CHAPTER TWELVE
Theodora stood pale with horror at my accusation. Emotions flashed over her face like images at the cinema; shock – fear – rage – desperation… The story of her guilt was written on that face, and she couldn’t erase it with a lie. Still, most people try to.
“What are you babbling about now, Snicket?” she stuttered, as her eyes flashed again on the stairs, and on the skeleton key. “Me? Put Mallahan’s body in that cave? That’s impossible and you know it, Snicket; I could never have smuggled it up there without you knowing. And I certainly didn’t kill her; I haven’t the slightest reason to!”
“I don’t understand Moxie’s death,” I said, shaking my head in regret. “I still don’t. But I know you do. If you didn’t, you’d never have tried to hide her body – and I know you did that. It was impossible for anyone else to have done it.”
“B-but!” Theodora burst out. “Hangfire –”
“When we first stepped into Wizard’s Hollow, there was nothing there,” I reviewed. “Then I left and you followed. We were distracted on the ledge outside by Ellington, and then we turned around and went right back into the cave and found Moxie’s body. In the time we were out of the cave, we were maybe a metre from the entrance, or less. Do you really think Hangfire could have climbed down a clinking chain right behind us, stomped into the cave, left Moxie’s body at the back, run out and climbed up again? Without us hearing, let alone in the time he had? That’s nonsense.”
“Then what am I supposed to have done?” she demanded, wide-eyed and angry. “In the space of seconds, I flew out to town, killed Moxie Mallahan, and then waved my magic wand and brought us back to the cave in an instant? It’s senseless.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Your timing is all wrong. The state of Moxie’s body suggests that she’d been dead for many hours. And who was the last person to see her? You. I sent her to work with you to obtain the Bombinating Beast from the Swinster Pharmacy, and by your own admission you accompanied her and then took her home. I spoke to her father, and he never laid eyes on her that night, and the next time he did was when he found her body in her bedroom where Hangfire had left her. What he did hear was a car bringing her home, someone coming in and out a few times, and then the car leaving – and then it was all silence until Hangfire drove up and snuck her through the window. You brought her home, but when you left it was to hide her body.”
“Absurd!” she exclaimed. “You and those police officers met me as I was leaving the lighthouse last night, Snicket. There was no body in the car!”
“Our meeting last night proves your guilt,” I declared. “We met you driving like a maniac around the edge of town wearing a mask and giving a blatantly false reason for being out. You’d never have behaved that way if you didn’t have something you desperately wanted to hide – like a corpse.”
“You were in that car, Snicket!” she cried, wringing her hands.
I gave her the hardest look I could muster. Even on a thirteen-year-old, it must have been frightening. “I wasn’t in the trunk,” I said, and her eyes flooded with terror. Even up to then, she must still have believed that I was just guessing.
“I almost feel sorry for you,” I went on, “but I feel sorrier for Moxie. You’d hidden her body in the roadster’s trunk to smuggle it to some obscure place to dump, but then I came along, and I just wouldn’t leave. We were together constantly from when the Mitchums left me with you last night up until we found Moxie’s body. There was no time to get away and hide the body somewhere else; you couldn’t even slip away during the night as you couldn’t risk me noticing. And all the time, Moxie’s body was still in the trunk, all through that night, when we passed by the Swinster Pharmacy in the morning, to when we arrived below Wizard’s Hollow. And what was the first thing you did when my back was turned? You went rummaging in the trunk of the roadster.”
Theodora took a few tottering steps away from me and fell onto her back. It looked painful, and I wasn’t sorry. I followed her as she tried to skitter away on her hands and knees.
“Even your parking gave you away,” I told her. “You’d already parked the roadster pointing directly up the path to Wizard’s Hollow, so the trunk would be pointing directly away. Opening up the lid completely shielded you from my view – but it was the only place you were safe. You couldn’t risk running with Moxie out to the shrubbery at the edge of the road, whether or not I saw her body; I’d have been certain to check. You had to leave her somewhere which it was completely natural for you to be and which I’d never go back to. The back of the cave was the only place there was.”
“Impossible!” she spluttered, ridiculous on the floor. “Inconceivable! Unlikely! I didn’t even want to go.”
“You accepted it the very first time I mentioned it,” I told her. "You’d seen the potential of Wizard’s Hollow. A barely-accessible cave in the middle of nowhere? The perfect place to hide a body. Even if we were captured by the Inhumane Society, you could simply pin the crime on them and nobody would suspect otherwise. Certainly I didn’t. You got greedy, Theodora – for once you had the perfect plan, or you’d never have taken such risks, and you took one too far. It was just your bad luck that I went straight back into the cave, or else I might never have known about Moxie, but because I was so quick, it made it completely impossible for Hangfire or any other member of the Inhumane Society. It was only possible for you.”
“This is madness, Snicket!” she shrieked. “You’re my apprentice! You don’t know anything about the world! You’re accusing me of carrying Mallahan’s body up to Wizard’s Hollow, with no hands free, invisible? Nobody could have done it, nobody!”
“It was only possible for you,” I repeated. “If you had been any other chaperone or anyone else in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, you wouldn’t have been able to do it, but because you’re S. Theodora Markson, it was possible. Because you’re the only person in town with so much hair you could even hide a child’s body in it!”
Her composure shattered like a bottle of ink, and black corruption flooded out. A long wavering scream poured from her mouth, and she fell to the floor, wailing and sobbing and gnashing her teeth and clawing at the stone for freedom. It was so pathetic that I almost felt sorry for her over again. Guilt is a pitiable thing.
“You have enough hair to hide a second person inside, if a small one,” I continued, in a low, sad whisper. “You even have enough to tie them up to suspend them there. I wondered why you hadn’t tried to fit any of your hair into your raincoat, but the shape of a body would have been obvious. You opened the trunk and slipped on your raincoat, and behind your shield you tied Moxie up in your hair. You carried her up to Wizard’s Hollow invisible and without using your hands. Both of us walked to the back of the cave and looked at it, and then when I turned my back and walked away, you only had to pull loose a few knots and let her fall, and then you left her there and followed me out. It was the one clever plan you ever had, and it was all to hide a death on your conscience.”
“N-no!” Theodora quailed and whimpered. “Maybe! Yes! I mean, only half yes! I did it, but not all of it!”
I looked down at her. In the state she was in, it was tempting to speak to her like a small child, as she had done so often to me, but I restrained myself. “What are you talking about?” I asked her. “What are you claiming you didn’t do?”
“Murder, Snicket!” she exclaimed, gasping for breath. “Alright, I admit it, I tried to hide her body, but only because I was afraid of being blamed if I left it where it was!”
“Left her,” I corrected, though the correct way of addressing a dead body is debateable. I didn’t feel like debating it just then.
“Yes, her, Mallahan,” Theodora rambled on. “I just couldn’t explain it, but I knew if I did nothing, you’d think I did it, just like you think it anyway. I couldn’t let anyone find out – least of all her father, for goodness’ sake. Can you imagine finding your dead daughter’s body in her bedroom. Dreadful!”
There is no good place to find the dead body of a dead loved one. Theodora had thought her home was all wrong, and Hangfire had thought a cave was all wrong. I thought it was all all wrong, but I wanted it to make sense. “I figured that this happened at the lighthouse, from what Mr. Mallahan told me,” I explained. “Now it’s your turn, Theodora. If you say you’re not a murderer, tell me who is, because there isn’t anyone else, Theodora.”
“I know,” she whispered, and though she was stiller and calmer now she looked no less frightened. “That was the worst part, Snicket. There wasn’t anyone else, there really wasn’t. What happened was simply impossible…”
“Start at the beginning, and tell me what was possible, then,” I instructed. “I sent my associates to find you, and send you and Moxie back to the Swinster Pharmacy. You said that you weren’t able to do anything there, and then the next morning the whole building had fallen into the earth. Was that all true?”
“Well, most of it,” Theodora whined. “The building being destroyed had nothing to do with me, though looking out the window I’d say it has everything to do with how the town got to its present state. But I did lie about us walking away with nothing, and about Mallahan saying she would go back the next day with her father – I made that up. There was no need for her to do any such thing, for you see, we had actually succeeded in what you asked us to do…”
I started. “You got the Bombinating Beast?” I gasped, stumbling slightly. “How?”
She shrugged. “Nothing complicated, Snicket. You always take the long way around, when everyone knows how to throw a rock through a window. We waited until there was nobody in the front and then just broke a hole in the window and grabbed it.”
“You stole it?” I frowned at her.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t go all high-and-mighty on me, Snicket. Both me and Mallahan thought it was a good idea… and that we shouldn’t tell you about it. As that villain was saying about Cleo Knight, not everyone is as perfect as you think they are. We did things the easy way and got results at last, and then I motored Mallahan back to her home.”
I wasn’t sure what to think of the window-smashing business. On the one hand, the statue was Moxie’s property, but on the other, the Swinster Pharmacy wasn’t. Smashing store windows and taking things tended to be how villains in storybooks went about things, and while storybooks aren’t real, that didn’t make it a nice thing to do. “Why didn’t you come and get me?” I asked instead of thinking about this.
Theodora scowled. “She insisted that the statue was her property and that you could come and see it in the morning,” she muttered. “But I could tell she wanted the scoop for herself. That’s why I…” She paused, and started playing with her hair. “…I hung around.”
“You spied on her,” I prompted.
She shrugged. “Call it what you like. She didn’t lock the lighthouse door when she shut me out, so I figured I could always sneak in, but to start with I waited outside in the shadow of the roadster so she wouldn’t know I was still there. It had gotten dark by then, so I was waiting for her to turn a light on so that I could watch what her silhouette did. But she didn’t turn any lights on. Rather, after a few minutes I saw a light flickering in one of the windows. The curtains were drawn, so I couldn’t see too well, but it seemed that she was working by candlelight. It was so faint, though; there was barely any light, and it kept going dark as she walked across it. Then after a while it stopped going dark, but the light dimmed until eventually it went out entirely, and the whole lighthouse remained dark.”
“That’s strange,” I murmured. “Did she go to bed by candlelight and wait for it to burn itself out? There was nothing like that in her room when I saw it.”
“I didn’t like it either,” Theodora confided. “I thought maybe she’d been studying the statue in secret, and it was just so suspicious. So I thought I would sneak up there myself to take a look. Just to look, Snicket, that’s all…”
“And not to steal her ideas for yourself, of course,” I interrupted. “Don’t make me be sarcastic, Theodora. Just tell me what happened.”
She cleared her throat slightly. “Well,” she mumbled, hesitantly, “as I said, the lighthouse door had been left open, so I snuck in there. It was empty and dark inside, but it was a straight walk up some stairs to find the room I’d seen. I listened at the door for the girl’s breathing, trying to tell if she was awake or asleep, but in all the silence of the lighthouse nothing in that room even stirred… and that made me even more suspicious, especially when I tried the door and found it had been latched on the inside.”
“You could have gone for help,” I told her. “Then, and later.”
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done the same thing,” she sniffed. “And if anything had happened, who would be more suspicious than the woman sneaking around in the dead of night in someone else’s house? What I really should have done, I see now, is just to have run away and let it be someone else’s problem, but at the time I was just worried. I’m not a monster, Snicket. I didn’t want anything horrible to have happened to that little girl either. So I thought back to my childhood sneak thief classes, and pulled out an old trick, how to break a lock while making as little noise as possible. All it took was a good thump in the right place and the right way, and the door split open a crack no louder than someone getting up to go to the bathroom. I waited a moment to see if I had disturbed anyone, but it was all quiet, so I quietly opened the door. But… I didn’t go in straight away.”
She hesitated, seeming to struggle for the right words. “Why not?” I pressed her, taking a step forwards. “Why didn’t you go in?”
“There was… an atmosphere in there,” she said, vaguely, waving a hand through the air. “I don’t know how to describe it. Just something close and oppressive about the air… something wicked. Of course, you’ll believe anything in the darkness, but still I just stood there on the threshold for a minute before I plucked up courage to step in. It was pitch-dark, so I had to move carefully around the room to open the curtains and let in just a little light from outside, but let me tell you, Snicket, I’d have preferred the dark. I even had to open the window and take some deep cool breaths before I could pull myself together. If you remember how dreadful you felt after finding that girl’s body back in Wizard’s Hollow, picture how much worse I felt almost falling over her, lying on the floor, her eyes bulging out and her mouth wide open like she was screaming –”
“I remember!” I interrupted, maybe louder than I needed to. “If I’m lucky, I might one day forget. What had happened?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she sighed. “I was baffled, Snicket, and confused, and also gobsmacked. I was a whole thesaurus entry. But I was also scared. It was just like that Van Dyke business from before – door locked on the inside, windows latched on the inside, the room empty but for a body lying on the floor. I had no idea who or what had killed her, and in that darkness I felt every moment that it would kill me as well. I just froze up, as if not moving or breathing would make me invisible and undetectable, but once I was completely sure there was nobody else in the room, I became scared of something else. I became scared of what anyone would think if they saw me standing over a girl’s body in an empty room I’d just broken into.”
“You wanted to run away from the problem,” I said, stalking around her, “just like you wanted to run away from Stain’d-by-the-Sea as soon as things got dangerous. Times like that are when we’re most needed.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, Snicket,” she said, a thing usually said by people who would like to argue but know that they would lose, “but in this case, even if there was something I could do or find out, which there wasn’t, just running away wouldn’t be good enough. Everyone would know that I’d been the last person to see Mallahan alive. All the evidence pointed to me, and none of it to anyone else. More than that, I’d met the girl’s father, Snicket. I interviewed him once about a valuable stolen object, and all he could talk about was his only daughter. The man was an emotional wreck. Let him find his daughter dead under his nose? Like I said, I’m not a monster. The only way to save both of us, as I saw it, was to spirit the girl’s body away where nobody would ever find it.”
“Like some damp cave on the edge of town,” I said, in a tone that made her quiver like she was looking at a really big spider.
“I didn’t have a plan yet, Snicket,” she mumbled. “I figured that I’d figure it out on the road. I left everything else inside the room just as it had been when I found it, aside, naturally, from the broken latch on the door, picked the girl up, and left, shutting every door behind me. I put her in the trunk of the roadster, covering her respectfully with my raincoat, and then I put on my mask as a disguise and drove off at top speed… and got caught by you and those police officers.”
“And you just couldn’t get away from me until Wizard’s Hollow,” I concluded.
She nodded. “Yes, I was terribly unlucky,” she said. “It was like being in a storybook, one of those ones with a sequence of miserable happenings. It shouldn’t happen to someone with a name as cheerful as mine.”
“Since I might not get the chance to ask again,” I said, “what does the S stand for?”
She scowled. “Seriously,” she said, “is that your only response to what I have to say?”
“I don’t know what to say,” I told her. “You behaved treacherously. You treated my closest associate with appalling disrespect. You played right into Hangfire’s hands. I have only one question for you.”
She shrugged. “Fire away,” she said, as if she had gotten off easy.
I stepped towards her, the last step I needed to get into the right position for my plan. “What happened to the Bombinating Beast?”
“Eh?” she blinked at me. “The statue? It was just sitting there on the table in the middle of the room. I could have taken it, but a moment’s thought told me that would only lead to more questions and more trouble, so I left it where it was.”
“Where Hangfire picked it up later,” I figured. It hadn’t been there when I had visited the lighthouse, but Hangfire had mentioned retrieving something from Moxie’s room which should have been kept out of reach of children. I fumbled with the notebook and pencil as I thought. “I wonder if he never really wanted to have it, just wanted other people not to have it.”
“It hardly matters now,” Theodora replied. “He’s got exactly what he wanted. We just need to figure out how to escape before he returns to gloat and kill us.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, and turned quickly around. The full extent of the chain on my leg wouldn’t let me reach the key Hangfire had dropped in the middle of the room, but with the pencil twisted between the notebook rings and the notebook held by only a corner in my hand I was able to reach quite a little way farther than I might have been able to on my own. Quick as a flash, the manacle key was in my hands, and almost quicker the manacle was off my leg.
Theodora had understood my intention a second too late, and paused mid-scramble towards me as I threw off the manacle. Now she extended a trembling hand towards me. “That was excellently clever of you, Snicket,” she said in a wheedling voice. I could not remember if this was the first time she had ever praised me or not. “Now, if you could just let me have the key…?”
I looked from her to the key and back again. “What’s the magic word?” I asked.
She scowled at me again. “
Please,” she sighed.
I dropped the key on the floor, and began to walk away. Behind me, I heard Theodora scrambling along, and then an “Oof!” and a thud as she reached the limit of her chain. “Help me, Snicket!” she cried. “I can’t reach!”
“You should be able to reach it eventually,” I said, at the top of the stairs. I slowly began to walk down them.
“Wait, Snicket!” Theodora screeched. “What are you doing? You can’t abandon me here!”
I looked back at her, each of us a mess, exhausted from anger and desperation. “You’re not the only one at the end of your tether, Theodora,” I told her. “It’s not that I expected you to be a good chaperone; I chose to be apprenticed to the fifty-second-ranked chaperone out of fifty-two, so I knew what I was getting. But I did expect you to be a good person. I’m not going to remain in apprenticeship to the sort of person who uses treachery to hide dead girls’ bodies in caves. We’re parting ways, Theodora. You go your way, and I’ll go mine, and I’ll hope that we don’t meet again.”
“But Snicket!” she moaned, as I descended the stairs one by one, “I’m your chaperone! I’m your superior! I’m your elder! I’m your –”
“You’re my greatest mistake,” I said. “Goodbye.” And then I dropped down below floor level, and could see her no more.
Just below floor level was a small door. It didn’t have a lock, so I passed through it, shutting it firmly behind me, and found myself on a landing above a spiral staircase. The bell tower was arranged like the Mallahan lighthouse, with rooms in the middle of each floor and a stair winding down around them, but there were no windows on the outside of this tower, so the staircase was dark and cold, and the rooms on the inside were open and empty. Slowly, I went down stair after stair, wondering what I should do now. Hangfire was about to set forth on the last stage of his plan, and I had no idea of how to stop him because I had no idea of what the last stage of his plan even was. I couldn’t go back to Stain’d-by-the-Sea, because there was no Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The viaduct leading over the drained sea and back to the mainland was still intact, at least, so I could follow the route Hangfire’s associates had taken and cross over there and eventually make my way to the city. Ellington, he said, had gone that way, and as I thought of this that plan started to get a little more attractive. Follow Ellington – why not? It was only what I had spent all my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea doing anyway. Now that I knew that Ellington had had nothing to do with the deaths of my associates – and, on reflection, I did know it – I realised I had been unfair to her that day, and perhaps all other days. She had only been doing it for her father, all the wicked things she’d been responsible for, all the lies she’d told. Could I judge her if I didn’t know what I’d have done in her situation? I didn’t know. But nobody ever really knows the exact circumstances of another person’s life; nobody ever knows what it feels like to be them. When we judge another person, we are always judging in the dark, with no easy light to guide our way.
But there was a light, I realised. There, on the floor in front of me, was a flickering line of faint light, dancing away from an empty black space. It was the edge of a door, I realised. I was on one of the landings on the tower staircase, and somebody had gone into this small room, and closed the door, and lit a candle in there. Now what would they do that for, I wondered. Who, and what, could be inside that room.
I burst through the door, thankful that it wasn’t locked. There was a closeness to the air, something faintly oppressive, like a bad smell you can’t quite sense. In the centre of the room was the faintly illuminated shape of a small table, and hovering about a milk bottle’s height above it were a group of strange lines and holes in the air through which faint candlelight was glimmering. The light was casting strange patterns across the floor and onto the walls of the room, and also onto a figure a bit taller than me, or maybe just older, whose face was hidden from me by a veil of dark hair.
“Get away from that thing!” I cried abruptly. I crossed the small room in a step and grasped in the dark space around the flickering lights. My fingers clutched something hard and wooden, and in a moment I had picked up the Bombinating Beast and thrown it across the room. The candle stayed on the table, its uncloaked light now turning the room the colour of fire, while the statue clattered into a corner with its evil face turned away.
“Mr. Snicket!” gasped Ellington Feint, who of course it was. I never doubted it for a moment, even though she had no reason to be there. She had no reason to be anywhere in my path, but I kept on finding her there anyway. “What are you doing here?”
“Why do you ask?” I replied.
“This is no time to get clever with me, Mr. Snicket,” she said, looking warily at the doorway. “You aren’t meant to be walking about on your own when Hangfire might return at any minute, and you’ve certainly got no right to spoil my experiment. Just a few minutes more, and I’d have figured out the secret of the Bombinating Beast.”
“Just a few minutes more, and you’d be dead,” I replied. “I already know that statue’s secret, Ellington. It’s a murder weapon!”
We stared at each other in the dark windowless room, trying to read each other’s faces in the candlelight. Ellington’s looked desperate and confused, which was the expression she always wore to get me to do something. I wondered if it was the same expression she wore when she really was desperate and confused.
“Perhaps we had better sit down,” she said at last, and we did, on either side of the table where the candle waved and jeered. It got in my eyes and stopped me from looking into Ellington’s.
“I’m afraid there’s no coffee,” she said. “This tower doesn’t have the best facilities. Still, I hope we can be more civil with each other than we were at our last meeting. I don’t think either of us were at our best, but I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, if you are.”
I nodded. “I don’t think either of us knew the full story,” I said, looking through the light. “But then again, neither did Hangfire. He seemed to think that he’d sent you away to safety a little while ago, but then he also said he’d only sent one person out to capture me. I’m guessing you had Carr Carter stand in for you again.”
“So you know about that,” she smiled. “But you always do, eventually.”
“‘Eventually’ is just another way of saying ‘not soon enough,’” I said, not matching her smile. “If I’d figured out your trap, or not walked into it so willingly, I might have been able to save my associates. I failed them.”
“You didn’t fail them, Mr. Snicket,” she said, leaning closer to the candle and to me. “You said they were murdered, didn’t you? Then it’s the murderer who is at fault. Do you know who it is yet?”
“It’s complicated,” I admitted. “You could say that lots of people are at fault. Me, for not being there at the right time; you, for keeping me away; Hangfire, for creating this whole terrible situation, and the Canute Company, for creating the terrible situation that led to that terrible situation, and then the people who created the terrible situation that led to all that in its turn…”
“Murder isn’t history,” Ellington replied. “You can’t put out a wanted poster for the whole world.”
“It’s all or nothing,” I said, looking at the shadows we were casting on the wall. “That’s the truth about who’s responsible, Ms. Feint. Either the world is the murderer – or nobody is the murderer…”
I watched streams of candle wax dribble onto the table as she struggled to form a response. It was understandable. She didn’t know the whole story. It had taken me some time to realise that I did. Over and over again, I had been told that these murders were impossible; that nobody could have committed them. And every time, it had been true. “Perhaps you should start at the beginning,” at last Ellington said.
“It’s hard to start at the beginning without also starting at the end,” I replied. “For instance, the death of Cleo Knight – the last death I discovered today. And yet it looked so much like the earlier death of Ingrid Nummet Knight, so many years ago – same room, same circumstances. There was a reason for that, and like the Inhumane Society of the time, we should have seen it coming today. But we each knew our own pieces of the story, and kept them to ourselves until today.”
“Ingrid Nummet Knight and Cleo Knight both died in a top-floor laboratory, with the door locked on the inside,” I recounted. “No murderer was ever found, and there was nowhere for one to flee to. In fact, Cleo’s mother, Doretta Knight, was actually watching through the window in the door when it happened, and didn’t even see a murderer – just Cleo being thrown about the room as she tried to escape… and I let my imagination run away with that description. I imagined a murderer hiding just out of sight, and slipping away through some ingenuous and unseen escape route… I was wrong, but I was almost right. I forgot two important things about Cleo Knight. The first was that she was afraid of heights; her bedroom is even on the ground floor of her house. The second is something I was told by Doretta Knight, but could have guessed myself, from the way Cleo went from being kidnapped – to living in a small cottage on the edge of town with no lock on the door, and went wandering alone in the valley to forage ingredients for her chemical formula: she had no regard for her own safety…
“At the time of Cleo’s death, she had been working on an experiment in the laboratory. She wasn’t wearing goggles or any other kind of protection; she also didn’t have the room’s ventilator turned on to cycle in clean air. Her experiment, I was told, involved putting a flame under some green chemical, and I recognised the chemical – clustergrease, a substance saturating the soil underground in the wider area. I knew that it was dangerous and flammable, but Hangfire told me something else – that it was highly toxic…
“Look at it from this angle, and the whole scenario is completely different. Cleo was boiling a highly toxic substance right below her nose and mouth, had maybe been doing this all morning – and it when someone called her over she found she couldn’t move right any more. She couldn’t even stay upright, and went falling to the floor whenever she tried to get up… Maybe she realised she’d been poisoned, and needed fresh air. There was a door right behind her – but it led out to a view over a thirteen-storey drop to the ground far below, and to someone with a terrible fear of heights, that was unthinkable; in fact, she’d pinned up a curtain right over the window precisely so she wouldn’t have to think of it. Instead Cleo crawled in the opposite direction – around the desk, first in the direction of the ventilator, to extract the poison gas, but when she couldn’t even get up any more then her only hope was to make for the door out of the room. Her mother was there, and in her fading consciousness maybe it wasn’t even a rational hope but a last desperate comfort to reach her…”
I trailed off; I needed a moment to compose myself. Ellington, too, was looking away, and there was a sadness in her eyes that I didn’t quite recognise. She looked like people do when they are about to cry, and the more I thought of the situation, the more I wanted to do the same. Instead, I resumed. “When her mother opened the door, the poison would have dispersed through the air,” I hurried on. “Cleo had accidentally smashed her equipment to the floor when she fell, so no more of the poison gas was being created. Its lingering effects might explain some of Doretta Knight’s odd behaviour… or maybe that was just the sort of person she was.”
“Everyone has their own way of dealing with grief,” Ellington whispered, her eyes bright beyond the candle. “That’s something I’ve heard people say.”
“I fear it’s true,” I said sombrely. “I think that’s what probably happened to Jake.”
She remained calm enough to raise a single question-mark-shaped eyebrow at me, an enigmatic gesture I might have enjoyed on a very different day. “How do you mean, Mr. Snicket? It’s my understanding that he died in some sort of accidental explosion.”
“You’re half-right,” I shrugged. “But the truth is worse. That’s just the sort of world we live in, it seems.”
“Here’s the situation,” I explained. “Hungry Hix was sitting in her office, surveying the whole front of the diner. Nobody could get to the back without her knowing about it, and there was nobody and nothing in the diner that she didn’t know about. At one point, a person entered the diner and walked past her door and round to the back. A while later, an explosion came from the back of the diner. In that scenario, who, if anyone, do you think was responsible for the explosion?”
Ellington had the same look in her eyes that every schoolchild has worn when their teacher asks a question that seems too easy. “The person in the back, I suppose?” she said, somewhat tentatively.
I nodded a weary assent. “One thing I’ve learnt through all these so-called impossible crimes is the difference between ‘impossible’ and ‘very difficult,’” I said. “Sneaking into the back of that diner was impossible. So the only person who went in there must have been the culprit.”
“But that must have been Jake Hix, mustn’t it?” Ellington asked. “Why would he turn traitor?”
“I’ll explain in a minute,” I said, words which nobody ever wants to hear. “For now, here’s another question. Say that Jake was out of the picture. Say that Hungry was on her own in the empty diner, lit the stove under her frying pan, and the whole place went up. What would you say had happened then?”
“A gas leak,” she answered promptly. “I’ve heard of such things. Somebody leaves an old gas oven on by mistake, and the slightest spark blows the whole place up.”
“Close enough,” I answered, the flame before me burning illusions of all kinds of taunting shapes into my eyes. “The only thing you got wrong was that they don’t always leave it on by mistake…
“The big mistake I made, on that note, had to do with the order of the deaths,” I continued. “I found out about Moxie’s death, and then I found out about Pip and Squeak’s, and then I found out about Jake’s, and then I found out about Cleo’s – and I made an assumption. It was a natural assumption to make, but if I’d examined it for even a moment, I’d have realised it didn’t make sense. Why on earth should that be the order they’d died in? I’d been out of the picture for hours; what did I know? In fact, for the most part, the order of the deaths doesn’t even matter… but there’s one exception; one huge exception. There’s one death which would never have happened if another death hadn’t happened first…
“You see, there’s one feature of Cleo Knight’s death that I didn’t mention, and haven’t explained yet. At some point in the day, somebody dropped a perfectly good plate of pasta puttanesca at the top of the stairs outside her laboratory. There was so much else going on that I barely thought about it at the time, but the actual answer is obvious – if you assume that, instead of Jake Hix dying before Cleo Knight, it was actually the other way around…
“Cleo Knight’s research was at a very delicate stage. It was hard work dragging her out of the Ink Inc. tower for anything, and nobody knew that better than her sweetheart, who according to his aunt was always sneaking out to meet her – and had been in and out of Hungry’s all that morning. Jake Hix was a chef, best in town, and he knew it. Nothing would have been more natural for him to have prepared lunch for Cleo and taken it up to her laboratory himself, to save her the journey. Arriving at about midday, though, would have put him right on the scene to witness Cleo’s death, just a little behind Doretta Knight, who of course wouldn’t have noticed in the circumstances that someone had turned up behind her. All of her attention was focussed on what was happening on the other side of the laboratory window – and so was Jake’s; people have dropped plates for less. There was nothing he could do; he could only watch in horror as Cleo Knight died right before his eyes.”
“A sad story,” Ellington said quietly. “I don’t know what I would do if someone I loved died right in front of me.”
“I don’t think you can possibly know until it happens,” I said. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with grief… and Jake’s was to run. Of the two of them, he wasn’t the strong one. He always found it hardest to handle the terrible things going on all around him in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Cleo was his anchor, and without her, all the terrible things rose up to swallow him – terrible crimes and terrible feelings. There was only one escape from the mortal grief and despair he felt.”
“Gas ovens,” Ellington nodded. “I’ve heard of that, too. People would turn on the gas, and put their heads in the ovens, and eventually the gas…” She stopped, and her eyes widened. “Just like Cleo Knight.”
“Just like Cleo,” I sadly agreed. “I wonder if he thought that, at least, was some comfort.”
“What little there would be left in such a horrible situation,” Ellington said, her voice shaking slightly. We looked out into the dark corners of the room, avoiding each other’s gaze. “I wonder, Mr. Snicket –” She hesitated. It wasn’t like her. “Perhaps it’s awful, but… whenever I hear of such things, I wonder if I’ll ever feel that way. I don’t know if I’m capable of it – of having such strong feelings for a person that I would rather die than live without them.”
As the candle burnt ever lower, we were just two shadows cast upon the wall. A boy, a girl – we might have been anyone. “I don’t know, either,” I replied. “I won’t know how I would react until it happens.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Mr. Snicket,” she whispered, or maybe it was just my imagination, just what I wanted to hear, “I hope you never love someone else that way.”
In the loneliness of that room, I didn’t know what I hoped for or feared. Our hands trembled beneath the table and did not reach towards each other, or at least, mine didn’t. Considering what happened later, I can only be grateful that they did not.
“I think Pip and Squeak also had trouble with someone like that,” at last I said, “although it’s pure guesswork on my part.”
“What happened to them?” Ellington asked. “I was expecting them around every corner when I was searching for you in town, but they never appeared.”
“What happened to them?” I repeated. “For a long time I had no idea. Even now the whole thing only makes sense if I read it all backwards. Let me explain the scenario to you…”
“It all begins with Polly Partial driving down to a nearby inkwell in the valley – it doesn’t matter why,” I began. “She was there, and she was well-known for having poor eyesight; otherwise, things might have been very different. Ahead of her is a taxi that turns left and drives into that outbuilding at the top-left, while she goes straight on and stops in the outbuilding at the bottom-right. Polly gets out and walks over to the vats at the bottom, but when she gets there she looks over to the gatehole into the fenced-off area around the inkwell, and sees something several feet high and several across that’s pitch-black and has a long tail. It drags itself around the corner from the left and heads into the gatehole, and Polly heads back in the opposite direction – and then she gets spooked, and decides to walk way up along the right edge to peek over the fence. What she sees there is the Bombinating Beast fly up over the fence at the far end and vanish, and at the same time, a tall man in an overcoat and a hat a little like mine appears for a moment beside where the inkwell should be and then vanishes just as quickly. She drives off and grabs me to investigate, but even in the wet mud I don’t find any other footprints or tracks around the fence except hers, just lots of old wheel ruts filled with rainwater. By the inkwell I find lots of different-sized scuffling marks, along with two small unlaced shoes, one bigger loosely-tied shoe, and an adult-sized Bellerophon Taxi cap; inside the inkwell is the body of a short man with a nasty head wound and with his other shoe and overcoat lying nearby, and Pip and Squeak’s bodies, more recently damaged, and Pip not wearing his shoes. Now, what does that sound like to you?”
Ellington was frowning, and it was a frown that might have meant a lot of things. Regret, for one; frustration. But also confusion. “It sounds familiar,” she said. “Bits and pieces of it sound a lot like the trick with the fake Bombinating Beast at the Van Dyke house, and that trick with the untrodden sand at the Haines house.”
“I agree,” I said, “and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It was planned that way. Those incidents inspired a terrible plan that went horribly wrong.”
“But what does it all mean?” Ellington asked. “Bits and pieces of it seem to fit together, but I can’t find any sense in it.”
“Making sense of it is almost impossible,” I said. “What I think you have to do is forget, for a while, about sense. Forget about why people did things or what they were hoping to achieve. Work back from the end result to find out how it happened – how it must have happened – and worry about the sense later. And when you do that, things start to line up.
“How did it all end? Except for a ‘Bombinating Beast’ that could jump a five-foot fence and which pretty obviously wasn’t what Polly Partial thought it was, nobody had left the scene, but Pip, Squeak, and the man had ended up in the inkwell; therefore nobody else was involved beside those three. Pip and Squeak had the kind of injuries you’d expect if they had died falling down the inkwell; so did the man, but he hadn’t bled from those but had from an older wound on his head, so he must have died some time earlier from the head injury. The adult-sized shoes, overcoat, and hat must have been his, and if the hat fitted and Pip and Squeak could get the rest, there’s only one person he can be – their absent father, Pheidippides Bellerophon. But those clothes were found separately at the scene, and since he had died earlier, he couldn’t have removed them himself – and since Pip and Squeak weren’t dead at the time, they must have been the ones who removed them, alongside Pip’s shoes…
“The man who appeared at the scene was wearing the overcoat and a hat like mine, which must have been the bigger Bellerophon Taxi cap, but Mr. Bellerophon couldn’t have stood up and wouldn’t have been tall enough – so instead, it must have been the only people at the scene that could have been tall enough: Two children, one sitting on the other’s shoulders, wearing an oversized hat and an oversized coat and probably a pair of oversized shoes as well – which would also explain why Pip had taken off his shoes as well, in order to put on the bigger ones, and accounts for the differently-sized footprints at the scene. The man appearing out of nowhere would’ve been Pip standing up after Squeak had climbed on his shoulders; as for him disappearing into nowhere, there’s only one way he could have gone that would have gotten Pip and Squeak into the inkwell – and that’s into the inkwell.
“Since their clothes didn’t fit, that must be when the cap and one of the shoes slipped off and remained at the top of the inkwell, while the overcoat and another shoe were brought down with them. Of course, they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble just to jump in and kill themselves; they must have planned to simply walk out of there in their disguise as one adult man rather than two children. That was their critical mistake – their tragedy. It’s easy to plan something complicated, but harder to make it happen in real life, and walking around in oversized shoes on wet mud and with someone sitting on your shoulders simply isn’t easy. I hate to think of it, but to have vanished so quickly, they must have taken just one step and botched it – tipped right over, and fallen straight into the pit behind them. But Mr. Bellerophon couldn’t have fallen down on his own account, or pushed them down either, because he was already dead – so it must have been the other way around: Pip and Squeak pushed him in…”
I stopped, as Ellington was looking at me with incredulity. “Are you quite sure about this, Mr. Snicket?” she asked, the way people always do when they think you can’t be. “It sounds like you’re pinning quite a terrible crime on those two sweet little taxi boys.”
“Not terrible; just desperate, I think,” I said, “but I’ll come to that. Pip and Squeak having arranged this whole thing is the only answer that makes sense, though. Instead, let’s talk about how two children got a grown dead man along a muddy road to a hole in the ground without anybody seeing them or leaving any footsteps save at the very end. But one thing was seen: The Bombinating Beast, going exactly the way they must have. They remembered from my own accounts a time when a fake Bombinating Beast had been used to fool witnesses, and once Polly Partial complicated things for them by turning up on the scene they would have realised they had the perfect witness. But what was the Bombinating Beast? At a few feet high and a few feet across, and trailing away behind them, it couldn’t have been much bigger than themselves – but once you think back on the Lansbury Van Dyke incident, and think of the way the Bombinating Beast afterwards was said to leap over a five-foot fence and vanish into the distance, and especially once you remember that it was particularly windy in that area around the inkwell, it becomes obvious what you’re looking for, and if you were to go and look for it in the very outbuilding Pip and Squeak had parked in, you would find it: A large black tarpaulin. Each of them held on tight to one of Mr. Bellerophon’s arms to drag him along on his back, and then they draped a black tarpaulin all the way over themselves, maybe tucking it into their shoes to make sure it held firm. With that covering them they could walk through the open area around the fence with impunity, at least from a short-sighted witness, and although they couldn’t see a thing themselves, it would be easy enough to stick close to the fence and follow it around. Once they were inside the fenced-off area and close to the inkwell, they could throw off the tarpaulin, and eventually a strong enough wind grabbed it to bundle it over the fence and blow it away into the valley.
“As for the lack of footprints, that’s easy, because they were lucky enough to time it just right. If they were in different conditions, they’d probably have used those big shoes to mess around with their own footprints, but as it happened, the whole area was, as I noted again and again, criss-crossed with deep ruts left by car tires – all filled with water. By stepping through those, and making sure Mr. Bellerophon’s legs dragged through them, they could get all the way to the inkwell without visibly leaving a trace. The wet mud would probably even distort the shape of their footprints afterwards, so that even once the puddles evaporate it wouldn’t be obvious where they’d gone. They were undoubtedly inspired by the unbroken sand around Haines Lodge, but it’s much easier to cross a damp surface when someone’s already made tracks for you…
“And then there’s just the matter of how they got themselves and their father down to the inkwell area in the first place. Of course it was their taxi, so they had the keys, but I and others knew that they hadn’t been able to use it recently as they’d run out of fuel, so their own taxi was actually one other bluff to conceal their involvement – and as for the gasoline, I’m sure they found some way of siphoning it out of Cleo’s Dilemma. A stack of books on the driver’s seat tells us that Pip was the driver for certain, and Squeak handling the pedals as usual, which confirms that they came willingly. Their father would’ve been in the back seat, bundled up in an overcoat and with his old Bellerophon Taxi hat pulled hard down on his head to disguise the wound there, just in case anyone saw them close up. Since he was already dead, I presume their plan was to conceal his body, and leave a false trail in case anyone ever came looking – and they ended up having to do something even more complex when they saw Polly Partial tailing them…”
“But why?!” burst in Ellington, who had listened patiently to the whole morbid exclamation. “Why would their father be dead, Snicket? Why would they be so desperate to throw him in a hole in the middle of nowhere where nobody in their right mind would ever think of looking? If they took all these risks, you make it sound like they were guilty of –”
She couldn’t say it. I didn’t either. They were my associates, after all; whatever the truth was, I knew them well enough to give them the benefit of the doubt, even when they were no longer there to appreciate it. “You don’t have to be guilty to be afraid,” I said. “That was the truth behind how Moxie ended up in Wizard’s Hollow, Ellington – did I tell you that Theodora did that? She had found a dead body, and was afraid, because the circumstances had no explanation other than her own guilt. And I think the same must have been true of Pip and Squeak, too…
“They’d always insisted that they were driving their father’s taxi because he was sick, and I didn’t pry no matter how much I doubted them. They avoided going home as much as they could, even going without food for a while when Hangfire had the Department of Truancy pursuing them. I think their father was sick, alright, but not like you or I might go to bed with a cold. In the back of the taxi I found a forgotten bag from the Swinster Pharmacy containing a few drinks bottles, and I don’t think they put pictures of Blotto the Octopus on medicine or fizzy drinks. Their father was a man who couldn’t help them and could barely help himself; he was too busy drinking his days away…
“But then at last there came a day where even he couldn’t be allowed to sit still. A flier had come through the door warning of an impending disaster. The man was Pip and Squeak’s father; they were too responsible to just leave him there in the crossfire. They had to do everything they could to persuade him to get out of town. I won’t pretend to know how the confrontation went, but there are all sorts of ways to fall at home and hit your head in just the wrong place, especially if you’ve been drinking enough to lose all co-ordination and judgement.”
“Another old story,” Ellington murmured. “I believe it’s usually the fireplace fender.”
“If I’d had the time, I’d have gone over to Pip and Squeak’s house, and I’d probably have found something of the sort,” I replied, “but in the event, someone else did come over, the worst possible people at the worst possible time. Harvey Mitchum had told me yesterday that he planned to call on Mr. Bellerophon to ask him, in his capacity as a taxi driver, to take Stew out of town before the saltstorm warning, and when I saw the Mitchums earlier today they said they had indeed gone over but found nobody home. It’s just a guess, but I think that probably happened right after Mr. Bellerophon had had his accident – and Pip and Squeak saw two police officers who spent their whole careers jumping to conclusions and arresting the wrong person. They panicked and completely misread the situation. As soon as the coast was clear, they came up with a plan to see to it that their father’s body was never found, or never linked back to them – and that plan destroyed them.”
And now it was all done. Pip and Squeak’s plan was over, and knowing the truth didn’t make it any better even if it might have made it any righter. We could only sit there, and regret that we lived in a world that chewed people up and spat them out as criminals.
“It shouldn’t have happened to them,” Ellington said, her eyes dim and green no more in the ever-dwindling candlelight. “Maybe in this world there are people who are destined to suffer – doomed to deserve it. But it shouldn’t have been those two boys who were trapped in that terrible, desperate situation.”
“At first it was unbelievable,” I said, “but I seem to have spent all my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea forgetting to believe that my associates are real people with their own lives and agendas. Pip and Squeak – Theodora – Carr Carter…”
“Ellington Feint,” said Ellington Feint.
I nodded. “Would you say that you’d done terrible things, Ms. Feint, or desperate things?”
She didn’t want to meet my eyes. “I’ve started to find it terribly hard to tell the difference,” she quietly replied.
“Maybe it always starts that way,” I said, and, pointing, went on, “but still, I can’t forgive the creator of that thing.” At the edge of the room, the Bombinating Beast still lay, discarded like an old gimcrack.
Ellington gazed at it. “That statue – you said it was a murder weapon,” she said. “But who’s the murderer, Mr. Snicket?”
I shrugged. “I’ve no idea, and it certainly doesn’t matter anymore,” I answered. “Somebody long, long dead, from a long time in the past. Its true purpose must have been forgotten for many generations.”
“But how does it kill?” Ellington asked. “I thought it was meant to reveal some hidden message, some secret. It’s carved just right to fit over a burning candle, and when the light shines out through the holes in its head, they make up all these strange shapes…”
“That was my first impression of it, too, when I got a good look at it,” I nodded. “The papery material pasted to the bottom only strengthened the idea, as I had an idea it might be stuck on with melted wax, probably from an old candle that had burned low inside while resting on a papery mat.”
“It did have a candle in, when I found it in my father’s study a few hours ago, and decided to take my one last chance to find out what it did,” Ellington interrupted. “But the paper covering had changed to a torn scrap of newspaper.”
“That’s not surprising, considering who had it last,” I said. “Moxie must have had the same idea. Tear off the old cover and pull out the old melted candle stuck inside, lay down a mat of paper to protect a flat surface underneath from hot wax, light a candle on top of that, and put the Bombinating Beast over it. Then shut yourself in a room with as little light as possible, and try to read the signs… and die. It’s an ancient and fiendish trap, and any of us could have fallen into it. I only figured it out after hearing that Moxie and Ingrid Nummet Knight had died in exactly the same circumstances; since they were locked into rooms with only the statue for company, that made it clear that the statue was somehow killing them.”
“And nearly killed me,” Ellington mused. “I suppose, after all, me and Moxie Mallahan were quite alike. I’m so sorry, Mr. Snicket. I do feel terrible about what happened, believe me.”
“She died because she was too good a journalist,” I said, and it made me look at that evil trap for the curious, the Bombinating Beast, with a terrible glare that I wished I could direct at its long-dead creator. “That thing is designed to kill anyone who looks too hard for the truth. It’s like a tiny model of the world.”
“But how does it kill?” Ellington asked. “How can a statue kill?”
“That’s the wrong question,” I said. “The right question is, what is it made of?”
“I can tell you that,” Ellington answered. “It’s carved from those black trees that used to grow in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and still do grow in the Clusterous Forest. Hangfire had a small number chopped down and brought up to the academy to be turned into fuel. Apparently they burn slowly and release a lot of energy, but he refused to put them anywhere except in the mining robot.”
“Then Hangfire knew the secret, or knew enough to guess it,” I said. “It was Ingrid Nummet Knight who built that mining robot you mentioned, and she was after one thing above all when she died: Clustergrease. No wonder she got hold of the Bombinating Beast. There are huge reserves of clustergrease buried underground in the valley, and the Bombinating Beast is carved from the trees that grow there. She probably wanted to study its effects on the black wood of those trees, and she got more than she bargained for. Clustergrease is a toxic chemical, after all, and when burnt it produces an equally poisonous gas…”
Ellington gasped, and looked back at the statue. “Then burning the black wood also…”
“Yes,” I answered. “It also kills.” I slowly got to my feet, and took a few steps to the edge of the room. I picked up the Bombinating Beast, and let the red light glance off its shiny and jagged scales, its cruel row of fangs. “Put a candle in this, and the flame doesn’t just produce light – it also licks away at the woody interior,” I explained. “Slowly but surely, more poisonous vapour pours invisibly out of it. The closer you get, the smaller the room you’re in, the more poisonous the air is. By the time the candle burns down to nothing, you’ve died – and left an impossible locked-room murder behind you. But the murderer never left the room. It couldn’t. It just sat there on the table, waiting for the next person curious and foolish enough to let it breathe fire.”
I let it fall to the table with a clunk, and its hollow eyes stared vacantly into the distance. Such a small and harmless thing, and so deadly. I didn’t feel better for knowing what it was, at last, that statue that had taunted me from in hiding for all the time I had spent in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I felt empty, like the statue. It was a statue of an evil creature, but it wasn’t evil in itself. It was just a tool, like a gun or a guillotine, that existed only to kill. Handle with care. Keep out of reach of children.
“No wonder he got rid of it as soon as he got his hands on it,” I murmured, looking at the statue. “He wanted to take it out of the equation, and after all he just might have had a use for it later… but then the statue fell into your hands, and for every minute it was there he must have gotten more and more desperate as we grew more and more curious. Once the statue arrived at Wade Academy, he couldn’t risk you or anyone else trying to figure out its secrets, so he had Dr. Flammarion palm it off on the Swinster Pharmacy – and then we found it there anyway, and Moxie and Theodora stole it. Maybe that’s why the Swinster Pharmacy was destroyed; his spies told him that we’d shown an interest and he threw caution to the winds to finally destroy the statue rather than saving it just in case. But he got there too late…”
“And another person fell victim,” Ellington concluded. She looked at the statue, too, with mixed feelings and unreadable eyes. “There was so much misfortune in that town, wasn’t there, Snicket? In that town, and in the world.”
“It’s enough to make you believe in bad luck,” I sighed. “I never used to believe in luck, but I’m starting to wonder if that might just be the one irrational thing that’s somehow true. Everything that’s happened to this town, to everyone connected to it, for years and years has been tainted by misfortune – for no reason.”
“And it can happen to even the best people,” Ellington whispered.
“Like your father,” I said, and after I was done hesitating, I added, “Hangfire.”
“I don’t like to think of him that way,” she said sharply. “In my mind, my father is still the wonderful, gentle man who raised me on his own. When I think of Hangfire, it’s like another person.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry that I’ve never seen that face of him,” I said. “From what he’s told me, I might have found him quite agreeable when he was my age, as a – a volunteer.” I paused for a moment. “You knew about that, too. When you saw the tattoo on my ankle, you knew straight away that it was a sign for V.F.D., and what those initials stood for.”
“My father never kept that secret from me,” she smiled. “He told me that it had once been a noble organisation, but that it had turned away from doing the right thing and become villainous.”
“Much like himself,” I replied. “I’ve only encountered his villainy. Still, even I can tell that it’s damaged him. We had a face-to-face conversation not long ago, and he needed a cane to walk.”
“I’m almost glad he wears the mask at times like that,” Ellington admitted. “He has his ups and downs, and it’s hard to watch the downs. When my father is working on some important plan, like at Wizard’s Hollow, he doesn’t show a trace of weakness, but I can tell afterwards that it’s hurt him. He spends less and less time taking care of things personally, and more and more time resting in one of his hideouts.”
“I’ve seen one of them,” I explained. “An old submarine in the Clusterous Forest. I didn’t realise who it was at the time, but I saw him receiving medical treatment.”
She frowned. “What medical treatment?” she asked, and she sounded a little worried. “I didn’t know it had gone that far…”
“I had an inkling that it might have,” I answered. “Around the time the Wade Academy was suffused with laudanum fumes, I discovered that someone had been chewing a local bark-based stimulant to combat its effects. I assumed at first that it was Hangfire resisting his own laudanum trap, but there was evidence that someone had been harvesting it for a long time. After seeing him getting dosed with laudanum in the submarine, I guessed that he used the bark to recover from its effects whenever he needed to act.”
Ellington’s expression was growing easier to read by the minute, and she looked tense and concerned. “I hope he’s got enough on his present mission,” she muttered, as much to herself as to me. “He sent away everyone to the mainland, even me, so he could pursue the last step of his plan on his own.”
“Maybe he thought you would come to harm by staying,” I suggested. “Just as he got everyone out of Stain’d-by-the-Sea before destroying it, he got everyone out of Wade Academy as well. He seemed to think that me and Theodora would be safe at the top of the tower, but I don’t think he’d care much if he was wrong. Where were you meant to rendezvous with him afterwards?”
“Rendezvous” is a French word meaning “show yourselves,” but it’s also an English word meaning a place you’ve agreed to meet up at later. Ellington knew what the word meant, though. “He didn’t give us one,” she said, her face creasing anxiously. “It was sort of implied.”
“Was it implied, or was it non-existent?” I enquired. “If he got everyone out of the way because they might come to harm, what does that say about himself?”
“Don’t say that!” she snapped at me. “My father wouldn’t do something that might bring harm to himself.”
“He’s been bringing harm to himself with every evil act he’s committed,” I argued back, “and I suspect he wasn’t well to begin with. Didn’t you think thirteen years old was a little young to be abandoning you, Ms. Feint? Didn’t you tell me yourself that Hangfire had called you to say that you’d never see your father again?”
Her anger fled, leaving only a pale and worried face, shivering in the sputtering candlelight. “What are you suggesting, Snicket?” she asked, in a shaky voice. “Why would he tell me that?”
“Maybe he said it because he meant it,” I said. It was a guess, but I was pretty sure by then. “Maybe he was already ill. Maybe he didn’t think he’d be coming back at all.”
“No…” she whispered, her face a mask of fear. “He can’t…” She leaned across the table suddenly, the candle shaking as she looked over it. “We have to stop him,” she said quickly, desperately.
“Stop him from doing what?” I asked as quickly. “Where did he go after he left me and Theodora?”
“I’m not sure,” she stammered. “I meant to catch him as he went down the stairs and insist on going with him, but I got distracted figuring out the Bombinating Beast. He can’t have gone far…”
I wracked my brains for clues. “Do you know what the last step of his plan was?” I asked. “His final aim?”
“To turn this whole area back into a place for nature, before people came,” she answered. “That’s why he was having us put out birdseed and plant trees in the Clusterous Forest and hatch those tiny creatures in the aquariums. He wanted to restore the natural habitat of the valley’s animals.”
“Then he must have planned to restore the sea,” I worked out. “But the sea is held back behind Zanclean Dam. The Inhumane Society’s bombs aren’t powerful enough to…” But he hadn’t needed bombs to destroy Stain’d-by-the-Sea, I realised. He had something better. “He’s going to use the mining robot,” I realised. “With that he can probably drill straight through the dam.”
“But if he does that, he’ll be swept away!” Ellington gasped. “I can’t lose him, not again. I already lost my mother…” She stared at me, and the darkening room couldn’t conceal her terror, the tears at the corners of her eyes. “Please help me, Mr. Snicket. Help me to save him.”
I looked at her, lonely and scared, an abandoned child in a dark tower, and thought of the man she wanted to help, a ruthless killer in the mask of a monster. It was almost a dilemma. I wasn’t sure at all if I wanted to save Hangfire, or Armstrong Feint. I wasn’t even sure if it was worth stopping him anymore. With how far he’d gone, I thought that there was no helping him now, just as there was no helping Stain’d-by-the-Sea. But it wasn’t a dilemma. It was easy. There was still one person who, even after everything that had happened, I did want to help; I couldn’t help wanting to help. The reason I had stayed in Stain’d-by-the-Sea was to help Ellington Feint find her father. Even if everything else had gone wrong, there was still one last thing, one promise, that I could try to do right.
Beneath us, the candle flared, and went out.