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Post by Teleram on Jan 14, 2015 19:15:31 GMT -5
I'm on Chapter 3 right now. Pretty good.
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Post by Dante on Jan 15, 2015 3:30:44 GMT -5
CHAPTER EIGHT Something was pouring into my throat. Water – no, more brackish than water, bitter, with a sudden sharpness. I didn’t know where I was and didn’t remember what had just happened, but I was being drowned. I spluttered, coughed and choked, tried to flail heavy arms and seal my lips to escape the torrent. My eyes blinked, but I could only make out a murky, swimmy confusion. “Mr. Snicket, please,” a voice said – a soothing voice. “It’s only coffee. Don’t waste it.” I blinked again, and again and again, until my eyes ached but worked better. I stopped struggling. I wasn’t drowning. I was in a situation that I shouldn’t be making a habit of. I was in bed, the covers tucked way up, pillows piled high beneath my head. The reason I shouldn’t have made a habit of it was that it wasn’t my bed, nor my room, not even the Far East Suite in the Lost Arms that I reluctantly called home these days. But it was a familiar room. It was small and plain and contained only a few items of furniture – a set of drawers, a desk, a chair with a familiar green bag hung upon it – with a sink in one corner and a window in another, which looked out on a sky the colour of pain. I blinked some more and looked away from it, and at the person sitting beside me holding a stained and cracked mug full of something dark and hot, held in fingers just as dark, stained with something I couldn’t identify. She had abandoned the braids she had been wearing the last time we had been in this situation, letting her dark hair fall loose past her shoulders. I preferred it that way, even if it wasn’t at its best, tangled and greasy rather than its usual state of being better-kept than anyone of no fixed abode. I could see her face this time, as I hadn’t at the station earlier that day – no, the previous day, now; her smile still might have meant anything, but so did her eyes beneath her question-mark eyebrows, and that troubled me deeply. It was Ellington Feint, of course. No one else could do me the cruelty of giving me coffee while thinking it was a kindness. “Rise and shine, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I can’t let you sleep all day.” I groaned, and squinted at the sky out of the window. “Is that sunrise, or sunset?” I asked. “Sunrise,” she said, and answered my next question before I’d asked it. “You haven’t been here long. You were brought in less than an hour ago.” Here. Wade Academy. Not just Wade Academy, but Ellington’s room again – or one like it. The dented binoculars and wilting plant I had seen on her windowsill last had vanished, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t her room. So I’d been captured. I struggled to remember as I struggled to sit up, but neither went very well; I felt as if my brain was moving half a second behind my head, and there was an irritating clanking noise somewhere. Ellington pressed me back down, shushing me gently. “Don’t get too excited, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.” “My friends were with me,” I said, as images of Moxie, Kellar, and Carr lined themselves up in my brain, sneaking along somewhere dark. “We were somewhere terrible, and something terrible happened.” “I believe that your friends are just fine,” Ellington said. “They’re here, too, in some of the other rooms.” “I should go and see them.” “You’re not going anywhere,” Ellington said, and I had to stop and look at her, really look at her. Her voice, her smile had begun to mean something sinister. “As I said, Mr. Snicket, you don’t have to worry about a thing. None of this is any of your business anymore.” “What do you mean?” I asked, and tried to sit up again. My left leg wouldn’t move properly, though, and that clanking noise rattled somewhere near. I looked past Ellington, down to the end of the bed, and then stopped stock still. I had leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. A narrow shape snaked away from the shape of my left foot beneath the sheets, and where the sheets ended, a length of chain appeared, fastened securely to the frame of the bed. Ellington was right. I wasn’t going anywhere. Ellington watched me yank at my ankle brace with an expression I couldn’t read. “You’re lucky you woke up at all, you know,” she said. “Hangfire loathes your organisation, Mr. Snicket – and after all the times you’ve interfered in his plans, he loathes you. I’m sorry to say that you aren’t very popular in the Inhumane Society.” “I’m not trying to be popular,” I said. “I’ve never been very good at it. Being chained up is a new low, though.” “You make me feel I should apologise, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said, smiling almost shyly, as if she had just been caught taking the last cookie. “I won’t, though. It took a great deal of hard work from me to reach this compromise.” “Being chained to this bed is a compromise?” “And a good one,” she insisted. I wondered how she could listen to herself. I wondered how I could lie there, listening to her saying that holding me prisoner was a reasonable compromise. Actually, I knew how I could lie there listening to it. I was chained there. I didn’t have a choice. “Maybe it’s a good compromise,” I said, “by Hangfire’s standards.” Ellington looked rueful and away. “By any standards,” she whispered. “You may want your freedom, but Hangfire wants your death. I have some leverage with Hangfire, though. My father won’t co-operate with him if I’m not protected, and vice-versa. Hangfire has to do me a favour now and again, and this is what I requested: That if you ever landed in his power, he should take your freedom without taking your life.” “I’ll bet he liked that idea,” I said. “The sad truth about compromise is that it never makes anybody happy.” I’d gone too far that time, I knew. It is always a risk to talk back too much to your captors. “Well, it’s a good thing that nobody was happy anyway, Mr. Snicket,” she snapped at me. She let out an exasperated sigh. “There are people who have it worse than you, you know. My father’s been locked away by Hangfire for months. I’ve been locked up in that tiny town jail for weeks. And I’d have spent who knows how long in prison in the city if Hangfire hadn’t –” She stopped just in time, or maybe just too late. Well, she hadn’t really told me anything I hadn’t guessed already. “If Hangfire hadn’t rescued you from that train, am I right?” I asked her. “If he hadn’t spirited you and Qwerty away, and left Ornette Lost and Kellar Haines in your place.” Now I was feeling ready to sit up and get things done. I shoved the covers away, and sat bolt upright in the bed. The chain on my ankle was just a bit too short to let me prop myself up on piles of pillows, but this was no time to be relaxing, anyway. It was time to pull my thoughts together and get them down on paper, and this was the result. Ellington’s face had gone unusually pale. She could have used a sip of her coffee, but it just sat still and cooling, and probably congealing for all I knew, in that mug in her lap, enclosed in smudged, black-nailed fingers. She looked worried, even slightly afraid. “You didn’t hear that from me, Snicket,” she said, urgently, and her eyes flicked across the room to the firmly-closed door. “I shouldn’t have let that slip. If Hangfire found out –” “If Hangfire was clever enough to cook up the trick that got you off that train, he’s more than clever enough to know that anyone clever enough to figure out his trick is clever enough to know that he’s the only person in town who’d want to pull it off,” I said, pausing a little after this awkward gabble to think over it again and make sure it made sense. “Are you saying you know?” Ellington asked, looking at me, wide-eyed. “You know how Hangfire switched me and Qwerty with your friends yesterday?” “I’ve been working on a theory,” I said, meeting her gaze. “Maybe you can tell me if I’m warm or cold.” That made her smile again, and I hoped I knew what it meant. I hoped, too, that I was right. Because if I was right about the train trick, that boded well for some of my other theories turning out to be correct, too. “Why don’t you fire away, then, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said, and now she took a sip of the coffee, raising it to her lips as she kept her green eyes right on mine. “Fire away, and I’ll tell you anything I can.” I smiled, too, and I wondered if she knew why. This kind of meeting between us was almost like old times. She had been involved in a scheme, and I was unravelling it. But a puzzle is only fun if someone figures out the answer. “The key to the switch is in something the Mitchums overlooked, in their investigation,” I explained. “They showed me a diagram on which they’d marked everyone who got off the train, thinking that you and Qwerty must have been among them if you weren’t there afterwards…” “…But they didn’t pay nearly enough attention to who got onto the train,” I went on. “When I arrived at the train station, I saw some men and women getting onto the train, and, right in front of you and Qwerty, a father with two children, or so I assumed. Everyone was wearing heavy clothes against the cold, and masks because the bell had rung. Under those conditions, you could make anyone up to look like nobody at all at first glance – and it was clear that that had happened when the Mitchums lined up all the adults from the train on the platform afterwards. Hangfire can fade into any crowd, so I’ve no idea if he was there or not. But there certainly weren’t two children there – except for Kellar and Ornette, who were dressed up as you and Qwerty, and drugged so heavily they had no idea what they were doing. “Forgetting about you and Qwerty for a second, the case for how Kellar and Ornette got onto the train suddenly seemed simple. Two unknown children had gotten onto the train, faces masked, bodies hidden under heavy coats – bodies that might easily have been dressed in prison uniforms and with their hands cuffed – and Kellar and Ornette got off. It was obvious that they were one and the same. And once I knew that, it was much easier to figure out how you could have traded places with them. “Kellar and Ornette, and Hangfire pushing them along, got onto one end of the train – and the next people who got onto the train, right behind them, were you and Qwerty. Now, at either end of the train, there’s a blind spot that almost nobody can see into, especially if it’s crowded. The end of the train and the wall of the compartments create a very narrow, very short corridor perpendicular to the long one across the compartments. The window in the door behind was so tiny that there wasn’t much hope of seeing anything through it without being right next to it. And the door at the top just looked onto a blank wall. Kellar and Ornette, in their disguised disguises, were completely hidden from view. All Hangfire had to do was haul off their overcoats and shove them forwards, and the policeman from the city would see exactly what he expected to see: Two young people in prison uniforms, both handcuffed, one a dark-haired girl and one a light-haired boy, walking around the corner to meet him. Even if he had to walk right to the end of the corridor to grab them, Hangfire could block his view of the real you and Qwerty. At that point, all Hangfire had to do was to throw the two discarded overcoats over you and Qwerty, and the switch would be complete. Ellington Feint and Dashiell Qwerty vanish – and Ornette Lost and Kellar Haines appear in their place.” Throughout my explanation, Ellington’s smile had been getting wider, and her eyes less worried. Keeping a secret, especially someone else’s secret, is a little like building a dam. It’s hard work for just one person, and what you’re trying to keep in will probably burst out as a result. “You’re starting to get good at these locked-room puzzles, Mr. Snicket,” she said, and took another sip of coffee. “All the experience you picked up in that Lansbury Van Dyke business clearly came in handy. Yes, you’re quite right; I didn’t find out until afterwards, of course, but that’s how I’m told the switch was achieved.” She held out the mug to me. “How about some coffee to celebrate?” “That wouldn’t be hygienic, but thank you anyway,” I said. “You know, it’s funny you should bring up the Van Dyke case –” “Of course,” Ellington added hurriedly, perhaps as an afterthought and perhaps as something else, “you haven’t said where me and Qwerty and Hangfire went after we’d switched with Kellar and Ornette. I presume a search must have been made for us, but as you can see, it can’t have been successful.” “Ah.” I had been hoping she wouldn’t mention that. “I haven’t quite worked that out yet. I need to revisit the scene of the crime.” “That’s what culprits are meant to do, not detectives,” Ellington replied. “I’m not a detective,” I said. “I’m just curious. I don’t suppose you’ll just tell me the answer?” She laughed. “That would be cheating, Mr. Snicket. Like looking at the back of a puzzle book for the answers.” I nodded. “You’re right. I’ve only once done that, and of course I regretted it afterwards. You’ll never know if you could have solved the puzzle yourself, if you do things like that.” “Well, it depends on how much that matters to you,” Ellington said. “I’m not much good at puzzles, so I always flick through to the answers.” She paused, and pondered, her eyes on the floor. “What you need is a hint, not a spoiler,” she said. “How about it?” “I’ll pass this time,” I said, “because I was hoping you could tell me about something else. Something about the Van Dyke case.” “Ah.” This time it was her turn to look as if she’d wished I hadn’t brought it up. “I thought you wrapped that case up ages ago, Mr. Snicket. Before all those arsons.” “There was a loose end I meant to ask you about afterwards, and the last time we met I had other things on my mind,” I said. “But now seems as good a time as any to ask you about those memoirs of Lansbury Van Dyke’s you stole. The ones which were probably going to reveal the Inhumane Society’s secrets, if published.” “Yes, I remember them,” Ellington said. She leaned over and set her cup of coffee down upon the small set of drawers beside the bed. “If you were thinking of borrowing them, I’m afraid I must disappoint you,” she said, looking back at me. “I lost them. Like everything else I possess, they were confiscated when I entered Wade Academy – just like the Bombinating Beast.” The Bombinating Beast. It was only a small statue, about the size of a milk bottle and worthless to its rightful owners, but it was clearly very valuable indeed to Hangfire, who perhaps saw something nobody else did in its ugly shape, carved to resemble a fearsome monster from Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s past. It had ended up in Ellington’s possession, but she had told me in our previous encounter what she had just repeated now – that Wade Academy, posing as a real school, had confiscated all of her belongings, like her record player, her notes, and the statue. And… “And like that bag of yours, too, I expect,” I said. “Oh, my mistake. They let you keep that, didn’t they.” I pointed across the room to where Ellington’s green, tube-shaped bag, with a secret compartment in the bottom that had hidden all kinds of things, was hung by its strap over the back of a small chair. Ellington looked over too, and a fleeting frown passed over her face. I didn’t do her the injustice of pressing her for an excuse. Hangfire probably had the Bombinating Beast, either way. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know how. “But I don’t really need to read the memoirs,” I continued, catching her attention again. “After all, I know someone who’s already done so.” “I’m sure they weren’t as interesting as you’re expecting,” Ellington answered, looking back at me. “They weren’t finished, of course – we both knew that. Or else they would have been sent to a publishers, though I’m not sure if any publishing house could be that interested in the dull history of Stain’d-by-the-Sea.” She shook her head, and gave me an apologetic look, as she tried to let me down gently. “If Lansbury Van Dyke ever knew the Inhumane Society’s secrets, he died before he could write them down.” “That’s a shame,” I said, and looked her right in those entrancingly deep green eyes. “I thought they might explain what you were doing at Haines Lodge last night.” Jackpot. It had just been a guess, a guess that would have explained maybe too many things, but I had guessed all too well. Ellington’s composure instantly broke apart into a look of shock – captive, trapped shock, like the eyes of a cat caught in the headlights of an oncoming taxi, though I had never seen such a sight myself and hoped I never would. They were the eyes of someone caught in a lie – a whopping lie. I didn’t expect her to admit it flat-out, but I knew the truth, and she knew the truth, and we both knew that the other knew, and knew that as well. It was just a matter of getting her to admit it. I needed the truth out of Ellington if I was going to explain Cotton Haines’s impossible death, and track down the culprit responsible. I had explanations for some of the impossibilities; I’d had a lot of time to mull it over whilst shoving seaweed out of my face in the dawn hours. The impossibilities pointed to not just one sinister plan at Haines Lodge, but two – and Ellington had mastered the art of getting mixed up in other people’s plans. Hangfire was a lot more lenient towards her for doing this, I noticed, than he was towards me. But I pushed that thought from my mind. It led somewhere I didn’t want to think about, and soon Ellington was talking again, and leading me away from all worst-case scenarios. “I’m afraid you’ve quite lost me there, Mr. Snicket,” she said, picking up her coffee again and looking into the mug. She put it down again, so it must have been empty at last. “I’m under Hangfire’s thumb, remember? After he rescued me from the train station, he would never have let me slip away to – where did you say, again? Haines Lodge? Somewhere I’ve never heard of, anyway.” “If you’ve never heard of Haines Lodge, let me tell you a story about it,” I began, shuffling to the centre of the bed so I could sit cross-legged and look at least a little bit serious. “Once upon a time, there was a spooky leaning house in the middle of a sandbank which showed all the footprints leading to and from it. One night an old lady looked into a darkened room that should have been locked, and saw something terrible watching her from the window. Her son shot the apparition and heard it scream, but there was nothing outside the window but broken glass and a long drop to the unmarked sand, and nothing inside the room but more broken glass and splashes of ink. What do you make of that story, Ellington?” “I can’t imagine, Mr. Snicket,” she said, frostily. “Does it have a twist ending?” “I hope so,” I said. “The obvious solution, and the one supplied to me by the old lady and her son, was a supernatural one; a witch with unusually specific powers must have been involved. But it seems to me that, if Mrs. Haines was standing in a lit corridor and looking into a darkened room, the chances of her seeing anything at all out of that window were minimal. It seems far more likely that what she was seeing was a reflection – maybe a reflection of someone who had crept out of that room moments before and who was hiding on the adjacent stairs leading upwards, just behind Cotton Haines’s back. The distraction of the gun going off would have frightened this person as much as anyone else, but it would also have given her an opportunity to sneak away and hide upstairs.” Ellington sat down in the chair, which wobbled unsteadily with age, and started nervously twisting the green strap of her bag. Something shifted in her disposition, and the way she looked at me was different. It was still frosty, but the frost of someone who wants to be brought inside and given a warm blanket and a steaming mug of, go on then, coffee. “You make a convincing case,” she said. “I don’t know many sneak thieves who drip ink everywhere, though.” “Not intentionally,” I replied, shrugging. “But if I walk into a room with rifled drawers and a quill pen on the desk but nothing to use that quill pen with, I’m more likely to think that the ink and broken glass on the floor come from a bottle of ink that’s been dropped. That window was shot out from the inside; broken glass had no business being anywhere but outside.” We sat in silence for a minute, Ellington giving me a long, slow, appraising look, like she didn’t know what to make of me. At the same time, I was giving her a look that was probably very similar. I was sure I was right. I was sure she had been there, and events had played out the way they had because of her presence. I didn’t know why she wasn’t opening up, though. She had nothing to fear from the truth this time. Unless… “You tell an interesting story, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said at last. She still wasn’t smiling, though. Her smile was lost, and instead there was only languor, a word which here means “a deep, self-indulgent tiredness.” “Maybe you should become an author.” “I can’t think what I would write about,” I said, dismissing the possibility with a little regret. “The only things I’m any good at writing are my case reports, and they’re miserable stories which nobody comes out of well.” I met her eyes again. “They are true stories, though, or at least, I try to make them so. And I was wondering whether this story would be going in my report of this case.” “It would be nice if you got to write one, wouldn’t it?” Ellington sighed. “But you know, Mr. Snicket…” She began to look more animated. The spark of an idea burnt in her eyes. “I thought you said this house was in the middle of a sandbank that showed the footsteps of everyone who crossed it. If I had been in this house last night, as you said, wouldn’t it be easy to find out, just by looking at all the footprints around?” It was a good comeback, but she wasn’t the only one who had those. “Funnily enough, we never found any footprints leading towards the house,” I said. “However, a little earlier in the evening there had been a rain shower, and that had washed away all the footprints over the entire sandbank. Anyone who arrived at the house before the rain had finished would be completely hidden, as the rain would erase their footprints and disguise the fact that they had ever arrived. And that is what happened, isn’t it?” I pressed her. “You’d gotten into Haines Lodge before the rain – you had to, to have been able to pick the lock on Hopkin Haines’s study and get in there to go through his papers, and I think I know how you did it.” “You act as if I’m some sort of cat burglar, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said, laughing off the accusation as falsely as she could. “I don’t routinely break into houses just for fun. I don’t have any special techniques or secret methods that you need to think so hard about.” “I agree,” I replied. “I think you probably used the simplest method imaginable. You climbed up a ladder, and broke a window.” I paused to see how she’d react. She raised an eyebrow. “You make it sound so simple, Mr. Snicket. I had gotten the impression that this was another of your impossible mysteries.” “Maybe it wasn’t quite that simple,” I confessed. “There was a ladder outside the house, but it would only just top the ground floor. And there’s only one broken window in the house that we didn’t see get broken – way up in the attic. But Haines Lodge has a unique feature that makes this far from being an insurmountable problem: The house leans. Specifically, it leans away from the side of the attic the broken window is on. I think you probably put up the ladder intending to break a window on the middle level of the house, where a breakage on the ground floor might get noticed. But when you climbed up there, you realised that the lean of the house actually made that wall inclined rather than completely vertical. The other sides are unclimbable because they’re either straight or have an overhang, but that side of the house simply has a very steep slope. The wood the house is made from is old and warped; I think you probably put your mind to it and climbed all the way up, finding hand and footholds in the walls that made it possible, and then broke a window in the attic, where hopefully nobody would hear, and climbed in. We stumbled on that broken window later and thought it had been broken from the inside, but we’d been tricked somehow; just like in the office, there was glass on the floor, indicating either that something had been broken in the room or that the window had been broken from the other side. “I strongly suspect you left the same way, too. Later on we were very confused to find a set of footprints leading out from the middle of the sand on that same side of the house, but of course the explanation was really very simple. At some point you climbed out of the attic window again, and carefully clambered down the side of the house until you reached your ladder again. You descended it to the bottom, which was set in the middle of the sand border, but you didn’t just run off. I suspect you wanted to hide your tracks where you could. So you turned around, scuffing your footprints as you did so, and you picked up the ladder and brought it with you as you crossed the sand. Once you were safely on the rock, you carried the ladder around the sand border to the back of the house, and then tossed it over the sand to where you found it. Of course, unlike the other items that had been left there to rot, it was obvious later that the ladder had only been placed there recently as it hadn’t sunk into the sand over time.” I paused for breath, and licked my lips. Talking for so long was making my mouth dry, but if the only drink available was coffee, I would rather pass. I crossed my arms, and looked at Ellington. I knew my answer didn’t explain everything. Actually, my theory had at least one enormous hole in it. I didn’t tell Ellington that, though. I was very interested in how she would react – not just because I wanted to know what she had been up to, although that was always true. But it would also shed light upon the actions of the murderer. “So, Ms. Feint?” I asked, at last. “How did I do?” As I had, she sat quietly for a long time, thinking, her eyes lidded and not quite looking at me. At last, she answered my question. “Close, but no cigar,” she said, using a phrase which here meant “close, but not quite there.” “But close enough, nonetheless. Well, congratulations, Mr. Snicket. I suppose you expect me to confess.” “Confess to what?” “Murder.” “Of course not.” She visibly relaxed at those words, her whole body seeming to unwind from a tense state, and slip into exhausted draping over her chair. She looked like her whole body was a coat she’d just taken off and left carelessly lying around. “Thank goodness for that,” she sighed. “I thought you were accusing me.” “Why would I do that?” I asked. “I didn’t accuse you of murder in the Van Dyke case, and that was just the same as this. You broke into a house for your own reasons, but the murderer was already there.” Ellington caught herself in the beginning of a nod, but I saw it, all the same. “It will probably not surprise you to hear, Mr. Snicket,” she said, “that I know a little bit more than I should about what happened at Haines Lodge last night. It sounds terrifying and impossible. Asking you to believe that not one but two people managed to slip out of that house without leaving a trace – well, it beggars belief.” “Belief is most deserved when it is begged for,” I said. “There has to be an explanation for how the murderer got in and out of that house which doesn’t implicate you. I’ll find it, Ms. Feint. I’ll find it, like I’ll find your father.” Ellington looked sadly across the room towards the door. “My father… there’s nothing I want more. I just want to take him away from this terrible town and forget all about Hangfire and the Bombinating Beast. But he’s hidden somewhere so deep and dark that even I can’t find him.” “I found a place I thought he might be kept,” I said. “An abandoned submarine, left in the heart of the Clusterous Forest. The Inhumane Society have someone hiding there, at least. I wondered if it was where they had their most valuable kidnap victims imprisoned. But you must already know about that place, of course. The footsteps you left in the sand from escaping the house pointed out in that direction.” “I’ve heard of it,” she admitted. “I didn’t get what I came for at Haines Lodge, so when I escaped, I decided to try searching the one Inhumane Society hideout left that I knew about. I never quite got there, though. The Inhumane Society scooped me up at the edge of the forest and brought me back here. They must have been searching for me ever since I slipped away when Hangfire got me and Qwerty away from that train.” “So, will you tell me about that now?” I asked. “What you were doing at Haines Lodge in the first place? What made you go there, and what you hoped to find?” She shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t make much difference now,” she said. “So I’ll tell you. You were right to ask about Lansbury Van Dyke’s memoirs. I read them through, but I was telling the truth when I said he never got far enough to spill the Inhumane Society’s secrets. Mostly he’d written about his childhood, and I got interested when he mentioned people like that Cyrus Colophon and Ingrid Nummet Knight. I thought he might have shared his secrets with his childhood friends, and there was just one person mentioned who I didn’t know anything about: Cotton Haines. I resolved to investigate her as soon as I could, but that wasn’t very soon at all; instead I infiltrated Wade Academy first, because some Inhumane Society mail I stole mentioned that they were setting up shop there. And you know how that business ended up.” “Let’s not speak of it,” I said, pushing from my mind what had begun as a pleasant memory. Ellington in a sunset-coloured dress, riding in a cart being pulled through the evening surrounds of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. That evening had ended in a downpour that had ruined Ellington’s dress and, once and for all, proved to me that she was working for the Inhumane Society, and while I’d walked away, she had ended up in jail. But Ellington shook her head. “We have to speak of it a little,” she said. “You see, if I hadn’t been jailed after that terrible night, I wouldn’t have had the chance to have some long, interesting discussions with Dashiell Qwerty. He knew all about everything that was going on in town. He knew all about me, too – I can’t imagine how. But most importantly, he knew all about Cotton Haines. Eventually I’d gotten out of him quite a lot of information about her life and the kind of person she was – and most importantly, where she lived.” “So the moment you were out of jail, and out of Wade Academy, you ran off over there,” I said. “Hangfire had all his attention on keeping Qwerty in order,” Ellington said. “I’m rather afraid I let Qwerty distract Hangfire from what I was doing, and made my way across town to Haines Lodge instead. I had no idea you were right behind me, with a party of your friends. I intended to search through some of her papers and things to find out if she had any of her secrets written down, and if not, I’d speak to her directly.” “And?” I prompted her. “What did you find?” Ellington sighed again, and slumped back in her chair. “Nothing,” she said. “All I could find in that office was boring old paperwork from a long time ago, and then I knocked over a bottle of ink and had to slip out. I hid in the attic for a while to see if there’d be a chance to search her bedroom instead, but when the house had quietened down and I went to have a look, I found the door bolted, and had to give up.” That was very interesting. It implied a few things that made the case a bit clearer – if Ellington was telling the truth, of course. But what reason did she have to lie here? I shook my head to clear it of questions. I could ask questions about Ellington Feint all day, and every answer I got would make me want to ask another dozen or more. But there was one more mystery from that night that she hadn’t mentioned at all, but it was just possible that she had something to do with it. In fact, I thought she probably did. I leaned as far forwards as I could for somebody who had been chained up, and very carefully asked her a question. “What about the Cauldron?” She blinked. “What about it?” So she did know what it was. “Did you go there last night?” I saw her lips move, but I would never know if she would have answered the question, for at that moment there came three hard, heavy knocks on the door. The knocks took their time, like they knew they wouldn’t be kept waiting. They weren’t the sort of knocks that were politely requesting to come in, please. They were there to grab attention, and they had big hands to grab it with. Ellington jumped as if someone had told her that all the coffee beans in the world had expired, and swung her head towards the door. But the door merely waited, with the shadow of the person outside almost visible in its impatience and authority. “I talked for too long,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Mr. Snicket. I forgot where I was. I must go now.” “No, wait!” I reached out to stop her and my chain stopped me instead, grabbing me by the ankle. That ankle had been a little bit sore since I was an infant, and I suspect whoever chained me up had known it. “Please excuse me, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said, a little flustered but with some of her composure scraped back. She had risen from the creaky chair and hurried to the door, and now hovered there, her hand not quite touching the handle. “Clearly I am needed, if only needed not to be here. But look on the bright side, Mr. Snicket. I hope to see you often. After all, you are here for the duration.” “For the duration” was a phrase which here meant absolutely nothing, at least to me. Her hand fell on the door handle and turned. “Ellington, please,” I said – no, I begged. “You don’t have to do this.” She looked at me then, really looked at me, the kind of look that is really inviting you to look at the person looking, and I did. I looked deep into her eyes, so green they made the sea look blue, and I saw one of the saddest souls I would ever see. Her smile, too, meant nothing. “I do,” she said, and she opened the door. Outside, I had the briefest glimpse of an imposing, dark presence, and then the door was slammed shut, and I heard keys jangling in the lock. I was alone. I had no idea how I had gotten here, or where my friends were, or even who they were. I was chained to the furniture, and the door was locked. I was more alone than some people ever are in their lives. As the morning sun struggled to squeeze through my tiny window, I felt like throwing myself to the bed and weeping into my sheets until I had wept all my sadness and my bitterness and my disappointment away. You’ll never know if I did or not. But the sunshine was a little brighter by the time I had made my resolution: This time, it was my turn to escape from a locked room. The first thing I did was to take stock of my surroundings. The bed I was on was a simple affair – a square metal framework with legs. My own leg was fastened by a manacle attached to a chain attached to the bottom edge of the bed, with no room to slip off, as there might have been if it had been, say, attached to the leg of the bed. The bed itself had a thin mattress covered in a thinner sheet, a bedsheet, and a single pillow. Next to the bed was a chest of drawers; I could take the drawers out, but they were all empty. If this had been Ellington’s room, rather than just one of the many identical rooms of the Wade Academy, she had cleaned it out and was clearly sleeping somewhere else now. There was a desk with no drawers and nothing stuck underneath it, not even gum, and a chair in similar condition. A sink with a pair of taps, cold and colder, was off in a corner, with a small and foggy mirror bolted above it. A poster on the wall informed me that LEARNING IS FUN! Sometimes, yes, but it is usually more fun when you don’t realise that you are learning. The poster was pinned to the wall with four small thumbtacks, too short to pick any locks. The small window opened a little way, but had been fixed so that it wouldn’t open far enough for a person to jump out, but I wasn’t desperate enough to chance the several-storey drop anyway. I didn’t need to. In ten minutes I was out of the manacle and out of the room. I could postpone my explanation of how I escaped until the time once again came for me to explain the impossible to someone else, but since this is a record of my actions, if not always of my thoughts, I should account for my escape here. To start with, I was lucky that the bedframe itself was not fastened to the floor in any way; if it had been, I probably couldn’t have escaped. Instead, if I was willing to drag the bed around, its metal legs grating with an agonising sound on the floor, I could reach every corner of the room. I started by throwing the mattress and pillow to the floor so that the bed would be a little lighter. Then I inched over to the door and looked through the keyhole. What I saw there filled me with a sense of utmost relief, and not a little curiosity. The key had been left in the lock on the other side. Moreover, since I had heard the keys jangling in the lock where a single key would rattle, I was hopeful that one of the other keys might unlock the manacle on my ankle – since it was probably far too much trouble for anyone to manufacture a large number of manacles that all have an individual key. Anyone who has chained up a large number of prisoners or slaves probably doesn’t have the patience to remember which of their many keys corresponds to which lock. Instantly I had the possibility of an easy escape method: Simply knock the keys out of the keyhole, onto some flat object I had slipped under the door, and then reel them back in and free myself. I knew it well, well enough to have created a similar situation quite some time before, in the Van Dyke case, so that Ellington could escape from a room that she was locked into. Was she returning the favour? I hoped so. The thinnest of the thin bedsheets would do to slip under the door for the keys to fall onto, and on inspection the door was indeed built with a large gap beneath it, perhaps so that patrolling teachers could hear any of their young charges awake and up to no good in the middle of the night. Presumably these tiny rooms were for the less-well-off of the Wade Academy’s prestigious intake: The merely rich rather than the actual heirs of the aristocracy. The distinction means little unless you are one of those groups. I knew a boy who bragged that he would one day become a count, and he was quite insufferable to everyone, rich and poor alike. In fairness, I also knew a girl who was anxious about the fact that she would one day become a duchess, and she often took this boy to task for his arrogance. She could afford to, though. Duchesses outranked counts. That left me with the problem of how to poke the key from the lock. The thumbtacks wouldn’t reach it, and my shoelaces were too soft to poke anything with great ferocity. I needed something very long and very thin and very hard, and as soon as possible. Probably I could have simply broken the old door down, but that is a lot harder than it looks, especially for a thirteen-year-old, and I didn’t really want to attract attention, which was why I only dragged the metal bedframe around after me so slowly. That and it was very tiring. I looked around the room. Where could I find the object I needed? A nail, I thought, and looked all over the wooden furniture. The chair had creaked and wobbled when Ellington sat on it. Its pieces were loose. I quickly flipped it over, and there it was, the most inspirational loose screw that I would ever see in my life, not that it would have much competition. I pried it from the frame of the chair, twisting and pulling and not caring in what state I left the chair once I was through. It could collapse for all I care, and indeed it did. Nobody would ever sit on it again, and all for want of a nail. But my need was greater than a chair’s. While I stripped the sheet off the mattress, I listened carefully at the door for a long time to make sure that nobody was patrolling. Then I slipped the sheet out through the gap under the door. I poked at the key as fiercely as I dared, not wanting the whole keyring to go bouncing out of my reach, and at last it sagged in the lock and then fell. A muffled clank sounded outside the door. I carefully reeled my catch in. If I was a much more unfortunate person than I was – and for all the trouble I had, there were many people far more unfortunate than me – then there might not have been a key to the manacle there after all. But there was, along with a long series of door keys. The fifth one I tried opened the door, and I walked free, stretching my stiff ankle. I hoped I wouldn’t get in trouble for making a mess of my room. I was more interested in seeing Hangfire get in trouble for making a mess of the town. It was time to clean up after him.
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Post by Tryina Denouement on Jan 16, 2015 10:01:47 GMT -5
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. Oh, OK! So there's not going to be any magicl stuff like that!
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Post by gliquey on Jan 16, 2015 12:30:39 GMT -5
Ah, so the "Appearance of the witch's face" marked on the map is misleading - other than not being the face of a witch, it's where the face seemed to be, not where it actually was. That accounts for some of the disappearances and confusion, but certainly not for the murder - other than a potential motive for Hangfire becoming slightly clearer.
"If ... I had immediately turned and run down the corridor, the mystery would instantly have been solved." - The other part, the hidden Hangfire murder, has a simple answer too. The witch's cackle is easy to explain: Hangfire's powers of imitation are assumed to have no boundaries. The rest... I'll just have to wait and see.
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Post by Dante on Jan 17, 2015 4:23:17 GMT -5
CHAPTER NINE Call me naïve – a word which here means “too unsuspecting to expect suspicious situations” – but I had not anticipated that I would again find myself stranded in Wade Academy, in the very clutches of Hangfire himself. I didn’t even have Ellington to protect me, or a mask to disguise me; I couldn’t rely upon my associates as they were likely similarly imprisoned, and without the possible means of escape that I’d had access to. I may no longer have been chained to the furniture, but I was still very much alone. Nobody ever said life would be easy. On the other hand, nobody ever said it would be hard, either – but it was, and I would just have to deal with it. I formulated a plan in an instant. It was “find my associates, stop Hangfire’s plan, and escape – not necessarily in that order.” It wasn’t a very good or a very detailed plan, but it had all the important parts, including the key element of ambition, as well as the key tool of a ring of keys. I didn’t know if I would succeed, but if I failed, at least I would fail heroically. The corridor was full of rooms with wide-open doors, all identical to mine, leading off both left and right. I picked left on principle and set off. My socks rustled against the floor of the corridors, making the faintest whispers of sound that I hoped nobody was likely to hear unless they were standing right next to me, in which case being heard would be the least of my worries. I still had my shoes slung around my neck, tied together by the laces; someone had taken them off me when putting my manacle on, and politely left them outside the door in the unlikely event that I needed them. They were still grubby from the flora and fauna of the Clusterous Forest, but the grime was drying and flaking away onto my jacket, just when I thought I couldn’t get any grimier. Maybe I should have requested a change of clothes before I broke out, but I wasn’t worried about being fit to be seen; my reputation around Wade Academy probably couldn’t get any worse if I tried. I looked down at my socks and remembered the last time I had been sneaking around in Wade Academy. Back then, Ellington had insisted I remove my shoes and socks, the former because they made too much noise and the latter because the floors were too slippery. But the floors were not slippery today; they were bone dry. That made me curious. The floors had been slippery before because they were being mopped with laudanum, part of a plan to keep the imprisoned children in the school as sleepy and unfocussed as possible. Perhaps the Inhumane Society had run out of laudanum and were running an ordinary school curriculum instead. Jokes aside, it was suspicious. I wondered if they’d gone back to their former plan of chaining children to beds and desks, as they’d been preparing for at the Colophon Clinic. But none of the tiny rooms I looked into had a single chain; that had clearly been special treatment just for me. So what were they doing instead? And where was everyone? That might have been nearer the right question. Stain’d-by-the-Sea still had a good few schoolchildren left, probably because it was a slower and more arduous process for a family to leave the town than for somebody without attachments. But there was not a person to be seen nor a sound to be heard in the corridors, and I sensed emptiness in the untended, unattended corridors and stairways I snuck around. A horrible thought crossed my mind about what the Inhumane Society might have done with the children, and I had to shake it off to free myself from panic. They wouldn’t have done anything outrageous, if only because, Ellington’s intervention notwithstanding, I would probably have been first for the chop if that were the case. But speaking of chopping, just then I heard a faint noise, some way off, muffled slightly. It was a sort of woody echo, repeating at regular intervals, the sudden and swift sound of something being struck again and slowly again. It was, in other words, a chopping sound. I couldn’t place where it was coming from until I glanced inside a random room, where the sound was louder even though the room was empty. But the room had a window. I looked outside. Unlike the window of the room I had been trapped in, which merely looked down on a gloomy alleyway between the school and its crumbling red-brick boundary wall, which itself sat atop a fairly deadly-looking cliff, this window looked down upon the front of the Wade Academy, the locked and gated grounds of which were clearly once rather expansive and interesting, with a round tower almost as high as the Stain’d lighthouse and ex-flowerbeds and sports fields now dry and covered in weeds. The mystery of the schoolchildren’s location was solved, for many of them had congregated out there, apparently not by choice as they were being engaged in a surprising form of menial work. They were gathered around a series of logs laid out flat on the ground, and it was at least not surprising that their wood was as black as night. The children were processing the logs like workers in a lumbermill; the first log still looked like a tree, bristling with branches and roots, but the children were hard at work, chopping and sawing off the branches to reduce it to a round, black cylinder, like the remnant of a kind of firework I had seen when I was a child. The next log after that had been pre-pruned, and a number of children were setting about it with rectangular pieces of metal in their hands that glinted in the sun, scraping away at the log. Its bark slowly peeled away beneath their implements, some areas flaking away in tiny pieces but others coming off in great layers. The strange thing was that the logs looked just as black as they had ever done without their bark, if not blacker; the bark itself was pale and papery. The next few logs were being sawn and chopped into smaller and smaller chunks until they were small enough to be carried inside, but it was the bark I focussed on, which a few children were picking up in armfuls, carrying across the grounds, and tossing over a nearby wall. I knew exactly where it would wind up. I had picked up a large amount of this strange material myself in my previous case, but I hadn’t understood what it was, at the time. I’d had a theory, but it looked like that theory was wrong. I looked far out over the grounds of Wade Academy, off to a distant corner, and saw there the shape of a ring of stones, surrounding the thin shadow of what I knew to be a deep, dark pond. Something lived in that pond, but I was no longer quite so sure what. This was quite something, as I’d had no idea what it was when I first encountered it, clawing and buzzing in the night. I doubted that the children were about their logging labours by choice, and looking around, I eventually found their foreman: Sharon Haines, ostensibly a member of the town’s fictional Department of Education, supposedly running the long-closed Wade Academy, and definitely a pawn of the Inhumane Society, if not a member. I wondered what James Haines would say about that, but I knew what I wanted to say about the person next to her: Kellar Haines, head bowed, looking, as far as I could tell from so high above, miserable. I wondered what he and his mother had said to each other when they had met again. He had chosen to leave her side to join me and Moxie and our associates against the Inhumane Society, but it looked like he had no choice now but to remain by his mother’s side. The two were manacled together at the wrists. I can take care of that, I thought, jangling my keys in my pocket. But that left two people still unaccounted for. Moxie and Carr were surely locked up somewhere where they couldn’t cause trouble, though I had no idea where that might be. I felt as if I was forgetting someone, and with an unpleasant jolt of recollection, I realised who it was, and that I had not forgotten her at all. It was Ellington Feint, but I had not truly forgotten her. What was worrying to me was that I no longer thought it was possible to save her. If I gave her the chance to leave Wade Academy with me and fight Hangfire together, I no longer believed that she would agree. I felt terrible for thinking this, and worse for thinking I was probably right. I had no idea where to begin to search for Moxie and Carr. They could have been at any of the far-flung corners of the school, which was too large a building, and built as if they were making it up as they went along, with no obvious pattern or symmetry to its structure. Rare was the upwards staircase twinned with a downwards one, and sometimes I would descend a staircase only to find I had to ascend a different one to get out of the area; corridors splintered off into dead ends, circles, spirals and angles, jutted out in overhangs, or opened into small rooftop squares that led in to more corridors, windows looked out on bare walls. Probably I crossed my path many times in my wanderings, and the air as I stepped out into the rooftop gardens or opened windows to look left and right and find my place got steadily less cold. My stomach told me it was time for breakfast. I said it should be so lucky. Eventually, I refined my plan: Get to the ground floor, and do what you can to meet Kellar. This would be difficult, as he was presently shackled to his mother, but I could unshackle him quickly enough if I got the opportunity, and if anyone both knew where Moxie and Carr were and was likely to tell me, it was him. My exploration now took a definite downward turn, descending every staircase I could find. I didn’t just want to find Kellar, though, or indeed the way out. I wanted to see where those chunks of wood being carried into the building were going, and what was being done with them. No adult, no matter how nefarious, makes children chop logs purely for their own amusement. There had to be some inscrutable plan behind it, but I had no idea what it was. If they were being burnt, why so many, why strip away the bark? Why the black wood? Were these even the right questions? On top of that, I wanted to see the basement. I’d heard rumours from my time at Wade Academy before of something sinister going on in the basement – something dreadful. The worst things always happen in the basement. There are so few ways to escape, and just as few for any responsible but nosy passers-by to peek in and learn what awful things were happening. I’d heard mention of fish tanks. Hangfire had been gathering fish tanks before, in the Colophon Clinic and other hideouts, with tiny black creatures like tadpoles swimming in them. I wanted to know how much they had grown since then. Fortunately, everyone knows how to find the basement. Just keep on going down. I went down. I went down every staircase I could find, enormously wide staircases big enough for a party or a riot, tiny ones tucked away behind unmarked doors, spiral staircases, even a ladder. There was probably a far simpler way to get to the ground floor and the basement, but I didn’t have the luxury of a map, and the Wade Academy seemed to have been built to obstruct all sense of direction, filled to the brim as it was with identical corridors, corridors identical but mirrored, and corners that turned at non-right-angles. Still I saw no one. The entire school seemed to have poured out into the front yard, which couldn’t have been difficult. Wade Academy had been an elite private academy for the sons of counts and the daughters of earls, some of whom I suspected I might know personally, and I rather doubted there had ever been enough of those to fill the whole building. There weren’t enough people for Wade Academy at the best of times, and now they were all outside chopping wood. They must have been very sure that a locked room could hold me. Of course, if either Moxie or Carr had themselves escaped, it meant I had almost no chance of simply running into them, but there was nothing I could do about that. We would all gravitate to the same place eventually. And then I was there. The entrance hall of Wade Academy was as grand as its reputation, a tall and echoey room supported by pillars carved to resemble those from collapsed temples in Greece. An enormous set of metal letters had been screwed across the wall opposite the main doors, reading W A D E A C A D E M Y, but the W had fallen off or been stolen at some point, so now it was only the ADE Academy, and the rest of the letters weren’t in much better shape. In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that the M in ACADEMY was in fact the original W turned upside-down. It didn’t look much more dilapidated than some schools in the world, though. If it wasn’t for the fact that most of the children had been gathered outside to work on lumber processing, it might just have been a convincing act, which reminded me to wonder how the children were being convinced to work on processing lumber if they were no longer doped with laudanum. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone and asked them. If Sharon Haines would just keep her back turned, I could sneak past her and right out of the school gates. But if I was the sort of person who did that, I would deserve to be locked up in a room somewhere. Instead, I turned around, and walked back into the heart of the Wade Academy. A stairway to the basement couldn’t be far off. It wasn’t far off. It was behind a door not too far from the entrance hall, the door hauled all the way open and propped there with a stack of black logs, strangely smooth and shiny for being so rough-hewn. A narrow, dark corridor, lit by a bare bulb swinging on its wire for some reason, led downwards at a steep angle; partway down the walls turned from brick to bare rock that had been chipped away long ago by whoever counts and earls hire to dig out their fantastic island schools. I made like I was crossing the road, looked and listened to make sure nobody was coming, and crossed from the right road to go underground. The last two times I had delved into basements in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, in my first and second cases in the town, I had been following the sound of screams. There were no screams now, but I shivered all the same, and not because it was cold, though it was; the walls seemed to radiate a bitter chill, and it was no more comforting to reflect on what my scientist associates would have said, that cold is only the loss of heat. Warmth was being stolen from my body and drained away by those cold walls, far too little to warm a world that seemed even colder. It occurred to me, and was a very small comfort, that the screams I had been pursuing before had on both occasions been the fear of people in Hangfire’s employ. This town was becoming a scary place for everyone. Only Hangfire himself seemed totally without fear. Much though I wanted to put off my fear, I think fear is a natural thing, and a healthy reaction to forces which are entirely terrifying. Hangfire could afford to be fearless because he was the terrifying thing. I wondered whether one day I might end up either paralysed with fear or a terrifying person myself. It felt less and less realistic to think there could be any space between those two options. It was a long staircase, and I walked it slowly. Getting scared later was taking up too much of my time. At the bottom of the staircase was another door, held back on a doorstop. People came and went this way a lot, clearly. I looked through and saw what they were visiting. The basement was mostly just one enormous room, though I could just barely see a few other doorways at its corners, hiding in the many shadows which a single dim bulb was insufficient to illuminate, making the room appear to be walled in a circle of foggy shade. By one doorway was a further logpile, scarcely visible in the low-power lighting, and tall enough to scrape the ceiling. Across the room were what I had known to expect: Fish tanks, rows and rows of them, set carefully onto tables and besides benches. It was a similar scene to one I’d seen in the Colophon Clinic quite a long time ago, but with two important differences. One was that there were no manacles attached to the benches this time, waiting to clamp onto children’s ankles. The other is that the fish tanks were no longer empty. They were almost hazy with dark, swimming shapes, black tendrils wriggling about in the water like tadpoles or leeches, or twisting, fallen leaves. They were living black creatures, and I had a strong suspicion they hatched from small black fish eggs, lying dormant on the dry floor of the Clusterous Forest, and they were hungry. I looked at the creatures, and frowned. They didn’t look any different from when I had last seen a few of these things, in fishbowls at an abandoned aquarium that Hangfire had taken over. There were just more of them, many more. They made the water black with their squirming bodies. Very occasionally there was a splash! at the water’s surface as one of the creatures popped free of the crowd for a second and hopped into the air before falling back into their shared home. Soon Hangfire would need more fish tanks, a lot more. But I had expected the creatures themselves to be a lot bigger, too. After all, I had seen an enormous one, lurking in the waters of the Wade Academy’s fire pond one night. Or had I? Was that real? As I pondered these questions, I heard the sound of a door squeaking open, across the room. I ducked back into the stairwell to hide, which would have been a terrible place to hide if anyone came from behind me, but I didn’t exactly have many options. In one of the farthest and gloomiest corners of the room, two people were emerging from the shadows. One of them I would recognise nowhere, as she was somebody I didn’t know. The other I would recognise anywhere. The person I didn’t recognise, a young girl, was nervously but unmistakeably complaining. “B-but we could also raise some more loveable animals as well… like ponies, and horses. Maybe Old Birnbaum has some we can borrow.” Even from across the room, I could see Ellington’s green eyes roll. “We need these creatures more than we need silly ponies. Remember who you’re working for, Johanna. Hangfire will not be pleased if the inklings aren’t fed soon.” The girl, Johanna, nodded hurriedly, and hurried off with her head down to somewhere out of my line of sight. This left me to watch Ellington. She looked tired and on edge, glancing around restlessly and slumping her head each time whatever she was waiting for failed to happen. I wondered what it was that Johanna had been sent off for. I wondered what the inklings, which presumably were the dark worm-like creatures in the tanks, were to be fed with. I admit I’d had my suspicions – terrible ones. I was so busy worrying about these, and worrying about Ellington watching over whatever was going to happen, that I completely failed to notice the third person to enter the room until her hand fell upon Ellington’s shoulder. Ellington jolted with shock, and so did I. The third person was wreathed in shadow and darkness itself. Ellington wore dark clothes, but her green eyes gleamed in any light, and her pallor reflected everything and nothing. But I could make out not a single feature of the person standing in the dusky corner, just a formless, billowing shape, like a ragged veil. Ellington brushed the person’s hand off her shoulder and took a few steps back, but the figure didn’t move. But I heard a faint whispering from its direction, some statement in an undertone I couldn’t begin to make out. I had to try and infer it from Ellington’s replies, which were higher than usual, more strained. They were the kind of desperate tones I’d only heard from her once before – when she was conferring with Stew Mitchum at the Stain’d library just before she was arrested, discussing the crimes they were to commit as members of the Inhumane Society. “You’re going to check on them? That seems sensible. We don’t want them to escape, or starve,” Ellington was replying, her voice cold and unfriendly, to some unheard theorem. Faint whispering followed, and I could picture the sharper curve of Ellington’s as she frowned. “You’ll have to speak up. I can scarcely hear you when you speak in that strange, forced whisper. Nobody’s going to eavesdrop on us, you know. They know better.” I made sure that I was truly inconspicuous before I looked back. The figure was whispering a few more words, and the shape of a hand jabbed forcefully as it did so. Ellington looked affronted. “Don’t order me around!” she retorted, in words I could probably have heard all the way up the stairs. “You’re not my mother.” That raised an eyebrow alright. Ellington’s interlocutor didn’t like it either, and I could see the strangely unnatural shape of their head shaking angrily as they muttered inaudibly for a short time. When the person was done, Ellington had hung her head, and sighed heavily in defeat. “Yes, yes. You can rely on me. I’ll be a good girl.” I couldn’t tell if the unknown figure believed this any more than I did. It had fallen silent as Ellington stalked off in the same direction as Johanna. That left the figure to stalk me. It stepped smoothly out of the shadows, and advanced in my direction. I had to work hard to suppress a gasp. It was the figure of a witch. There was no other way of describing it, even though this person didn’t match any of the costumes I’d seen at Hallowe’en or the pictures from old books, even though I was only assuming their gender – but still, there was no mistaking their aura. Tall, considerably taller than Ellington at least, and clad in a long, lacy black cloak held closed with an elliptical silver clasp, barely a feature of their body could be seen; the cloak covered them from almost the soles of their high-heeled boots to the bizarre, pointed tip of their immensely tall hooded head. In the dim basement, beneath the low hood of that cloak, there appeared to be only a pitch-black shadow in place of their face – but for a hint of shining, bared teeth. A black-gloved hand held the cape shut tightly about their body, but that wasn’t the only thing the hand held; from between their fingers, a pointed, needle-like implement protruded, long like a stiletto dagger, black like the wood that was spreading its ebony roots through the Wade Academy. Sitting, I must presume, in the archives of V.F.D. headquarters, peering over this musty and surely long-forgotten report, perhaps you get a sense of the impression this person made which someone sitting reading an entertaining book at home could not truly understand – this shifting figure of living darkness, a shadow in outright defiance of the flickering and fading lightbulb above it, their stride relentless even as they hunched with an inner fury, a vicious weapon openly bared in their hand – this was a person who emanated sheer hostility and malice, and who I believed would not hesitate to perform some act of terrible violence. The witch was coming towards me. I ducked back up the stairwell and rattled up it as fast as I dared, hoping not to make a noise. At the top I threw the merest glance back over my shoulder and saw boots appear through the basement doorway at the bottom. I ran and hid like a coward. Sometimes that is the right thing to do. I had no idea who this person was – or rather, I had no clue who they were, and what ideas I did have were vague and uncertain – but as I crouched in the shadow of a grand staircase with curving bannisters that led up into the academy, I reflected on the words she had spoken, or rather, the words Ellington had spoken back. “Going to check on them… We don’t want them to escape or starve.” The children of the Wade Academy didn’t need such monitoring; most were under Sharon Haines’s watchful eye, with maybe a few others like the Johanna girl engaged in more specific tasks under particular taskmasters I didn’t want to run into. So who could Ellington have been referring to but the Wade Academy’s prisoners? Prisoners like me – and like Moxie and Carr. I had everything I needed to rescue them but their location. The witch would show me that – if I dared follow her. And dare I had to. I had no other plan and no realistic prospect of coming up with one. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d followed a member of the Inhumane Society to where they’d trapped a friend of mine; I had once followed Hangfire’s associate Nurse Dander to a place where she had Cleo Knight hidden away, or thought she had. I chose to focus on the success of that mission, and not the fact that I was following an armed individual in Hangfire’s stronghold with no possible escape, as I heard the sound of footsteps approaching. I didn’t risk peeking between the bannisters. I hid safe and sound in my dark corner and waited for the harsh, echoing footsteps to strike their way past, turning in their stride to ascend the stairs just behind me, taking them, from the gap between the sound of their steps, two at a time. I waited as the footsteps got louder and closer and just above my head, and held my breath even though I was sure it couldn’t carry that far, and breathed free as the sound grew quieter and farther. I risked a glance upwards, and saw the flick of a black cape passing around a corner above me. Then I scurried out and followed, silent as I could, pausing at every corner. The woman, or witch, seemed to know Wade Academy like the back of her hand. She never hesitated once or faltered in her stride as she led me a weaving way through the Wade Academy. That she was doing this, I hoped she did not know, but if she had wanted me to get thoroughly lost, this was certainly the way to do it. She took seemingly random and orderless turns at every crossroads, until I had soon given up all hope of memorising them; chose arbitrary doors out of long corridors full of them that revealed narrow passageways built out of crawlspace, or staircases so skinny and steep it was clear they had been shoved in wherever the architects could find room for them; knew which windows were windows and which were glass doors onto balustrades. On every staircase and balcony, I laid low, sometimes even on my hands and knees, in case one glance up or down from someone in the right place might spot me in the wrong place; I kept myself one corner behind the witch at all times, though sometimes the corners were at opposite ends of enormously long corridors where I feared losing her at the other end, and sometimes were in such quick succession that I almost bumped into my quarry’s cloaked back or stepped on her pointed heels, and escaped only by holding my breath and slipping back in a split second. I thought for a moment that this seemed an impossible place for a villain to have hidden their prisoner, where they could not easily reach them – but of course, it was the best place, where nobody else was likely to find them, and said prisoners, were they to escape, couldn’t even find their own way out. I wondered how I would find my own way out, and wearily imagined I would manage the same way I had before: Trial and error, a phrase which here means “trying every option until you find the right one, without any reason behind your choices.” Leaving everything to luck in theory meant that a plan could succeed very quickly, but somehow success always seemed to flee to the end of a hallway of failures. Eventually my chase neared its end, or so I hoped. Surely nobody could be buried so inescapably deep in Wade Academy that I could have to follow any further a person so dreadful, I was coming to believe, for it seemed like I had been at the pursuit for hours. I cannot know how long it really took; less than the ages it felt, surely, in those dreadful passageways where I feared discovery at every turn, and no markers of time were available – my wristwatch long gone, even the windows and the sky hidden from me. It was still early in the morning, and my stomach knew it. It would be nice to think that it was my stomach growling in its cage that gave me away in the end, but in fact I had only myself to blame, not my captors. If I had ever imagined that I was moments away from unmasking the witch, would I have been so clumsy? That is yet one more wrong question without an answer that I was left with after this case. All the questions in the world were worthless when what undid me was a patch of mud on the floor. I wasn’t paying attention to it, and I slipped. I crashed forwards into a crossroads, landing flat on my face and banging my shins on the floor. My shoes clattered and rattled away from me, and every hard part of my body hurt from the impact on the lovingly-tiled floor that had doubtless once been someone’s pride and joy. I groaned from the pain as I slowly and gingerly pushed myself up from the diamond-tiled, octopus-patterned floor, the carved octopus’s many-limbed dance mocking my bipedal inferiority. I looked for my shoes, and found two pairs. The second were black and almost hidden beneath the ruffled and tattered rim of a dark cloak, a cloak that rose up and up, to where it hung from the shoulders of… My shoes were lying at the feet of the witch. Her terrible face glared down at me with an unspeakable frozen fury. Her expression was what is sometimes called a “mask of hate.” It was also a literal mask. I could trace its hard rough lines within its cowl. It was familiar to me. I recognised it without recognising or even seeing the eyes that lay behind. With a flash of her cloak the witch darted down a side corridor. I heard her footsteps clacking away, followed by distant rattling, and then silence. I had been stunned badly enough by my fall not to think twice about what she had done, and when I did, I was stunned again. Here I was, prone on the floor. She could have done anything she wanted, and she had a vicious weapon in her hand that I suspect had been used on quite a few people in the previous twenty-four hours. So why, then, did she run? Even if she was all out of laudanum, why didn’t she physically attack me? I had no doubt she was capable of doing so. Could she have panicked for some reason? I slowly, achingly picked myself up from the floor, and dusted myself off. I even put my shoes back on; there didn’t seem much point in concealing my presence any more. Then I took a deep breath, held it, and looked down the corridor the witch had vanished down. The corridor was a short one, with a few open doors at either side, culminating in two closed doors at the very end. It really was the very end, too. The corridor finished in a blank wall. There wasn’t even a window; there was simply nowhere to go. Something lay on the floor just in front of this black wall, a small heap of shiny objects. It was another ring of keys. Not liking where this was going, I slowly advanced towards the end of the corridor, looking through each open door as I passed. All of them led to tiny dormitory rooms that were totally empty. There was no chance that anyone could have hidden in those rooms. Soon enough, I had my nose to the blank wall, with doors shut on either side of me. It was a pretty strong guarantee that they, too, led to tiny bedrooms in which there was nowhere to hide, and I also had a strong feeling that they were locked. I’d read a book once about locked room mysteries – impossible mysteries which could not have been committed, as the culprit must have seemingly walked through a locked door, or an impermeable wall, or a window countless storeys above ground, to attack their victim and escape from the scene. The Lansbury Van Dyke case had been just such a mystery, but a mysterious locked room didn’t have to be locked or even a room. It just had to be a sealed area – an impassable one. Haines Lodge was such an area. I wondered if this was one, too. I checked briefly over the walls and floor for secret passageways, but this wasn’t the wizard school from the books that had been popular recently. The only places to hide were the two locked rooms on either side of me. Facing neither, I raised my voice, and asked a question I thought I already knew the answer to. “Moxie, Carr, are you in there?” And two voices on either side of me, but on the opposite side of doors, answered in an inaudible clash of “Is that about time you Snicket Lemony?!” I hurried to first one door and then another with the keys the witch had left where she had vanished, and then back and forth again. Behind those locked doors were indeed Moxie and Carr, quite alone in two tiny bedrooms, manacles securing their ankles quite firmly to their beds. Dark bruises on their necks. “Thank goodness you’re here,” Carr said, as I unfastened her. “I haven’t heard a thing since I woke up, save distant calls for help. I can’t believe Moxie was so close.” “Where have you been?” demanded Moxie, shortly followed by “Why are we here? How did you escape? When did you get those keys? Who’s keeping us here?” I let her babble questions without giving me a chance to answer as I looked around her room. Like Carr’s and mine but mirrored, it had only a few small, bare and empty items of furniture and a window that barely opened and looked down on a shadowy alleyway. I couldn’t see a thing down there, witch or no witch. When she was done, I told her my story, or most of it. I left out the part about Ellington, which on reflection was most of it, but Moxie had a tendency not to listen properly when I talked about Ellington. She claimed I went on a bit and wouldn’t get to the point, but I never knew what the point was. “Let me take a wild guess,” I said. “Back there, in the submarine, someone snuck up on both of you from behind, and then you woke up here.” “This must be that sharp pain in the neck my brother spoke of,” Carr said, touching it gingerly. “Someone covered my mouth and jabbed me here before I could even react.” “Me too,” Moxie said. “They must have attacked each of us in turn without the person in front noticing. Whoever that witch is, she’s stealthy, alright.” “Stealthy enough to escape from a corridor with no exit,” I said, glancing again at the windows. But what matters right now: What do we do next?” “Can we escape?” Carr asked. “Maybe the right question, is, should we?” Moxie followed. I nodded. “I agree. I’ve no idea what Hangfire is up to any more, but whatever it is, he has to be stopped. We let him get away with too much when he kidnapped a school’s worth of children. I think it’s about time we put that right.” “What do you mean?” Carr asked. “How could we do that?” “Last time we were here, Hangfire had everyone constantly dosed with laudanum,” I explained. “It looks like he’s given up on that now, but it must have lasted just long enough to delude the schoolchildren with some lie or threat about what they’re doing here. If we can get their watchmen out of the way for long enough – and it was just Sharon Haines on duty when I left – we should be able to disillusion them. With that done, Hangfire can bring in all his allies if he likes – and I only count him, Sharon Haines, Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander – and they won’t be enough to stop everyone from walking out of here.” I smiled. It felt good. “And a school’s worth of witnesses should be enough to convince the Officers Mitchum to go after the Inhumane Society, don’t you think?” “It sounds ideal,” Carr admitted, “but risky. How do you plan to get Sharon Haines out of the way?” “Tell me it’s not as complicated as your last plot,” Moxie groaned. “Not nearly as much,” I said, and began to explain my plan.
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Post by gliquey on Jan 17, 2015 17:13:36 GMT -5
"... and slipping back as in a split second." - I don't see the point of the "as". Should it not just be "slipping back in a split second"?
This disappearance is probably my favourite. Who is the witch, and why was Lemony moments away from finding out who she was? This person can't be Ellington or Moxie and probably isn't Sharon - is it perhaps Theodora? She hasn't appeared yet, is a female adult and probably would not want to kill Lemony if she discovered him. But she definitely isn't "a person who emanated sheer hostility and malice".
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Post by Dante on Jan 17, 2015 17:35:49 GMT -5
"... and slipping back as in a split second." - I don't see the point of the "as". Should it not just be "slipping back in a split second"? I think you're right. Edited.
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Post by Dante on Jan 19, 2015 3:17:22 GMT -5
CHAPTER TEN “Do you think this is going to work?” hissed Moxie. I shrugged. “So long as we’re not interrupted, probably,” I said. “It depends less on us than on Hangfire. I think we’re perfectly capable of succeeding.” “On balance, I think that’s probably reassuring,” Carr said, peering around a corner. “Wish me luck,” she said, and, with a blanket wadded around her fist, broke the window. We were in a room around the side of the ground floor of Wade Academy. The building was as fortified as a castle or a prison for our purposes; none of the windows we could find opened far enough to climb out of, and the only official way in or out appeared to be the wide open front door which Sharon Haines had her eyes right upon. It was impossible for us to walk out that way; she knew all of us by sight, for both me and Moxie she had confronted up close several times before, and Carr, of course, was her daughter. We needed some kind of distraction to get her – and Kellar, who was still manacled to her side – out of the way, and the main attraction of my plan was that it had plenty of potential distractions. One of them was, for instance, Carr breaking a window and climbing out of it. That ought to bring Sharon Haines running if anyone noticed it, which I was pretty sure they wouldn’t, but it was nice to think that the plan worked whether we were noticed or not. Right now Carr was sneaking along the dingy alleyway that ran between one side of Wade Academy and the boundary wall that encircled it. At the end of the alleyway was the open grounds at the front of the school, an enormous open space where schoolchildren were presently busy chopping and debarking and sawing away at the black logs they had been brought, for what purposes I knew not. But that was quite a way along the front of the school, and we were hoping that nobody would notice Carr far away to the side, following the edge of the wall out and through the grounds, in plain sight but with her hair and clothes blending in with the red bricks. Everyone would be too busy either with their manual labour or with overseeing a bunch of children performing manual labour they were untrained in. The only person not too busy to notice Carr sneaking around would be Kellar, who if he saw, we were sure wouldn’t tell. Of course, if anyone else was watching the scene, either from the high windows of Wade Academy or from the summit of Carr’s ultimate destination, she would probably instantly be spotted. We just had to hope she could get to the tower before anyone saw her. That was none of our business, though. Carr had her end of the plan to fulfil. Me and Moxie had to sneak back off to the front entrance of Wade Academy, occasionally dodging children who came past with heavy black log sections in their arms, and wait there for what would come next, snatching looks through the great portal whenever we dared risk Sharon Haines’s glance. Carr’s role was really straightforward enough: Follow the Wade Academy boundary wall unnoticed until she was on the opposite side of the bell tower to the slaving schoolchildren, then cross the open ground unseen, and enter the bell tower. Would there be somebody inside guarding it, or waiting up at the top, watching over the children far below or waiting to ring the bell in accordance with one of Hangfire’s schemes? If so, Carr would have to improvise – or even get captured, if it would draw Sharon Haines away from the children. But if there was nobody there, as my past experiences suggested there usually was, then Carr’s job once she entered the tower was nearly done. She had only to climb to the top, and ring the bell. The ringing of a bell can mean different things in different communities. Sometimes it serves as a signal for people to gather where the bell rings in meeting, or at other times it is a warning that people should stay away. In my organisation, the ringing of a bell would eventually come to signify the beginning of a particular code, though that would not be introduced until a little while after I wrote the original version of this report. But in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the toll of a bell indicated only one thing: That people should immediately don their breathing masks, so they could breathe free without risking salt lung, or water pressure, or the Bombinating Beast, or any number of lies put about by the Inhumane Society. That was exactly what we wanted, too. Carr would ring the bell, and we would immediately be given an opportunity to hide our faces. Of course, there was every chance that Sharon Haines, rather than assuming Hangfire wished her to keep her face concealed for some reason, would actually proceed straight to the tower to investigate. But even that would be fine. It would get her away and leave the children unattended. I suspected she was probably too obedient for that, though, and that was why I had come up with the next stage of the plan to follow. It would be down to Moxie to take care of that, if we only heard the bell ring soon. We waited long enough to worry. We could see the tower from the doorway, round and brick, with exposed sides all around the top where anyone could look out. It reminded me of a kind of prison I had heard about, called a panopticon, consisting of just such a tower surrounded by rings and rings of cells in which the prisoners could be observed at all times, without knowing if they were being observed. It reminded me, too, of Hangfire, and of someone else whose identity I didn’t know – another member of my organisation I had been told was hidden in the town, observing everything I did and reporting back to headquarters on my progress. I didn’t know if I was being observed right now, but I wasn’t observing Carr. I couldn’t see her progress or the door of the tower from the school’s entrance, which was really a good sign as it meant Sharon Haines probably couldn’t see her either, but gave us no clue of what to expect. Was Carr on the brink of success? Had she been captured? Hesitated in her mission, and fled instead where freedom was just on the horizon? Some of these possibilities seemed less likely than others, but when you know nothing, it is possible to fear, and hope for, anything. High above, the air seemed to fall still in anticipation. No wind blew and no sounds polluted the sky. A single, low note, a mournful cry but to me a triumphant one, sounded away across the sky, short but seeming to ring on and on for seconds and minutes after it ended, creeping its slow way across the Wade Academy, across the drained valley, and all the way across town. A long, hushed moment of stillness fell in its wake, as all, for miles around, paused to hear its call. For so long that bell had been a sign of fear and oppression in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but in that moment, I heard something else in it – felt something that made me feel strange and not entirely pleasant. It was power – the right kind of power, the power to be listened to. Carr’s hand had moved the bell, but I had commanded it. I had created this silence, this quiet in the world, and though it was the peace I longed for I wasn’t sure I liked how it made me feel to be responsible for so much. I looked at Moxie to see her reaction, but she had already put on her mask. If any of us had been carrying masks the previous night, they had been taken from us upon our abduction from the Clusterous Forest. It hadn’t been too hard to find more in Wade Academy, though; a ready supply of masks was important to Hangfire’s plans as they allowed him to remain incognito, a word which here refers to having your true identity hidden – and your face is as good as your identity. There had been rooms full of coat hooks, formerly changing rooms for sports sessions, where from each hook hung a mask, like a gallery of silent faces. A mask each was one of the items I had been looking for in the school to complete my plan, and Moxie had the other two, and they had been even easier to find. Ink may have become much more difficult to obtain in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but pen and paper were never far away in a school. Outside, work paused with the bell as everyone, children and Haines family alike, turned to look up at the tower, though there was nothing to see – Carr was too smart to poke her head out of the side to pull faces at everyone, though I almost expected to see the tower gently trembling with the ring of the bell. Then the children turned to Sharon Haines instead, for guidance. Sharon Haines looked up at the tower for one more moment, and then shrugged. “You heard, children,” she said, her piercing voice carrying across the silent yard. “Masks on, on the double.” With some grumbling, the children began reaching for their pockets and satchels and belt loops for the masks they had brought with them, setting down their tools to equip the strange masks with their fish-scale silver. Sharon Haines produced a pair from somewhere and handed one to Kellar, and both she and her son masked up, Kellar moving listlessly and sad. I noticed that he still had a terrible bruise upon his neck from where he had been drugged the previous day. This case was rougher on him than anyone; I just hoped that he would soon be free. Sharon Haines hadn’t, as I thought might have been the case, had to return inside to fetch a mask for herself or her son, but Moxie and I now had the excuse we needed to put on masks of our own. Moxie had what might be the biggest risk of all ahead of her. But she hadn’t raised a single complaint or objection. She had lived in this town all her life, and gave few signs of liking it much, but she was more than brave enough to stand up for the people of the town when they were in danger, and I had come to admire her a great deal. When I had first met Moxie and Ellington, I had considered recommending one of them to V.F.D. as a potential recruit. I had only slowly come to accept that, as on many other occasions, I had made the wrong choice. Carr would be keeping an eye on events from the tower. I was on standby here, waiting. That just left Moxie. We looked at each other, eye to eye through our masks, and nodded to each other. No more was needed. I trusted her. Moxie left our hiding place, in the shadows around the academy door, and walked out into the open as if she was meant to be there. Sharon Haines wasn’t standing aloof from the lumbermilling; pulling Kellar along with her, she was patrolling the columns of black timber, inspecting the progress of the children on their work and, from what I could tell from her gestures and comments, occasionally delivering instructions and advice. For the first time I wondered if she had originally been a teacher herself, before Hangfire came along. What this meant was that it wasn’t so difficult to get close to her and Kellar, maybe even close enough to unfasten the manacle around Kellar’s wrist without her noticing. That was a bit too much of a risk, though, and to me didn’t solve the problem of Sharon Haines. I’d had a better idea, and it was for that reason that we’d needed to find a pen and some paper. Moxie advanced over to the growing pile of hewn log sections which Sharon Haines was presently standing near, Kellar at her side. It would be just about possible to get next to them without making oneself obtrusive. One child had just headed inside with an armful of wood, and while I had to flatten myself behind a pillar to avoid notice, Moxie walked right past them just as invisibly. Masks conceal your identity. If you act like one of the crowd, nobody will know that you’re not meant to be there. Moxie reached the log pile, and walked around it, mask facing the logs but her eyes peering sideways. Sharon and Kellar probably were appearing in her peripheral vision as she did so. This was the difficult part, the part where I had to remind myself that even if Moxie was detected and captured, it might still force Sharon Haines to leave the scene unattended to haul Moxie inside. Moxie paused at the log pile about half a metre from Kellar. She knelt down, and scooped up a heavy-looking block. Standing up suddenly, she wobbled in Kellar’s direction. It looked so unintentional that even I wondered if it really might be. Moxie didn’t quite knock into Kellar, but she steadied herself right next to him to adjust the balance of the cumbersome log in her arms. Kellar shifted slightly to give her more space, but then stopped as her arm brushed his, and their eyes met for a fraction of a second. Then Moxie was righting herself and was off on her way, marching back towards the front door. Sharon Haines gave her a momentary glance before looking elsewhere. Kellar watched Moxie go, and then looked down at his feet. He held his hand strangely, cupped, at his side. In moments, Moxie was back inside with me, and tossing the log down with a thud and a scattering of bark fragments. “Mission accomplished,” she muttered. “It’s up to Kellar now.” Kellar had been a part of my plan from the beginning. I knew I could trust him if I had to, and more to the point, I knew his mother probably trusted him, too; he may have run away from her and Wade Academy repeatedly, but he’d always spoken his mind to her and never lied. This is why it made me uncomfortable and guilty to have asked of Kellar what I did, in the note wrapped around a key that Moxie had slipped into his hand. Feign illness. Get your mother away. L.I hoped I wasn’t asking too much of him. Kellar stood where he was a few moments, not obviously up to anything. I noticed him slip something into his pocket, though, but other than that, he didn’t do a thing. Seconds slipped by like minutes. Was I wrong? Was he letting me down, after all? Should I have just gone for a bombastic and obvious plan, like rushing out of the building screaming and hoping that shock and numbers would do the trick to overwhelm Sharon Haines? “Come on, Kellar,” I heard Moxie whisper beside me. Her eyes were glaring at him as though she could beam the message into his ears by the power of thought alone. “Your sister’s an actress! Think of something!” He would have to think of it fast. Sharon Haines looked down at him and said something inaudible. Kellar gave a slight nod, and they both turned to walk back along the line of lumberworks. Suddenly Kellar made an odd move I couldn’t make out, a strange twist to his leg that happened so quickly I couldn’t decide what I’d seen. One minute he was taking a step, and the next he was on the ground, dragging his mother with him. Kellar curled himself into a heap and Sharon only just caught herself to avoid falling over him. “My ankle!” I heard Kellar howl entirely convincingly, his pained voice carrying over the grounds, and causing the other children to pause in their work to look at him. “I think – argh!” Sharon Haines, shocked, started babbling over him. A masked girl ran over to help as I watched. It was hard to watch. Kellar pulled off whatever his ankle injury was meant to be with pain so convincing it made me wince in sympathy. I could tell from the corners of her eyes that Moxie was grimacing under her mask. “I hope he didn’t overplay that and actually hurt himself,” she murmured. “Maybe he really did pick up some acting tips from Lizzie Haines.” I didn’t answer. Outside, my plan was finally coming to fruition. Sharon Haines was evidently giving rapidfire instructions to the girl speaking to her, their masked faces nodding at each other violently, and then Sharon had Kellar up on his uninjured leg, supporting him with both arms, hobbling into Wade Academy together. I suppressed the urge to yodel in triumph. Yodelling is between you and the mountains. Kellar and his mother limped their lopsided, three-legged way closer and closer, and Moxie and I hid as they entered the building. I heard Sharon Haines murmuring soft words of encouragement to her son. I really did feel guilty about this one, even when I remembered that Sharon was helping a murderous crime lord keep dozens of children captive for some evil purpose. She felt she had no choice, one of her daughters being under his thumb, and I felt a little sick to exploit one of the few positive feelings she had left. I hoped Kellar would forgive me for this. More to the point, I hoped she would forgive Kellar. She had a lot to ask forgiveness for herself, though. One of these days, I hoped we could all forgive each other, and move on from the terrible events that occurred in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but even then I suspected there was no way I could forget even a second, not least in my guiltiest moments and my darkest nightmares. Kellar’s eyes swept the entrance hall to the school, and momentarily met mine, peering out from behind a pillar. Hidden from his mother, he raised his arm in a sad, secret wave, and then he and his mother vanished into the walls of the school. The labouring children outside were, like myself and my friends, no longer supervised. It was time I gave them the freedom they deserved. I ran outside. A few people looked up at my hurrying gait, but not nearly so many as downed tools to watch as I leapt up on one of the highest of the shiny black logs, and tore off my mask. I’m not usually given to inspirational speeches, preferring to act and speak from the sidelines. But I’d had to give more than one lately. I had to believe that I wasn’t burnt out. I opened my mouth and spoke as loudly as I dared. “Children of Stain’d-by-the-Sea!” I began. Pompous, but traditional. “You have all been deceived! This isn’t a real school, not even for intern lumberjacks. It is a hive of repression run by the notorious villain Hangfire, who is keeping you here for some barbarous purpose.” Whispers and murmurs swept through the crowd of children like a breeze. I had their attention – and moreover, for several of them I had their trust, having helped various of the town’s children out with a variety of suspicious and perplexing cases throughout my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, many of them nothing to do with Hangfire’s plans at all. If a few would come to my side, I hoped the rest would follow. “Fortunately, Hangfire has far fewer allies than he would have you believe! He controls people by fear and intimidation, but you can’t give a man like that what he wants. There’s nothing to stop us all from walking out of here right now – and we need to run, not walk. Join me and leave this terrible place, once and for all!” Flushed with inspiration and a feeling of liberation, I leapt from the log, and began running towards the gates. And then I slowed… and stopped. It was silent behind me. Not a single footstep had joined my own. I turned back. The schoolchildren were all looking at me, blank-masked. I could see Moxie hovering nearby, her own mask removed, her face as confused as mine. Looking around, I could see Carr creeping back over, too. But I couldn’t see what was holding the others back. “Well, come on!” I called. “Hangfire could send his enforcers any minute! Let’s go!” A few of the students looked at each other. They seemed… not confused, exactly. Just awkward. At last, one of them stepped forwards, and faced me face to mask, and she delivered their answer. “No,” the girl said. I think I actually staggered. I looked at her, with an expression which I am told was of the deepest bewilderment – at Moxie, and Carr, who both shrugged. “But why?” I croaked. The girl sighed. “You’re new here, aren’t you?” she asked, and then turned back to her companions. “Get back to work, okay? I’ll take care of this guy.” As she ushered us over to a discreet pile of logs, I saw that some of the schoolchildren had started taking off their masks. I recognised few faces out there, but all avoided my gaze. The girl before me didn’t, though. She took off her mask and revealed a face that I recognised from a photograph – a face which, though it was of a girl who had been kidnapped, I had expected to find hidden in the darkest corner of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, not labouring with deluded schoolchildren. Her name was Lizzie Haines, and she was Kellar’s sister. “You must be Snicket, right?” she asked, pointing at me. “And – Mallahan, and – oh, Carr!” Her face brightened. “Long time no see, half-sis.” “What are you doing here?” asked Moxie, rubbing her head. “You don’t have to be Hangfire’s prisoners. You could leave right now.” Lizzie shrugged. “We aren’t prisoners, though, and we can leave,” she said. “We can leave anytime we like. But we want to be here… or at least, we do more than we want to return to the town.” “I know that’s not right,” I argued. “We were here ourselves, me and Moxie. Hangfire had everyone drugged with laudanum. He had thugs like Stew Mitchum keeping order.” Lizzie looked troubled. “Stew Mitchum is no longer in Hangfire’s employ,” she said, “and as for the drugging and kidnapping, we’re not exactly happy about that, either. But Hangfire’s going to get his comeuppance, too, along with everyone else. And we’ve decided, all of us, to help him achieve that goal.” Moxie clutched her head. “But – I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would everyone stay here and not go back to their families?” Lizzie cringed, and started nervously winding a strand of hair around one long-nailed finger. “You three don’t really know what’s going on around here, do you?” she asked. “Why Hangfire is here, and what he hopes to achieve.” “Are you saying you do?!” I asked, totally incredulous. Lizzie nodded. “Yes. We all do,” she said. “You see, a few of us found ways to resist the laudanum, and we staged a little rebellion against Stew – and when we took it as far as Sharon Haines and her boss, Hangfire, he had a change of heart. He stopped doping us and gathered us all together, and told us what was really going on. The things that have happened in this town, and what he came and gathered us all together for.” She shook her head sadly. “After that, it was hard to go home again. But Hangfire offered us an alternative, no strings attached.” “But he’s a murderer,” I insisted. “He’s a terrible villain. He has something monstrous in mind –” “You could call him a murderer,” Lizzie admitted. “Don’t think that any of us are happy about everything he’s done, but in his position, I’m not sure if I wouldn’t have done the same. And where his plans aren’t so violent, a lot of us decided to go along with them and help him. Only so far as our interests coincide, though.” Her eyes grew wide, and she rubbed her hands together. “Boy, are they interesting, though – dramatic. I wish I could tell you all of them!” “Why don’t you, then?” Moxie asked. “Come on, Lizzie, I’m a journalist. If Hangfire’s such a swell guy, why won’t you let us in on the scoop?” “Because you had better get out of here,” Lizzie said, pointing over at the gates. “Hangfire mentioned you in particular, Snicket, and that organisation you’re a member of. He loathes you, and I see where he’s coming from. And the way you and your pals have foiled his plans so many times, he really feels he has no choice but to lock you up. Well, that’s one thing we don’t have to agree with him about, too, so scoot while you can. Better yet, leave town altogether. There’s a storm coming, and there won’t be many places safe soon enough.” “But –” I thought of her family, the handcuffed pair who had just vanished. “He put a manacle on your mother and brother! How can you justify that?” “Hangfire doesn’t have to,” she said, looking away. “My mother got a bit too freaked out about what would happen if Kellar ran away again, and went a bit too far. She’s suffered a lot, too. I hope soon we can walk away from all of this.” She looked back at me, Moxie, and Carr. “Like you three. Take my advice here: Walk away. Leave this dump of a town and don’t look back. Especially you, Snicket; none of this is any of your business.” “Justice,” I declared, “is everyone’s business.” To my surprise, Lizzie nodded again. “We agree,” she said. “So does Hangfire, believe it or not. That’s why you had better run. Before something very dark comes and –” She didn’t have time to finish her sentence. Unnoticed by me, unnoticed by all of us, something very dark had come into our midst before we even knew it, rising up behind Lizzie Haines and slapping a hand with long, dark nails onto her shoulder. Lizzie gasped and stumbled aside, leaving me face-to-face with a person wrapped in black. It was the witch, and her shadowy cowl with its lopsided point scowled at me with a brutal expression. “I am the dread witch, Picacea,” she rasped, her voice a dry croak, dropping into deep, menacing tones. “Begone from this place, foolish child. Darken no more its foothills, or suffer my wrath, my curse most terrible…” “Oh, please,” I retorted. I had had just about enough of this. “Take off that ridiculous mask, Ellington. You’re not frightening anyone in that asinine get-up.” The witch froze, her arms spread in a grand gesture beneath her oversized cowl. Then she slumped in embarrassment, and pulled back her hood, revealing a mask I had seen a couple of times before – one carved out of dark wood, resembling in shape a more elaborate version of the silvery breathing masks used in the town, but with a bestial, snarling expression carved upon it. That mask had been stolen from Lansbury Van Dyke’s murder scene by Hangfire, and last I had seen it, he had been wearing it, but clearly he had delegated it now to his subordinates – perhaps unwisely, as I noticed that one of the tall horns that had given the hood its tall and pointed shape had broken off. The slim hands with their black nails reached up to the sides of the mask, and pulled it away from her head, revealing a glowering pair of green eyes, question marks frowning above them. “That was uncalled for, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I was only trying to scare you away before you got into danger again.” Moxie was looking back and forth from my face to Ellington’s with her own expression contorted with astonishment. “What – but that was – so she – and –” she spluttered, before finally settling in “Will someone please tell me what on Earth is going on in this town?!” “You might be better off asking that question closer to home,” a deep voice intoned, and I looked around in surprise. Advancing towards us was someone I hadn’t seen in what felt like ages, though in reality it was less than twenty-four hours. It was Dashiell Qwerty, his rumpled hair looking as if it had been in a fight, which was exactly the impression he intended to convey. With him was an unlikely associate, being dragged along with his arm in a vice-like grip – Stew Mitchum, an uglier look than usual on his round face. “Qwerty?!” I exclaimed. “Not you, too?” “No, Snicket,” he replied, as he reached us. “Not me too.” “Qwerty,” Lizzie Haines nodded, sounding a little embarrassed. “How did you get out? And… how did he?” she asked, jabbing a thumb at Stew Mitchum, who cringed away from her. “I let myself out,” Qwerty answered. “Locks aren’t a difficult obstruction for me; opportunities are. Snicket’s breakout attempt seemed a worthy cause to join, though, and I thought I would escort Stew back to his parents at the same time.” “Anywhere but here,” Lizzie replied. “You’d better move along, sharpish.” “I couldn’t agree more,” Qwerty agreed evenly. “Especially if we wish to avoid adult supervision.” I craned my neck around a pile of logs, just in time to see Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander burst from the entrance to Wade Academy, their familiar weapons of a syringe and sharp knife clutched in their respective fists. Shortly behind them was Sharon Haines, lingering in the doorway, hand on a glum-looking Kellar’s shoulder. “Flammarion and Dander!” hissed Carr. “Any ideas, Snicket?” “Give your mind a break, Snicket,” Qwerty said, sounding calmer than I had seen him in a long time. “Someone else is taking care of the heroics for a change.” A deafening squeal and crash of metal burst through the air like a thunderclap. Following my ears in amazement, I saw the twisted remains of the Wade Academy’s ornate front gates tumble through the air and fall crashing to the ground in the wake of a car zooming towards us at a speed far higher than its gentle purring would indicate – and what a car, a real beauty that even non-car-enthusiasts couldn’t get enough of it, the colour that every car should be, spotless paintwork and a scratchless radiator despite having just driven straight through two metal gates. The melodic toot of a horn announced the arrival of the Dilemma, a car so beautiful that the only hideous thing about it was the expense needed to purchase one. It belonged to Cleo Knight, but she was not driving today. As it braked to an instant stop before us, one of the windows wound down and Pip Bellerophon leaned out. “I knew looking for you near the Wade Academy would pay off! All aboard, everyone!” He didn’t have to tell me twice. Everyone wants a ride on a Dilemma. Moxie, Carr and me, shortly followed by Qwerty and an eager, shine-smudging Stew, crammed into the back seat with room to spare. Lizzie Haines caught herself like she’d just been about to follow suit. “This all, Snicket?” Pip asked, looking curiously out of the window at Lizzie, Ellington, and the other children. “It is for now,” I replied, not as sadly as I might have, as I was getting a ride in a Dilemma. “Floor it, Squeak,” Pip instructed, and the car took off like a rocket. It turned in a smooth fast circle past the logs, past an awestruck Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander, and rushed through the air like a tornado towards the empty gatehole. We smashed through the brickwork just next to it. “Sorry,” Pip said, looking back at the rest of us. “We’re still getting used to it.” “Did something go wrong?” asked Squeak, from down below his feet. “I didn’t feel a thing.” “That’s a Dilemma for you, brother,” Pip replied, as the Dilemma tipped down the rocky slope around the Wade Academy with but the faintest of bounces. “I can’t believe Cleo let us borrow it. I never want to give it back. Where to, Snicket?” “Hungry’s,” I answered without a moment’s thought. “We could all use it. I have a stomach and a mystery to attend to.” “I’d appreciate it if you could drop me and Stew off at the police station on your way,” Qwerty requested. Moxie raised her eyebrows. “You’re not turning yourself in again?” Qwerty smiled enigmatically at her. “Merely collecting my belongings and making a telephone call. I trust that Stew will be gracious enough to speak up for me when we arrive.” “Who says?” growled Stew, who despite the spaciousness of the car’s interior seemed to be mysteriously crammed into a tight corner. “I’d like to turn you in, see if that wipes the smirk off your face!” His own face grew redder and rounder as he raged and yelled “I’ll turn you all in! My parents will lock all you dumb kids up!” “Remember that I’m speaking up for you, too,” Qwerty replied, his demeanour as unruffled as his hair wasn’t. “The fact is, Stew, that you aren’t original enough to explain the hot water you’re in. What will you tell your parents to let you stay at home again? That you were expelled from Wade Academy, perhaps? That the other students got so sick of you that they forced you out? Either of those would be almost true, which is why they’re no good for you. So I’ll come to your aid, and you can do something worthwhile for a change and come to mine, and then we can go our separate ways.” “Qwerty, you always know everything that’s going on in town,” I said, almost begging. “What happened at Wade Academy since we were last there? What did Hangfire tell all those children?” “Yeah, squeal, sub-librarian,” snarled Stew. “Even I don’t know what he told that bunch of kids. Maybe he gave ‘em money, like that Derma Dander lady gave me.” Qwerty ignored Stew, but worse, he ignored me a bit, too. “When have I ever given the impression that I know everything that’s going on in town?” he asked, giving me a long, slow look. “I’ve occasionally recommended a few books, but that is every librarian’s duty.” “Give me credit enough to recognise a hint when I see one, if only in retrospect,” I said. “I’ve thought about it a lot since you were arrested, and looking back, it’s obvious that you were always trying to steer me in the right direction. Even Ellington told me that you knew all about her, and about Cotton Haines.” “That was my biggest mistake,” Qwerty said, his deep voice sinking to mournful, funereal tones. “The crowning error of a long and terrible series. I’ve heard only rumours of what happened since I got out of prison, but if I had only stayed silent, some of this might have been avoided.” “What do you mean?” I asked. Qwerty glanced out of the window, and sighed. “I’ll come and see you later, Snicket,” he said, “and your chaperone. I’ll explain what I can then. For now, I am otherwise engaged.” I looked out of the window too. The car wasn’t moving. It had drawn up outside the police station and former library so smoothly that I hadn’t even noticed it brake. Qwerty reached over Stew a little like you’d reach over an angry but tiny dog, and opened the door. As Stew swarmed out, with Qwerty unfolding himself behind, Qwerty looked back at me. “Oh, and Snicket,” he said, “have you stopped Hangfire yet?” I blinked in total blankness at him. “I… I don’t know,” I said. “He’s behind everything, but I don’t know that I’ve even seen him at all during this investigation.” Qwerty shook his head, his disappointment clear. “Consider what I told you at the station, Snicket,” he said. “And hurry.” He slammed the door. Squeak slammed on the accelerator. We drew gently away, leaving Qwerty and Stew behind us. I put my head in my hands. It was just like Qwerty to leave me with a bombshell. He said he would talk to me tonight, but he hadn’t said he would explain. But why not? Why wouldn’t anyone explain? I had a horrible feeling that I knew part of the picture, a big part. The image of the Cauldron loomed large in my mind, but it was as if an enormous blank mask had come slamming down on top of it. Everything in this town was hidden. “I don’t think I understand anything anymore,” I said. Moxie patted my back sympathetically. “If I’ve learnt anything since I met you, Snicket, it’s that I never understood anything in the first place,” she said. Carr nudged me gently. “We’re here,” she said. “Maybe you’ll feel better after some breakfast, Snicket.” “I doubt it,” I said, but we all got out, me and Moxie and Carr with Pip and Squeak. I let my hand slip sadly from the Dilemma’s lovingly painted side. Couldn’t anything in Stain’d-by-the-Sea just be what it appeared? Hungry’s wasn’t exactly booming. Hungry Hix was absent as usual, and so were most of the customers, leaving just her nephew Jake and his sweetheart Cleo to gaze into each other’s eyes. I felt a pang in my stomach that wasn’t hunger. There was a pair of eyes I would have very much liked to stare into, but I no longer knew what I would see there. Moxie cleared her throat, and they sprang apart. “Good to see you all again,” Jake said, mostly sincerely, as Cleo nodded at us. Then they gave us a second glance. “Snicket, Moxie, Carr… you’re filthy. Where have you been?” “It’s a long story,” I sighed, as I collapsed into a welcome chair near the front, my associates with me. “Even a summary would take too long. Let’s just say that we’ve been investigating a witch.” “One of the Stain’d-by-the-Sea witches?” asked Cleo, her glasses flashing inquisitively. “The ones with ink instead of blood in their veins, and the ability to become invisible? My grandmother used to scare me with stories about those before she died, when I was just a little girl.” “You can’t believe everything your parents tell you when you’re little,” Moxie groused. “Don’t knock it, Moxie. In a way, Ingrid Nummet Knight was right,” I replied. I steeled myself as six people’s gaze fell upon me. It was now or never, and much though I would have preferred never, justice is everyone’s business. “There really is a witch in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. A witch with blood in her veins that’s as cold as ink, a witch who’s invisible because she looks just like the rest of us. A witch who can cross sand without leaving a mark and sneak into impossible places, not with magic but with fiendish intelligence. A witch who helped to conspire against the famous names of this town, and to murder them.” I looked across the room at my chosen culprit. “Isn’t that right, Carr?”
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Post by gliquey on Jan 19, 2015 14:37:11 GMT -5
"Me and Moxie" - It's incredibly pedantic but I can't stop myself from pointing out that it should be "Moxie and I".
Interesting Sebald reference - we know Lemony attended Code Class from TBL, but what's the point in having codes before the schism? It depends how secretive you think V.F.D. was before the schism: I reckon it's always been fairly low-key and enigmatic, so a Code Class still makes sense even if the Sebald code didn't exist until Sebald came along.
I assumed the 'witch' Snicket was talking about was Ellington for most of the way through his final speech. Carr? Intriguing.
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Post by Dante on Jan 20, 2015 3:29:07 GMT -5
"Me and Moxie" - It's incredibly pedantic but I can't stop myself from pointing out that it should be "Moxie and I". I have no problem with pedantry and welcome the advice. However, I've now done quite a lot of research and thinking on the matter, and I've ultimately decided to leave it as is. The sentence would require more rearranging than what you propose to be technically correct on all levels, and my primary consideration has to be what flows best, which is the version I wrote. But it's also true that this particular rule is falling out of use in a lot of colloquial speech as the "wrong" versions are intuitively acceptable (which is where most grammar rules seem to originate anyway). If it was a spelling error, that would be a different matter, as spelling and typing errors are non-diegetic, but grammatical ones aren't necessarily. Snicket's a first-person, thirteen-year-old narrator; his sentence construction is going to agree with his state of mind first and foremost.
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Post by Dante on Jan 21, 2015 3:31:43 GMT -5
CHAPTER ELEVEN The room fell silent, my associates completely agog at my accusation. Pip and Squeak stared open-mouthed; Jake’s hand, clutching a kitchen knife, hovered mid-slice above a tomato; Cleo’s eyes flashed back and forth suspiciously from me to Carr, at whom Moxie was gazing with an incredulous expression of betrayal. Carr herself kept an unflinching gaze upon me, but her expression was not one of anger or upset but simply of annoyance. “Have you gone out of your mind, Snicket?” she eventually asked, calmly but with steel in her voice. “Far from it,” I answered. “As a matter of fact, I’ve had my suspicions about you since we first met, way back during the Lansbury Van Dyke case. There were a couple of odd giveaways – like how the second time we met you knew my name, even though I hadn’t been introduced. You slipped up like that again not so long ago, by the way; you named Flammarion and Dander when they came looking for us out of the Wade Academy, but you’d never set eyes on them before and we’d never discussed them in front of you. So how did you recognise them and know their names?” Carr gestured dismissively. “You’ll have to do better than that. There are any number of explanations for how I could have learned all that.” “It’s funny you should mention learning,” I said. “I always wondered how the Inhumane Society learned that Lansbury Van Dyke had a secret compartment in his office which even his own secretary didn’t know about… despite the fact that it made a loud noise every time he opened it.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Of course, if the secretary was a double agent, it would be easy.” Bullseye. I could tell that my audience hadn’t been quite so convinced by the naming argument, but the Inhumane Society’s knowledge of Van Dyke’s secrets, and Carr’s ignorance, had never made sense unless one was disguising the other. I slowly watched my friends’ faces turn sour on Carr Carter-Haines. Carr let her mask slip a little. She was scowling now, but not surrendering. “All that’s in the past, Snicket,” she said. “Nobody remembers those events clearly enough to tell whether or not what you’re saying makes sense. Is all you have to pin this case on me evidence from your previous case?” “Not by a long chalk,” I said. “The truth is, Carr, the witch’s escape from a dead end in Wade Academy gave you away. There was no way it could have been worked unless either you or Moxie was the witch – and no offence, but I was never going to suspect Moxie in that situation.” “Is that a compliment I hear from you, Snicket?” Moxie wryly asked. “That’s a rarity.” “Don’t get complimentary just yet,” Carr cautioned. “We all saw that Ellington was the witch, Snicket. You unmasked her outside Wade Academy.” “Nice try, Carr,” I replied, “but of course, you couldn’t have known that I’d been spying on the witch arguing with Ellington not that long before. Ellington couldn’t have been the witch I pursued to an impossible escape.” “Spare a thought for the rest of us here, Snicket,” Cleo interrupted. “We don’t have a clue what you’ve been up to for the past twenty-four hours. A summary would be appreciated.” I nodded. “To cut a long story short, I was captured, with Moxie, Kellar, and Carr, and imprisoned in Wade Academy,” I explained. “Someone snuck up on us in a corridor where we were lined up listening at a doorway, and drugged each of us in turn – but I guess it was actually the person at the back of the line who snuck up like that, right, Carr?” I asked, directing her a stern look which she answered in kind. “Anyway, Kellar was being kept with his mother, and I’d escaped, and followed a person dressed like a sort of witch who was going to check up on the Inhumane Society’s prisoners – I assumed those were Moxie and Carr, though in retrospect it was probably Moxie, Dashiell Qwerty, and Stew Mitchum. I surprised the witch and she vanished around a corner, and around that corner was a corridor leading to a blank wall, two locked doors on either side of it, and an abandoned keyring on the floor. Moxie and Carr were in each of the rooms, both manacled to their beds; nothing was hidden in either room, and the windows didn’t open far enough to jump out of, quite aside from the fact that they were several storeys above the ground.” “Another one of your impossible mysteries, Snicket?” Jake asked, knowingly. “And you’ve heard nothing yet, believe me,” I replied. “But back to this one, since the witch definitely went into the corridor but couldn’t have hidden or escaped, it followed that she was one of the two people in the rooms – almost certainly Carr. The witch was wearing shoes with high heels and a tall mask to make herself look much taller than she really was, and had a long black cowl covering her body. Those were her disguise, and she could transform back into her real persona if she only got rid of those things. The only question was where – but it wasn’t really a question at all, when there were open windows and a dark alleyway right below them in each of those rooms. I’m guessing that Carr panicked when she saw that I’d escaped and decided to change back into her real identity to keep an eye on me. She ran into the corridor, picked the room opposite Moxie’s – because Moxie’s was occupied, and only the opposite one had a window – and locked the door behind her, then locked the manacle to her ankle and shoved the keyring under the door. Then she took off her shoes and mask and cowl, bundled them all together, and threw them out of the window, where they’d be invisible in the darkness of the alleyway.” I gave a slight shrug. “I thought something like that was probably what had happened, and then later on Ellington turned up in the same witch get-up – but her cowl was lopsided where the witch’s had just looked tall, and when she took down her hood I saw that one of the horns on the witch’s mask had been broken. That confirmed that it had probably been dropped from high up since the last time I saw it – and settled in my mind that Carr, who I believed had a hand in the murder of Cotton Haines, was the witch and the culprit.” “Hold the phone, Snicket,” Squeak squealed. “Murder? Again?” “Murder most dark and treacherous,” I agreed. “Well, it’s nice to know that you think of me that way, Snicket,” Carr retorted. “I had rather thought that you’d accepted me into your elite circle. But, I suppose…” She trailed off, and looked thoughtful. “Bearing in mind what I’ve seen of how you work, and even everything you’ve just said, then I know you wouldn’t make that accusation for no reason. I know you wouldn’t say such a thing with no basis.” Slowly, very slowly, her blank face began to twist into a smile I didn’t recognise – a cold and forced one, unnatural and unlike her. “So, you think I’m a witch, do you?” she demanded. “You think I’m a murderer, do you? Prove it, Snicket. Prove that I’m the one you’re looking for.” Her cold eyes bored into me like a pair of icicles. That was when I realised that she knew. She knew what I knew, just as she knew that her friendship with us, her disguise as our associate, was already well and truly sunk – that her role as the Stain’d witch was already unambiguously dyed into her and couldn’t ever be erased. But if I wanted to pin the murder on her, too, she wasn’t going to let me off easy. She wasn’t going to simply confess, even if she had nothing more to gain with us. She was going to make me work for it – and I fully intended to. “Don’t worry, Carr,” I said. “I’m going to prove it beyond all doubt. “For the benefit of those who weren’t present to witness the terrible events at Haines Lodge,” I began, “let me summarise the events which occurred” – and I proceeded to deliver a summary too long to reproduce here. “Ellington already told me how she’d snuck into the house through the attic and been responsible for the supposed witch sighting outside the office window” – and I hear exclude another summary of those events – “before hiding in the attic, finding Cotton Haines’s door bolted after everyone had gone to bed, and escaping again through the attic window and down the ladder, leaving half a trail of footprints and hiding the ladder back where she took it from. “I accepted that as true; it all made sense. But it also left one gaping, enormous problem in one person’s account of events that night: Carr’s. When we returned to Haines Lodge later after recovering Cotton Haines’s body from the Cauldron, Carr told us she’d searched all around the house and found no footprints in the sand. But that didn’t make sense, as Ellington must already have escaped before then. After all, when we discovered that Cotton was missing, we stamped up a storm running around the house and calling for James Haines. Ellington must have noticed that if she was still there, and she must have noticed us leave the house, too – she was in the attic, so all she had to do was look out of the window on the front side of the house and she’d see us all pouring out through the door. Why would she go scrambling down a ladder when the house was empty and she could walk out through the front door, her own footprints hidden by all of ours? Why would she have waited so long after finding Cotton Haines’s door locked anyway? It doesn’t make any sense. So Ellington must have escaped from the house before we discovered that Cotton had been taken – and Carr must have been lying about not finding any footsteps around the house, as Ellington’s would have been there. The only reason Carr would do that is if she was trying to cover up for Ellington, and she’d only do that if she was a fellow member of the Inhumane Society.” “Hold the line, Snicket,” Carr interrupted. “You’re not getting away with it that easy. We know exactly when the witch left the house, remember? It was long after Cotton’s death, and just before we found those footprints. We were all searching the top floor, and we heard that dreadful cackle – the witch’s cackle – and we ran around to where we heard it and met at the foot of the attic stairs. There was nowhere else for the witch to go. That must have been when Ellington made her escape.” “You’re forgetting something, Carr – or rather, obscuring something,” I argued. “Why would Ellington, trying to sneak out of the house, deliberately come back down to the bottom of the attic stairs, and cackle at the top of her voice? What would that achieve – especially when after that she was going to turn right around and run back up the stairs and escape? She would only do that if she wanted to be caught. The truth is, of course, that Ellington was already long gone – but someone was out to make us think that we were hot on the culprit’s heels, and to lure us out to the Clusterous Forest as well, most likely. Where was everyone when we heard the witch’s cackle? I was outside Cotton’s room, and Kellar was in a bedroom just along to my right. James Haines was on the stairs below, Moxie was in a bedroom near those stairs, and Carr, you were – in a storeroom just alongside the attic stairway. All you had to do was lean out of the door, produce your most sinister cackle, then shut the door on yourself again, only to burst out a moment later when everyone else turned up. You created the illusion of a person who had just escaped up into the attic – but really, the person who cackled hadn’t gone anywhere. It was just you, and you were just there.” Moxie slammed her hand onto the table, hard. “Are you serious, Snicket?! It was that simple all along?” “The best tricks usually are,” I said, looking at Carr. Jake coughed slightly. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would somebody have been cackling in an empty corridor whilst trying to escape unnoticed anyway? It doesn’t make sense.” “Honestly, Jake,” I replied, “we were so worked up on impossibilities and stories of witches, we’d have believed anything. But once you start asking yourself why the impossible events would have happened in the first place, the fake logic seeps away and the real logic becomes clear. An invisible witch might have cackled in triumph over her successes, and in a way, that’s still true. But in real life, the only reason to do that is to draw attention, falsely.” “I’m flattered, Snicket,” Carr deadpanned. “You make me sound every bit as ingenious as Hangfire, but I can’t wait for your next trick – proving how I could have been by your side when you noticed the shadow of the witch carrying my stepgrandmother’s prone body all the way up the Cauldron.” She looked over at Moxie, and asked, with surprising earnestness, “Remember that, Moxie? We were all in Cotton’s room together when we looked out of the window and saw the murderer climbing up the Cauldron. We left the house and crossed the sand in a big group, watching the silhouette rise up the shadow of the Cauldron! If I’m the murderer, how could I have been going up there and been right next to you at the same time?” Moxie inched away from Carr, looking both panicked and flustered. “You – you must have used some trick…” “A trick to be in two places at the same time?” Carr demanded. “Now, if I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely – a locked room, the other side of town – and you had to prove that I wasn’t there, that would be easy. But instead Snicket thinks you were setting eyes on two of me!” She shook her head. “That really is impossible, and it proves that Snicket’s theory is just so much hot air.” Moxie looked over at me, as did everyone else. “Well, Snicket?” she asked. “Well yourself,” I replied. “Why not try and figure this one out on your own, Moxie? If something’s impossible, it’s impossible. If something doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense. Ask yourself what’s possible, then, that would explain what we saw.” “Well… alright, Snicket,” Moxie said, clasping her fingers. “I accept your challenge.” She closed her eyes, and thought. Her forehead occasionally twitched in concentration. “Well… the Carr who was with us was definitely the real thing; it wasn’t so dark that she could have been an impostor or anything. And given that we were talking about the Haines family all night, with the Haines family, I’m sure someone would have mentioned if Carr had a secret identical twin.” “And just in case anyone’s considering it,” I pointed out, “we met Carr’s half-sister Lizzie earlier, and I don’t remember thinking that they looked particularly alike.” Moxie nodded. “So impersonation is out,” she said. “Our Carr was definitely the real thing. So…” She looked up at me, eyes questioning. “The Carr on the Cauldron wasn’t?” A dramatic sigh pointed us to Carr again, who was rolling her eyes. “Isn’t that what I just said?” she asked. “It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there.” “Then…” Moxie searched as frantically for answers as if she was searching a room. “It must have been some kind of mechanism, pulling –” “Where you were before was fine,” I quickly interrupted. “The person on the Cauldron wasn’t Carr. But that doesn’t mean that Carr isn’t the murderer.” “So was somebody else made to carry Cotton Haines all the way up there?” Pip asked. “And then when Carr got to the top, she kicked her over the side…” “Carr didn’t even go all the way up to the Cauldron,” Moxie pointed out. “She stayed at the bottom.” “This line of inquiry is a red herring,” I interjected. “Again, it’s a distraction. You see, I don’t remember seeing the person climbing up the Cauldron carrying a body… Admittedly, the shadow was indistinct, but it seems like it should have been obvious. Actually, my first thought had been that Cotton herself might have been compelled to go up there for some reason, but the truth was quite different.” “So who and what did we see?” asked Moxie. I hesitated a moment before answering, knowing I would have to tread carefully on this subject. “Probably the same person who’d left the house a short while before,” I slowly explained. “Ellington’s tracks from the house led straight across the sand and towards the Clusterous Forest, yes, but that doesn’t mean that she went straight there – or even there at all, really. She’d just have wanted to get away from the sand that showed her trail first of all. There’s nothing stopping her from having gone right back around the house and headed over to the Cauldron.” “Why would she have done that?” Cleo asked, one eyebrow raised. “Maybe she just wanted to look,” I said. I had a dark suspicion of why that might be, but it was just a suspicion so far. I couldn’t tell it, not one part of it. “But I thought it might have been Ellington even at the time. I’ve seen her enough times to get a sense of her shoe size, and the footprints leading up the Cauldron looked about the right size and shape. I thought she might have witnessed something, but she slipped away again.” “Impossibly, I might add,” Carr pointed out. “The footprints led all the way up to the top of the Cauldron, but there was nobody up there and no way down.” “Obviously she didn’t want to get caught, once she realised she was being followed by people who had a very severe idea of her purpose,” I explained. “Fortunately, the spiral structure of the Cauldron made it far easier for her to escape than any of us were in a mood to realise. The path spirals quite tightly around and around the outside of the Cauldron, with the result that, while the entire stack is very tall indeed, it’s actually only a short drop down to the next level of the path. Ellington just waited until we were on the last section of the path before the top, left it until we were just about at the top, then let herself down the outside of the cliff to land on the path behind us. It wasn’t such a narrow path that she’d just fall right off it again; James Haines could fit on it, after all. And the four of us had churned up the path with our own footprints on the way up, so Ellington’s own footprints going down again wouldn’t show. From there she could make her escape while we sat around stunned atop the Cauldron.” Jake whistled. “I don’t know who to be more impressed by, Snicket – her for coming up with that plan on the spot, or you for figuring it out.” “Ellington came up with it in seconds, and I came up with it in hours,” I admitted. “She trumps me on this one.” “Well, that’s as may be, Snicket,” Moxie frowned, “but there’s a problem that totally explodes it. The only footprints leading up to the Cauldron were Ellington’s, but the footprints of the murderer who threw Cotton Haines down there should have been present first! Without those, it’s impossible that Cotton Haines could even have died, let alone wound up at the bottom of the Cauldron.” I smiled a grim smile. I had an answer to her objection, but it wasn’t a pretty one. “There’s nothing impossible about it,” I said. “The murderer didn’t need to cross the sand up to the top of the Cauldron, just like they didn’t need to cross the sand to enter and leave Haines Lodge. It appeared that Cotton Haines had been thrown down the Cauldron – but that was all part of a grand illusion to obscure the way she really died, and disguise the identity of the murderer in the process.” “How, Snicket?” Carr demanded. She was smiling now, too, the demented smile of someone who knows that they’re finished but is playing the game to the bitter end. She probably looked like she was crazy, but I knew that she was all too sane. “How did the murderer spirit Cotton Haines through walls and over trackless sand and kill her from a fall without there being any fall? I’m not going to confess. You do it, Snicket.” “The murderer could never have entered the house and then left again without marking the sand,” I said, “but if the murderer was already inside the house, it would have been very possible to leave without touching the sand and return the same way. As for Cotton Haines, she died from a fall alright, but not down the Cauldron. She was thrown from her own bedroom window.” Hungry’s was silenced once more. Jake had long since given up on trying to prepare any food as he concentrated on my explanation, and Cleo was focussing just as hard. Pip and Squeak were absolutely rapt with attention. Moxie was the only person who’d been present at Haines Lodge and didn’t already know the solution – since I’d worked it out earlier, and Carr, of course, knew. She looked totally flabbergasted, the implications flooding into her mind like a broken dam. Carr’s face, on the other hand, was unreadable. “Are you entirely sure this is possible, Snicket?” Moxie asked, at last. “There weren’t any marks on the sand below Cotton Haines’s room, so Carr would have had to have thrown her three metres away…” “I don’t think it would be as hard as you might think,” I said. “Carr showed when she took Cotton Haines’s body back to the house that she could quite easily carry her, and when Carr and her stepfather were helping Cotton to bed earlier that night, she looked about as light as a feather. And three metres isn’t so far as you might think – it’s about twice my height. I won’t lie down to demonstrate, but I think there are a lot of things you could throw over three metres away if you had the advantage of being three floors up.” I paused for a moment to let this sink in, and decide whether they were convinced or not, before revealing my trump card. “Added to that, it would actually have been a bit less than three metres.” “How do you figure?” queried Jake. “Because of a unique architectural feature of Haines Lodge that was also crucial to the murderer’s means of exit and entry to the building,” I pointed out: “The building tilts. The whole structure is on a lean towards the side Cotton Haines’s room is on. Without measuring it, I wouldn’t know, but on the top floor then will shorten the distance you’d have to throw something over the sand by perhaps just enough. Let me take you through how I think this whole crime was committed…” “Carr, you’re a member of the Inhumane Society,” I said, pointing at her. “More specifically, you’re a double agent they’ve been using to get close to people in town who know the organisation’s secrets, and work towards that destruction. You helped Hangfire get away with Lansbury Van Dyke’s murder, but for Cotton Haines’s you had to carry it out yourself. Whether or not that’s the reason you went to visit her yesterday, we’ll probably never know, but once we turned up, and indeed Ellington showed up as well, you knew you had to act first before Cotton Haines let something important slip – and I suspect she already told us a lot that was more significant than we realised. Your only choice was to get rid of Cotton that night – but you also needed to do so without risking suspicion falling on you. That was probably why disguising the murder behind the witch myths of Stain’d-by-the-Sea appealed to you, because you were in a unique position to exploit the features of those myths to make them seem to have come true. “I imagine that Cotton never really bolted her door from the inside. At some point, either when you put her to bed or after the rest of us had gone to bed ourselves, you drugged her with a laudanum injection in her neck, just as had been used on Kellar and Ornette Lost earlier in the day. Either way, when the house was quiet and we were all meant to be sleeping, you snuck into Cotton’s room and bolted the door behind you so you couldn’t be interrupted. You could have murdered Cotton with an overdose, or even with that vicious needle artefact you had in your witch disguise, but it was important that she appear to have died outside the house, so that those inside the house escaped suspicion. So you opened her window as wide as you could, and realised it was probably possible to throw her all the way across the sand… And so you picked this vulnerable old lady up in your arms, a family member who trusted you, and you took a running start across the room and projected her out of the window. “Cotton Haines was an old woman. She was thin and fragile. Being thrown three floors down onto hard rock would have killed her instantly. That was the easy part, but you couldn’t leave her there, or it would be obvious that she was killed by someone inside the house. You needed to create the illusion of someone who could leave without a trace so that we would suspect someone who could also enter the house without a trace. That meant that you had to get Cotton away from there – but without leaving a mark on the sand yourself. Even if you’d known how Ellington had gotten into the house and how she would later get out, you couldn’t risk leaving your footprints even halfway across the sand – if anyone compared footprints to the ones left there, you would be caught. And that’s when the tilt of the house became useful to you another way: I noticed that the curtains in Cotton’s room had extremely long cords to tie them back, but if you were to tie them end to end, and fix them to something secure – probably the nearest leg of her bed, since we saw scratch marks beneath those indicating that the bed had been pulled about a little – then it would form a rope you could use to climb out of the window. But rather than the rope hanging flat against the side of the house, it of course dropped away from the side. That meant that you could swing on the rope, pushing yourself outward from the house, and gain enough space to jump off and land over the sand, by Cotton’s body. Nobody would see you; nobody was going to enter the study on the floor below where a witch had supposedly appeared, and the window on the floor below that was the kitchen window, which was high and tiny and too filthy to look through anyway, so your patrolling stepfather wouldn’t notice a thing. It was the perfect escape. “From there, all you had to do was hurry with Cotton’s body over the rocks to the bottom of the Cauldron. You had no need to go to the top; there was a gate at the bottom you could open up and walk right through into the centre, where you left your burden and bolted the gate behind you. Then it was back to the house, take a running jump from the rocks, grab onto the rope without touching the sand and climb back up. With the window closed and the curtain cords restored, there wouldn’t be any sign of what you had done; it would be as if Cotton had just vanished. I don’t know how long it all took, but you might just have been incredibly lucky. Kellar heard something that woke him up, and when he opened his door he saw someone slip around the corner. Of course, that was probably just you, and you could just slip around the central staircase column and come up behind Kellar again, pretending you’d been woken too. From then on, all you had to do was play along with everyone else – not forgetting to cover up Ellington’s escape and fake it as another witch appearance later with naught but a cackle. “And that’s it,” I concluded, spreading my arms. “That’s how you, Carr Carter, or Carr Haines, committed a devious and cruel murder. I thought Hangfire was the only one in town who could sink so low, but it turns out there was someone else, hiding in plain sight all along. I’m right, am I not, Carr?” Carr had a strange expression on her face. It wasn’t quite sadness, and it wasn’t quite acceptance, though it had a little bit of both. It reminded me of somebody preparing themselves for an ordeal. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and when her eyes were open again I made sure to look deep into them, trying to put in that gaze everything I couldn’t speak – my need for her to be the murderer, and for this horrible case to be closed. “Tell me I’m right, Carr. Tell us that you are the murderer of Cotton Haines.” Carr broke my gaze, and turned to look out of the window instead. There was a light drizzle outside, raindrops breaking the reflections in the puddles. She looked as bitter as wormwood, though her voice when she spoke was even. “I hated that old woman anyway.” Collective gasps met my ears; one of them might even have been mine. Until she spoke those words, it still hadn’t sunk in that this was really happening. “Criminy, Carr,” Moxie cried, “just why?” “You may as well ask why my mother hurried the family out of Stain’d-by-the-Sea as soon as she could, leaving her mother-in law and her children’s grandmother behind,” Carr said, still avoiding our gaze. “Or, for that matter, why me and Lizzie each jumped at the chance to leave home, but avoided visiting our one relative, or near-relative, in all the months we’ve been in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Why my mother and Kellar left their husband and father way back in the city to come over here to be criminals under Hangfire’s thumb.” Her eyes vanished behind a twisted expression of disgust. “My stepfather is a brute, pure and simple, and my stepgrandmother is poison – the whole Haines family is. You don’t have the faintest idea how we’ve suffered.” “For – for crying out loud, Carr!” Jake cried, rising with a hand to his forehead. “Are you serious?” “I really was good at school, but I got myself thrown out just to have an excuse to get away from my stepfather,” Carr muttered. “I came back to Stain’d-by-the-Sea to go to school here, where I still have dim memories of being with my real father. Then Stain’d Secondary’s teacher for our grade quit, and the school closed the classes for people mine and Jake’s age. I had no idea what to do. Try and find a job in a town that was bleeding out? Or go back to the city and try and get into my old school? I would rather do anything than go back to my stepfather’s place… and so it didn’t seem like there was anywhere for me. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up yet, just so long as I don’t have to be it now.” She shifted slightly, restlessly. Something about the movement told me she didn’t intend to quit now. Whether it was to justify herself, or explain herself, or even just because someone would listen, she was going to tell us her whole story. “That was when a man appeared before me, a man who wouldn’t show his face. He said his name was Hangfire, and he knew all about me – and about the Haines family, too. I was a little frightened of him, but then he told me that he too had a grudge against the Haines family and many other famous figures of the town, who had formed an evil alliance. If I was willing, he said, he could give me an opportunity to strike back at them and avenge the injustices they’ve caused.” As the rain pattered against the window, her glare softened into something faintly sad. “Since then I’ve done many things I would never have thought I’d do – some I regret, and others I don’t. But I’m far from the only one to fight fire with fire. My mother and half-sister, for example, and in time my half-brother too, I expect. Johanna Strauss and the grandmother she was kidnapped to extort, Sally Murphy. The children of Stain’d Secondary. Ellington Feint and Armstrong Feint. We want justice, and the things we’re willing to do to get it aren’t pretty. But it’s better than doing nothing at all.” “You won’t get away with this,” I told her. “You and Hangfire. Whatever it is, I won’t let it happen.” “None of us will,” Moxie said, rising from her chair to face Carr. Cleo and Jake followed suit, with Pip, and Squeak. Cleo shook her head at Carr. “We won’t let you destroy this town,” she said sternly. “You can count on that.” Carr laughed suddenly, as if she couldn’t help herself. “You’re surprisingly naïve, aren’t you?” she asked. “I suppose you are a member of the Knight family. Trust me, you have no idea what we’re planning. You’ve been looking in the wrong place for this entire investigation. But you know,” she said, looking around, “you can always join us – all of you can. If you support him, Hangfire can probably overcome his aversion to the Knights and to V.F.D. enough to tell you what’s really going on.” “You can join us instead, Carr,” Jake said, making as if to roll up his sleeves, which he’d already rolled up to work on our meal, “on a trip to the police station.” Carr’s face set with determination. “Guess again,” she said, and swiftly whipped something sharp and pointed out from a hidden pocket. It was the black, needle-like implement I’d seen her wield as the witch, crude and sharp, like a narrow dagger. It tapered from a slightly bulkier body that reminded me a little of a syringe, or a fountain pen. “Back off!” she ordered, waving the needle in front of her as she backed away herself towards the door of Hungry’s. “This thing is loaded with enough laudanum to kill, if you aren’t careful.” She narrowed her eyes at me as she said this. “For goodness’s sake, Carr,” gasped Jake, “surely you wouldn’t actually use it on us?!” The last of Carr I saw for some little time was of her eyes burning intensely beneath her flame-red hair as she spoke. “I don’t have to,” she said. “I just have to threaten you.” And with a whip-like motion she lashed her arm back and then hurled the needle into our midst. Everyone leapt backwards, stumbling over chairs and tables in their wake and making a tremendous crash. Hungry’s became the scene of a riot without a single punch being thrown as furniture and condiments went flying, and children with them. What with shock and struggling with being entangled with the legs of chairs and other people, it was some time before we could haul ourselves up and look around. “Is everyone alright?” Jake asked, looking swiftly to Cleo. “I think we’re all fine,” Squeak said, his voice high and nervous. “I saw that needle thing miss us and go flying.” “Where’s Carr?” I realised. The door of the restaurant was swinging shut. I dived for it and pushed outside, but the streets were as empty as always, the only movement a few blowing papers and balls of dust. Maybe I heard clattering footsteps fading away, but it could just have been an illusion of the wind. I stepped back into the diner. Pip, Squeak, and Moxie were righting tables and chairs, sweeping up spilt salt and pepper. I saw Cleo fish out the needle from behind the counter and frown at it before dropping it carefully into her pocket. Jake was quietly going about finishing whatever he had been preparing, something involving soft hunks of bread and sliced sausage. The scene before me looked so normal and domestic, and yet we were all unusually silent. We were exhausted with surprise, and blindsided by despair. We sat, companionably but individually, each lost in our own thoughts until Jake served up a half-dozen plates bearing sizzling sandwiches, dripping with melted cheese and sesame seeds, stuffed full of meat. “I made kumru,” Jake said, by way of explanation. “It’s a Turkish sandwich – the name means ‘collared dove,’ but that’s based on the shape of the sandwich, not what’s inside it. There’s ketchup and mayonnaise if you want it, but if it’s your first time trying these, there are more than enough flavours to be getting on with.” We sat and ate our collared doves. I hoped my organisation’s carrier birds would understand if I found it delicious, a warm, rolling explosion of flavours that gathered in intensity with each bite. By the time I was only halfway through, already the troubles of the past twenty-four hours seemed a world away. “In retrospect,” I heard Moxie say, through a mouthful of sandwich, “that all went pretty badly.” “With Carr, you mean?” Cleo asked. I noticed she was carving up her sandwich with a knife and fork. I felt guilty for a second about using my hands, and then took another bite and didn’t care. “No, I mean everything since we went to Haines Lodge, and before that,” Moxie mumbled. Gesturing to me, she asked, “Don’t you agree, Snicket?” “Well, we did achieve something,” I said. “I figured out that Carr was a traitor, and we learnt a lot about Hangfire’s set-up at Wade Academy. But I suppose you’re right that none of it really helps us.” “Seems like just when you think Hangfire’s the only villain, someone else pops out of the woodwork,” Pip complained. “That Flammarion guy, Sharon Haines, and now Carr…” “And all of Wade Academy,” Moxie sighed, staring down at her sandwich. I told her that she’d feel better if she took another bite, and Jake smiled, and we all did, for a moment. “It is starting to feel like everyone’s against us, for one reason or another,” Cleo frowned. “Even people who don’t agree with Hangfire’s crimes are helping him with some things. What does that say about the alternative?” “About what we’re doing,” Jake nodded. “The way you tell it, Snicket, Hangfire didn’t even have to show up this whole time. Other people were carrying his plans the whole way.” “That is odd,” Cleo commented. “Normally he’s more than happy to get his hands dirty. When I was kidnapped by Dr. Flammarion, it was Hangfire – though he pretended to be Colonel Colophon – who marched me down to their laboratory and locked me up. He wouldn’t even delegate that, but this time he delegated murder.” “It seems Cotton Haines’s murder was partly unplanned,” I said, feeling sadder as the last bite of my sandwich approached. “But you know, you have a point. Hangfire does seem to have been strangely absent.” Now I just felt worried. “Maybe he’s been up to something we don’t even know about.” “Qwerty would know,” Moxie suggested. “He seems to know everything.” “He does, doesn’t he?” Squeak piped up. “I wonder how.” “He’s a librarian,” I said quickly. “He has to be good with details and careful observ –” I paused mid-sentence, and not to take a bite. My mind had been rifling through everything Qwerty had said and done this case, looking for the clues he usually left me, and that I was slow enough only to understand long afterwards. Now, like a secretary interrupting their boss’s meeting, I felt my memory interrupt my train of thought with a flash of a moment late the previous day – a memory of Qwerty, face hidden, eyes alive with tension. He was saying something, and it appeared in my mind before the memory had even finished speaking, words that I had completely forgotten in the ensuing chaos. Words he’d spoken mere minutes before being caught by Hangfire, and smuggled away somewhere I’d yet to explain. “Are you also boarding this train?” he had asked, and I had asked the wrong question, and in my mind, I asked it again and again, trying to understand his hint. “Because there won’t be another chance to do so,” the image of Qwerty said, and like a bolt from the blue, I understood. Like a fool, I understood, after all this time, with the last bite of an incredible sandwich halfway to my mouth. “Are you alright, Snicket?” Jake was asking, peering at me as if from the other side of glass. Moxie groaned. “Oh, no,” she said. “You’ve figured something out, haven’t you, Snicket?” She started taking furious bites out of her sandwich as Jake looked on with mingled bafflement and sadness. “They’re sandwiches, Moxie,” he moaned. “You don’t have to hurry them. They’re meant to be portable…” I took my own last bite, and savoured it as much as I could while needing to hurry. “We have somewhere we need to be,” I said. “It might just be incredibly dangerous and we may be risking our lives. Is anyone volunteering?” They all stood up. I felt prouder and more frightened than ever. “We can take the Dilemma,” Cleo said, aligning her knife and fork on her plate. “I’ll drive; Pip and Squeak probably still need practice. Where to, Snicket?” I was already halfway to the door. “Stain’d Station,” I called. “I think Hangfire plans to sabotage the railway.”
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Post by gliquey on Jan 21, 2015 14:17:14 GMT -5
"like how the second time we met you knew my name, even though I hadn’t been introduced" - Very, very nice. I remembered this situation when Snicket brought it up, but would have never noticed the unclosed hole otherwise.
I think Snicket was rather confident to confront Ellington as a witch so cockily - given that he thought Carr had been the witch before, it was a big risk. The second appearance of the witch (or rather, first appearance of the second witch) should have completely confused him, although I guess he did notice the costuming issue that readers couldn't have known. In a previous comment, I noted that neither Carr nor Ellington could have been the witch: I was wrong both times. Ellington couldn't have been the first witch, but Carr certainly was. I think the witch vanishing is my favourite disappearance solution in ?a/b: it's incredibly simple, but still very difficult to predict.
"Since then I've done many things I would never have thought I'd do" - Carr sounds much like any member of Count Olaf's theatre troupe. "Armstrong Feint" - Way to give the game away, Carr.
I'd been looking at the Qwerty hint quite a lot and I didn't get anywhere - Did Qwerty mean that there was a crucial clue to their disappearance that Snicket would have noticed/found had he boarded the train? (Nope - that mystery was solved a few chapters ago.) Did Qwerty mean that Snicket wouldn't get another chance to talk to Ellington/himself unless he boarded the train? (Nope - he's seen both people since.) Did Qwerty mean that Snicket wouldn't have any more opportunities to leave Stain'd-by-the-Sea, and that he should consider returning to the city (perhaps even hinting something related to his sister)?
But Hangfire sabotaging the railway makes sense of Qwerty's comment - it means Qwerty has to have some connection to Hangfire, but that was also true the moment he disappeared from the train. I imagine Snicket has a better idea of Qwerty's allegiances than I do (which would indicate Qwerty definitely was innocent in ?3, because that's what Snicket assumed), and has mentioned the book recommendations already. I wonder how these will be handled in ?4 - it's certainly possible that Snicket has noticed them and Qwerty is planting them there, but I don't reckon they will be mentioned at all. They can just exist out-of-universe, for only the readers to understand.
As for Qwerty being the one from V.F.D. watching Snicket, I'm interested to see whether that's going to be true in this canon. I'm reminded of the moments in TSS that make you think the Baudelaires' journey was all a test by V.F.D. to see if they are worthy to recruit. However, I've no doubt that - at least in Handler's series - Hangfire is a real villain and no V.F.D. member (except possibly Theodora) is doing anything to help them.
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Post by Dante on Jan 21, 2015 15:51:38 GMT -5
Thank you for your detailed comments, gliquey. They're just what I wanted to hear to believe that the effect of the story has been what I intended.
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Post by Hermes on Jan 21, 2015 16:24:46 GMT -5
Sorry for my continued silence. I am reading this with interest, but have no time for detailed comments; I have finished marking exams, but of course all the things that were set on one side during that time have now come back to haunt me. Let me just say in passing that I like the cameos by Olaf and the Duchess, and the forward-looking allusion to the log-chopping episode in TBB.
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Post by Dante on Jan 23, 2015 3:37:29 GMT -5
CHAPTER TWELVE The Dilemma shot through the deserted streets faster than I could hope. As Cleo deftly and slightly recklessly manoeuvred the vehicle down narrow avenues and around tight corners, I explained my theory. “Yesterday, Hangfire performed a switch at Stain’d Station, Qwerty and Ellington for Kellar and Ornette,” I explained, glossing over the details of the switch as best I could. “I figured out how Hangfire exchanged the two pairs aboard the train, but I didn’t know where they’d gone afterwards, as the train was in plain view and had no hidden avenues of escape. Then I remembered that Qwerty had warned me that the trains might stop running to the town, and now that I know Hangfire has been absent from everything that’s happened since then, I think Qwerty must have been warning me that he had a plan for the railway. Think about it – not many trains come through, sure, but it’s the most efficient way in and out of town. If the Mitchums were to call for backup from the city, or my organisation decided to get involved in what’s going on here, they’d come on the railway. If Hangfire sabotages it, the town will be practically cut off.” Moxie, who was next to me in the back seat with Pip and Squeak – Squeak, as usual, sitting in the footwell with his brother above him – grabbed my arm. “That reminds me of something,” she said. “I think the telephone lines run through the viaduct out of town. If Hangfire attacks the viaduct, we won’t even be able to communicate with the outside world. The next town is hours away even by car. Hangfire will be able to do whatever he wants.” The situation was worse than I thought, so I rushed on. “If Hangfire wanted to perform some act of sabotage against the railway, it’s not his style to do anything in plain sight, so that made me think that maybe there’s some kind of hidden passageway or tunnels beneath the station. And then I remembered that there are service hatches between the rail lines at the station! They probably lead to a basement floor for the electrics and storage in the station. Most of the hatches looked unused, but I’ll bet there’s one below where the train pulled in this morning that’s cleaned up and totally accessible. Hangfire would just have needed to sneak Ellington and Qwerty out the door of the carriage facing the back wall of the station, between the wheels, and then into the hatch, and they’d be away.” “If there are service hatches like that along the rails,” Cleo said, her eyes on the road, “they probably run all the way out beneath the viaduct and to Offshore Island. If there’s a way into them from the Wade Academy basement, Hangfire would have been able to march Ellington and Qwerty straight out to Wade Academy, and work on whatever his sabotage method is from pretty much next-door to his headquarters.” “And since the trains come in so rarely, the station is mostly deserted,” Pip pointed out. “Hangfire could’ve been using the viaduct passageway to sneak in and out of town all this time!” “That has to be his target – and ours,” I said firmly. “As soon as we’re at the station we should head straight down there. I’ve no idea what we’ll find, but whatever it is, it can’t be good.” “Does anyone have a flashlight?” Moxie asked. It was a question I never thought to ask, which usually meant it was the right one. “There’s one in the glove compartment,” Cleo said, gesturing to a compartment just in front of where Jake was sitting beside her. “Since I was kidnapped, I’ve started travelling prepared for anything.” “With any luck, we won’t need to be,” Jake commented nervously. “If we find anything suspicious, there’s probably no reason why we couldn’t just leave and report it to the authorities.” “To the Mitchums?” I asked. Jake shrugged. “They can’t ignore straight facts, Snicket. If Hangfire’s cut the telephone wires or something, that’s vandalism. They can send someone to fix it, and send themselves to investigate it.” “Seems a bit tame for Hangfire,” Squeak cut in. “That’s what worries me,” I said, and then the blur of grey buildings against a grey sky outside the windows stopped moving. We were there. We unloaded from the car like clowns in the circus, and let the carved octopus with its many broken arms welcome us into Stain’d Station. The station was, as expected, completely empty. It was the end of the line, and the only train that ever came to it came only once a month, or as little as it could help, to put it another way. With the train’s monthly visit having happened yesterday, nobody had any reason to pay attention to the train station for weeks. Anything could happen here, and nobody would care. We hurried over to the farthest platform, and looked down at the tracks. Set between them, right in the middle of where the train carriage had parked itself earlier for Hangfire to sweep Qwerty and Ellington away from, was a rusty hatch in the middle of the travel. Though the hatch was rusty, there were no weeds growing up around it as there were around all the other hatches, and the hinge looked well-oiled. I jumped down between the tracks. Even though no trains were due for a long time, I felt a little nervous being there, with the ghost of a train sitting on me. The others slowly followed suit as I looked down at the hatch. “Won’t it be locked?” Moxie asked. I shook my head. “At the best of times, the staff probably relied on it being in the middle of the train tracks as being security enough,” I said. “The only question is whether Hangfire’s locked it up from the inside.” “He probably hasn’t bothered,” Jake said. “The guy seems pretty confident in himself. Remember when he was just driving through town in a van marked ‘Department of Truancy,’ wearing a mask even when the bell hadn’t rung, waving a club around?” “If you act like you have a right to be somewhere, oftentimes people will believe it,” Cleo nodded. “Especially if you’re an adult,” Squeak complained. I acted like I had a right to do so and flipped up the service hatch. I saw a ladder bolted to the wall, and darkness. It looked like a hole cut into the world, one that led to absolutely nowhere, and if I climbed into it, I would be absolutely nowhere, too. It was the kind of darkness in which anyone could do anything, no matter how good their nocturnal vision was. It was the sort of place almost designed not to let in light. Probably its unknown corridors had never seen natural light since they were built, and any lightbulbs in there, I guessed, would probably have burnt out long ago. Behind me there was a click, and a yellow flare illuminated the depths. The ladder descended about an adult’s height into a narrow little corridor, cramped and featureless. I looked behind me, and there was Jake, offering me the flashlight. “Nobody’s sneaking up on any of us this time,” he said. “For better or for worse, there’ll be no hiding places down there.” “For better or for worse,” I repeated. Those words could have been the caption for my entire time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Then, one by one, we descended the ladder and entered Hangfire’s domain. As part of my schooling, I had been in a great number of dark, underground passageways hidden beneath perfectly ordinary locations, but there weren’t many of them that my organisation didn’t control. This time, I had no right to be there. Nobody had a right to be there any more, it seemed. It was cold like a building that had never been lived in, colder even than being outside. The brick walls of the corridors were patched with damp oozing through from the earth behind, and the ceiling was a mess of thick electric cables and cobwebs. Occasionally we would stumble across things left in corners or right across the path – brimming toolboxes, hard hats, even a sandwich and a long-evaporated mug of coffee – that looked as if they had been laid down by someone who had every intention of returning within minutes, and never had. The spectres of their intentions were forever before my eyes. The corridor zig-zagged for a little way before meeting up with a junction on our right and veering off diagonally to the left. Shining his torch way up the left path, we could make out the shadow of another junction. “These corridors must all run right beneath the tracks,” Cleo said. “All the paths on the right will just lead to more dead ends where the tracks finish, although some of them might also lead on to storerooms under the station.” “There are a bunch of outbuildings of no importance behind the station, too,” Pip revealed. “There are probably branches off to those as well. But I guess that’s not really where we’re interested in going, is it?” “I doubt it,” I said. “There’s exactly one line of communication between the town and the outside world, and Offshore Island, come to that. Hangfire won’t have wasted his time anywhere else.” “It’s like that ancient monster with lots of heads,” Moxie said. “Getting distracted by all the heads won’t get you anywhere. You have to go right to the root of the problem.” “Or the root of the branch line, in this case,” I said. “Breathe in. It looks like it only gets narrower.” It did, the passageway becoming more cramped as we travelled in the direction of the viaduct. As dust clouded around me and filth scraped off the walls around me and onto my shoulders, I found myself not regretting that I hadn’t cleaned up yet from a night in the Clusterous Forest. If anyone didn’t like spiders, they didn’t show it, or maybe they were thinking of something they were more afraid of. Still, it was noticeable that the ground beneath our feet had a kind of furrow cut through its layers of years-old dirt. Someone had indeed been using the tunnel regularly, though neglecting to brush away the many cobwebs that would doubtless have draped themselves around a taller person’s head. Whenever I glanced back, I could see Jake and Cleo stooping, not because the roof was too low for them but as the cobwebs were. Too many of those and they would start looking like a ghost. The sound of my footsteps changed beneath my feet, and I looked down. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all transitioning into the same brick material. If you were to flip me upside-down, I wouldn’t know my left and my right from my up and my down. We were probably entering the sturdy walls of the viaduct that led from the mainland shore, over the drained valley and into the town, passing through Offshore Island along the way. No wonder the passageway had been getting so narrow. It was probably heavily reinforced. A tunnel like this probably only existed for maintenance workers to inspect the line without having to walk on the railway tracks for miles without anywhere to stand aside from the trains. There were, of course, no more branches to the tunnel, and it ran completely straight. Occasional ladders led up to rusty hatches above our heads, but we had no interest in those. There really was no hiding, no escape from our destination now. All conversation between us stopped; all stumbles and hesitation. We had only a long straight line before us. There was nothing more to comment on, merely the necessity of enduring our growing sense of tension, our imaginations feverishly sorting through idea after idea for what Hangfire could have arranged, our lips constantly hovering on the wrong question “Are we there yet?” And then we were, one way or another. The flashlight beam fell upon a blank wall. I stopped, and everyone else stopping behind me jolted me a few steps forward until I nearly fell down. “What’s the hold-up?” yelled Pip from behind. “A brick wall,” I called back. “The path ends here.” “How can it?” asked Cleo, buried somewhere in the middle of the queue. “It doesn’t make sense to end a tunnel like this halfway across the viaduct.” I played the flashlight over the bricks some more. They weren’t the same colour as the bricks of the walls, and mortar oozed between them. “This is recent,” I said. “Hangfire must have walled it up to stop us from getting through.” “He can’t have. He’d be walling up his own secret entrance to the town if he did that,” Moxie argued. “And anyone could just climb through one of the hatches and go on top of the viaduct until they got to the other side of the wall,” Pip added. “This doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t stop or inconvenience anyone except Hangfire.” We were silent, and in the silence I thought I could hear something, like distant footsteps, or a kind of scratching noise. Its source seemed invisible. I took one last step closer to the wall, just in case there was some clue to be gleaned from it that could only be seen slightly closer to, and stubbed my toe on something. I had been so distracted by the exciting prospect of a blank wall that I had completely missed a large object lying on the floor. I turned the flashlight to my feet, and gasped. What I saw was a pair of glass tanks, one of the ones used in the Wade Academy’s basement, one filled with a faintly viscous-looking green liquid, and the other filled with a liquid that was a dark blue, with miniscule bubbles of froth upon its surface. A plastic lid had been taped onto each of the tanks, making them more like glass cubes of liquid, and through these lids a pair of tubes was poking deep into each the liquids. These tubes led out of the liquid and entered either end of a cylindrical metal object which had a number of electrical wires poking out of it, two of which descended to the floor of the passageway and into the back of a round alarm clock, with jangly bells fitted to either side of it like comical animal’s ears. I wasn’t laughing, though. I had seen enough movies to have a pretty good idea of what I was looking at, and I was pretty certain that the item was a bomb. “What’s wrong, Snicket?” Moxie asked, nudging me in the back and moving me dangerously close to knocking into the bomb again. In answer, I stepped around it to the narrow gap between the bomb and the wall, and shone my torch down at the device. Moxie gasped too, and clasped her hands over her mouth, as though keeping hold of her breath. “Is that really…?” she began, and looked at me. “Is this what I think it is?” I motioned her to duck low so the others could see. It was tough in that cramped corridor, but soon everyone had the opportunity to gasp at the likely death machine Hangfire had left there like a gift. “Th-that’s a bomb, isn’t it?” Pip stammered, pointing down at it. “It’s got to be, it’s got a clock on it.” “So do wristwatches,” I pointed out, as if that made it any less of a bomb, “and speaking of which, what time is it?” “Right now,” Cleo asked, leaning way back, as if she didn’t want to be any closer to the bomb than necessary, “or when it blows up?” She stretched a long finger of her own down to point at the clock. “It spells it out right there on its face.” I bent around and looked at the clock. The time its hands pointed to were at about thirteen minutes to one o’ clock, and I told her so. But protruding through the face of the clock were two tiny copper wires, part of an electrical circuit, one just above the numerals XII and one just below the numeral I. In other words, when the minute hand was at twelve and the hour hand was at one, they would complete an electrical circuit. In other words, the bomb was due to go off at one o’ clock in the afternoon, in what was now less than thirteen minutes. That sent the blood draining from our faces and haring off to hide deep inside our bodies. But, as I had reflected earlier, there was now nowhere to hide and nowhere to escape to. “This is insane,” Jake muttered, pulling out a handkerchief and mopping his face with it. “Blowing up the viaduct? Really?” “If Hangfire’s planning something as obvious as that, he really must be nearly ready to complete his plans,” Moxie said. “Maybe he walled up the passage to protect the tunnel to Wade Academy from filling with fire,” Squeak babbled. “I saw that in a movie once – fire just went whooshing through corridors from an explosion like a flood. He’s probably built up a whole bunch of walls down his end, but over here…” I quickly looked at Cleo. “You’re a chemist, Cleo,” I said, trying to keep my voice level rather than spread panic. “Any idea what these chemicals are, and how this machine might work?” “Oh, I know what they are,” Cleo said, not even taking a closer look. “One of them is infamous. The other I work with myself.” She pointed at the blue liquid first, and said, “That’s a rare chemical compound, gammanitroglyceric acid – a volatile substance made even more reactive through a complex chemical process to liquidise it. You might know that, when you mix an acid with an alkaline substance, they neutralise each other, but in the case of gammanitroglyceric acid, if you mix it with an alkali as strong as itself then the chemical breakdown releases an enormous amount of energy – an explosive amount.” She paused to chew on her lip and cast a nervous look at Jake. “It’s normally used in weapons manufacture and mining operations,” she went on. “Let me guess,” I said. “The green stuff is a strong alkali.” She nodded grimly. “And it gets worse,” she said. “I told you I work with that myself, as part of my invisible ink research – it’s an extremely potent chemical extracted from plants I gather at the edge of the Clusterous Forest. It’s also the chemical Hangfire was filling fire hydrants in town with back during his arson spree. It’s an accelerant, highly flammable and makes any fire burn faster – but more than that, it makes any chemical reaction it’s a part of stronger.” “What’s it called?” Moxie asked. “I’ve taken to calling it clustergrease, though it doesn’t have a formal name,” Cleo answered, staring down at the gloopy green fluid. “It has a chemical composition I’ve never read about before. It might just be unique to this area.” “So if the clustergrease were to mix with the acid,” Pip slowly outlined, “I’m guessing it would cause a pretty big explosion.” “I wonder if something like this is what the Inhumane Society used to blow up Colonel Colophon’s statue thirteen years ago,” Moxie mused, as if to distance herself from the present. “It’s certainly more than enough to blow a chunk out of this viaduct,” Cleo admitted. “That electrical device in the middle probably pipes them into each other when the clock reaches a certain time.” “And when is that time now?” Jake swiftly asked. I looked at the clock again. Eight minutes left. “There’s still time enough to run,” Squeak hurriedly squealed. “Everyone who doesn’t want to try and defuse this should do just that,” I said. “Go, now. There’s no sense in more of us risking our lives than need to.” “Can we defuse it?” Moxie asked, looking first from me and then to Cleo and back again. “We could smash one of the chemical vats,” Pip suggested. Cleo shook her head. “Wouldn’t work. When the other chemical starts getting piped into that side it would just pour onto the floor as well and cause the same reaction.” “What about carrying it up the ladder and throwing it off the viaduct?” Moxie proposed. I shook my head. “Look at the bases,” I said, pointing to where a layer of grey was pasted between the tanks and the ground. “They’ve been mortared down. And it sounds to me like you couldn’t throw it far enough not to risk structural damage to the viaduct anyway.” “Can we cut the wires or tubes?” Jake asked, and then shook his head just as quickly as he’d asked. “No, I’ve seen the movies too. They’ll be rigged with some kind of electric trigger that’ll just start the bomb right off there and then.” “Then what can we do?” asked Moxie. Everyone looked at me. I looked at the timer. It was down to six minutes. Soon there wouldn’t even be time to run. “Okay, let’s analyse this,” I said, though attempting any kind of complex planning in a hurry is usually a bad idea. It is as if you were to trip over your feet every time you went running. “We can’t break it. We can’t move it. Is there some kind of third option between those two?” Cleo looked like she wanted to stride about in thought, but there was no wriggle room for any of us. “We could, we could…” Jake was trying to snap his fingers as if they would conjure an answer into existence. “Um…” We all wracked our brains in the least comfortable way we could manage for a minute, before looking at the clock again. It stood, of course, at only five minutes to one. Thinking under pressure usually makes you think only about the pressure, and a bomb is a great deal of pressure indeed; death is the ultimate deadline. Moxie snapped her fingers, to Jake’s chagrin. “Could we tamper with it somehow?” “Sabotage Hangfire’s own sabotage plan?” Squeak squeaked. “I like it.” Pip peered down at the clock. “Could we tamper with the timer?” he asked. “Just take the clock hands off, or wind them back maybe. Like how some garages’ll set back the mileage on a car to make it look newer than it is…” He looked up nervously at the rest of us. “Er, or so I’ve heard.” “Does anyone here have a secret passion for mechanics or electronics?” I asked as I looked around. “Pip, Squeak, would you take a look at it?” “Oh my no,” Pip shuddered, backing away. “We have a hard enough time driving a car, really.” “Jackie at Moray Wheels used to handle the tuning-up for us,” Squeak explained, “but I guess she’s with Hangfire now.” Four minutes. Jake snapped his fingers, successfully this time. “We may not have a mechanic or an electrician, but we do have a chemist!” he exclaimed, and turned to Cleo. “Come on, Miss Knight… there must be some way we can tamper with those chemicals to spoil them like week-old milk.” “I have been thinking about it, and under normal circumstances it might be possible,” Cleo replied. She wasn’t showing her fear the way the rest of us were, but I could see her brow fixedly furrowed behind her glasses. “We’re not under normal circumstances, though. For instance, the clustergrease we might be able to do away with if we could set it on fire, but I wouldn’t want to risk that in a closed system with the gammanitroglyceric acid. Added to that, we have no way of igniting it, nor of penetrating the casing in order to ignite it. Another dead end, I’m afraid.” I wasn’t even looking at her at this point, rude though it was. My eyes were on the countdown. Three minutes left. “Hypothetically,” Moxie started, using a word which here means “in theory” or “in a fictional situation,” “what about the acid? If it’s so reactive, could you set it off early or neutralise it somehow?” Cleo looked down at the rich blue acid with a rueful expression. “I suppose,” she said, “that if we’d brought a bucket of water, even a bottle with us, we could have smashed the tank – risking getting covered in acid or setting the bomb off, of course – and thrown water over the acid to neutralise it. It’s such a reactive substance that even that small a quantity of a more neutral liquid could have neutralised all of it.” “So what you’re saying,” Pip said, very quietly, “is that we should have run while we had the chance.” Cleo gave a slight nod. “Yes, we probably should. And now, we have no chance.” Two minutes left. I no longer remember, but this must have been the point at which it dawned on me that I had brought my friends here to die. That I had warned them it might happen was no excuse. I had placed them in an unknown danger and it had proven to be deadly. I had been unbelievably irresponsible, as I was sure Theodora would have spared no time in lecturing me if my ashen bones could hear. Irresponsible – a word to put on my tombstone. I had taken responsibility for my friends, I had taken responsibility for Stain’d-by-the-Sea, I had even taken responsibility for a daring joint enterprise with my sister, and in every single respect, I had failed. In the rankings of success at their endeavours, my organisation ranked Theodora fifty-second out of all the chaperones they had appointed, which was fifty-two of them. I could see that I would similarly take a posthumous place at the bottom of the table. I looked around at the people who were with me, taking what little responsibility I could to ensure I didn’t shirk my feelings of utter failure at the last possible moment I could feel them. Pip and Squeak Bellerophon, younger and far more independent than I was, attempting to hold together a taxi service that their father was clearly never going to return to. Jake Hix, even for his age a chef of stunning talents who could have walked right into the city and opened a restaurant called Jake’s and hit it off immediately. Cleo Knight, a brilliant chemist on the verge of developing the seemingly impossible, invisible ink that actually worked, and who knows what else over the course of a lifetime that was shortly to be cut tragically short. And of course Moxie Mallahan, poor Moxie, who too often I had taken either for granted or not seriously, though she was the finest reporter I’d ever known in terms of sheer tenacity in pursuing a story. I’d failed her, and everyone else, and as the clock ticked over to just one minute left, I reflected on the last happy time we’d had together – not so long ago, at Hungry’s, all of us gathering together for a delicious meal even after the shock of Carr’s betrayal, after she had threatened us with… The laudanum needle. Just for a second, I froze, to make sure if I hadn’t imagined it, if I wasn’t completely deluded and grasping at straws. Then I asked a question to a brilliant chemist. “Cleo,” I said, and I pointed to her pocket, “if we don’t have any water, would laudanum do?” Everyone else froze in their fretting as well. All of us turned to Cleo. Her hand began to descend towards her pocket, where earlier she had placed a potentially deadly weapon. Her hand was shaking. “It’s a near-neutral substance,” she muttered, more to herself than to the rest of us. “Near enough for our purposes… The perfect delivery mechanism, too.” She slowly drew the needle instrument from out of her pocket; a pen-shaped piece of carved wood, ending in a long, slender point. “I think it’ll work.” “Thirty seconds!” screamed Squeak, pointing wildly at the clock. His scream seemed to shatter the ice of terror that had locked us all in place, and we clasped at the walls or at each other as Cleo lunged down towards the acid tank, needle in hand. She aimed it straight for one of the tubes leading deep into deadly blue substance. The needle, sharpened to who knows how terrible a point, easily penetrated the plastic tubing. Cleo slipped her thumb onto the needle’s plunger. Then she paused. “Of course,” she said, “if it’s less neutral than I remember, it’ll either do nothing at all, or cause the acid to explode straight away.” “We’ll all die anyway!” Moxie cried. “Just do it!” All of our voices joined in horrified unison for those final three words. Cleo drove her thumb into the plunger without a moment’s hesitation for breath. We all saw the dark, red-brown fluid of the laudanum pour down the tubing, and then swirl into the acid like a cloud, where it drifted and mingled and snaked away in countless shadowy marine shapes. The whole tankful of acid seemed to cloud over with it, and go black. There was a loud click! as the clock hit zero. This was followed by a quiet whizz and whirr within the electronic cylinder that joined the tubes of the two tanks. With a hiss like an opening drinks can, dark liquid was sucked up out of the tank Cleo had injected, and green sludge was drawn in fits and starts up the pipe from the clustergrease, and with a gurgling and splashing, the contents of each tank began to pour into the other. We watched as dark liquid spread through the interior of the green clustergrease like a stain, and green clustergrease began to drip in faintly visible blobs in the dark tank. And that was all. There was no explosion, as you well knew. How else could I have written this report? All that happened was that the six of us pretty much just collapsed with relief and exhaustion, Jake and Moxie sobbing quietly with happiness, Pip and Squeak and Cleo apparently too stunned and desensitised to really react at all. That was probably why nobody saw me get up and leave a moment later. They didn’t see me walk back down the passageway until I found a ladder up to the top of the viaduct. They didn’t see me climb up and, with difficulty, shoulder aside the hatch that lay between me and the open sky. They didn’t see me breathe in the cool air and feel the refreshing wind on my face, didn’t see me turn to look along the viaduct to where, not so far away, an island like a great pile of stones, ringed around with a wall of red brick and sheltering a tall square building sat like a toad. They didn’t see me look up at the tall round tower that rose up above that island, where a terrible person was no doubt watching at that very instant. That person would have seen me, though. I wanted him to. I wanted him to know that we had beaten him, and would do again.
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