Chapter Eight
by Dante
If you have spent any time at all among organisations with interests in religion, politics, or any other collaborative enterprise which occasionally requires choosing between two equally unattractive choices, you have probably come across the phrase “better the devil you know.” It is an interesting phrase, for few people claim to be personally acquainted with any devils, which are wicked and dangerous creatures which exist underground, or in the human heart, or possibly nowhere at all, but many people feel as if they have known a few devils in their time, and have risked knowing more. It is for occasions like these that the phrase “better the devil you know” was invented, for it simply means that, if forced to choose between following a wicked and dangerous thing which you already know and a wicked and dangerous thing which you know nothing about, you may wish to choose the wicked and dangerous thing you already know, for while wicked and dangerous, you at least understand it and can start to predict what wicked and dangerous thing will happen as a result of following that devil, and prepare to overcome it. For instance, if you had been reading a collaborative story previously written by multiple different authors, only to suddenly find that halfway through just one of those authors was going to write the entire rest of the story, you might simply shrug and say, “Better the devil you know” – although in this case, of course, the only choice you have is whether to continue reading or not.
Although the Baudelaires did not believe in devils, they had more than enough evidence for the existence of wicked and dangerous things, and had faced more than their fair share of choices between equally wicked and dangerous options, such as the choice between flunking their exams or flunking their running exercises at Prufrock Preparatory School, or the choice between subjecting themselves to the verdict of a corrupt court or escaping that court with a corrupt man. But now it seemed as if another unknown devil had arrived at the mysterious ship called the
Moth II, as the ship suddenly trembled, as if struck by a heavy blow. A curious buzzing noise drifted through the room like smoke before dying away, and the lights above the children’s head flickered and went out for a few seconds, hurling the Baudelaires into a blackness as deep and impenetrable as that at the bottom of 667 Dark Avenue’s empty elevator shaft, alternating with the light like pinstripes on a suit.
“What was that?” cried out Klaus, as he stumbled against a sea chest which, until a few moments ago, Captain Alighieri had been standing in. “Captain Alighieri? Captain Stanton?”
Violet, too, fell against a padded chair which, as far as she recalled, Captain Stanton had been sitting in. “Is everyone alright?” she called, as the shaking subsided. “Klaus? Sunny?”
She felt Sunny’s small arms clasp around her legs. “Here!” Sunny announced. “Okay.” As the lights flickered again, Sunny looked over in Klaus’s direction. “Bomb?” she asked quietly, her eyes wide.
“I don’t know,” Klaus answered, as he steadied himself. “The ship seems to still be upright, so we can’t be too badly damaged – but I think the bomb was moved to the
Marpole. I hope this ship wasn’t protected at the cost of the
Marpole’s sailors.”
“Wherepole?” Sunny asked, and as the lights started to flicker less and leave the Baudelaires more in the light than in the dark, the children looked around, and felt themselves in the dark again as they tried to answer Sunny’s question.
“You’re right, Sunny,” Violet said curiously. “Where is everyone?”
Sunny had, of course, been asking just what had happened to the sailors of the
Marpole, and indeed to the captain of the
Moth II, most of whom had been crowded into that room what seemed like a few seconds ago. But now the room was deserted, and only the Baudelaires were left behind, with only a repaired film projector, several untidy bookshelves, an empty sea chest, and some pieces of dusty furniture for company.
“They must have slipped away when it went dark,” Klaus concluded, looking around. “That buzzing thing must have scared them badly enough to act on instinct. They didn’t even stop to think about us.”
“Whatever was making that noise must be something very urgent,” Violet said anxiously. “They left us here, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. We should try and find the captains again and see if we can leave the area.”
“The captains seemed like they might have been about to oppose us, though,” Klaus said. “It might be safer to simply escape to the Carmelita and sail away.”
“Or collaborate,” Sunny insisted.
“It’s true that the captains might also have been sympathetic to us,” Violet said. “Perhaps staying with them would have been safer than then open sea.”
“Some people would say ‘better the devil you know’ in situations like this,” Klaus remarked. “But I’m not sure what the devil we know actually is. Everything seems unknown at the moment.”
“Then find out,” Sunny said firmly, and the elder Baudelaires could not agree more. All three were curious children, who had spent their lives trying to find out more than they knew already – Violet about physics and mechanical devices, Klaus about the world’s history and stories, and Sunny about what was best to bite and how best to prepare it to be bitten. Even as they had been surrounded by unknown devils in their unfortunate lives, they had always done their best to understand and overcome their problems, and the situation they were in at the moment was no different. Although the
Moth II had seemed very mysterious when they had first encountered it, they had, by listening to the accounts of people like Captain Stanton and Captain Alighieri, come to more or less make sense of the complicated history of the ship and its crew, and their attitude to the mysterious buzzing noise and the strange force that had shaken the ship was no different.
They stepped out of the library and into one of the ship’s many messy, deserted corridors, lit with a harsh orange glow by the bulbs hanging over their heads. “Captain Stanton?” Violet called, while Klaus cried “Captain Alighieri?”
Their answer was another booming impact that shook the ship, leaving it echoing with metal creaks and further haunting buzzes. The Baudelaire siblings fell against the wall and crumpled to the floor in an uncomfortable pile, picking themselves up uneasily.
“We had better go carefully,” Violet said, as she brushed dust from her clothes. “If the ship continues to shake like this, we might seriously hurt ourselves. Make sure to hold the handrails at the stairs; we don’t want to fall down them.”
“If there was a second explosion, it’s unlikely that the first one was the bomb,” Klaus said, as they carefully resumed their procession. “But I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.”
“It might not matter,” Violet replied. “Whatever is happening could sink the ship. It’s probably safest on deck, so we should go up as soon as possible.”
“Porthole!” Sunny cried, pointing to a metal ring set in the wall quite a long way above her head. “Find out!”
“Good thinking, Sunny,” Violet said. “I’m having a hard time keeping track of the ship’s layout, but I think the
Marpole should be in that direction.” She squinted at the porthole, which was a little way above her head, too, but it appeared to be quite dark outside. “Here, Sunny, see if you can see anything,” she said, lifting her little sister above her head, and up to the level of the porthole.
Sunny squirmed uncomfortably, having many unpleasant recollections of being picked up and threatened by Count Olaf, but it was different when it was her sister. What she saw out of the porthole, however, was no different than what her sister saw. “Dark,” she said. “Nothing.”
“It was the middle of the night when we got here in the first place,” Klaus remembered. “I suppose we haven’t been here for enough hours for dawn to break, though I’m not sure how long we have been here. Everything has been so drawn-out that it feels like we’ve been here for years.”
“Perhaps we’re just facing west,” Violet said, as she set Sunny down. “Once we get to the deck, perhaps dawn will be breaking in the east. I think there should be some stairs just up ahead.”
Unfortunately for Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, the stairs were of no more help to them than the captains had been, for like the captains and the other sailors, the stairs were completely absent. In front of the large rectangular hole in the ship’s walls where a flight of stairs should have led up to the deck was an equally large and rectangular metal door, shut fast and without a handle to open it with. Violet examined the seam between the door and the wall and looked over the hinges, but could see no way to open it.
“This is worrying,” Klaus said, looking up and down the corridors for any other doorways he might have missed. “Wherever the sailors went, they seem to have barred the doors behind them. Why would they do that?”
“They can’t have forgotten about us,” Violet said quickly, trying not to sound worried. “Maybe it’s the deck that’s dangerous, and they were trying to protect us.”
“Then why couldn’t they tell us that?” Klaus asked, frowning at the missing sailors. “Why couldn’t they have waited for just a few seconds to tell us what they were going to do?”
“We’ll just have to ask them when we see them,” Violet concluded.
“How will we do that?” Klaus asked, moodily. “We can’t get through this door.”
“More stairs?” suggested Sunny.
“I’m almost sorry to disappoint you,” a sneering voice said, and the Baudelaires swivelled around in shock. Standing in a nearby doorway, his expression as cruel and unwashed as ever, was a man they had been trying their hardest to forget about, and that man was Count Olaf. Ever since they had arrived on this ship, Count Olaf had been slipping in and out of their company as easily as he seemed to slip in and out of capture, and now he had appeared again, to cast another shadow over them in the confining hallways.
“Almost sorry,” Olaf repeated, “because it’s a great inconvenience to me as well. Unfortunately, all of the stairways upwards appear to have been locked up.”
“You were trapped here too, Olaf?” Violet asked. “The last time we saw you, you had run off again.”
“Yes, but I had to return here to hide,” he scowled. “I had tried to sneak onto that
Maypole ship, but it was full of burly sailors, and I couldn’t risk staying there. I even had to abandon the bomb.”
“The bomb?” Klaus exclaimed. “You’ve seen it?”
“No,” Olaf corrected. “But I’ve seen people seeing it. I saw its crate being carted along by some of the crew, and followed them to a dark room. While I was hiding outside, waiting for my chance to rush in and grab it, I heard them say they should check the timer, and peered in to see the backs of them as they took the lid off the crate. But after that they just filed out of the room and locked it up, and I had no chance to –”
“Hold on, Olaf,” Violet interrupted. “The bomb has a timer?”
Olaf nodded. “And it’s counting down,” he said. “From what I heard those sailors say, between when I escaped and when I got back here, the countdown had reached seven.”
“Seven?” asked Klaus. “Seven whats?”
“Well, not seconds or minutes, obviously,” Olaf snapped. “Hours? Days? Years? I haven’t a clue. All I knew is that I had no use for a bomb which wouldn’t explode when I wanted to, and no use for a ship full of people trying to capture me. So I decided to hide here instead, the last place they would think of looking.”
The Baudelaires resisted the urge to point out that the
Moth II was, in fact, the first place that the
Marpole’s crew had been looking for him. Instead, Violet asked, “And now all the staircases have been locked? Are you sure?”
“I’m no map-reader,” Olaf said, reminding Violet sadly of another acquaintance of hers who was an expert on maps, “but I can find my way around easily enough. The doors seem to have all shut automatically. I had just come down the stairs when that explosion shook the ship a few minutes ago, and when I looked back to flee then the door had already closed.” His expression became grim. “It looks like we’re trapped in here with all those irritating sailors.”
“Sailors are gone,” Sunny informed him.
“Are you trying to tell me that the sailors are gone?” asked Count Olaf, his single eyebrow rising up his forehead in surprise. “I was nervous that they might still have been with you. But I suppose they’ve run off, like rats fleeing a sinking ship.”
This was not an expression which the Baudelaires particularly wanted to think about whilst on a ship that was under attack, and Violet quickly changed the subject. “If the doors shut right after the explosion,” she said, “the sailors should still be aboard this ship; they shouldn’t have had time to get out, either.”
“How troublesome,” Olaf muttered.
“We don’t know where they are, though,” Klaus explained. “They slipped away from us. If none of us can leave the ship, it’s almost like they’re hiding from us.”
“Then we had all better search for some other way to escape,” Violet said. “I’m not sure why or how we’ve been trapped here, and as long as I don’t know why, then I want to get out.”
“Now you’re thinking like me,” Olaf said, stroking his straggly beard in pleasure. “And if those sailors continue to oppose us, I have a trump card.”
“A trump card?” Klaus repeated nervously. “What do you mean?”
A trump card, as you probably know, is a powerful item in your possession which can be used to overcome the mightiest efforts of your enemies, and have to be stored safely in decks of cards, pockets, and sugar bowls. As Count Olaf stepped farther out of the darkness in which he had been lurking, the Baudelaires saw that not only did he have a sneaky smile on his face, but also a sneaky hand behind his back, and this sneaky hand now snuck out from around him to reveal the familiar object in which Count Olaf was keeping his own trump card safe. It was a diving helmet, and all three Baudelaires knew what was inside.
“The Medusoid Mycelium!” Olaf cried in triumph. “While rushing about between ships to hide, I took the time to dodge back to the
Carmelita to retrieve this helmet. I left the harpoon gun, of course, as a single harpoon is quite useless against a small army of sailors, but with this fungus I can poison as many people as I like at once.”
“Olaf!” cried Violet, shocked. “You can’t possibly unleash that fungus. You’ll poison yourself as well!”
“Throw in sea!” Sunny demanded. She had a particular abhorrence, a word which here means “disgusted dislike,” of the Medusoid Mycelium, having been one of the few people in recent memory to have been infected with its toxic spores and survived.
“Don’t worry your stupid little orphan heads,” Olaf said, waving away their objections. “I won’t be harmed by this as nobody will be foolish enough to risk making me release it – and even if I did, I could simply run away very fast and escape.” He frowned. “And speaking of escape, we’ve been standing around here talking for too long, and I’m getting bored. We need to start exploring again and find our way off this ship and onto our own ship. I’ve successfully ruined that incriminating film, and any other evidence on this ship will go down with the ship when it surely sinks soon. Follow me, troupe members!”
Olaf abruptly knocked the Baudelaires aside as he started striding confidently down the hallway, back in the direction the Baudelaires had come from. The Baudelaires looked at each other uncertainly for a moment, and then, by an unspoken agreement, began to follow the wicked and dangerous man. It was not that they wanted to follow him, of course, or spend any more time in this unpleasant villain’s company. But as long as he held a trump card which could doom all of them, and as they had no better idea of where to run anyway, the Baudelaires felt just slightly safer following Count Olaf than running blindly through the eerily deserted corridors of the
Moth II. Before they knew it, they had chosen the devil they knew, but as the strange and unknown buzzing noise continued to creep its way around the ship, they reflected that even while they hated Count Olaf, they feared the devil they knew far less than the devil they didn’t.
In the silence without discussion that followed, the Baudelaires noticed that the silence was, of course, far from silent, for even when all arguments and screams fall silent, the world is far from quiet. The loud clanking of Olaf’s heavy footsteps was the most obvious noise, next to the Baudelaires’ three pairs of footsteps hurrying along after him, but they could not drown out the threatening creaking of metal that echoed towards them from all around the ship, nor the continuing haunting buzzing noise, which at times grew so loud as to fill the children’s ears before softening and falling away, though never quite vanishing. Still, the Baudelaires jumped at the crashing noise that echoed towards them from ahead, as Count Olaf kicked a wide pair of double-doors open.
“This place seems important,” Olaf said, sounding pleased with himself, as he led the Baudelaires out into a wide corridor that curved away to their left and right. Arched entryways appeared at intervals in the wall that curved around some greater space before them, but each of these entryways had a pair of curtains hanging behind it, so the Baudelaires and Olaf could not see what was ahead. Olaf marched over to the nearest pair of curtains and gave it a hard tug, and then scowled as it failed to come tearing down to the floor. He knocked the material aside, and vanished behind it in a cloud of dust, leaving the Baudelaires only time to hear his murmur of admiration before they followed him.
The Baudelaires understood the moment they stepped through the archway just what had impressed Count Olaf so much. They had stepped out onto a balcony overlooking a grand theatre occupying several storeys of a large room at the very end of the ship. Four chairs set before them looked over a tiered floor occupied by many, many plush chairs, all facing towards an enormous stage which the walls of the room curved around to meet. An enormous and ornate pair of curtains hung open at the edges of the polished stage, but it was the rear of the stage, hiding a pair of offstage wings which would normally be used for the actors to change costumes or the stagehands to store props, but it was the upstage area which caught the attention of the Baudelaires. The very rear of a stage is normally occupied by either a blank wall or a curtain concealing a blank wall, but in this case, the stage terminated in a black wall, shining slightly in the dim artificial lighting, and it took the Baudelaires some moments to realise that the rear of the theatre was actually a wide window looking out over the midnight sea and sky. In daylight it would probably have looked quite magnificent, but at this hour the only thing to be seen outside was a pitch-black emptiness which made the Baudelaires feel strangely uneasy.
“What a magnificent stage!” crowed Count Olaf. “It’s just perfect for a magnificent actor like myself.”
“I don’t think any plays are being performed right now, Count Olaf,” Klaus pointed out. “You probably won’t get an opportunity to act here.”
Violet ran a finger along the edge of the balcony, and frowned at the grimy fingertip that met her. “Nobody’s been in here for years, from the looks of things. It’s simply been abandoned.”
“What a waste,” Olaf scowled. “I’m tempted to go down there and do myself justice with a few soliloquies.” He closed his eyes, and a dreamy, peaceful smile spread across his lined face. “In fact, I think I will!”
“Wait, Olaf!” Violet cried, but Olaf had already vaulted over the edge of the balcony and landed with surprising agility in the aisle a floor below. As he approached the stage, the Baudelaires once again looked at each other, wondering what they should do.
“Do you think we should just leave him there?” Klaus whispered, glancing over at their vain former guardian. “We don’t have time to waste on this silliness.”
“Mycelium,” Sunny pointed out.
Violet sighed. “Sunny’s right, I’m afraid,” she said. “So long as Count Olaf has such a dangerous weapon in his possession, we shouldn’t let it out of our sight. What if the
Marpole’s crew returned, seized him and the helmet, and tried to open it? We would all be in danger.”
Klaus nodded wearily. “I agree,” he said. “There are probably staircases down to the auditorium at the ends of the corridors outside here, so let’s hurry.”
The Baudelaires hustled out of the box and back through the curtains. As they hurried down the stairs at the end of the corridor, Count Olaf’s voice, adopting a proud and piercing tone distinguishable from his ordinary voice chiefly by being louder, echoed around them, almost drowning out the constant background buzz. The Baudelaires emerged at the edge of the auditorium to see Olaf holding the Medusoid Mycelium helmet aloft, and gazing in rapturously through its porthole.
“To be, or not to be!” he cried, clutching his chest as if in pain. “That is the question. This is the night that either makes me or fordoes me quite –”
Noticing the Baudelaires approach, Olaf motioned to them to cheer and applaud. They did no such thing.
“Tedious orphans,” he growled. “Didn’t you learn from that vice-principal to always applaud for a genius?”
“Genius where?” asked Sunny.
Olaf glared at her. “That sounded like an insult,” he muttered. “Listen up, baby. If you ever hope to gain any promotion in my theatre troupe –”
As Olaf bickered, Violet climbed up to the stage and, walking past him, approached the wide window that looked out on the night. She gave it an experimental tap, producing exactly the sort of sound you would expect from tapping on a window.
“What are you doing?” Olaf said, wheeling around.
“Something bothers me about this window,” Violet replied. “I wonder if it’s actually black glass. This room is fairly well-lit, so I’m surprised that no light is being shed on the sea outside.”
“Who cares?” Olaf said dismissively. “If we could break that window and escape, it would be good for us, but I don’t see the use of it. This room is good for acting, and that’s about it.” He started to turn back to Klaus and Sunny, but then paused, his eyes catching something offstage. “Ah, a prop!” he cried, hurrying off into the wings.
“Olaf,” Klaus said, firmly, “we really should be going –”
He paused as Olaf returned, bearing his prop proudly atop his head. The prop was a dusty pirate captain’s hat, but more to the point, it looked identical to the hat they had last seen upon Captain Alighieri’s head, except for a slight tear in one corner.
“It’s about time I got hold of one of these,” Olaf said, sounding pleased. “Even in my Captain Sham disguise, I didn’t have a proper captain’s hat, but as the captain of the
Carmelita and de facto captain of the
Moth II, I think I’m entitled –”
“Where did you find that hat?” interrupted Klaus. “Was it just lying on the floor?”
Without waiting for an answer, he started following the footsteps Count Olaf had left on the dusty boards. Violet and Sunny followed him into the wings, and saw him leaning over a dustless patch beside a wall, where Count Olaf’s footprints stopped and then returned.
“Why was this here?” Klaus mumbled to himself.
“I thought it was just a costume hat,” Violet said. “Why would it be surprising for them to have several?”
“Dust,” Sunny pointed out. “Years abandoned.”
“They’re right, bespectacled bookworm,” Count Olaf said. “Nobody’s been in here for years, and it sounds like you saw that captain quite recently. He can’t possibly have been through here.”
“I know, but it’s so tidy in here otherwise,” Klaus pointed out, and indeed it was true that this particular offstage wing was cluttered with far less debris than littered the rest of the ship. “It seems like a strange coincidence for an identical hat to Captain Alighieri’s to have been left here.”
“It was trapped in a crack in the wall panelling,” Olaf shrugged. “They probably had to leave it behind.”
“You mean here?” Violet asked, leaning down to point to a corner of fabric stuck between two pieces of wall panelling. “How did it get –”
But as her finger touched the join between the two panels, she was inexpressibly surprised when one of the panels moved slightly. Her mechanical instincts firing, Violet stepped forwards to investigate the panel more closely, and as Klaus, Sunny, and Count Olaf watched, she placed her hands flat against the panel and slid it sidewise, causing a whole section of the wall to drift aside like a sliding door, which is exactly what it was. But this was not just any sliding door. It was a secret passage, and the three children and one adult were astonished by what they saw behind it. You yourself might be surprised to hear that what was behind the secret door was, in fact, another door – a wide metal door, more like a shutter found over the entrance to a garage or a shop at night, with an easily-missed button set into the wall just to one side of it. But what was especially intriguing to the Baudelaires, and even to Count Olaf, was the symbol emblazoned upon those doors in golden paint.
“What symbol is this?” Olaf exclaimed. “It’s not the V.F.D. insignia.”
“We don’t know any more than you do,” Violet said, observing the strange and indescribable shape. “But we have seen it before.”
“Where?” Olaf demanded.
“Eyepatch,” Sunny answered, pointing at Olaf’s hat.
“Captain Alighieri was wearing an eyepatch with this symbol on it,” Klaus explained. “We first noticed it in a picture on the ship’s bridge, but he was still wearing all the same pirate garb when he was brought into the library. Perhaps it’s a symbol of the
Moth II’s new piratical affiliations.”
“Ridiculous. Pirates only use a skull and crossbones,” Olaf said.
“Not necessarily,” replied Klaus, who had read a great deal about nautical history. “Swords and hourglasses were also used.”
“These symbols aren’t swords or hourglasses, though,” Olaf replied. “They look like letters. But it probably won’t be possible to understand what they mean until we already know what they mean, just like how the V.F.D. insignia doesn’t look like a V.F.D. at all until you’ve already heard those letters a dozen times. No, there’s something far more important about this shutter than the symbol on it.”
“What’s that?” Violet asked.
Olaf pointed at a handle at the very bottom of the shutter. “This thing is our ticket out of here,” he said. “We all want to get back to the deck, don’t we? Well, this” – and he leaned down, and wrenched the handle upwards, sending the whole shutter sliding up into the wall – “is a cargo elevator!”
Count Olaf was, for once, quite correct. Behind the metal shutter was a wide, cubic metal box, perfect for moving important cargo, like crates containing important merchandise or weaponry, from one level to another of a large structure like a ship. Count Olaf stepped into the cargo elevator, and the Baudelaires followed, feeling extremely confused.
“This is very strange,” Klaus pointed out, looking around the elevator. “Why would a cargo elevator lead into a theatre?”
“And why,” continued Violet, “would it be hidden behind a secret passage?”
“Why down button?” Sunny asked, and this was perhaps the most baffling question of all. Count Olaf was staring at a small panel by the side of the doors, where you would normally expect to find the buttons that control what floor an elevator will stop at, and as it happened this was indeed where those buttons were. But there were only two buttons on the panel – an up button, presently dark and unilluminated, and a brightly glowing button pointing downwards.
“This elevator only goes down from here,” Olaf said, and his voice sounded troubled. “Why does it only go down?”
The Baudelaires were no less troubled. Not so long ago for them, it seemed as if many of the ship’s mysteries had been solved, but immediately more and more mysteries had taken their place, and these mysteries seemed even more insoluble than those before, strange and bizarre mysteries which raised their own questions about the accuracy of the information they had previously learnt. It was almost as if their lives were as much a series of mysterious events as a series of unfortunate ones.
And another mystery was about to be added to that catalogue of mysterious misfortune. It was a mystery the Baudelaires almost missed out on, for had Olaf not hesitated, and instead jabbed the down button on the elevator the moment they had stepped aboard it, they would have had no idea that this new mysterious event was occurring at all. But Count Olaf did hesitate, and so all four of the elevator’s occupants did hear, and jump in shock to hear, a further terrible, booming crash against the side of the ship, now closer than ever before, and accompanied by a tremendous shattering noise of breaking glass. All four of them, the Baudelaires and Count Olaf, stuck their heads back out of the elevator and looked along the passage they had taken, back towards the theatre stage, back towards the wide window which had now been smashed into countless razor-sharp pieces – back towards the thing which had knocked it down as casually as Count Olaf would knock down a sandcastle.
It was a giant metal tentacle.
<O>
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