“We have to find J. S.,” Klaus agreed, “but how? Trying to locate one guest in an enormous hotel is like finding one book in a library.”
“A library without a catalog,” Violet said quietly, and the three Baudelaires exchanged sad glances by the light of the frog-shaped lamp. The children had uncovered countless secrets in libraries under the most desperate of circumstances. They had decoded a message in a library while a hurricane raged outside, and had found important information while a sinister person chased them around a library in wicked shoes. They had discovered crucial facts in a library that held only three books, and obtained a vital map in a library that was only a pile of papers hidden underneath a table. The Baudelaires had even found the answers they were looking for in a library that had burned down, leaving only a few scraps of paper and a motto etched on an iron archway. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny stood for a moment at the concierge desk and thought of all the libraries they had seen, and wondered if any of the secrets they had uncovered would help them find what they were looking for in the perplexing library of the Hotel Denouement.
“The world is quiet here,” Sunny said, reciting the motto her siblings had found, and as her words echoed in the lobby, they heard a noise above them, a quiet shuffling from the enormous dome, scarcely audible over the sound of the croaking frogs. The shuffling grew louder, but the Baudelaires could not see anything in the blackness over their heads, which was as dark as a crow flying through a pitch black night. Finally, Violet lifted the frog-shaped lamp as far as its cord would allow, and all three children removed their sunglasses. Faintly, they could see a shadowy shape lowering itself from the machinery of the clock using what looked like a thick rope. It was an eerie sight, like a spider lowering itself to the center of a web, but the Baudelaires could not help but admire the skill with which it was done. With only a slight shuffle, the shape drew closer and closer, until at last the children could see it was a man, tall and skinny, with his legs and arms sticking out at odd angles, as if he were made of drinking straws instead of flesh and bone. The man was climbing down a rope he was unraveling at the same time, which is an activity I do not recommend unless you’ve had the proper training, and unfortunately the best trainer has been forced to go into hiding ever since a certain mountain headquarters was destroyed by arson, and he now earns his living doing spider imitations in a traveling show. Finally, the man was quite close to the ground, and with an elegant flourish he let go of the rope and landed silently on the floor. Then he strode toward the Baudelaires, pausing only to brush a speck of dust off the word MANAGER which was printed in fancy script over one of the pockets of his coat.
“Good evening, Baudelaires,” the man said. “Forgive me for not revealing myself earlier, but I had to be sure that you were who I thought you were. It must have been very confusing to wander around this hotel without a catalog to help you.”
“So there is a catalog?” Klaus asked.
“Of course there’s a catalog,” the man said. “You don’t think I’d organize this entire building according to the Dewey Decimal System and then neglect to add a catalog, do you?”
“But where is the catalog?” Violet asked.
The man smiled. “Come outside,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”
“Trap,” Sunny murmured to her siblings, who nodded in agreement. “We’re not following you,” Violet said, “until we know that you’re someone we can trust.”
The man smiled. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” he said. “When I used to meet your father, Baudelaires, we would recite the work of an American humorist poet of the nineteenth century, so we could recognize one another in our disguises.” He stopped in the middle of the lobby, and with a gesture from one of his odd, skinny arms, he began to recite a poem:
“So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!”
The words of the American humorist poets of the nineteenth century are often confusing, as they are liable to use such terms as “oft,” which is a nineteenth-century abbreviation for “often”; “disputants,” which refers to people who are arguing; “ween,” which means “think”; and “rail on,” which means to bicker for hours on end, the way you might do with a family member who is particularly bossy. Such poets might use the word “prate,” which means “chatter,” and they might spend an entire stanza discussing “theologic wars,” a term which refers to arguing over what different people believe, the way you might also do with a family member who is particularly bossy. Even the Baudelaires, who’d had the works of American humorist poets of the nineteenth century recited to them many times over their childhood, had trouble understanding everything in the stanza, which simply made the point that all of the blind men in the poem were arguing pointlessly. But Violet, Klaus, and Sunny did not need to know exactly what the stanza meant. They only needed to know who wrote it.
“John Godfrey Saxe,” said Sunny with a smile.
“Very good,” the man said, and he walked across the shiny, silent floor of the lobby, pulling the rope down from the ceiling and tucking it into his belt.
“And who are you?” Violet called.
“Can’t you guess?” the man asked, pausing at the large, curved entrance. The Baudelaires hurried to catch up with him as he turned to exit the hotel.
“Frank?” Klaus said.
“No,” the man said, and began to walk down the stairs. The Baudelaires took a step outside, where the croaking of the frogs in the pond was considerably louder, although the children could not see the pond through the cloud of steam coming from the funnel. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked at one another cautiously, and then began to follow.
“Ernest?” Sunny asked.
The man smiled, and kept walking down the stairs, disappearing into the steam. “No,” he said, and the Baudelaire orphans stepped out of the hotel and disappeared along with him.
CHAPTER
Eight
The word “denouement” is not only the name of a hotel or the family who manages it, particularly nowadays, when the hotel and all its secrets have almost been forgotten, and the surviving members of the family have changed their names and are working in smaller, less glamorous inns. “Denouement” comes from the French, who use the word to describe the act of untying a knot, and it refers to the unraveling of a confusing or mysterious story, such as the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, or anyone else you know whose life is filled with unanswered questions. The denouement is the moment when all of the knots of a story are untied, and all the threads are unraveled, and everything is laid out clearly for the world to see. But the denouement should not be confused with the end of a story. The denouement of “Snow White,” for instance, occurs at the moment when Ms. White wakes up from her enchanted sleep, and decides to leave the dwarves behind and marry the handsome prince, and the mysterious old woman who gave her an apple has been exposed as the treacherous queen, but the end of “Snow White” occurs many years later, when a horseback riding accident plunges Ms. White into a fever from which she never recovers. The denouement of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” occurs at the moment when the bears return home to find Goldilocks napping on their private property, and either chase her away from the premises, or eat her, depending on which version you have in your library, but the end of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” occurs when a troop of young scouts neglect to extinguish their campfire and even the efforts of a volunteer fire department cannot save most of the wildlife from certain death. There are some stories in which the denouement and the end occur simultaneously, such as La Forza del Destino, in which the characters recognize and destroy one another over the course of a single song, but usually the denouement of a story is not the last event in the heroes’ lives, or the last trouble that befalls them. It is often the second-to-last event, or the penultimate peril. As t
he Baudelaire orphans followed the mysterious man out of the hotel and through the cloud of steam to the edge of the reflective pond, the denouement of their story was fast approaching, but the end of their story still waited for them, like a secret still covered in fog, or a distant island in the midst of a troubled sea, whose waves raged against the shores of a city and the walls of a perplexing hotel.
“You must have thousands of questions, Baudelaires,” said the man. “And just think—right here is where they can be answered.”
“Who are you?” Violet asked.
“I’m Dewey Denouement,” Dewey Denouement replied. “The third triplet. Haven’t you heard of me?”
“No,” Klaus said. “We thought there were only Frank and Ernest.”
“Frank and Ernest get all the attention,” Dewey said. “They get to walk around the hotel managing everything, while I just hide in the shadows and wind the clock.” He gave the Baudelaires an enormous sigh, and scowled into the depths of the pond. “That’s what I don’t like about V.F.D.,” he said. “All the smoke and mirrors.”
“Smoke?” Sunny asked.
“‘Smoke and mirrors,’” Klaus explained, “means ‘trickery used to cover up the truth.’ But what does that have to do with V.F.D.?”
“Before the schism,” Dewey said, “V.F.D. was like a public library. Anyone could join us and have access to all of the information we’d acquired. Volunteers all over the globe were reading each other’s research, learning of each other’s observations, and borrowing each other’s books. For a while it seemed as if we might keep the whole world safe, secure, and smart.”
“It must have been a wonderful time,” Klaus said.
“I scarcely remember it,” Dewey said. “I was four years old when the schism began. I was scarcely tall enough to reach my favorite shelf in the family library—the books labeled 020. But one night, just as our parents were hanging balloons for our fifth birthday party, my brothers and I were taken.”
“Taken where?” Violet asked.
“Taken by whom?” Sunny asked.
“I admire your curiosity,” Dewey said. “The woman who took me said that one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. And she took me to a place high in the mountains, where she said such things would be encouraged.”
Klaus opened his commonplace book and began to take furious notes. “The headquarters,” Klaus said, “in the Valley of Four Drafts.”
“Your parents must have missed you,” Violet said.
“They perished that very night,” Dewey said, “in a terrible fire. I don’t have to tell you how badly I felt when I learned the news.”
The Baudelaires sighed, and looked out at the pond. Here and there on its calm surface they could see the reflections of a few lights in the windows, but most of the hotel was dark, so most of the pond was dark, too. The triplet, of course, did not have to tell the Baudelaires how it felt to lose one’s parents so suddenly, or at such a young age. “It was not always this way, Baudelaires,” Dewey said. “Once there were safe places scattered across the globe, and so orphans like yourselves did not have to wander from place to place, trying to find noble people who could be of assistance. With each generation, the schism gets worse. If justice does not prevail, soon there will be no safe places left, and nobody left to remember how the world ought to be.”
“I don’t understand,” Violet said. “Why weren’t we taken, like you?”
“You were,” Dewey said. “You were taken into the custody of Count Olaf. And he tried to keep you in his custody, no matter how many noble people intervened.”
“But why didn’t anyone tell us what was going on?” Klaus asked. “Why did we have to figure things out all by ourselves?”
“I’m afraid that’s the wicked way of the world,” Dewey said, with a shake of his head. “Everything’s covered in smoke and mirrors, Baudelaires. Since the schism, all the research, all the observations, even all of the books have been scattered all over the globe. It’s like the elephant in the poem your father loved. Everyone has their hands on a tiny piece of the truth, but nobody can see the whole thing. Very soon, however, all that will change.”
“Thursday,” Sunny said.
“Exactly,” Dewey said, smiling down at the youngest Baudelaire. “At long last, all of the noble people will be gathered together, along with all the research they’ve done, all the observations they’ve made, all the evidence they’ve collected, and all the books they’ve read. Just as a library catalog can tell you where a certain book is located, this catalog can tell you the location and behavior of every volunteer and every villain.” He gestured to the hotel. “For years,” he said, “while noble people wandered the world observing treachery, my comrade and I have been right here gathering all the information together. We’ve copied every note from every commonplace book from every volunteer and compiled it all into a catalog. Occasionally, when volunteers have been lost or safe places destroyed, we’ve had to go ourselves to collect the information that has been left behind. We’ve retrieved Josephine Anwhistle’s files from Lake Lachrymose and carefully copied down their contents. We’ve pasted together the burnt scraps of Madame Lulu’s archival library and taken notes on what we’ve found. We’ve searched the childhood home of the man with a beard but no hair, and interviewed the math teacher of the woman with hair but no beard. We’ve memorized important articles within the stacks of newspaper in Paltryville, and we’ve thrown important items out of the windows of our destroyed headquarters, so they might wind up somewhere safe at sea. We’ve taken every crime, every theft, every wicked deed, and every incident of rudeness since the schism began, and cataloged them into an entire library of misfortune. Eventually, every crucial secret ends up in my catalog. It’s been my life’s work. It has not been an easy life, but it has been an informative one.”
“You’re more than a volunteer,” Violet said. “You’re a librarian.”
“I’m more of a sub-sub-librarian,” Dewey said modestly. “That’s what your parents used to call me, because my library work has been largely undercover and underground. Every villain in the world would want to destroy all this evidence, so it’s been necessary to hide my life’s work away.”
“But where could you hide something that enormous?” Klaus said. “It would be like hiding an elephant. A catalog that immense would have to be as big as the hotel itself.”
“It is,” Dewey said, with a sly expression on his face. “In fact, it’s exactly as big as the hotel.”
Violet and Klaus turned their gaze from Dewey to look at each other in confusion, but Sunny was gazing neither at the sub-sub-librarian nor at her siblings, but down at the dark surface of the pond. she said, pointing a small, gloved finger at the calm, still water.
“Exactly,” Dewey said. “The truth has been right under everyone’s noses, if anyone cared to look past the surface. Volunteers and villains alike know that the last safe place is the Hotel Denouement, but no one has ever questioned why the sign is written backward. They’re staying in the , while the real last safe place—the catalog—is hidden safely at the bottom of the pond, in underwater rooms organized in a mirror image of the hotel itself. Our enemies could burn the entire building to the ground, but the most important secrets would be safe.”
“But if the location of the catalog is such an important secret,” Violet said, “why are you telling us?”
“Because you should know,” Dewey said. “You’ve wandered the world, observing more villainy and gathering more evidence than most people do in a lifetime. I’m sure the observations and evidence you’ve gathered in your commonplace book will be valuable contributions to the catalog. Who better than you to keep the world’s most important secrets?” He looked out at the pond, and then at each orphan in turn. “After Thursday,” he continued, “you won’t have to be at sea anymore, Baudelaires.” The children knew
that by the expression “at sea” he meant “lost and confused,” and hearing those words brought tears to their eyes. “I hope you decide to make this your permanent home. I need someone with an inventive imagination who can improve on the aquatic design of the catalog. I need someone with the sort of research skills that can expand the catalog until it is the finest in the world. And, of course, we’ll need to eat, and I’ve heard wonderful things about Sunny’s cooking.”
“Efcharisto,” Sunny said modestly.
“Hal’s meals are atrocious, I’m afraid,” Dewey said with a rueful smile. “I don’t know why he insisted on opening his restaurant in Room 954, when so many other suitable rooms were available. Bad food of any style is unpleasant, but bad Indian food is possibly the worst.”
“Hal is a volunteer?” Klaus asked, remembering what Sunny had observed during her errands as a concierge.
“In a manner of speaking,” Dewey said, using an expression which here means “sort of.” “After the fire that destroyed Heimlich Hospital, my comrade arrived on the scene to catalog any information that might have survived. She found Hal in a very distraught condition. His Library of Records was in shambles, and he had nowhere to live. She offered him a position at the Hotel Denouement, where he might aid us in our research and learn to cook. Unfortunately he’s only been good at one of those things.”
“And what about Charles?” Violet asked, remembering what Klaus had observed during his errands.
“Charles has been searching for you since you left the lumbermill,” Dewey said. “He cares for you, Baudelaires, despite the selfish and dreadful behavior of his partner. You’ve seen your share of wicked people, Baudelaires, but you’ve seen your share of people as noble as you are.”
“I’m not sure we are noble,” Klaus said quietly, flipping the pages of his commonplace book. “We caused those accidents at the lumbermill. We’re responsible for the destruction of the hospital. We helped start the fire that destroyed Madame Lulu’s archival library. We—”