“Those mysterious initials again,” Violet said. “It can’t be Jacques Snicket, because he’s dead. But who else could it be?”
“We can’t worry about that now,” Klaus said. “We have to figure out what words have been substituted in these poems.”
“How can we do that?” Violet asked.
“I don’t know,” Klaus said. “Why would Quigley think we would have memorized these poems?”
“He wouldn’t think that,” Violet said. “He knows us. But the telegram was addressed to the Queequeg. He knew that someone on board could decode the poetry.”
“But who?” Klaus asked. “Not Fiona—she’s a mycologist. An optimist like Phil isn’t likely to be familiar with T. S. Eliot. And it’s hard to imagine Captain Widdershins having a serious interest in poetry.”
“Not anymore,” Violet said thoughtfully. “But Fiona’s brother said he and the captain used to study poetry together.”
“That’s true,” Klaus said. “He said they used to read to one another in the Main Hall.” He walked over to the sideboard and opened the cabinet, peering at the books Fiona kept inside. “But there’s no poetry here—just Fiona’s mycological library.”
“Captain Widdershins wouldn’t keep poetry books out front like that,” Violet said. “He would have kept them secret.”
“Just like he kept the secret of what happened to Fiona’s brother,” Klaus said.
“He thought there were secrets too terrible for young people to know,” Violet said, “but now we need to know them.”
Klaus was silent for a moment, and then turned to his sister. “There’s something I never told you,” he said. “Remember when our parents were so angry over the spoiled atlas?”
“We talked about that in the grotto,” Violet said. “The rain spoiled it when we left the library window open.”
“I don’t think that’s the only reason they were mad,” Klaus said. “I took that atlas down from the top shelf—one I could only reach by putting the stepladder on top of the chair. They didn’t think I could reach that shelf.”
“Why would that make them angry?” Violet asked.
Klaus looked down. “That’s where they kept books they didn’t want us to find,” he said. “I was interested in the atlas, but when I removed it from the shelf there was a whole row of other books.”
“What kind of books?” Violet asked.
“I didn’t get a good look at them,” Klaus asked. “There were a few books about war, and I think a few romances. I was too interested in the atlas to investigate any further, but I remember thinking it was strange that our parents had hidden those books. That’s why they were so angry, I think—when they saw the atlas on the window seat, they knew I’d discovered their secret.”
“Did you ever look at them again?” Violet said.
“I didn’t have a chance,” Klaus said. “They moved them to another hiding place, and I never saw them again.”
“Maybe our parents were going to tell us what was in those books when we were older,” Violet said.
“Maybe,” Klaus agreed. “But we’ll never know. We lost them in the fire.”
The elder Baudelaires sat quietly for a moment, looking at the cabinet in the sideboard, and then, without a word, the two siblings stepped onto the wooden table so they could open the highest cabinet. Inside was a small stack of books on such dull topics as child rearing, proper and improper diets, and the water cycle, but when the children pushed these books aside they saw what they had been looking for.
“Elizabeth Bishop,” Violet said, “Charles Simic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Franz Wright, Daphne Gottlieb—there’s all sorts of poetry here.”
“Why don’t you read T. S. Eliot,” Klaus suggested, handing her a thick, dusty volume, “and I’ll tackle Lewis Carroll. If we read quickly we should be able to find the real poems and decode the message.”
“I found something else,” Violet said, handing her brother a crumpled square of paper. “Look.”
Klaus looked at what his sister had given him. It was a photograph, blurred and faded with age, of four people, grouped together like a family. In the center of the photograph was a large man with a long mustache that was curved at the end like a pair of parentheses—Captain Widdershins, of course, although he looked much younger and a great deal happier than the children had ever seen him. He was laughing, and his arm was around someone the two Baudelaires recognized as the hook-handed man, although he was not hook-handed in the photograph—both of his hands were perfectly intact, one resting on the captain’s shoulder, and the other pointing at whoever was taking the picture—and he was young enough to still be called a teenager, instead of a man. On the other side of the captain was a woman who was laughing as hard as the captain, and in her arms was a young infant with a tiny set of triangular glasses.
“That must be Fiona’s mother,” Klaus said, pointing at the laughing woman.
“Look,” Violet said, pointing to the wall behind the family. “This was taken on board the Queequeg. That’s the edge of the plaque with the captain’s personal philosophy—‘He who hesitates is lost.’”
“The whole family is lost, almost,” Klaus said quietly. “Fiona’s mother is dead. Her brother joined Count Olaf’s troupe. And who knows where her stepfather is?” He put down the photograph, opened his commonplace book, and flipped to the beginning, where he had pasted another photograph taken long ago. This photograph also had four people in it, although one of the people was facing away from the camera, so it was impossible to tell who it was. The second person was Jacques Snicket, who of course was long dead. And the other two people were the Baudelaire parents. Klaus had kept this photograph ever since the children found it at Heimlich Hospital, and had looked at it every day, gazing into his parents’ faces and reading the one sentence, over and over, that had been typed below it. “Because of the evidence discussed on page nine,” the sentence read, “experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor’s whereabouts are unknown.” For quite some time, the Baudelaires had thought this meant one of their parents was alive after all, but now they were almost certain it meant no such thing. Violet and Klaus looked from one photograph to the other, imagining a time when no one in the pictures was lost, and everyone was happy.
Klaus sighed, and looked at his sister. “Maybe we shouldn’t be hesitating here,” Klaus said. “Maybe we should be rescuing our captain, instead of reading books of poetry and looking at old photographs. I don’t want to lose Fiona.”
“Fiona’s safe with her brother,” Violet said, “and I’m sure she’ll join us when she can. We need to decode this message, or we might lose everything. In this case, he or she who doesn’t hesitate is lost.”
“What if we decode the message before Fiona arrives?” Klaus asked. “Do we wait for her to join us?”
“We wouldn’t have to,” Violet said. “The three of us could properly operate this submarine by ourselves. All we’d need to do is repair the porthole, and we could probably steer the Queequeg out of the Carmelita.”
“We can’t abandon her here,” Klaus said. “She wouldn’t abandon us.”
“Are you sure?” Violet asked.
Klaus sighed, and looked at the photograph again. “No,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
Violet nodded in agreement, and the two Baudelaires shelved the discussion—a phrase which here means “temporarily stopped their conversation”—and unshelved the poetry books in order to get to work on decoding Quigley’s Verse Fluctuation Declarations. It had been some time since the Baudelaires had been able to read in a comfortable place, and the children were pleased to find themselves silently flipping pages, searching for certain words, and even taking a few notes. Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message hidden within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie
knots when you’re taken hostage. With each poem the children felt more and more powerful—or, as they might have said in their food code, more and more wasabi—and by the time the two volunteers were interrupted they felt as if the tables just might be continuing to turn.
“Snack!” announced a cheerful voice below them, and Violet and Klaus were pleased to see their sister emerging from the kitchen carrying a small plate.
“Sunny!” Violet cried. “We thought you were asleep.”
“Rekoop,” the youngest Baudelaire said, which meant something along the lines of, “I had a brief nap, and when I woke up I felt well enough to cook something.”
“I am a bit hungry,” Klaus admitted. “What did you make us?”
“Amuse bouche,” Sunny said, which meant something like, “Tiny water chestnut sandwiches, with a spread of cheese and sesame seeds.”
“They’re quite tasty,” Violet said, and the three children shared the plate of amuse bouche as the elder Baudelaires brought Sunny up to speed, a phrase which here means “told their sister what had happened while she was suffering inside the diving helmet.” They told her about the terrible submarine that had swallowed the Queequeg, and the terrible villain they encountered inside. They described the hideous circumstances in which the Snow Scouts found themselves, and the hideous clothing worn by Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats. They told her about the Volunteer Factual Dispatch, and the Verse Fluctuation Declarations they were trying to decode. And, finally, they told her about the hook-handed man being Fiona’s long-lost brother, and the possibility that he might join them aboard the Queequeg.
“Perifido,” Sunny said, which meant “It would be foolish to trust one of Olaf’s henchmen.”
“We don’t trust him,” Klaus said. “Not really. But Fiona trusts him, and we trust Fiona.”
“Volatile,” Sunny said.
“Yes,” Violet admitted, “but we don’t have much choice. We’re in the middle of the ocean—”
“And we need to get to the beach,” Klaus said, and held up the book of Lewis Carroll’s poetry. “I think I’ve solved part of the Verse Fluctuation Declaration. Lewis Carroll has a poem called ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’”
“There was something about a walrus in the telegram,” Violet said.
“Yes,” Klaus said. “It took me a while to find the specific stanza, but here it is. Quigley wrote:
“‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the movie theater.’”
“Yes,” Violet said. “But what does the actual poem say?”
Klaus read,
“‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!’
The Walrus did beseech.
‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach.’”
Klaus closed the book and looked up at his sisters. “Quigley wants us to meet him tomorrow,” he said, “at Briny Beach.”
“Briny Beach,” Violet repeated quietly. The eldest Baudelaire did not have to remind her siblings, of course, of the last time they were at Briny Beach, learning from Mr. Poe that the tables of their lives had turned. The three siblings sat and thought of that terrible day, which felt as blurred and faded as the photograph of Fiona’s family—or the photograph of their own parents, pasted into Klaus’s commonplace book. Returning to Briny Beach after all this time felt to the Baudelaires like an enormous step backward, as if they would lose their parents and their home again, and Mr. Poe would take them once more to Count Olaf’s house, and all the unfortunate events would crash over them once more, like the waves of the ocean crashing on the tidepools of Briny Beach and the tiny, passive creatures who lived inside them.
“How would we get there?” Klaus asked.
“In the Queequeg,” Violet said. “This submarine should have a location device, and once we know where we are, I think I could set a course for Briny Beach.”
“Distance?” Sunny asked.
“It shouldn’t be far,” Klaus said. “I’d have to check the charts. But what would we do when we got there?”
“I think I have the answer to that,” Violet said, turning to her book of T. S. Eliot poems. “Quigley used lines from a very long poem in this book called The Waste Land.”
“I tried to read that,” Klaus said, “but I found T. S. Eliot too opaque. I scarcely understood a word.”
“Maybe it’s all in code,” Violet said. “Listen to this. Quigley wrote:
“At the pink hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a pony throbbing party…
“But the real poem reads
“At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a—”
“Blah blah blah ha ha ha!” interrupted a cruel, mocking voice. “Ha blah ha blah ha blah! Tee hee snaggle sniggle tee hee hee! Hubba hubba giggle diddle denouement!”
The Baudelaires looked up from their books to face Count Olaf, who was already stepping through the porthole and onto the wooden table. Behind him was Esmé Squalor, sneering beneath the hood of her octopus outfit, and the children could hear the unpleasant slapping footsteps of the horrid pink shoes of Carmelita Spats, who peeked her heart-decorated face into the submarine and giggled nastily.
“I’m happier than a pig eating bacon!” Count Olaf cried. “I’m tickled pinker than a sunburned Caucasian! I’m in higher spirits than a brand-new graveyard! I’m so happy-go-lucky that lucky and happy people are going to beat me with sticks out of pure, unbridled jealousy! Ha ha jicama! When I stopped by the brig to see how my associate was progressing, and found that you orphans had flown the coop, I was afraid you were escaping, or sabotaging my submarine, or even sending a telegram asking for help! But I should have known you were too dim-witted to do anything useful! Look at yourselves, orphans, snacking and reading poetry, while the powerful and good-looking people of the world cackle in triumph! Cackle cackle cutthroat!”
“In just a few minutes,” Esmé bragged, “we will arrive at the Hotel Denouement, thanks to our bratty rowing crew. Tee hee triumphant! V.F.D.’s last safe place will soon be in ashes—just like your home, Baudelaires!”
“I’m going to do a special tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian dance recital,” Carmelita bragged, “on the graves of all those volunteers!” Carmelita leaped through the porthole, her pink tutu fluttering as if it were trying to escape, and joined Olaf on the table to begin a dance of triumph.
“C is for ‘cute,’” Carmelita sang,
A is for ‘adorable’!
R is for ‘ravishing’!
M is for ‘gor—’”
“Now, now, Carmelita,” Count Olaf said, giving the tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian a tense smile. “Why don’t you save your dance recital for later? I’ll buy you all the dance costumes in the world. With V.F.D. out of the way, all the fortunes of the world can be mine—the Baudelaire fortune, the Quagmire fortune, the Widdershins fortune, the—”
“Where is Fiona?” Klaus asked, interrupting the villain. “What have you done with her? If you’ve hurt her—”
“Hurt her?” Count Olaf asked, his eyes shining bright beneath his one scraggly eyebrow. “Hurt Triangle Eyes? Why would I hurt a clever girl like that? Tee hee troupe member!”
With one of his tiresome dramatic gestures, Count Olaf pointed behind him, and Esmé clapped the tentacles of her outfit as two people appeared in the porthole. One was the hook-handed man, who looked as wicked as he ever had. And the other was Fiona, who looked slightly different. One difference was the expression on her face, which looked resigned, a word which here means “as if the mycologist had given up entirely on defeating Count Olaf.” But the other difference was printed on the slippery-looking uniform she was wearing, right in the center.
“No,” Klaus
said quietly, as he stared at his friend.
“No,” Violet said firmly, and looked at Klaus.
“No!” Sunny said angrily, and bared her teeth as Fiona stepped through the porthole and stood beside Count Olaf on the wooden table. Her boot brushed against the poetry books Violet and Klaus had taken from the sideboard, including books by Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot. There are some who say that the poetry of Lewis Carroll is too whimsical, a word which here means “full of comic nonsense,” and other people complain that T. S. Eliot’s poetry is too opaque, which refers to something that is unnecessarily complicated. But while everyone may not agree on the poets represented on the wooden table, every noble reader in the world agrees that the poet represented on Fiona’s uniform was a writer of limited skill, who wrote awkward, tedious poetry on hopelessly sentimental topics.
“Yes,” Fiona said quietly, and the Baudelaire orphans looked up at the portrait of Edgar Guest, smiling on the front of her uniform, and felt the tables turn once more.
CHAPTER
Thirteen
The water cycle consists of three phenomena—evaporation, precipitation, and collection—and collection, the third of these phenomena, is the third of the phenomena that make up what is generally known as “the water cycle.” This phenomenon, known as “collection,” is the process of the gathering of water in the oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds, reservoirs, and puddles of the world, so that it will eventually go through the phenomena of evaporation and precipitation, thus beginning the water cycle all over again. It is a tedious thing for a reader to find in a book, of course, and I hope that my descriptions of the water cycle have bored you enough that you have put this book down long ago, and will not read Chapter Thirteen of The Grim Grotto any more than the Baudelaire orphans will ever read Chapter Thirty-Nine of Mushroom Minutiae, no matter how crucial such a chapter might be. But however tedious the water cycle is to readers, it must be very tedious indeed to the drops of water who must participate in the cycle over and over again. Occasionally, when I pause while writing my chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans, and my eyes and back turn upward from my desk to look out at the evening sky—the purple color of which explains the expression “the violet hour”—I imagine myself as a drop of water, especially if it is raining, or if my desk is floating in a reservoir. I think of how ghastly it would feel to be yanked away from my comrades, when we were gathered in a lake or puddle, and forced into the sky through the process of evaporation. I think how terrible it would feel to be chased out of a cloud by the process of precipitation, and tumble to the earth like a sugar bowl. And I think of how heartbroken I would feel to gather once more in a body of water and feel, during the process of collection, that I had reached the last safe place, only to have the tables turn, and evaporate into the sky once more as the tedious cycle started all over again. It is awful to contemplate this sort of life, in which one would always be forced into motion by a variety of mysterious and powerful forces, never staying anywhere for long, never finding a safe place one could call home, never able to turn the tables for very long, just as the Baudelaire orphans found it awful to contemplate their own lives as Fiona betrayed them, as so many of their companions had betrayed them before, just when it seemed they might break out of the tedious cycle of unfortunate events in which they found themselves trapped.