CHAPTER THREE
I once told a person I admired that showing up early was a sign of a noble person. All I can say is that I tried, and yet still the sun was barely visible over the horizon as I finally arrived at Stain’d Station, breathless enough to have to stop and appreciate the scenery. Stain’d Station wasn’t much to look at any more, for while it had once been a grand building decorated with elaborate carvings of octopi, with platforms enough to hold eight separate trains, and a roof high enough to contain the stormcloud of steam those trains would vent, it was now only open in the same way a murder victim is open, lying fallen in the street with a gaping wound in its side. The train came by just once a month now, which wouldn’t be any time soon, and probably the service would soon be cancelled altogether. The cliff edges on the opposite side of the building crept closer every day. I could already see it in my mind, the building falling in one day, the cliff snatching it all into the abyss, and the viaduct being left hanging onto nothing, like the arches of a famous Roman building I had seen in history books. Then I would be able to see clearly the red sun squatting in the bottom of the drained valley, casting a bloody shadow over the rippling sea of unnatural weeds called the Clusterous Forest, where black trees grew and where one of my organisation’s submarines had fallen long ago.
All in all, then, I was glad I hadn’t asked Ornette to stay in Stain’d Station itself, although that would have defeated the very purpose of the mission I had given her. No, I had asked her to watch the station, and what lay beyond it, and probably she was watching me right now, gasping in the street to recover my breath for running up several flights of stairs. I hoped it counted as being a little less late if she saw me down here.
The district around Stain’d Station had originally served to serve the station and its many passengers, with hotels, eateries, and tourist information, but these days, nobody came to Stain’d; people only left, and they had left the hotels, eateries, and tourist information centres, too, left them empty and unstaffed and unused. There was a big hotel right across the street from the station, big enough that it had probably failed faster than the letters spelling out its name could fall from over the front door, where they now lay in a disordered jumble that even I couldn’t rearrange. But when they had locked those front doors for the final time and chained them shut to make absolutely sure then they had forgotten to lock the back door. Looking around to make sure I wasn’t being followed, although I knew well I was being watched, I slipped around the back of the hotel and through the door and into a stairwell, and from there up more flights of stairs than I cared for, and like all stairwells in the world, each flight felt longer and steeper than the last. By the time I was at the top I had no breath left to call out, and had only my deep, noisy breaths to announce my presence as I opened the door to room 215.
“I was beginning to think something had happened, Snicket,” Ornette’s voice said, the peak of her cap telling me that her face was pointed the other way, towards the hotel room’s window. She sounded halfway between worried and halfway between being annoyed, the way most friends will be when you’re late to see them.
“It did,” I said, “but not to me.” I took a step towards her, but had to adjust it in mid-air. The floor was littered with elaborate creations of folded paper. Paper birds perched atop the empty wardrobe, a few paper apples lay in a bowl looking more appetising than the ones in the Swinster Pharmacy, and on the bedside table a paper cup had a wisp of paper smoke curling up from inside. Ornette could make just about anything out of paper, if she had enough paper, and sometimes I wondered if her real talent was finding enough; she could probably make a complete replica Bombinating Beast if I asked her to, and I thought I might, if I found that that statue was still in the window of the pharmacy the next morning. I looked at the paper model I had just missed stepping on. It was a paper footprint. “I see you’ve been keeping yourself busy,” I said.
“I had to, because the job didn’t do it for me,” she said, as I carefully tiptoed my way across the floor to join her, leaning on the back of a sofa below the window. A pair of binoculars sat on the window ledge between us, borrowed from Ornette’s uncles. “I know you said it was just a precaution, but it was too good a precaution, Snicket,” she went on. “As far as I can see, there’s nothing happening out there, not even a paper aeroplane.”
The window looked out over Stain’d Station – literally over, so that, as I had imagined, you could see the viaduct beyond as it stretched over the waving arms of seaweed in the Clusterous Forest below, narrowing to a needlepoint as it arched its way over the drained valley to eventually meet the far distant mainland. But between Stain’d Station and the mainland there was one another stop the viaduct made on land, and that was Offshore Island, a small island a little way out from the town itself. The viaduct passed over one edge of the island, and the rest was occupied by a crumbling red-brick wall surrounding a tall red-brick building, blank-faced and square like a monolith. This was Wade Academy – Hangfire’s headquarters and hideout, brazenly planted in plain sight, and wholly impenetrable. The whole island was patrolled by the adult members of the Inhumane Society, watching for intruders and escapees, while the children inside spent their time chopping black logs dragged up from the Clusterous Forest for some reason I couldn’t yet fathom. A tall red tower, taller than the school, also pointed upwards from within the high walls, and I was sure Hangfire had his own watchers surveying the town from there, and ringing the tower bell when Hangfire had some dirty work to do in town. The townsfolk of Stain’d-by-the-Sea associated the tolling of this bell with various things; for many, it was a fabricated medical risk called salt lung that was supposedly associated with excess salt particles the wind picked up from the valley floor, but for others, the older, the more gullible, the bell meant something else. It meant that the Bombinating Beast was out hunting. The only defence was to stay inside and wear a special mask, and funnily enough this defence was the same against both salt lung and the Beast, but in fact it was to Hangfire’s convenience that people stay out of his way and not get suspicious at masked people wandering the town’s streets.
Offshore Island, Stain’d Station, and the viaduct that linked them – this is what I had asked Ornette to spend her time doing today, and indeed which all the members of The Association Of Associates had been performing in shifts for quite some time: Watching those places frequented by Hangfire, and alerting the rest of the group if any members of the Inhumane Society were seen creeping from their lair into town. They’d been very quiet just lately, though – very suspiciously quiet.
“Oh wait, I tell a lie, there was something,” Ornette suddenly announced. She reached over to a shelf nearby and picked up a paper model from next to a real apple core. Solemnly, she turned to me and placed the cuboid of folded paper into my hands.
“You made a paper truck,” I said.
“No, there
was a paper truck,” she said. “I just made one so that I wouldn’t forget, at least not for too long.”
I put the truck down. Ornette had worked hard on it; the wheels actually turned, and it rolled unevenly away and fell off the sofa. “Why would you forget it? An actual truck made of paper driving around the streets sounds pretty memorable to me.”
“Don’t joke around with me, Snicket. It wasn’t made of paper, it contained paper,” Ornette snippily replied. “A few hours ago, a truck drove out of town and right up to the gates of the Wade Academy.”
“It drove out of town?” I asked. “It didn’t come from the school originally?”
“I doubt it,” Ornette replied. “Look closer at my model, Snicket. That’s a mail truck. That’s why I didn’t think much of it at first. But the other kids spent a while bringing bundles of paper out of the school for the postman to pile up in the back of the truck, and then eventually they were done and the truck drove back into town and the kids went back into school. Sharon Haines was overseeing the whole thing.”
Sharon Haines was the face of the Department of Education and Wade Academy, but like so many faces in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, it was nothing but a mask. There hadn’t been a real Department of Education for a very long time, and no Wade Academy for even longer, probably. There was only the Inhumane Society, which had imitated both organisations for its own ends, that end being gathering all of the town’s children in Wade Academy to work at some purpose that was inscrutable to me. Inscrutable means unfathomable. Unfathomable means I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. I’d been in Wade Academy and escaped, twice by now, with my friends and associates in The Association Of Associates, but the rest of the town’s children had chosen to remain behind because they knew something we didn’t. I should have listened to them. Rather, I should have made myself find the chance to listen to them, especially to people like Kellar Haines, who had been torn between his friends and his family and had finally chosen the latter, and Carr Carter, who had always been a traitor sent by Hangfire to manipulate me.
Traitors. There had been a traitor in Ink Inc., too, probably; that was what Cleo’s mother, Doretta Knight, had told her in a letter she had sent recently. Back in the time of Ingrid Nummet Knight and the glory of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, someone in the company had been leaking the company’s secrets to the recently-formed Inhumane Society. In the same letter, Doretta Knight mentioned that she’d been friends with the Inhumane Society’s founder, a girl named Picacea Plover, until the latter’s disappearance. I don’t know if Cleo had spotted the connection, but I don’t think I was being paranoid in making it.
“Earth to Snicket, Earth to Snicket,” Ornette’s voice reached me, with the gusts from a paper fan she was waving in my face. “You’re drifting off again, Snicket.”
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head as if I could shake off all my questions and doubts. “I have a lot to think about. But this mail delivery, though…”
“Even with binoculars, I couldn’t make out what the papers were, obviously,” Ornette explained. “But whatever they were, Wade Academy was clearly mailing out a heck of a lot of them, and I don’t think it was their school newsletter.”
“Enough to maildrop the whole town?” I asked.
Ornette nodded. “There really aren’t that many people left now, Snicket. I’d say they’d easily cover everyone.”
“If that’s the case, we’ll probably find out what they have to say very soon,” I said, and I started to settle down on the couch for a long night. “Maybe even by the time you get home. It’s late and it’s my shift, Ornette. You should get home and get some sleep.”
Ornette looked at me, and looked away, and looked uneasy, uncomfortable suddenly, like I was an eel slithering around rather than a boy going nowhere. “About that. There’s something else I didn’t mention. Not something I’ve seen, and not something out there. Just a vibe, that I’m getting at home…”
My eyes should have been on the street, but instead they were on her. A friend sharing an uncomfortable problem might as well be sharing an uncomfortable seat; there is no way you could be thinking of anything else. “Your uncles’ home, or your father’s?”
Ornette’s uncles, known as the Talkie brothers, were two-thirds of the town’s official fire department, an organisation I have some respect for, although I prefer volunteering. Her father, Prosper Lost, was the other third, but he spent the other two-thirds of his own time running the Lost Arms, a hotel I had the grave misfortune to be living in and which I had considerably less respect for, although I had changed my opinion of the proprietor for the better recently. “Both, sort of, but mainly my father,” Ornette went on, her eyes now firmly fixed on a sheet of paper she had conjured up and was now rapidly folding every which way. “It’s partly why I volunteered to do this in the first place, to get out of there for a while. Not just because this is important, but because he doesn’t approve.”
“Nobody’s ever approved of what we’re doing here, I think,” I said, respecting the way she was avoiding my gaze by avoiding hers, too, and looking out at the darkening town. The light was almost gone now, but there might be moonlight to replace it. “What we’re doing is dangerous and irresponsible and not for children. Everyone’s guardians are saying the same thing – not just in our organisation, but in the whole world.”
“Maybe they’re right,” Ornette admitted. “Even if they knew everything, maybe they wouldn’t approve. Maybe even we wouldn’t, because we don’t know everything either. Maybe we’re wrong about all of it.” She looked out of the window, and I could see her eyes narrow as she tried to look at something very, very far in the distance, but she didn’t pick up the binoculars. “I think he’s thinking of taking us out of town,” she said abruptly. “Giving up and leaving for good. It was after I was kidnapped by Hangfire that one time… He realised that, for what little business there was in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, there was even less security. Especially for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. The hardest thing of all to say was what we both knew for sure, which is that her father was right. Getting out of Stain’d-by-the-Sea might well be the safest thing to do, even if the consequence was letting Hangfire get away with everything he was going to do – and more to the point, everything he’d already done. If there was any justice in the world, someone had to bring him to account. It shouldn’t have been us, but there was nobody else.
“So anyway,” Ornette picked up, after we’d silently shared that thought, “that’s what I wanted to say. That if I walk out of here and go home right now, it might be the last time we see each other. Well, I know we haven’t known each other long, but it’s leaving everything else, too, and you’re part and parcel of that, you and Jake and Moxie and the Lost Arms and Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It honestly wasn’t a great place to grow up, but it’s where I grew up, and…” She shrugged her shoulders, like she was giving something up. “I wasn’t ready.”
Nobody is ever ready. I thought that, but I didn’t say it, because I knew it would be of no comfort. Sometimes, the true thing to say is the wrong thing to say, maybe even too often. Maybe the wrong thing to say was actually the right thing to say, for that reason, but I couldn’t say it, not then. I still didn’t know how to tell the right wrongs from the wrong rights, and I still struggle today. Maybe there was no right thing to say or do, no right place to look, no right place to be, but there was only where we were, and only who we were, and I was the only one who could say anything.
I stuck out my hand. “Good luck,” I said.
She laughed all of a sudden, loud in the silent building, and stuck out her own hand. We shook, like associates parting from a meeting. “Good luck to you, too, Snicket,” she said, giving me one last smile before she turned to walk out of the room and out of my story. “I think you’ll need it more than I do.” She walked over to the door and put her hand on it and I thought she was hesitating, but she was only throwing something back into the room behind her, and then the door was open and shut and she was gone.
I looked after her, and then I looked out of the window, wondering if I’d see her in the street, and then I decided that, no, we’d already said our goodbyes, with words and with a folded piece of paper. I let the binoculars be and walked over to the piece of paper she’d left. It looked simple at first, a few rectangles stuck together, but I picked it up and saw that it was actually a plane, one of the smaller ones that would only hold a few ant-sized passengers, but still better than the triangles of paper that were the best I could fold. On a whim, I tossed it into the air, and I was surprised when it didn’t fall straight to the ground like most paper planes but soared gently across the room to finally come down to land on top of the wardrobe, way out of my reach. On balance, that was probably the safest place for it. For myself, I returned to the window, took up the binoculars, and prepared to strain my eyes in the moonlight for even the slightest glimpse of activity at the school or in the street. Had that station wagon, I wondered suddenly, been there when I arrived?
“SNICKET!”
A roar from behind me practically sent me leaping through the window to a very early end on the street below. Swivelling to the door in a flurry of paper objects I saw a man’s shape blocking my only exit, and my terrified imagination told me it could be only one man, the man dogging my footsteps in Stain’d-by-the-Sea: Hangfire.
But I only believed it for a moment, because after that moment my brain took over and recognised the voice and the potato-like silhouette. I might have preferred Hangfire. Instead it was the police.
“Well, well, well,” growled Officer Harvey Mitchum, as he strode slowly into the room, scrunching paper punctuating his footsteps. “Well, well, well.”
I cleared my throat nervously. “Goodnight, officer,” I said, with a glance at the dark street. I hoped by now that I had something of a rapport with Officer Mitchum and his wife, also called Officer Mitchum. They knew I spent my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea investigating crimes, and had even made a couple of arrests based on my investigations. But they also blamed me for stirring up trouble in the first place. It is easy not to be bothered by crime if you stay in the police station all day.
“Oh, it will be a good night, for someone,” echoed the officer. “And that someone is me, Snicket. I’ve finally caught you red-handed.”
It is hard not to look at your hands when someone mentions them like that, even when you know that “red-handed” is just a phrase meaning “in the middle of a crime.” My hands just looked shadowy to me, but Harvey Mitchum cried out “Aha! You’re looking at your hands! That’s a sign of a guilty conscience!”
I put my hands away behind my back.
“Aha! You’re hiding your hands!” Harvey Mitchum cried again. “That’s a sign of a guilty conscience!”
I sighed, and just let my hands hang loose at my side. “Can I help you, officer?”
“Oh, you’d like to help, wouldn’t you?” the officer sneered, to which I nodded sincerely. “Well, answer me this, Snicket: What are you doing here?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I ask because the police station received an anonymous tip-off from a regular caller,” Harvey Mitchum said. “It said that two children were behaving suspiciously in the abandoned hotel near Stain’d Station.”
So Ornette and I hadn’t gone unnoticed. It seemed that someone had, in the end, noticed us without being noticed themselves. That told me that we were probably on the right track, but now we were on the wrong side of the law. Or at least I was, and that gave me an idea. “It must have been a hoax,” I said quickly. “There’s only one child here.”
“Don’t try and fool me, Snicket. You can’t fool someone smarter than yourself,” Harvey Mitchum answered. “I saw your accomplice sneaking out of here, but instead of catching the catspaw, I decided to go for the ringleader himself. Normally I aim to arrest all the criminals involved in a crime, but right now I simply don’t have the manpower.”
There was indeed something very strange about Harvey Mitchum showing up on his own. Normally he never investigated a crime without his partner in policing, marriage, and endless bickering, Mimi Mitchum, by his side. Talking to just one of them was a bit like talking to only half a person, half as talkative and half the brains. I wasn’t the Mitchums’ biggest fan, but it was a little concerning, and I said so. “I notice that your partner is missing this evening,” I said. “I do hope that she’s alright.”
The lone officer Mitchum harrumphed and rolled his shoulders and tried not to look like he appreciated the sympathy. “She’s in the station wagon, with Stew,” he muttered. “We’re spending time with him while we think about asking Fred to drive him out of town, to his aunt’s, poor boy.”
If Stew Mitchum’s aunt was anything like the rest of the family, I almost sympathised. Then I remembered everything Stew Mitchum had ever done or said, and stopped sympathising. Stew Mitchum was the Mitchums’ son, a son as spoiled as the son of the town’s only police officers can possibly be, and just about every time I met him, he got worse. The first time I met him, he had tried to shoot me with a catapult. Later on, he had beaten me up. But there was another name the officer had mentioned that I didn’t recognise.
“Who’s Fred?” I asked.
“Pheidippides,” he replied, and I was about to excuse him when he went on, “but that’s Mr. Bellerophon to you. I haven’t seen him around in a while, but I’m sure he’d be willing to help an old school pal out.”
Pheidippides Bellerophon. I should have known the owner of the Bellerophon Taxi would have a name as tough on the tongue, and a nickname as bite-size, as his sons “Pip” Bouvard and “Squeak” Pecuchet. I hadn’t seen him around either, and his sons had told me he was sick. Come to think of it, they’d told me they’d been at the Swinster Pharmacy in the first place buying something for him, so maybe he really was sick. I was so surprised that I let Harvey Mitchum start talking about his son again.
“My poor boy’s an emotional wreck at the moment,” he sighed. “We can’t leave him on his own, but we can’t bring him into danger either, so he comes in the police car and one of us stays with him while the other checks things out. It’s impeding our police work, but family is the most important thing.”
I wondered if Stew would agree. He’d recently left his family to become a student at the Wade Academy, or so he had told his parents, but really he’d been lured into joining the Inhumane Society and had enforced their instructions upon the children they had captured. That had backfired eventually when they rebelled against him and locked him up. The last time I’d seen him, I’d helped to take him home at last, but it looked as if the experience still haunted him.
“I take it,” I said, “that Wade Academy didn’t agree with him.”
“And here was me thinking he was getting a top-drawer education over there,” Harvey Mitchum sighed, and suddenly he drew a chair out from against the wall and sat on it in that horribly unwise backwards position, his front and its back facing me. “Listen, Snicket. Since you mention it, I should have a serious talk with you about something.” He gave me that stern yet over-sincere expression that every child is terrified of seeing on their parents’ faces. “I want to talk to you about bullying.”
My eyes flicked to the door. “Officer –”
“Bullying is bad, Snicket,” Harvey Mitchum began to explain, gesturing vaguely with his hands while staring into my eyes with unsettling directness. “It’s wrong. And worst of all, it’s not good.”
“I’m fully aware of that, officer –”
“If you ever bully someone, Snicket, then the person you’re really bullying is yourself. And you’ll regret it someday, just like I did.”
“I’m sure you’re right, officer, but I don’t go to –”
“Come sit over here, Snicket, and let me tell you my story…”
“I confess!” I blurted out. “Your tip-off was right. I was behaving suspiciously here. Arrest me, officer.”
Harvey Mitchum blinked a few times, as if he couldn’t believe that he wasn’t dreaming, and then heaved himself up from the chair and pushed it aside with a smile.
“Aha!” he repeated. “I knew I’d catch you one day, Snicket, and now I have. I’ll have you cuffed and in the cells before you can say ‘guilty as charged.’”
“Guilty as charged?” I repeated, as he slipped a pair of cuffs over my wrists faster than I expected. “I wasn’t aware that behaving suspiciously was that serious an offence.”
“Ah, but you weren’t just behaving suspiciously,” Officer Mitchum said, as he began pulling me along by the chain between the two cuffs, which is apparently very painful if the cuffs aren’t too large to fit you. “There’s a word for what you’re doing here, Snicket, and that word is breaking and entering.”
“I think you mean ‘entering,’” I pointed out, as we shuffled into the corridor. “I didn’t break anything, and you said it was just one word.”
“Smart as ever, I see, Snicket,” he huffed, as we began to descend the stairs. “But we’ll see how smart you are when you’re put on board a train to the city jail.”
At this point I was seriously considering simply running away from him as soon as we left the building, but I still had a few arguments left up my sleeve. “I thought the next train wasn’t for a few weeks,” I said. “You don’t intend to put me in the police station’s cell for that whole time?”
“Oh, but I do,” Officer Mitchum explained, with a smug grin. “I intend to keep a very close eye on you for the next few weeks.”
“And listen to me being smart the whole time?”
He stopped dead in the hallway, and I bumped into his back because it was far too dark to see that he’d stopped dead. He was blocking the light, so I couldn’t see what expression was on his face, or gauge just which way the little gears in his head were turning. But after what felt like quite a long time just standing there, he turned around and slipped the handcuffs off my wrists again.
“I’m going to put you under house arrest,” he said, “in the Lost Arms, with that guardian of yours, Markson. I’ve spoken to her enough to know that she has a pretty firm hand when it comes to children. I can trust her.”
Which was a very good measure of Officer Mitchum’s competence, but I kept all further smart remarks to myself as he paraded me out of the building, right out of the front doors, which he’d knocked one of the chained handles off to enter. The surveillance had been a failure, sure, but at least I could be pretty confident that nothing had come into town from the Inhumane Society up until about this time, that bundle of papers aside. I’d make that my next course of action, I thought, as we marched up to the station wagon, the illuminated cab of which revealed two figures inside.
“Guess who?” Harvey Mitchum announced, as he opened the back door and shoved me inside. I wasn’t sure who he was addressing, but he’d already told me he had Stew with him, and here he was, sharing the back seat with me. He was the spitting image of his father and mother in the front seats, a shapeless body and a head with plump cheeks and stubbly hair. There was one big difference about him to how I remembered, though. His eyes were flashing about everywhere, on me, on his parents, especially out the darkened windows, and the expression he wore didn’t suit him, or anyone. It was one of fear.
“Hello, Stew,” I said, as politely as I could muster, which was more than I would have mustered if his parents hadn’t been around. “Officer Mitchum.”
Mimi Mitchum scowled at me from the front seat, but said nothing, which was the nicest thing she’d ever said to me.
“Breaking and entering,” Harvey Mitchum announced, as he climbed into the passenger seat; it was Mimi’s turn to drive. “House arrest with his guardian. A very successful night’s work, but we’ll have to drive him home now.”
“We’re not a taxi service, Harvey,” his wife answered, and I groaned internally at the beginning of what threatened to be another of the endless arguments that passed for candlelit dinners between them. “We’re not a train or an autogyro. It’s not our job to drive people home, it’s our job to arrest criminals.”
“Yeah, and I arrested him, job done,” argued her husband. “I’m only saying let’s drive him home because we’ve got to drive him somewhere before we drive us home.”
“We can’t drive us home before we check out that tip-off about Wizard’s Hollow, Harvey, or did you forget, like you forgot that I haven’t arrested anyone yet tonight?”
“There won’t be anything to see out there in the middle of the night, and you can just re-arrest Snicket if it’s so important to you!”
“I can’t re-arrest him if he’s already arrested!”
“Then I’ll de-arrest him and you can re-arrest him!”
“You can’t de-arrest him, he’s committed a crime!”
“And that’s why we need to drive him to his home to get him out of our hair!”
“We’re not a taxi service, Harvey.”
As Mimi Mitchum drew in another breath to begin the whole argument again from the beginning, I interrupted as fast as I could. It wasn’t just because they were going nowhere – though we were all literally going nowhere, as Mimi hadn’t started the car yet – but one of them had just mentioned such an obvious clue that at first I wondered if it might even be too obvious. “If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is Wizard’s Hollow?”
They both turned to glare at me, making it clear that they minded me asking very much, and Mimi angrily started the car and left her husband to answer.
“You read a lot, Snicket, I’ll say that for you,” Harvey Mitchum began, looking back from the front seat. “So you’ve probably read about the wizard of Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”
“I preferred L. Frank Baum’s version, but yes,” I said, immediately thinking back to a book I had been thinking of a lot since I came to Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It was called
Stain’d Myths, and had become one of my most important resources in predicting Hangfire’s murderous plans. I had been wondering if the wizard would turn up. “The wizard lived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea in ancient times, when the Bombinating Beast roamed freely, and kept it under his power by keeping it well-fed – on human flesh, naturally.”
Stew let out a little whimper beside me, and shrank farther away from the windows. It was a disturbing sight, and I didn’t like to look at it. I didn’t like to think of what he might have known, what he could have been told that would drain away all the bravado he’d had and leave shameless terror in its place. What had happened to him since I’d seen him last?
His father was looking at him with a pained expression, too, and reached out to ruffle his stubbly hair as best he could. “Don’t worry, my little stewed apple pie, you’re safe in here,” Harvey Mitchum told him as I cringed in the next seat. Family nicknames should never, ever be shared. Added to that, if I was honest with myself, he probably wasn’t safe in here at all, but if Harvey Mitchum had his doubts, he didn’t show them as he turned back to me with a fierce frown. “Don’t scare my son, Snicket. Remember our little chat.”
I didn’t want to. “I’m sorry, Stew,” I said quickly, “and officer, please continue with your story.”
“Well, alright,” muttered Harvey. “Anyway, you’re not wrong, Snicket. The wizard was the one who controlled the Bombinating Beast, but he didn’t just do it by keeping it fed but by imitating the buzzing noise it made, from which we get the word ‘bombinating.’”
I hope I looked suitably awestruck. I had never expected to get an actually useful vocabulary lesson from Harvey Mitchum.
“That wasn’t all the wizard could do!” Mimi interrupted, taking her eyes off the darkened road to give her husband an accusatory stare. “He was a wizard, after all! He could cast all kinds of magical spells.”
“I was getting to those, Mimi, and anyway, don’t you know all spells are magical?”
“What about spells of bad weather?”
“Those aren’t real spells, Mimi, I’m talking about the magical ones!”
“But you just said all spells are magical!”
“Only the magical ones!”
I may have read the L. Frank Baum novel, but only because my sister told me the wizard was a phoney; I still preferred my brother’s detective novels, but I would prefer anything to having to listen to an argument about whether all spells are real or just the magical ones. “What magical spells did the wizard have?” I interrupted, with an internal sigh. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hangfire tried to use this idea, but I couldn’t possibly take it seriously, not then.
“He stole an invisibility spell from the Stain’d witch coven, I heard,” Harvey said. “And he brought terrible fates upon his enemies with spells of the four elements – you know, water, earth, fire, and air…”
I made a mental note not to mention this story to Cleo Knight, who had a poster of the hundred-odd chemical elements in the periodic table at her home.
“Anyway,” Harvey Mitchum resumed. “Your storybook wizards all live in towers and the like, but of course that’s completely unrealistic. The wizard of Stain’d-by-the-Sea lived in a cave out on a tiny islet between the town and Offshore Island, where he could work his evil magic without being disturbed by the townsfolk. Obviously, with the draining of the sea the island isn’t an island any more, but the cave is still a cave, whether or not it has a wizard living in it, and that’s Wizard’s Hollow.”
That question had certainly taken long enough to be answered, but it left me with quite a few more, most notable of which was how anyone could take such nonsense seriously, though why didn’t I ask Prosper Lost rather than expecting the Mitchums to give a straight answer was nipping at its heels. Chief among the questions I could actually say out loud, though, was “How easy is it to get there, since you were talking about going there tonight?”
Harvey and Mimi exchanged looks. “Well, it’s probably a bit late now,” Harvey admitted. “The person who tipped us off was probably just jumping at shadows.”
She sounded a bit uneasy herself. I wondered if she’d heard these stories a lot in her childhood, perhaps when tucked up into bed late at night, with only a single dim lamp that wasn’t quite bright enough to chase out the shadows, windows that didn’t quite keep the howling winds from stirring the curtains.
“It’s easy to get near, but a bit harder to get in,” Mimi explained. “If you want to see it, you just drive down along the lighthouse side of the viaduct, past Godwit Falls, and you can’t miss it. It has a sign up and everything, from when the town was trying to attract tourists after the draining of the sea. But obviously, because the sea was drained, the cave is now halfway up a cliff, and climbing up from the bottom is a challenge. That’s why they put in the Stain’d Chain Walk.”
“I think I’ve heard of chain walks,” I said. “They’re walks along coasts and cliff edges that are so difficult that they require chains hammered into the cliffside to walk safely.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Harvey said, nodding approvingly. “There are four or five chains that take you all the way to the top and Wizard’s Hollow. Pretty dangerous under windy, rainy, or dark conditions.”
“You know, I think it’s a little windy outside right now,” Mimi piped up. “We’d better not risk it.”
“Yeah, I hear it too,” Harvey eagerly confirmed, though the streets had been very still when we’d gotten into the car. That had been a little while ago, I realised, and it must have been very late; Mimi must have been driving slowly in the darkness, and it was indeed pitch-black outside, and I was suddenly starting to feel lonely. Somehow, there are few lonelier places than a car in the middle of the night, even with all the lights on and other people around you. It is even lonelier if you don’t know or even like those people very well. Harvey and Mimi Mitchum in the front, their shoulders jostling against each other, their faces drawn tighter than blackout curtains, and Stew in the back, a bully, curling up into himself, his frightened eyes reflecting off his window. There was not a sound to be heard, just the faint chugging of the engine, too quiet against the vastness of the night.
And then there was another sound.
It was a sound I’d heard quite a few times since I had come to Stain’d-by-the-Sea – a low, mournful clanging in the distance, the sad toll of a faraway bell, stuck up at the top of a lonely tower so it could be heard all the way across the town. It rang through me like a cold, cold breeze, because this bell also meant something dreadfully sinister to me. It was the bell of the Wade Academy, and whatever its warning meant to the townsfolk, it meant to me that Hangfire and his associates were prowling about, on some unknown and terrible mission.
After a few seconds of tolling, the echoing call of the bell rang only in our ears, and then faded away for good. It was like being able to breathe again, and from the collective sigh of relief in the car I guessed that the Mitchums felt the same way.
“Masks on,” Harvey Mitchum instructed, handing one over his seat to Stew and then helping his wife fix her own on. The masks were completely unnecessary, nothing but a myth, but I had mine, too, and I slipped it out from my jacket and put it on. I don’t normally do things just because other people are, but sometimes it’s only sensible to fit in, and become as faceless as the people around you for a while. It is strange, that the act of putting on a mask can help you to avoid suspicion, and yet sometimes that is just what people want to see.
“Just the normal bell!” Mimi Mitchum said, her voice strangely bright under the tinniness of the mask. “For a moment there, I thought it might be the big one.”
“The big one?” I asked, my own voice muffled. The Mitchums were really on a roll tonight. I couldn’t think of another time they’d known so much more than me.
Harvey Mitchum sighed. “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you, Snicket?” he asked, which seemed faintly hypocritical even though it was a rhetorical question, a question he didn’t expect an answer to. “If you just stayed at home for once and opened your mail like a normal person, you’d be in the loop more often, and this is one heck of an important loop to be in.” He opened the glove compartment and shuffled his large hands about in there for a few moments. “Here, read this,” he said, pulling out a newly-crumpled piece of paper. “Arrived just this evening, a joint announcement from the Coast Guard and Octopus Council. The whole town’s been put on alert.”
Letting myself get arrested had turned out pretty well, just like the last time I had let myself get arrested. I didn’t want to make a habit of it, but I didn’t have to hide my smile at all as I reached for the piece of paper the officer was holding out. The mask did it for me.
IMPENDING SALTSTORM CRITICAL ALERT.
A storm front moving in from Zanclean Dam is expected to distribute dangerously high levels of salt into the atmosphere around Stain’d-by-the-Sea within an estimated forty-eight hours. During that period, anyone within the town’s limits will be susceptible to salt lung, a medical condition unique to the locality in which salt crystallises within the respiratory system, causing a persistent salty flavour in the mouth, suffocation, and death. While the risk of salt lung can ordinarily be minimised using the Coast Guard’s air filtration masks, these were not designed to cope with the inordinately dense saltwinds approaching and are expected to fail. As such, there will be no defence from salt lung within Stain’d-by-the-Sea for the duration of the saltstorm.
Experts agree that a temporary evacuation of Stain’d-by-the-Sea is the only guaranteed means of survival, and advise all residents with non-essential business in the town to evacuate upon receipt of this notice and not return until the stated period is exceeded. Fortunately, the Octopus Council has developed highly sensitive instruments which can deliver up to one hundred and seventy minutes’ warning of the saltstorm’s arrival in town. This warning will be relayed to the town by a continuous tolling of the alarm bell during this period. Use this time to gather your family and important belongings, and exit the town before the ringing ends to avoid fatalities. Those who stay do so at their own risk.
From your friends and guardians at
THE OCTOPUS COUNCIL
THE COAST GUARD
“Responsibility lies within humanity.”My smile had faded soon enough. The Mitchums were right. This was the big one. This, not nonsense about wizards, was what I had to be worried about. Forcing people to cower in their homes wasn’t good enough anymore; Hangfire’s ambitions had reached so much farther, and he now intended to reach out and take Stain’d-by-the-Sea all for himself. What would he do then, in a town with no people in it? What secret was so enormous that he would have to banish the whole town to keep it hidden?
I’d abandoned my mask often enough to know that salt lung wasn’t real, and I certainly wouldn’t be evacuating, because it seemed very likely that anyone who evacuated would never be coming back. This was Hangfire’s endgame, or so he planned, but I had a different plan, now. This would be our final showdown. Whatever he was planning, I had to find out first – and find him, too, and stop him. And I had a lead, too, thanks to that clumsy tip-off – perhaps he’d been hoping to lure the Mitchums into a trap and get them out of the way, too. Instead, tomorrow morning Wizard’s Hollow would become my trap for Hangfire.
“I’ve already seen quite a few cars heading out past the lighthouse for the road to the mainland,” Harvey Mitchum’s tinny voice said, as I read over the flier again and again. “Of course, we’re not non-essential, so we’ll be remaining until the full alarm, but that’s why we’ve been thinking of sending Stew to his aunt in the city with ol’ Fred Bellerophon. We can trust him.”
“I l-l-love my dear auntie,” a thin and whiny voice spoke up, and it took me a second to realise it was Stew’s voice speaking up from behind his mask. He sounded nervous, which was unusual, but dishonest, which was familiar enough to help me recognise that it wasn’t some imitator hiding in the boot. “I’d be happy to leave anytime if my mommy and daddy follow soon.”
“Oh, you’re such a good boy, Stewie!” Mimi exclaimed, almost sobbing with adoration. Her fist thrust too close to my head on its way to ruffle Stewie’s hair. “Don’t you worry. So long as you’re with your mommy and daddy, everything will be okay.”
Suddenly the car seemed to jump upwards, and the side dipped and jerked up again with a great
BANG that threw me and Harvey out of our seats and into Mimi and Stew, and Stew screamed as a second
BANG sent the car bouncing upwards and a
CLANG split the air as something shot past the right window, and then there was a terrible, high-pitched squealing and grinding as car careened and jerked to a sudden halt. The headlights through the front window flickered on and off, but all I could see were the dim shapes of the yellow-tinted street, flicker-flicker, shadows jumping in and out of life in the stillness.
I heaved myself off the trembling Stew with difficulty; the car was still raised upwards slightly on the right and front. Shuffling up to the right window, I slowly wound it down and looked out as Harvey Mitchum did the same thing. It looked like we’d jumped the curb on the right side of the road, and something had knocked one of the wing mirrors off. Looking back down the street, I saw a streetlight shining at an odd angle that made a likely culprit, but the light revealed something else.
“I told you to keep your eyes on the road, Mimi!” Harvey yelled, slamming his hand on the dashboard hard enough to make him growl and start rubbing his reddened palm.
“It’s not her fault, officer,” I spoke up, although perhaps I wasn’t being completely honest. Probably everything was, on some level, as much her fault as everyone else’s in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but in total darkness save for a few headlamps that needed changing I could well imagine that she might just have missed what had lurched us off the road. “Look behind us.”
Harvey looked, and I saw his little eyes in the little slits on his mask look past me and back at the section of road we’d just driven on. I couldn’t make out his expression, but his sharp intake of breath told me everything, certainly far more than the face of the road would reveal.
Running across the road was a long, jagged crack where the road surface had split and come apart, crumbling edges flaking away, and the road on each side of the crack was tilted upwards, like a small, wide mountain range, or a pair of trapdoors opening. It was as if a giant had stood underneath the road and put their hands up and pushed slightly, breaking the road and folding it outwards. Yes, it was just like that, as if something had passed underground too close to the surface, pushing it upwards in its wake. The crack narrowed and vanished in the sidewalks on either side, leaving just the split in the road, like an especially severe speed bump. Harvey Mitchum opened his car door, got out, and walked slowly over to the crack, treading carefully as he reached the risen ground. The crack wasn’t very wide, but it was wide enough for him to lean over and peer inside.
“Does Stain’d-by-the-Sea suffer from earthquakes?” I quietly asked Mimi Mitchum, as the three of us stared at her husband.
She silently shook her head. “That’s never been a problem,” she said. “Apart from a couple thirteen years ago, that is.”
Harvey Mitchum returned, in a slow and thoughtful silence, and we didn’t take our eyes off him as he got back into the car. With a shrug of his shoulders and a deep breath, he said probably the last thing I had wanted to hear.
“Well,” Harvey Mitchum said, “that wasn’t there when we drove this way earlier.”