr shrugged. “What do you expect to find?” James Haines grumbled, without stirring. “Fingerprints? A signed confession?” “The ‘how’ is more important than the ‘who,’” I said, though I was not entirely correct. “I don’t know what to find. That’s the thing about research. If you just reread the same book over and over again, you can only learn about what you already understand. Think of this building as a library, though, and every room as a section of the Dewey Decimal System.” Kellar nodded. “The best books are the ones you didn’t know about in advance. You just browse the shelves until something catches your interest.” “It’s called serendipity,” I said, remembering something Dashiell Qwerty had told me before. “They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.” “What’s the question?” Moxie asked. “You might just have said it,” I answered, and got to my feet. “Let’s search this house from top to bottom. If the murderer’s left a trace – or if there’s any clue to how they got in and out – we’ll find it. Any further questions?” “Yes,” Kellar said. “If we’re starting from the very top, then who’s doing the attic?” I didn’t get the impression, from his tone of voice, that he was keen to go up there. It would have been a good time to ask the wrong question again, but I didn’t. He would probably explain just why he was asking soon enough, though in the event, Carr did. “You’re probably wondering why Kellar just asked that question,” she said, patting his shoulder. “You see, when we moved out, there was no wiring up there, so the attic was always dark… cold… frankly, rather spooky.” “It was full of old toys and furniture and… things, from my grandmother’s time,” Kellar went on, with a slight shiver. Now and then he would reach up with his hand and rub at the strange bruise on his neck. It had faded a little, but would be with him a good while yet. “How spooky are we talking about?” Moxie asked. “Getting up for a glass of water at midnight spooky, or keep the door locked and shiver when you walk past it spooky?” “R.L. Stine spooky, or Mary Shelley spooky?” I clarified. “It’s night right now,” Kellar said. “So, Mary Shelley.” I nodded. A place that’s no darker than usual at night still seems darkest. “Change of plans. We’ll search the house from bottom to top instead. Even if it’s no lighter by the time we get to the attic, we can at least search together. For now, let’s split up and search the lodge floor by floor. Kellar and Carr, even if this is your first time home in years, you know what to expect, so look for anything out of place; Moxie and I will search for anything just plain suspicious.” “Don’t mind me,” James Haines grunted. “I’ll just sit here… drink my tea…” He topped up the teacup again from a bottle in the sideboard. I wasn’t sure if there was any tea left in it by now. The rest of us looked awkwardly at each other, and then took him at his word, and didn’t mind him as we split up to search the house. With the lights on, naturally. Haines Lodge was deceptively large. This is a phrase which sometimes confuses people, but taking into account that “deceptively” means “not really” and “large” means “large,” you can probably understand that I mean that Haines Lodge seemed like a big place but was actually quite small. It had a lot of rooms, but they were arranged in a straightforward, ring-like structure that made it hard to get lost. The rooms might be large without furniture in them, but each was packed with chairs and tables and cupboards and all sorts of things that made it quite cramped to get around. It felt like a house that was luxurious for one person to live in and probably considerably less luxurious for the seven members of the Haines family who had been living in it years ago – Cotton and her now-late husband Hopkins, her son James and his wife Sharon, and their children Kellar and Lizzie and Sharon’s daughter Carr. Any house can feel cramped and busy with seven people in it; it just depends on how well you get along with each other. However, having three friends here, and knowing that James Haines was brooding in the kitchen and could potentially be called on to help, if we really needed him, made searching the house enormous more bearable, as every time you left a room or crossed a corridor, I would see Moxie taking mental notes, Kellar studying something carefully, Carr reminiscing, and know that I was not alone. Admittedly, sometimes we made each other jump as we bumped into each other, but with the lights all on, we could almost pretend it was daylight. Haines Lodge had no basement, as apparently the house’s foundations had just filled up with sand, over and over, no matter how deep they dug, so the house had three main storeys, plus its attic, which I gathered scarcely counted. It had all the rooms you would expect in a normal old house, like a kitchen and a dining room and a well-stocked pantry, but there were also some anomalies, a word which here means “things which didn’t fit with the rest, like a matador and a dragonfly.” The second floor in particular was filled with strange rooms which seemed as if they had been added more to fulfil the family’s notions of what a stately home should have. There was a billiard room, a room unsurprisingly used for playing billiards and similar sports, all of which involved a long cue stick and a table covered in worn green felt, with tattered net pockets around the edge and a single black ball resting in the centre, the painted number eight on its surface staring at me like a pair of empty eyes. There was a trophy room, a room full of glass tanks that made me uneasy and hooks on the wall to be used to display shiny metal cups and dead animals. I was momentarily reassured by the absence of long-dead animal corpses from this room until Kellar mentioned to me that many had begun to moulder and had been thrown out somewhere, and now the trophy room displayed no achievements, no signs of prowess in sports, academia, or murder. There was the library of witchcraft, of course, with its equally mouldy books, and most outlandishly of all, there was a ballroom, covering the whole east wall of the second floor and taking up about a quarter of the entire floor, with a floor of pale patterned tiles and six dark windows with curtains as richly-coloured and faded as those in Cotton Haines’s room, ready to be tied back with long golden cords. It even had a chandelier, though it was more like a few repurposed candelabras, rusty-looking claw-like shapes hanging from chains in the ceiling. The more I looked at the ballroom, the more I thought that, in the right light, or rather in no light, it actually looked more like a medieval dungeon. I was glad to be out of there, and making a start on a search of the third floor of the building – a much more domestic floor, with bedrooms and a bathroom alongside a storeroom and an old playroom from when Kellar, Lizzie, and Carr were infants. When I looked in there, it seemed as if nothing had been moved since all those years before, with alphabet-tiled blocks and a round ball and a train set, rails scattered in pieces on the floor, lying haphazardly on the soft carpet. I thought about Cotton Haines coming in there sometimes to look at these old, abandoned toys, and it made me not want to look at them any more. The end of childhood is often a very sad thing, as you realise how much darker and more complicated the world is than your parents ever let you suspect, and there is no way of retreating to those more innocent times, no matter how much you try. We made the reasonable assumption that there was likely to be nothing suspicious about the rooms we had slept in, for those of us who had not just literally been in those rooms at the time of the crime but had never actually fallen asleep anyway – more specifically, me – and split the rest of the third floor between us. Cotton’s room, thankfully, we had already checked over before we left the house, quite some time before, so the door of that room remained firmly closed. It was all too easy to remember what lay behind it, though. Behind that door was a bed, and on that bed were lacy covers, and those lacy covers were drawn right over a twisted hump that had been made to lie straight but could never naturally look peaceful. I didn’t have the guts to go in there. I have recorded before that a ghost in a bedsheet is the silliest kind of ghost, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t scary. But what I couldn’t see in that room, what I could only imagine beneath the sheet, was scarier. I had vowed to get scared later, of course – much, much later in my life. But when that time came, I was going to be very scared indeed. I didn’t want to gather more terrible memories for my adult self to regret. Still, after we had dispersed to the various places we wished to search on the third floor, I couldn’t forget what, and what had so recently been who, was behind that last door. I had decided to look over the bathroom, but there was little enough to see, just the usual stuff of every bathroom. There was not a window in sight, and so not even anything to spy out of the window, but the room was dominated by a long, porcelain bathtub, decorated with clawed feet and a single tap in the shape of a familiar beastly head, formed from tarnished metal. I noticed that the feet at one end of the bath had been padded upwards with old coasters to compensate for the lean of the house, which by now I only remembered when looking through windows at the skewed horizon, or when walking through corridors I had the strange feeling of being aboard a ship on a stormy sea, or when walking up a certain flight of stairs I felt as if I was about to fall over backwards. It was an open and obvious room without a window and without a clue, but behind one of the walls of that room was Cotton Haines’s bedroom, and indeed, Cotton Haines herself, if it could still be called her. That thought made me feel guilty. There she was, lying in bed as if asleep but never to awaken from her dark dreams, and it was, at least in part, because of me and my failures. I had not encountered many dead people in my life at that time, thankfully, though I feared for the future. I wondered if I could dispel some of my guilt by paying my respects, and then felt guiltier for having thought of paying my respects only to alleviate my feelings, and not for Cotton Haines’s sake. Still, there was nothing I could do for her now, but I might be able to do something for myself. I would pay my respects after all, I decided. I would walk out of that room, walk into the next room, and bow my sorry head to Cotton Haines. It was the least I could do. I got halfway there, at least. I walked out of the bathroom and along the corridor to the door to Cotton Haines’s room, and I put my hand on the doorknob, and I stopped. My hand was trembling, though I could think of no good reason for it to do so. A corpse cannot hurt anyone, except in movies or in freak coffin-bearing accidents. And the murderer was long gone, of course. So why should I hesitate? Why did I feel so uneasy, as if there were eyes on my back, breath on my neck? Why did silence, even of the creaking boards of the house, suddenly feel as if it was waiting for something? Because it was. It was waiting for something, and it was waiting for something terrible. There were eyes and breath in that hallway, there was something lingering out of sight, there was something behind my back. As I stood paralysed and waiting for something to happen, there was a sound, a truly haunting sound, one so suffused with sheer malevolence and contempt that I still stood paralysed where I should have been turning immediately and running down the corridor to confront it – or to flee. A sound I hoped I would never hear again, though I would, just as I would ask the wrong question one more time before the end of this report. What I heard was the witch’s cackle. Did I really hear that?, I thought. Was that real? Or just my overwrought, underslept imagination? Can it please just have been my imagination? If, instead of asking myself these useless questions, staring at a door I was never going to open, I had immediately turned and run down the corridor, the mystery would instantly have been solved. But I missed my chance. I missed my chance to catch the witch, because I forgot what was real. Witches, magic, monsters and impossible crimes aren’t real; only evil is real. But as the cackle echoed away along the corridor, I only asked the wrong questions. A door to my right flew open. Kellar jumped out, alarm spelt out on his paper-white face. “Did that come from…?” he started, and pointed a finger down the corridor. I nodded. Then, we turned and ran. The corridor on the third floor ran in a ring around the staircases. Kellar ran down the top side, and I around the bottom. I almost bumped into Carr as I turned the corner, stepping out of a storeroom she had been investigating, and then almost into both Kellar and Moxie, as the four of us met in the middle, by the staircase leading down into the house and the staircase leading up into the attic. I have mentioned before that the stairs to the attic were behind a door. That door was, as the four of us looked on, slowly swinging shut of its own accord, gravity and the tilt of the house drawing it across the floor in a gentle arc before it clicked into place, and all was still. We watched it for what felt like a very long time, and listened to the steady sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, like the ticking of a clock. “Did you hear that?” a hollow voice groaned above our heads, and we jumped again, and saw that it was James Haines, arriving from downstairs. His face reminded me of a painting I had once seen, of someone who had just heard something terrible, and felt the whole world tremble about him. “I was just coming up when I heard a horrible laugh,” he said. “An evil laugh.” “I heard it too,” Moxie said. “I was just looking through the room I’d slept in. I think I might have fallen asleep, and I wanted to be sure that nobody took advantage of it.” “I was in that storeroom,” Carr said, pointing over her shoulder. “It sounded like it was just outside the door.” “I was in my room, like Moxie was in hers,” Kellar said. “When I looked out, Snicket was in the corridor. But he was nowhere near that laugh.” “Did you see anything?” Carr asked. I shook my head. “I was looking the other way,” I said. “I couldn’t believe I really heard it.” We all stared at the door for a little longer. Here I was, back to staring at a door, not believing something. Waiting for an answer. “Who do you think it was?” Moxie asked, at last. “I’m very glad you said ‘who,’” I replied. “It had to be the culprit,” Kellar said. “Had to be. They must have had another wicked plan in mind before we chased them up there.” “We didn’t exactly chase them,” I pointed out. “Seems to me you did,” James Haines said. “I came up from downstairs, and if Snicket and Carr came around the lower corridor, and Kellar and Moxie from the upper, why, whoever that was had nowhere to go but up.” He looked at the door, and his brow began to furrow, and he put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. It was an unpleasant, wet sound, like bones breaking. I had a sudden and terrible sense of déjà vu. I looked at the others, to see if they felt it too, but their faces were like mine, anxious and bloodless. “We’d better go up there, then,” I said, but my mouth was so dry that the sentence dried up before I could finish it. I mouthed the last words and looked foolish. James Haines lumbered forwards. He was slightly unsteady on his feet, but more from extreme tiredness than fear. “I’ll go first,” he mumbled, and added, less quietly than he thought, “What would you kids do without me…” I thought we would go up anyway. We just might have taken longer about it. Wincing, he flung open the door – and revealed a narrow flight of dark stairs. Angling his shoulders slightly sideways, James Haines squeezed through the door, and we followed on his heels, watching under his arms to see what happened. The stairs up to the attic creaked excessively, and groaned under James Haines’s weight. I didn’t like to think about them snapping in two beneath him, but reassured myself that, if they could bear his weight, they could probably handle mine. The walk up to the last floor of Haines Lodge seemed longer than the rest, or perhaps it was just slower. The column of the stairs was dark, almost pitch black, but eventually, faint fingers of moonlight pried their way around James Haines and fell in bars across our faces, as we at last stepped into the attic. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t what I saw. What I saw was a wide but poky room with a slanted ceiling that narrowed to an angle at the edges of the room and rose to a point above our heads, like a pyramid. In the corners had been stuffed a few odds and ends that wouldn’t be out of place at an antique store or junkyard – an old rocking chair with spindly arms like skeletons and one of its rockers missing; an ornate candelabra bent in the middle; a heap of old bedsheets. One corner was dedicated to more esoteric oddities – a splintered shelf filled with old picture books; crate with a curious smell which I rather feared held all the discarded trophies from the trophy room; a toy doll that didn’t look broken, just abandoned. The moonlight filtered in through four gables indented in the four sides of the attic, narrow triangular windows with glass so thin the wind seemed to whistle through them, apart from the one which it definitely whistled through, as it was broken. Moonlight glinted on glass fragments and dust on the floor. Carr and Kellar had last been here when they were small children, I remembered. When you’re a small child, nearly anything can be scary if you are alone. But at thirteen years old, it wasn’t scary. It was boring. I felt disappointed. This didn’t look like the sort of place where any questions could be answered. Especially since, I realised with a sense of weary disappointment – or was it relief? – there was clearly nobody hiding in that attic. “Well, if there was ever a witch up here,” Kellar said, looking around, “they’re not here now.” “Yeah, this place is empty…” James Haines murmured – “or so she wants you to think! Take this!” He took a flying leap towards the pile of bedsheets and began kicking it furiously. Clouds of dust rushed upwards to engulf him, and soon his kicking gave way to coughing. “But this is twice now that the murderer has escaped from under our noses!” Moxie moaned. “We don’t even know what they were doing here this time, let alone how they got out!” “I don’t know about that,” I said, tracing a line with my eye from the broken rocking chair to the broken window about a metre above it. All the glass at the bottom edgeof the window had been very carefully cleared out, I noticed, so anyone crawling over it wouldn’t risk slashing themselves as they departed. I walked slowly over to the chair, glass crunching under my feet, and again was filled with a sense of déjà vu. “Déjà vu” strictly speaking refers to a sense that something has happened to you before when it probably hasn’t, but this wasn’t the first time I had walked over broken glass that night. What I felt a sense of déjà vu for was a sensation of wrongness. Something was wrong about this situation, my mind was telling me. You’ve misunderstood something important. But more important just then was to lift myself up to the window, and look out. The window faced the western side of the house, in the opposite direction from the Cauldron. I was glad not to see that terrible chamber of doom yet again, with the Moon hovering over it like an omen, and the tracks of our futile footprints stretched across the sand. And yet, looking down – down, over the wall of the house on the rising side of the lean, which had a harsh incline that I could just about imagine sliding or climbing down – and into the three-metre moat of sand, I could indeed see footsteps, showing clearly in the sand. A single person’s footsteps, strangely scuffed and spaced wide apart, as if the person was walking with an unsteady and stumbling gait, heading straight outwards from the middle of the sand and out onto the rocks. When I said the middle of the sand, I didn’t just mean that it began midway along the length of sand border. I meant that they began literally in the centre of the sand, over a metre away from the wall of the house, as if the person who had made them had simply appeared there, or landed from a jump that must have broken their legs. We had the footprints of our escapee, but they began from nowhere. They didn’t end nowhere, though. They ended somewhere very particular. I looked up again, slowly, following the line of the prints and tracing it out over the rocks and down into the stony valley, searching for where they would end, if a person were to keep on going in that direction. They ended in the worst-case scenario. An unnatural, impossible place, a whirling and drifting vortex of mystery, a forest of unanswered questions. The footprints were headed straight for the Clusterous Forest.
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Post by gliquey on Jan 11, 2015 7:10:08 GMT -5
("edgeof" - a small typo.)
"But when that time came, I was going to be very scared indeed." - I'm not sure if I've commented on this subject before. This is possibly the most explicit of several clues that seem to have been planted, either by Handler or by you, suggesting an actual scene (probably at the climax of the series) where Snicket does get very scared, remembering his past suppressions of fear dating all the way back to Murphy's house (and maybe even before that). It seems almost like a prophecy. I hope it doesn't end in an anticlimax.
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Post by Dante on Jan 13, 2015 9:19:25 GMT -5
CHAPTER SEVEN “You aren’t serious,” Moxie said, looking at me as if I had suddenly grown antlers. We’d retreated to the Haines Lodge sitting room to argue over the embers of the fire. “You’re not really intending to go into the Clusterous Forest.” I was, and I was very serious. This was no flippant decision. I had been curious about the Clusterous Forest for a long time, but not curious enough to investigate, because the Clusterous Forest was an unsettlingly unnatural place. A dense and writhing forest of long tendrils of seaweed the height of trees, that waved and curled and blew in the wind or just stirred, restlessly, on still days, as if on the brink of uprooting itself and wandering away, the Clusterous Forest made no sense – made, indeed, as much sense as everything else we had seen and heard that strange night. My chaperone had told me once that it was a wild and lawless place, not fit for man or beast, and for once I had believed her, but since then I had trodden in many wild and lawless places in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, from the empty manor of the Sallis family where a murder attempt was underway, to the tower and basement of the Colophon Clinic where a girl had been kidnapped by an unspeakable villain, to the walls and grounds of the Wade Academy where something terrible lurked in the waters of a deep, deep pond. The Inhumane Society made everywhere lawless, and Haines Lodge had become a lawless place, too, where the laws of time and space, let alone those of human society, no longer applied. How much worse can the Clusterous Forest be, I asked myself. How much worse can it be than a place where a woman was killed almost underneath your nose, by a murderer who appears and vanishes as they please? Moxie, though, was different to me and the members of the Haines family. The Haineses had lived outside of Stain’d-by-the-Sea for many years, and the Clusterous Forest was almost as new a phenomenon to them as it was to I, who had only recently arrived in town at all. But Moxie had lived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea all her life, seeing the Clusterous Forest every day from the high windows of her lighthouse home. It had been more than enough time to imbibe some of the town’s newest myths. “I’m not saying it’s not dangerous,” I said, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to say that my plan was dangerous. It didn’t seem like that would win anyone else over. “But I think it’s about time we had a look. We’ve chased the Inhumane Society all over town, and just about the only place we’ve never been is the Clusterous Forest. It seems like just the place where people as terrifying as Hangfire would hide their deepest secrets.” “Yes, because you need to be a terrifying person to survive there!” Moxie cried, exasperated. We’d been doing this for a while now. “None of you have lived in the town since the Clusterous Forest appeared in the wake of the sea’s draining. None of you know the dangers of that place.” “What dangers?” James Haines interrupted, with a glance at Kellar. Moxie looked him in the eye, straightened her back, and clasped her hands. It was strange how a few small changes made her no longer look like an exasperated girl drinking tea on a sofa and more like a serious reporter in full possession of the facts. It made me sit up straighter, too, and pay careful attention to what she had to say. “Authorities have always advised people to avoid the Clusterous Forest, originally because its geography and biology were uncharted and unknown, respectively, and thus theoretically dangerous to human life – and subsequently because it gained a history of causing people who entered its borders to disappear,” Moxie recited, in the manner of an old article that perhaps she was quoting. I wondered if it was one of her mother’s. “Cartographers have attempted to map the Clusterous Forest from above using helicopters and hot-air balloons, but none have ever mapped its interior owing to the notorious reputation of the forest. An entire scientific mission sent in to monitor the growth of the Clusterous Forest’s plants vanished after they pressed into the deepest parts of the forest, and expert survivalists sent to retrieve them also vanished.” Kellar looked at me nervously. “That’s quite a lot of dead people, Snicket.” “Or kidnapped people,” I replied. “Anything else, Moxie?” She closed her eyes, and thought deeply. “Dogs sent in with the rescue mission returned to the forest’s edge unharmed after several days, but only reluctantly left the borders, and they smelt briny for weeks afterwards.” “I never knew there was such a crazy place just a mile from where my old mother was living all these years,” James Haines said, his voice quiet, his eyes on the orange-fringed embers. “I dragged the family out of town right after the sea was drained and the first wave of Ink Inc. layoffs hit the town, so I never knew about any of this stuff.” “You probably just missed it,” Moxie said. “Apparently the earliest person to go missing was a visiting naturalist. A week or so after the forest appeared, this naturalist just walked into the Clusterous Forest and was never seen again.” I was instantly on guard at the reference to a naturalist. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard of a missing naturalist in the town. “What was his name?” I asked. Moxie frowned at me. “I didn’t say it was a he,” she said. “Though it was – but I don’t remember a name. It was just a passing reference in a much later article.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you ask?” It is funny how it never seems to be the wrong question when someone else is asking you. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I was just curious,” I said. Carr rescued me from what could have been a difficult interrogation. I did worst in Interrogation Resistance Class when my friends were the ones interrogating me. “Moxie,” Carr asked, “when was the last time anyone disappeared in the Clusterous Forest?” Moxie thought for a moment. “Quite a few years ago, I think,” she admitted. “People were put off, and nobody has approached the Clusterous Forest for years. I remember some group proposing fencing the whole place off with barbed wire at one point, but it never got off the ground as nobody was willing to even go near.” “Well, there you have it,” I said. “The objective was successfully achieved. The disappearances scared everyone away from the Clusterous Forest, leaving certain people free to come and go as they please and do whatever they wanted there. And I know just who would come up with that sort of scheme.” “A wild animal?” suggested Moxie, with an ironical expression. “A very persistent and consistent wild animal,” I said, “that’s never left behind any bones for people to find, and has never shown itself outside the edge of the Clusterous Forest.” James Haines muttered something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like “Hasn’t it?”, and I was reminded again of the fire pond on the grounds of Wade Academy. I had looked into that pond, and what I had seen there was a terrible, writhing shadow, a shadow that roared with an awful, buzzing sound. I knew what James Haines thought was in the Clusterous Forest, but I didn’t know what I’d seen in that pond. It had been late at night, and I had, on reflection, been in a highly suggestible state, a phrase which here means “willing to believe anything.” We were all in a highly suggestible state after the events of that night, but it was time to start being more critical if we wished to bring the murderer of Cotton Haines – and of Lansbury Van Dyke, and Colonel Colophon, and maybe Ingrid Nummet Knight as well – to justice. “If humans had spent their whole lives believing in the impossible and never trying to test those beliefs, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” I said. “We wouldn’t have cities and industries and, most importantly of all, libraries. I’m not willing to walk away from the Clusterous Forest without a second glance, no matter how eerie it is. Besides, it’s still night, right now, so if anyone is patrolling the Clusterous Forest, there’s a good chance we can sneak past them and uncover the forest’s secrets.” I stood up. Sometimes it is easier to achieve something frightening by plunging straight into it without giving yourself a chance to hesitate. “I’m going out there. Who’s with me?” I met with a disconcerting number of averted gazes and figures resolutely remaining seated. That made me hesitate more than the prospect of entering the Clusterous Forest did. Had I misjudged this one so badly? Was I taking the danger as seriously as I should be?” James Haines shifted in his seat, and heaved a weary sigh. “Don’t do it, kid,” he said. “Snicket, or whatever your name is. We don’t have myths and legends and rumours for no reason. Going into the Clusterous Forest is suicide. That’s what all the records say.” “In that case,” I said, “it’s a good thing that nobody has to join me.” Moxie let out a disgusted sound, and glared at me. “Don’t do this, Snicket. Don’t guilt-trip us. You know we can’t really let you go on your own, and that’s exactly why you won’t go at all. You can’t force us.” “I’m not forcing you,” I said, stepping towards the door, “and I am going.” “Not alone, Snicket,” Carr said. “Isn’t there anyone else you can fetch to go with you? Your chaperone, perhaps?” “She may be stupid,” I said, “but probably not stupid enough to do this for me.” “Then get the police!” James Haines cried. “Their jurisdiction doesn’t extend to the Clusterous Forest,” I said, recalling something they had told me once. “Besides, you’ve met the police. Which do you think they’re more likely to do – join me for a run through the Clusterous Forest, or lock me up for my own safety?” “Well, maybe they’d be right to do so,” he replied, and crossed his arms. I would have shrugged, but I didn’t want to show that I was shaking. It looked like I really was going to be alone this time. I could live with that, though. I had been alone before. My sister had done dangerous things alone, too. And been captured, Snicket, my sense of reason reminded me. I told it that both her and I had been captured before, doing dangerous things alone, and we’d escaped. There was no reason it couldn’t happen again. I crossed the sitting room and put my hand on the doorknob. “Oh, for crying out loud!” exclaimed a yet more exasperated voice behind me, and I heard a sofa creak as someone got up to join me. I looked over my shoulder, and saw Moxie, giving me a look which I knew meant that I owed her a very great favour indeed. “You win, Snicket. I’m with you all the way, no matter which way it is. As a journalist, I can’t very well let an apprentice go wandering into danger without me being there to cover the story.” “Count me in, too,” Carr said, joining us and giving me a companionable pat on the shoulder. “I’m older than you two. It wouldn’t be responsible for me to let you go alone.” Kellar had quietly gotten up and walked over while she was saying this, and gave me a resigned shrug. “I hope this is a better idea than it feels, Snicket,” he said. “Oh no you don’t,” declared James Haines, hauling himself from his seat and drawing himself up to his full height. He was big enough to make thirteen feel like a very young age indeed. “Not you, Kellar… or you either, Carr, come to think of it. You’re my kids, sort of, and if you think I’m letting you walk into a seaweed forest full of killer animals or killer killers, you have another thing coming.” Kellar looked up at his father, and then back at me. His expression was strangely taut, and drawn, as if me and James Haines were having a tug-of-war and Kellar was the rope. “But, Dad,” he hissed, a sign that he wanted privacy without possibly being able to get it, “these are my friends. I can’t abandon them.” “Friends are less important than family, son.” “Carr’s going too. She’s family.” James Haines growled irritably. “Even if I let her go, she can take care of herself. You’re a child.” “I’ve already been kidnapped twice in this town,” Kellar said. “I want to do something about what’s happening to Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I want to make a difference rather than be dragged passively around. I want to make a choice.” “You have a choice. You can choose to obey your father, or you can choose to be grounded.” “That’s not a choice.” “Are you arguing with me? I’m your father, Kellar. Fathers are to be respected and obeyed at all times.” “Didn’t you ever argue with your father?” “That was different.” “How?” “I didn’t argue that I should be allowed to go and get kidnapped.” Kellar shook his head, and reached past me to grab the doorknob, and with a twist, it was open. Nobody wants to hear a family argue, especially someone in that family. I hoped Kellar knew how to end this before it got as bad as the Officers Mitchums’ bickering. He pulled himself up to his own full height, which wasn’t actually very impressive at all, and looked his father straight in the eye, which was. “I’m going, Father,” he said, quietly. “And you should be, too. Why aren’t you?” James Haines shrunk in that moment, in my eyes and perhaps his own. He glowered and looked away and let his shoulders slump. “My mother just died,” he said. “She was murdered, as if by magic, by a murderer who can’t be seen or grasped. You think I’m afraid, Kellar? Darn right I am, and so should everybody be. I’m going to stay here and I’m going to grieve and you are going to stay right here with me, where it is safe.” I hated to interrupt, but I had to. James Haines didn’t understand the stakes. “Pretty soon, nowhere will be safe,” I said. “This house certainly isn’t. Frankly, I’m not sure if the Clusterous Forest can be any worse.” “This is no business of yours, kid!” James Haines shot back, his eyes aflame. “It’s always people like you who cause trouble! Strangers, coming wandering in and shooting their mouths off about what people should be doing with their lives! What makes it your business to come and interfere?” “The truth is everyone’s business,” I said. “And,” Kellar added, his voice firm, “it’s definitely mine. You’re right, dad. It’s my grandmother who’s died. Somebody should be finding out what happened, and if Snicket’s volunteering to do it, then I volunteer right along with him.” “Volunteering,” spat James Haines, but his fire was gone. He gave me one last furious look, and then collapsed, like a burnt-out log. “Get out, then,” he muttered. “Stay here, go, it makes no difference. This whole world’s turned upside-down. I don’t understand it, and I don’t care about it, either. Just leave me in peace.” He turned away, and we did. We left him in peace, and quietly shut the door behind us. Then we walked out of the house and onto the well-trodden sand and into the earliest hours before dawn. “That was pretty amazing, Kellar,” Moxie whispered. “I’ve never stood up to my father like that.” “Me neither,” I said. “It’s one of the hardest things you can do.” “We may have to stand up to worse yet today,” Carr said. She sounded annoyed, and it took me a moment to understand why. “If you want to infiltrate the Clusterous Forest by the cover of darkness, there’s precious little darkness left. Let’s hurry.” Hurry we did, crossing the sand around to the side of the house where the mysterious set of footprints began in the centre of the barrier of sand. We met them where they met the rock, heading out in the direction of the Clusterous Forest, but I lagged behind a little. I ducked over to look behind Haines Lodge, and saw a few scattered and rusting old tools lying heaped against one another; a barbecue grill, a bunch of shovels, even a lawnmower, all sunk an inch into damp sand. The ladder lay just beside them, splintered to sharp points at one end. “Are you coming or not, Snicket?” I heard Kellar call behind me. “This was your plan! You can’t lag behind!” “Coming,” I called back. There was an experiment I would have dearly liked to try just then which might have resolved some of the mystery, but it would have to wait. The Clusterous Forest was, quite rightly, our priority. Getting to the Clusterous Forest was a simple matter of carefully picking our way down the rocky slope to the drained valley and then walking, as the crow flies, across the stoney, sandy valley floor. The crow was probably smart enough to fly in the opposite direction, but we were stuck with no opportunity for deviation and no landmarks; just a flat expanse of bare rock, cracked and worn all across and occasionally crumpled up in curving, layered folds, or erupting in shapeless, molten-looking crusts. Pebbles and a fine layer of sand drifted everywhere in the light wind and got into our shoes through no visible means, as if they were witch pebbles slipping through the soles of our shoes as if there were nothing there at all. It wasn’t a long walk to the edge of the forest, and after about twenty minutes, the ground started to get softer, sandier and muddier, crunching gently beneath our feet and slipping as we took each step, whilst tiny plants emerged out of the dirt that we stepped around. Vibrant green mosses spread in uneven clumps and patches and thickened and linked up with one another as we walked on, and from out of them, small fronds of seaweed, some lying flat and lifeless and others so light that they flicked and danced about like a candle flame alive to the tiniest breath of wind. They grew taller and thicker as we advanced, licking at our calves and catching our hands and waving like prison bars as the forest loomed closer and closer, the approaching wall of weeds growing as tall as trees and waving over our heads like flags of warning. From far away it did look like a wall, but closer to, it was clearer that there were gaps between the tendrils, each growing maybe a foot away from the next, so it would be possible to slip through rather than having to constantly push and hack away at an actively resisting surface of slimy green. And then we were no longer on the borders of the Clusterous Forest. We were in it, no questions or denials. And yet it happened so subtly, so gradually. At every step, I expected that the forest was still to get thicker, still to get more wild and alien, that I paid no heed to the sudden fall of silence, distant sounds deadened by the thick layers of weeds, the only noise the sandy crush of our footsteps and the slick rustling of the seaweed. I was engulfed before I knew it, and Moxie, Kellar, and Carr were engulfed with me. I stopped, and they bumped into me and stopped too, and we all stopped and listened to the silence and breathed in the air, its flavour like bitter brine. “I don’t suppose anyone brought a compass?” I asked. They didn’t dignify that with a response, either, which was only fair. “What exactly do you think we should be looking for out here?” asked Kellar, trying to look around without getting a faceful of seaweed wrapping around him. Stand still too long, and it began to wind around you, so you became like a green mummy. “Tracks, paths – signs that people have been passing through here frequently,” Carr suggested. “And signs of things that aren’t people, too,” Moxie added, darkly. “You don’t have to believe in myths to believe this could be a dangerous place. Any wide open spaces could be quicksand, for example.” I studied the ground around my feet, looking for any traces of a path – even the slightest widening of a gap between plants, or areas where the ground had been trodden down. Any tendrils of seaweed that had been trodden on or torn were also a sure sign that something had passed by. “Let’s keep going,” I said, “carefully, and straight. It would be far too easy to get lost in here, but so long as we can just turn right around and retrace our steps, we should be okay.” “When dawn comes, the Sun should rise right ahead of us,” Carr pointed out. “We can navigate by that, if it comes to it.” I should have been the one to suggest that, but navigation and cartography had never been my strong points. If they had, I might have been working in hot-air balloons or submarines like some of my associates in my organisation, and I regretted I could not call on their talents at this very moment, to either survey the Clusterous Forest from above or refer to maps of the area from when the sea was here. Instead, I had only my wits and common sense. I hoped they would be enough. We moved on, pushing our way through the wild and tangled thicket. If you think we did not seem afraid of the Clusterous Forest, you would be wrong. If you think it does not seem a fearsome place, you would be wrong. I am sure all of us had hoped that, upon entering the forest’s verdant borders, it would reveal itself as simply a harmless haven for nature, merely one with a bad first impression, like the Haines attic. But first impressions exist for a reason, and as such they are often entirely correct. Not one of us had ever thought the forest was anything but a bizarre, disturbing place, a sea where there was no sea, which seemed as if it might drown us in the very air, or conceal all manner of dark horrors. We tried not to mention it, because nothing makes fear worse than someone else’s fear, but it was a place I could picture myself going quite mad if I were lost there – and that could happen quite easily, if we grew careless. Navigation was almost totally impossible. There were no landmarks, just countless miles of damp earth and crunchy moss and shivering green tentacles of plant life, reaching pleadingly up to the sky. Carr had rightly pointed out that we could navigate from the sky, but that would be no easy task, for the sky itself was increasingly elusive, appearing in glimpses and snatches and fragments broken apart by writhing knots of seaweed that were soon reaching far above our heads, tall enough to conceal even the tallest and least sneaky adult – tall enough to conceal, it occurred to me, a building, or a cave, or some other horrid place where Hangfire could shelter his associates and fling his victims. But any break from the forest would have been a relief, really, no matter how grim. The forest wasn’t just an unnavigable maze; even to call it a maze would imply it had the security of walls and choices. It was more like a desert. The seaweed couldn’t disguise the sand beneath our feet, though it did disguise what little light there was overhead, from the falling Moon and the rising Sun, so our progress forwards, agonisingly slow and with frequent calls to each other to make sure we were still together, was chiefly made through shadow, our eyes gradually accustoming to the almost non-light. We were constantly touched, tousled, wound around, and inappropriately contacted by the seaweed as it swayed and draped around us, leaving the marks of its slick folds upon our clothes and skin, green and smelling of brine. Within ten minutes we were filthy; within half an hour, soaked. We might as well have fallen in the sea after all. The atmosphere was so salty it felt like we were barely breathing. That was when we found the clearing. My feet told me first that something was different, striking the ground with a squelch rather than a sad, deflating squish. I stopped and squinted ahead, but could see only darkness. It took me a moment to realise it wasn’t the layered, variegated darkness of the forest interior. It was a deeper darkness, flatter, subtler. Moxie and Kellar and Carr squelched to a halt besides me. I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. It didn’t look like a pit. It looked like nothing. Then I looked up, and I saw something at last. I had become too used to looking down at my feet to watch for danger, not expecting to get any help from the sky above – but there it was, the sky looming overhead, a great wide patch of it fringed by bristling seaweed, hovering just ahead. A few faint stars were dotted above me, but a little way away, there was the faintest hint of an orange haze outlining the farthest fronds, and it gave just enough light to make out what was beneath our feet in the clearing. It was like moss, but pitch-black, and completely carpeting the ground, with not a single gap through which soil or seaweed could protrude. Occasionally the black moss rose or fell in small hummocks, and from the largest of these, the mosses formed into a cluster of bubble-like black nodes, as if somebody had just sunk beneath them and was losing the last of their air. From one of these, slightly larger than the others, the surface of the moss was broken, and from it was erupting a skinny, fork-like shape, about as high as my knee. It, too, was black, and slightly resembled inverse lightning, dark and rising from the ground. I knew what this moss was, or thought I did, and thought I knew too what the shape emerging from the ground was. I had trodden in something very similar in the past, growing around the Inhumane Society’s former hideout at the Colophon Clinic. A friend of mine had examined it, and informed me that it was caviar – in other words, fish eggs. I didn’t know what kind of fish eggs grew on the ground in a place without a sea, but I had seen, quite some time ago, in another of Hangfire’s hideouts a number of bowls and fish tanks filled with small, black, wriggling creatures, something like tadpoles or leeches, with a sharp bite that drew blood. The forked, rigid shape growing from the ground certainly wasn’t a fish egg, though, or any kind of animal. I suspected it was a tree. A very famous tree had once stood in the centre of town, outside the town hall, before it had been felled to make way for a statue that had been blown up, again by the Inhumane Society. The Inhumane Society also appeared to be very interested in items carved from a peculiar pitch-black wood, as black as the tiny tree growing before me. Was it the same kind of wood? Was it the same kind of tree? What did it mean, to find tree and egg together here, in this dark and sinister forest of unnatural seaweed? I didn’t have answers to these questions, but I had more evidence, now. Clues are like signs pointing you to your destination, I had been taught. Whether in research or investigation, don’t ignore what they have to tell you. The more you find, the closer you are. “What is all this stuff?” Moxie’s silhouette asked. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But the Inhumane Society is cultivating it.” “Do you think this is some kind of farm for them?” Carr asked. “There’s such a lot of it growing here.” I shrugged my shoulders, and then remembered that she probably couldn’t see the movement. “I’ve no idea; if it’s natural, it has to grow naturally somewhere. But that doesn’t mean that the Inhumane Society can’t take advantage of that.” “So maybe there’s more nearby,” Kellar said. “Maybe their hideout.” We swivelled our heads, looking around and about for any sign of a hideout. All I could see was a field of black, and a forest of only slightly less black, waving as if in the ghost of a current. “I think I see a path through the seaweed,” Carr said, pointing way off to one side. “It’s narrow, but I’m pretty sure.” I couldn’t see a thing, but Carr was taller, and maybe that counted for a lot. We waded through the sticky black morass, and sure enough, the wall of weeds parted for us to reveal another ring of cleared land, black with eggs and sable saplings, a few more and a little taller this time. I didn’t like what that implied. This one also had something else, though, which was an area of stamped-down eggs, crushed to a sickly dark paste beneath someone’s shoeprints, at a far corner. Someone had been through that way recently, or rather, had just stood there, looking out at the field of primitive life before returning the way they had come. We followed their absence, leaving our own unmistakeable trail of caviar debris and carrying blackened soles with us, treading with as stealthy a squelch as we could and trying not to feel bad about the countless eggs dying beneath our feet as we went. It wasn’t really a surprise after that to find another field of eggs and saplings, and then another, and another, linked together like beads or a chain. In each of the fields, the saplings were growing taller and stronger and more numerous, until the last formed a little forest within the forest, one that was slightly more normal and thus all the weirder than the forest of seaweed that surrounded it. Entering each clearing and finding more of these saplings, their trunks resembling sewer pipes as their branches clawed wildly upwards in leafless, claw-like spikes was somehow even more unsettling than the Clusterous Forest, for these trees looked far more wild and angry than the melancholy drifting of the seaweed that enclosed their copse. The footprints took a winding path through the black forest. We followed them, skirting warily around each rough dark trunk, everyone but me pausing occasionally as the spindly twigs of the black trees caught at their hair and refused to break or let go. “I wonder just where these footprints are leading us,” Moxie said, her frown shaded by her hat. “At least we know they’re going somewhere, this time,” Kellar said. “These prints didn’t just appear out of nowhere.” He was right. It wasn’t possible to get a good look, at black prints on black ground under black trees beneath black skies, but it did look as if there was a forwards and a back trail, footsteps pointing in both directions. They had been following a straight line for a while now. “It can’t be far now,” I said, squinting uselessly into the distance. The way forward was a collage of black trees overlapping each other, and whatever lay past them was buried in the distance. “Be prepared for anything.” It was a silly thing to say. It is impossible to be prepared for absolutely anything, and probably inadvisable. It is unlikely that anyone is prepared for giant cupcakes to fall from the sky and start occupying our eateries, but nobody needs to be prepared for something that won’t happen. Being prepared for anything mostly means trying not to be taken by surprise when it turns out that something that won’t happen actually does, which is exactly what happened to me and my associates in the Clusterous Forest, as we finally reached our destination. The footprints came to a halt at something that looked at first like an ancient, overgrown temple I had once seen in a photograph. It was so overgrown that it was hard to make out what it even looked like – a grimy wall, tall and curved outwards, draped and wrapped up and enfolded by Clusterous seaweed to the left and right, covered over with dark moss growing around black roots that led up to a black tree, still young but thick and spiny where it grew atop the wall. There was so little of the wall that wasn’t vegetable matter that it was hard to identify the regular, rectangular doorway in the centre of the wall as anything other than a gap in the roots at first. “Just what is this place?” Carr asked, looking over it. “What kind of a building looks like this?” “It looks like it’s cylindrical,” Kellar said. “Look at the way it curves over, like the shape of a cigar.” I was looking at a rectangular hump in the moss just besides the doorway. It was slightly curved inwards, and exactly the size and shape of the doorway, with a raised wheel in the centre, like you might use to turn a valve on and off. It seemed obvious that it was the door that matched the doorway, fallen off long ago, but no ordinary door; it was extremely thick, and might have taken an army to blast through – though in the event, it looked as if the pressure of black roots growing around its hinges had finally popped it free. “I think UFOs are sometimes described as cigar-shaped in stories,” Moxie said. “This isn’t even a fantasy story, let alone science fiction,” I said, looking away from the fallen door. “There are plenty of totally identified flying objects that are cigar-shaped, like planes. This one probably crashed here a long time ago.” “It doesn’t have any wings, though,” Carr pointed out. “And I think we’d have noticed a plane crash in town,” Moxie said, folding her arms and scowling at me. “ The Stain’d Lighthouse wouldn’t have missed a scoop like that.” “The plane might have crashed into the sea long before it was drained, and the wreckage drifted here,” I said, “which would account for the fact that it’s missing its wings. Or maybe it was brought here secretly after being stolen. Either way, it’s the perfect hiding place for the Inhumane Society – a ready-made building in the middle of a forest so dense that nobody can see it from the outside, and nobody wants to come looking for it.” “Until we did,” said Kellar. “What do you think is inside?” “Maybe Hangfire,” I said. “Maybe a kidnapped naturalist. Maybe your sister, Lizzie. We won’t know until we find out, but go carefully. We can’t know how many members of the Inhumane Society are hidden away inside. Try not to make any noise unless you have to; we don’t want to attract attention.” The three of them, Moxie and Kellar and Carr, nodded. There were only the four of us, and we were, mostly, children. There wasn’t likely to be much we could do if we were confronted by an adult who wanted to use force against us. In retrospect, it would probably have been a good idea to chase up my other associates – Pip and Squeak, Cleo Knight and Jake Hix – to bolster our numbers, but I didn’t want to leave our foes time to cook up some other dastardly scheme. It was us or nobody. I advanced upon the doorway. As I climbed up into the hatch, which was a couple of feet off the ground, I found myself stopping as I hoisted myself up. Just beside the doorway was a metal plate bolted to the wall of the building. It wasn’t so grown over with eggs as the rest of the wall, just filthy with age, so I hadn’t seen it at first, but now I wasn’t sure I could look away. There was some kind of writing or raised design on it, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was an enormous gash carved down the middle of it with some very sharp implement, as if somebody wanted to ruin whatever that plate had once said, but around this long vertical line a longer wavy line had been cut, winding from side to side around the central cut. It made the gouges resemble a kind of symbol, a little like a dollar sign, a line through a letter S. Then I realised that there was another way of reading that – as a letter I going through a letter S. I.S. Inhumane Society. I wondered if this was some kind of insignia for the organisation, and it was thinking about insignias that made me see the original sign on the metal plate for what it was, and gasp out loud. It was writing, of a sort, and it was a symbol – like the I.S. symbol, it was a combination of letters, three of them drawn in an elaborate fashion to resemble something completely different to those letters. The design looked like an eye, and I didn’t know how I hadn’t noticed that symbol first, as it was intensely familiar to me. I had seen that symbol every day of my life for many years, because the same symbol was marked on my own ankle. It was the symbol of the secret organisation of which I was a member, and under whose instruction I was in Stain’d-by-the-Sea in the first place. V.F.D. Volunteer Fire Department. The insignia marked on the side of this construction meant that, whatever this construction was, it had originally belonged to my organisation, before being brought here and reclaimed by the Inhumane Society. But why? And how? “Snicket?” a voice called up behind me – Moxie’s, I think, but it was so far away. “Is something wrong?” “Nothing,” I said, casually nudging a trailing root to cover the plaque. V.F.D. didn’t have many planes – they were too public, too noticeable. But the organisation had always taken an interest in the sea and its darkest depths, because they were secret and because the organisation could be secret in it. The building, then, was very probably a submarine. That explained how it could have lain in the centre of the Clusterous Forest unnoticed for so long, even when the sea had been drained around it. But why was it here in the first place, and why had V.F.D. never sent anyone to search for it? I tried not to believe that they already had. I tried not to believe that they had sent me. “Scared, Snicket?” Carr’s voice called, and that shook me into action. “Not at all,” I said, “just thinking.” I stopped thinking, foolishly, and stepped away from the doorway. One by one, Moxie, Kellar, and Carr hopped up behind me, and we waited for our eyes to get used to the darkness inside – a little easier, for having spent so much of the recent hours in darkness already. A corridor all in metal stretched ahead of us, with a long line of sticky black caviar debris leading off along it. The whole corridor tilted slightly forwards, but we’d spent enough time at all angles in Haines Lodge for that not to be a problem. “Take off your shoes,” I suggested. “We’ll make less noise on this floor in our socks. You can tie your shoes together by the laces and drape them around your neck.” “Our socks and jackets will get dirty,” Kellar said, pointing at the black-splattered soles of his shoes and at the long trail of black that led ahead of us. “We’re already filthy, Kellar,” Moxie said, flicking a green stain off his forehead to show him. Kellar blinked a few times, as if the idea simply hadn’t occurred to him. Then he smiled, and quietly chuckled. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” he said. “I’m even dirtier than when Hangfire tied me up in a closet. The places I wind up in because of you, Snicket.” I don’t know if it was really funny, but none of us could quite restrain a giggle. We were so wound up and tense that even the slightest amusement felt hilarious. Just trying not to laugh was funny in itself. We knocked ourselves out for a few minutes laughing that breathy, giggly laughter you sometimes just can’t hold in, standing in the worst place to be standing laughing, where anyone might have found us, so long as it was anyone bad. “Once this is all over,” I said, when we’d recovered, “we’ll all go for a slap-up meal at Hungry’s again, or ask Jake to lay on a meal like he did at Handkerchief Heights after that Wade Academy business. I’d say that it was on me, but I’m flat broke.” “Everyone’s flat broke, Snicket,” Moxie smiled. “We should really be rewarded for doing this.” “You almost never get rewarded for the things that really matter,” I said, with a shrug. “Okay, that’s enough procrastinating. Let’s go.” I lied. You can never have enough procrastination, a word which here means “doing something you want to do instead of something you don’t want to do, for longer than you can afford to.” That’s the problem with it. But we went all the same. Our besocked feet made dry, whispery noises against the metal floor as we tried to avoid stepping in the black mud, seeing as our socks were more or less the only parts of us that hadn’t gotten filthy in the Clusterous Forest. It was dark, which made mysterious a place which would probably have been fairly dull in the light; but the corridor was short enough, and turned after passing through another wide-open bulkhead door, the new corridor lit more eerily than usefully by a flickering electric light on the wall. There were more doors on either side of us, but all were closed and looked rusted shut; it might have been possible to force them open, noisily and with great effort, but by unspoken agreement, we all wanted to see what whoever had been inside this submarine spent their time visiting. The submarine clearly hadn’t been among V.F.D.’s most important, for it was relatively small. We hadn’t gone far before we heard voices somewhere up ahead, and stopped. “Shh,” I hissed, glancing backwards at my companions, who stood still as all the other shadows in the narrow corridor. The corridor continued ahead, but there was an open door coming up on my left, from which the voices emanated. They were low, their words and tone hard to make out, but faintly familiar, which was perhaps more worrying than if they were the voices of people I had never heard before. I crept forwards as silently as I could, and edged a single eye around the door frame as far as I dared. “As your private apothecary, I don’t know if I can permit this.” With nothing else to focus on, no other noises or distractions, the voice leapt out in sharp clarity. Recognition of the voice was accompanied by recognition of the figure, the person speaking easily visible at a desk beneath a bare lightbulb, rummaging through a doctor’s bag with a clasp at the top. He looked a little thinner than when I had last seen him, like an old beach ball that nobody has kept full of air, but there was no mistaking the small round glasses, wispy little beard, and foul expression of Dr. Flammarion, a man who had once kidnapped Cleo Knight and who was one of Hangfire’s associates in the Inhumane Society. As I watched, Flammarion drew something thin and shiny from the bag. I recognised it as a syringe, and watched as he stuck it through the top of a small brown bottle, and drew the plunger back on the syringe, filling it a little way with dark liquid. “Your state of health frankly isn’t up to this kind of activity,” Flammarion was saying, frowning at the liquid. “You could perfectly well have left matters with the likes of me and Dander.” A kind of cough and a low mutter answered this statement, making me jump, as I hadn’t been able to see the other person in the room. But a slight movement I could just barely make out revealed the shape of a seated person just on the edge of my perspective through the door frame. The upper half of their body was just beyond the door, and I couldn’t make them out without risking poking my head too far into the room, and the person was also sitting in the shadows, so just the shape of their sleeve and their feet could be seen. They had been sitting so still that I had mistaken them for the furniture, but on closer examination, it wasn’t just the shadows they were sitting in. It was a wheelchair. Whatever they had said, Flammarion understood it, and his face developed an ugly look. “Perhaps Derma and I wouldn’t have had quite such difficulties,” he said, referring to his recent spell in jail, “if a little more trust had been placed in us. After all, if we aren’t trusted, how are we supposed to trust you?” I felt my attention irresistibly drawn to the syringe in Flammarion’s hand as he scrutinised it, nameless thoughts passing across his countenance. Slowly, he turned, and began to walk, slow step by slow step, towards the person in the wheelchair, neither of which budged an inch. “After all,” Flammarion said, “you won’t even tell us the whole truth about what happened thirteen years ago.” I couldn’t possibly have looked away from those two figures, no matter how badly I might have wanted to, and I really should have. This was it, what I had been searching for all this time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. This was it, in the most fearsome place, in its most hidden depth, between what I suspected were two of its most dangerous people. This was the town’s secret. I felt like rushing in there and shaking them both, though perhaps only very gently for the person in the wheelchair. Just say it, I wanted to scream. Tell me what the secret is!Flammarion lowered the syringe, past the level of the person’s head, past their heart, until he was pointing it at one of their unseen arms. I was staring so hard at the syringe that I could see it tremble slightly. “You should know – you must know – that you can depend upon Camarilla Flammarion,” Dr. Flammarion whispered. “I left everything behind to hurry back to this town, didn’t I, at the very moment I heard that voice for the first time in thirteen years? So, won’t you tell me…” Flammarion bent lower, closer to the person, until he had to put one arm down on the arm of the wheelchair to steady himself. The chair turned slightly as he did so, and part of the front of the chair swivelled into my line of sight. But Flammarion’s body was in the way. I couldn’t see who was in the chair. All I could see was Flammarion’s hand reaching across his body, the point of the needle dripping, and jabbing it into the arm of the person in the chair. “Are you,” Flammarion whispered, to a face I couldn’t see, as his thumb pushed the plunger of the syringe down, injecting something into the unmoving person before him, “who I think you are?” Not a word, not a breath, passed. The silence, the moment, was unbreakable. Flammarion’s round body hid the person in the wheelchair so completely, except for a tiny stretch of bare skin on an arm, where a syringe quivered. The person in the wheelchair hadn’t made one movement. It was as if Flammarion was injecting a corpse. But he didn’t seem to notice. He was looking right into the face of the person in the chair, his balding head blocking my view of someone deeply important, with something deeply wrong with them. There was a sense of terror about the whole scene, a dreadful tension that had me rooted to the spot, but with something horrible in my heart, that made me want to gasp for breath or grasp my chest or run. There was something terrible very very near me, and I thought it was the person in the wheelchair in that room. I might have been partly right, but I was definitely at least partly wrong. “Where is Picacea?” whispered Flammarion. That was when I felt a hand grasp my shoulder. I let out a gasp that was almost a cry, and Flammarion whipped round. His eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of me. But then they started to narrow, and his mouth started to stretch, into an awful, cruel smirk, and in that smirk I read the meaning of the grasping hand holding me ever tighter by the shoulder, sharp fingers digging in, fixing me to the spot so I couldn’t rise, couldn’t turn, couldn’t move. Behind Flammarion, something began to move. Slowly falling, lolling into view, was the seemingly limp upper body of the person in the wheelchair, and atop their body was a blank-faced, silvery mask, and the eyes of the mask were like the sockets of a skull. A piercing, stabbing pain erupted in the side of my neck. It seemed to drive on into me forever. I opened my mouth to cry out, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, could just flap my lips uselessly. The blank-eyed blank face receded into mist and fog and shadow. Soon everything else followed. I felt myself hit the floor, but felt no pain.
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Post by gliquey on Jan 14, 2015 14:06:08 GMT -5
"Friends are more important than family, son." - Based on context, this seems like it should be the other way around (family > friends), but maybe I misunderstood the conversation slightly.
"casually nudging a trailing root to cover the plague." - As much as I love the sentence as it currently stands, I'm pretty sure "plague" should be "plaque".
The last scene seems to resemble the beginning of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" - an observer (Snicket/Bryce) from outside the room eventually spotted, a mysterious unseen figure in bad health (?/Voldemort), an associate talking to the unseen character (Flammarion/Pettigrew). Is this intentional?
"Picacea" seems to be the name of a character but knowing the I.S. could possibly refer to a fungus.
Did Snicket really never realize the initials hidden within V.F.D.'s insignia? I would have thought someone would have told him if he didn't work it out himself at some point.
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Post by Dante on Jan 14, 2015 16:07:08 GMT -5
"Friends are more important than family, son." - Based on context, this seems like it should be the other way around (family > friends), but maybe I misunderstood the conversation slightly. No, you're right. I think I must have started the line expecting it to go "less important" but then defaulted to the more familiar construction. Edited. I get the feeling somehow that this is not the first time I have made that error. Edited. Not intentional, but I'm trying to think whether there were any echoes of it in my mind as I was writing. I haven't thought about that scene for many years. All was - well, forgotten. I remember it faintly now that you mention it, but I think this must be a coincidence. Unclear writing; in context what I meant was that he hadn't seen the V.F.D. eye design on the plaque before he'd seen the I.S. design. Edited.
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Post by gliquey on Jan 14, 2015 16:48:35 GMT -5
I get the feeling somehow that this is not the first time I have made that error. Edited. I've certainly mistyped "plague" instead of "plaque" in the past. I don't know why - it's not like I type "plague" far more often. Fair enough. I noticed a faint connection about halfway through the last part and the more I looked, the more similarities I found. It's still a nice parallel, even if unintentional.
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