“He’s dead,” Klaus replied. “I think you’re right, Violet. We don’t want to be as villainous and monstrous as Count Olaf.”
“But what are we going to do?” Quigley asked. “Sunny is still Olaf’s prisoner, and Esmé will be here at any moment. If we don’t think of the right thing right now, it’ll be too late.”
As soon as the triplet finished his sentence, however, the three children heard something that made them realize it might already be too late. From behind the archway, Violet, Klaus, and Quigley heard a rough, scraping sound as the toboggan reached the bottom of the waterfall and slid to a halt, and then a triumphant giggle from the mouth of Esmé Squalor. The three volunteers peeked around the archway and saw the treacherous girlfriend step off the toboggan with a greedy smile on her face. But when Esmé adjusted her enormous flame-imitating dress and took a step toward the smoking Verdant Flammable Devices, Violet was not looking at her any more. Violet was looking down at the ground, just a few steps from where she was standing. Three dark, round masks were sitting in a pile, where Violet, Klaus, and Quigley had left them upon arriving at the ruins of headquarters. They had assumed that they would not need them again, but the eldest Baudelaire realized they had been wrong. As Esmé took another step closer to the trap, Violet dashed over to the masks, put one on and stepped out of her hiding place as her brother and her friend looked on.
“Stop, Esmé!” she cried. “It’s a trap!”
Esmé stopped in her tracks and gave Violet a curious look. “Who are you?” she asked. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. It’s a villainous thing to do.”
“I’m a volunteer,” Violet said.
Esmé’s mouth, heavy with orange lipstick that matched her dress, curled into a sneer. “There are no volunteers here,” she said. “The entire headquarters are destroyed!”
Klaus was the next to grab a mask and confront Olaf’s treacherous romantic companion. “Our headquarters might be destroyed,” he said, “but the V.F.D. is as strong as ever!”
Esmé frowned at the two siblings as if she couldn’t decide whether to be frightened or not. “You may be strong,” she said nervously, “but you’re also very short.” Her dress crackled as she started to take another step toward the pit. “When I get my hands on you—”
“No!” Quigley cried, and stepped out from the arch wearing his mask, taking care not to fall into his own trap. “Don’t come any closer, Esmé. If you take another step, you’ll fall into our trap.”
“You’re making that up,” Esmé said, but she did not move any closer. “You’re trying to keep all the cigarettes for yourself.”
“They’re not cigarettes,” Klaus said, “and we’re not liars. Underneath the wood you’re about to step on is a very deep pit.”
Esmé looked at them suspiciously. Gingerly—a word which here means “without falling into a very deep hole”—she leaned down and moved a piece of wood aside, and stared down into the trap the children had built. “Well, well, well,” she said. “You did build a trap. I never would have fallen for it, of course, but I must admit you dug quite a pit.”
“We wanted to trap you,” Violet said, “so we could trade you for the safe return of Sunny Baudelaire. But—”
“But you didn’t have the courage to go through with it,” Esmé said with a mocking smile. “You volunteers are never brave enough to do something for the greater good.”
“Throwing people into pits isn’t the greater good!” Quigley cried. “It’s villainous treachery!”
“If you weren’t such an idiot,” Esmé said, “you’d realize that those things are more or less the same.”
“He is not an idiot,” Violet said fiercely. She knew, of course, that it was not worthwhile to get upset over insults from such a ridiculous person, but she liked Quigley too much to hear him called names. “He led us here to the headquarters using a map he drew himself.”
“He’s very well-read,” Klaus said.
At Klaus’s words, Esmé threw back her head and laughed, shaking the crackling layers of her enormous dress. “Well-read!” she repeated in a particularly nasty tone of voice. “Being well-read won’t help you in this world. Many years ago, I was supposed to waste my entire summer reading Anna Karenina, but I knew that silly book would never help me, so I threw it into the fireplace.” She reached down and picked up a few more pieces of wood, which she tossed aside with a snicker. “Look at your precious headquarters, volunteers! It’s as ruined as my book. And look at me! I’m beautiful, fashionable, and I smoke cigarettes!” She laughed again, and pointed at the children with a scornful finger. “If you didn’t spend all your time with your heads stuck in books, you’d have that precious baby back.”
“We’re going to get her back,” Violet said firmly.
“Really?” Esmé said mockingly. “And how do you propose to do that?”
“I’m going to talk to Count Olaf,” Violet said, “and he’s going to give her back to me.”
Esmé threw back her head and started to laugh, but not with as much enthusiasm as before. “What do you mean?” she said.
“Just what I said,” Violet said.
“Hmmm,” Esmé said suspiciously. “Let me think for a moment.” The evil girlfriend began to pace back and forth on the frozen pond, her enormous dress crackling with every step.
Klaus leaned in to whisper to his sister. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Do you honestly think that we can get Sunny back from Count Olaf with a simple conversation?”
“I don’t know,” Violet whispered back, “but it’s better than luring someone into a trap.”
“It was wrong to dig that pit,” Quigley agreed, “but I’m not sure that walking straight into Olaf’s clutches is the right thing to do, either.”
“It’ll take a while to reach Mount Fraught again,” Violet said. “We’ll think of something during the climb.”
“I hope so,” Klaus said, “but if we can’t think of something—”
Klaus did not get a chance to say what might happen if they couldn’t think of something, because Esmé clapped her hands together to get the children’s attention.
“If you really want to talk to my boyfriend,” she said, “I suppose I can take you to where he is. If you weren’t so stupid, you’d know that he’s very nearby.”
“We know where he is, Esmé,” Klaus said. “He’s at the top of the waterfall, at the source of the Stricken Stream.”
“Then I suppose you know how we can get there,” Esmé said, and looked a little foolish. “The toboggan doesn’t go uphill, so I actually have no idea how we can reach the peak.”
“She will invent a way,” Quigley said, pointing at Violet.
Violet smiled at her friend, grateful for his support, and closed her eyes underneath her mask. Once more, she was thinking of something she had heard sung to her, when she was a very little girl. She had already thought of the way that the three children could take Esmé with them when they ascended the hill, but thinking of their journey made her think of a song she had not thought of for many years. Perhaps when you were very young, someone sang this song to you, perhaps to lull you to sleep, or to entertain you on a long car trip, or in order to teach you a secret code. The song is called “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and it is one of the saddest songs ever composed. It tells the story of a small spider who is trying to climb up a water spout, but every time its climb is half over, there is a great burst of water, either due to rain or somebody turning the spout on, and at the end of the song, the spider has decided to try one more time, and will likely be washed away once again.
Violet Baudelaire could not help feeling like this poor spider as she ascended the waterfall for the last time, with Quigley and Klaus beside her and Esmé Squalor on her toboggan behind them. After attaching the last two forks to Klaus’s shoes, she had told her companions to tie the leather straps of the toboggan around their waists, so they could drag the villainous girlfriend behind them as they climbed. It was exh
austing to approach the peak of Mount Fraught in this manner, particularly after staying up all night digging a pit, and it seemed like they might get washed back down by the dripping water of the Stricken Stream, like the spider Violet had heard about when she was a little girl. The ice on the slope was weakening, after two fork-assisted climbs, a toboggan ride, and the increasing temperatures of False Spring, and with each step of Violet’s invention, the ice would shift slightly. It was clear that the slippery slope was almost as exhausted as they were, and soon the ice would vanish completely.
“Mush!” Esmé called from the toboggan. She was using an expression that arctic explorers shouted to their sled dogs, and it certainly did not make the journey any easier.
“I wish she’d stop saying that,” Violet murmured from behind her mask. She tapped the candelabra on the ice ahead of her, and a small piece detached from the waterfall and fell to the ruins of headquarters. She watched it disappear below her and sighed. She would never see the V.F.D. headquarters in all its glory. None of the Baudelaires would. Violet would never know how it felt to cook in the kitchen and gaze at the two tributaries of the Stricken Stream, while chatting with the other volunteers. Klaus would never know how it felt to relax in the library and learn all of the secrets of V.F.D. in the comfort of one of the library’s chairs, with his feet up on one of the matching V.F.D. footstools. Sunny would never operate the projector in the movie room, or practice the art of the fake mustache in the disguise center, or sit in the parlor at tea time and eat the almond cookies made from my grandmother’s recipe. Violet would never study chemical composition in one of the six laboratories, and Klaus would never use the balance beams at the gymnasium, and Sunny would never stand behind the counter at the ice cream shop and prepare butterscotch sundaes for the swimming coaches when it was her turn. And none of the Baudelaires would ever meet some of the organization’s most beloved volunteers, including the mechanical instructor C. M. Kornbluth, and Dr. Isaac Anwhistle, whom everyone called Ike, and the brave volunteer who tossed the sugar bowl out the kitchen window so it would not be destroyed in the blaze, and watched it float away on one of the tributaries of the Stricken Stream. The Baudelaires would never do any of these things, any more than I will ever see my beloved Beatrice again, or retrieve my pickle from the refrigerator in which I left it, and return it to its rightful place in an important coded sandwich. Violet, of course, was not aware of everything she would never do, but as she gazed down at the vast, ashen remains of the headquarters, she felt as if her whole journey in the Mortmain Mountains had been as useless as the journey of a tiny arachnid in a song she had never liked to hear.
“Mush!” Esmé cried again, with a cruel chuckle.
“Please stop saying that, Esmé,” Violet called down impatiently. “That mush nonsense is slowing our climb.”
“A slow climb might be to our advantage,” Klaus murmured to his sister. “The longer it takes us to reach the summit, the longer we have to think up what we’re going to say to Count Olaf.”
“We could tell him that he’s surrounded,” Quigley said, “and that there are volunteers everywhere ready to arrest him if he doesn’t let Sunny go free.”
Violet shook her mask. “He won’t believe that,” she said, sticking a fork-assisted shoe into the waterfall. “He can see everything and everyone from Mount Fraught. He’ll know we’re the only volunteers in the area.”
“There must be something we can do,” Klaus said. “We didn’t make this journey into the mountains for nothing.”
“Of course not,” Quigley said. “We found each other, and we solved some of the mysteries that were haunting us.”
“Will that be enough,” Violet asked, “to defeat all those villains on the peak?”
Violet’s question was a difficult one, and neither Klaus nor Quigley had the answer, and so rather than hazard a guess—a phrase which here means “continue to expend their energy by discussing the matter”—they decided to hazard their climb, a phrase which here means “continue their difficult journey in silence, until they arrived at last at the source of the Stricken Stream.” Hoisting themselves up onto the flat peak, they sat on the edge and pulled the leather straps as hard as they could. It was such a difficult task to drag Esmé Squalor and the toboggan over the edge of the slope and onto Mount Fraught that the children did not notice who was nearby until they heard a familiar scratchy voice right behind them.
“Who goes there?” Count Olaf demanded. Breathless from the climb, the three children turned around to see the villain standing with his two sinister cohorts near his long, black automobile, glaring suspiciously at the masked volunteers.
“We thought you’d get here by taking the path,” said the man with a beard but no hair, “not by climbing up the waterfall.”
“No, no, no,” Esmé said quickly. “These aren’t the people we’re expecting. These are some volunteers I found at headquarters.”
“Volunteers?” said the woman with hair but no beard, but her voice did not sound as deep as it usually did. The villains gave the children the same confused frown they had seen from Esmé, as if they were unsure whether to be scared or scornful, and the hook-handed man, the two white-faced women, and the three former carnival employees gathered around to see what had made their villainous boss fall silent. Although they were exhausted, the two Baudelaires hurriedly untied the straps of the toboggan from their waists and stood with Quigley to face their enemies. The orphans were very scared, of course, but they found that with their faces concealed they could speak their minds, a phrase which here means “confront Count Olaf and his companions as if they weren’t one bit frightened.”
“We built a trap to capture your girlfriend, Olaf,” Violet said, “but we didn’t want to become a monster like you.”
“They’re idiotic liars!” Esmé cried. “I found them hogging the cigarettes, so I captured them myself and made them drag me up the waterfall like sled dogs.”
The middle Baudelaire ignored the wicked girlfriend’s nonsense. “We’re here for Sunny Baudelaire,” Klaus said, “and we’re not leaving without her.”
Count Olaf frowned, and peered at them with his shiny, shiny eyes as if he were trying to see through their masks. “And what makes you so certain,” he said, “that I’ll give you my prisoner just because you say so?”
Violet thought furiously, looking around at her surroundings for anything that might give her an idea of what to do. Count Olaf clearly believed that the three masked people in front of him were members of V.F.D., and she felt that if she could just find the right words to say, she could defeat him without becoming as villainous as her enemies. But she could not find the words, and neither could her brother nor her friend, who stood beside her in silence. The winds of the Mortmain Mountains blew against them, and Violet stuck her hands in her pockets, bumping one finger against the long bread knife. She began to think that perhaps trapping Esmé had been the right thing to do after all. Count Olaf’s frown began to fade, and his mouth started to curl upward in a triumphant smile, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, Violet saw two things that gave her hope once more. The first was the sight of two notebooks, one a deep shade of purple and the other dark blue, sticking out of the pockets of her companions—commonplace books, where Klaus and Quigley had written down all of the information they had found in the ruined library of V.F.D. headquarters. And the other was a collection of dishes spread out on the flat rock that Olaf’s troupe had been using for a table. Sunny had been forced to wash these dishes, using handfuls of melted snow, and she had laid them out to dry in the sunshine of False Spring. Violet could see a stack of plates, each emblazoned with the familiar image of an eye, as well as a row of teacups and a small pitcher for cream. But there was something missing from the tea set, and it made Violet smile behind her mask as she turned to face Count Olaf again.
“You will give us Sunny,” she said, “because we know where the sugar bowl is.”
CHAPTER
Th
irteen
Count Olaf gasped, and raised his one eyebrow very high as he gazed at the two Baudelaires and their companion, his eyes shinier than they had ever seen them. “Where is it?” he said, in a terrible, wheezing whisper. “Give it to me!”
Violet shook her head, grateful that her face was still hidden behind a mask. “Not until you give us Sunny Baudelaire,” she said.
“Never!” the villain replied. “Without that big-toothed brat, I’ll never capture the Baudelaire fortune. You give me the sugar bowl this instant, or I’ll throw all of you off this mountain!”
“If you throw us off the mountain,” Klaus said, “you’ll never know where the sugar bowl is.” He did not add, of course, that the Baudelaires had no idea where the sugar bowl was, or why in the world it was so important.
Esmé Squalor took a sinister step toward her boyfriend, her flame-imitating dress crackling against the cold ground. “We must have that sugar bowl,” she snarled. “Let the baby go. We’ll cook up another scheme to steal the fortune.”
“But stealing the fortune is the greater good,” Count Olaf said. “We can’t let the baby go.”
“Getting the sugar bowl is the greater good,” Esmé said, with a frown.
“Stealing the fortune,” Olaf insisted.
“Getting the sugar bowl,” Esmé replied.
“Fortune!”
“Sugar bowl!”
“Fortune!”
“Sugar bowl!”
“That’s enough!” ordered the man with a beard but no hair. “Our recruitment scheme is about to be put into action. We can’t have you arguing all day long.”
“We wouldn’t have argued all day long,” Count Olaf said timidly. “After a few hours—”
“We said that’s enough!” ordered the woman with hair but no beard. “Bring the baby over here!”
“Bring the baby at once!” Count Olaf ordered the two white-faced women. “She’s napping in her casserole dish.”