The Ersatz Elevator

by Lemony Snicket

  Sure enough, the doorman was at his usual post by the door, and was just noticing the three exhausted children sitting on the bottom step.

  "Hello there," he said, walking up to them and smiling from beneath the wide brim of his hat. Sticking out of his long sleeves were a small starfish carved out of wood, and a bottle of glue. "I was just going to put up this ocean decoration when I thought I heard someone walking down the stairs."

  "We just thought we'd have lunch here in the lobby," Violet said, not wanting to admit that she and her siblings had been listening at doors, "and then hike back up."

  "I'm sorry, but that means that you're not allowed back up to the penthouse," the doorman said, and shrugged his shoulders inside his oversized coat. "You'll have to stay here in the lobby. After all, my instructions were very clear: You were not supposed to return to the Squalor penthouse until the guest left. I let you go up last night because Mr. Squalor said that your guest was probably on his way down, but he was wrong, because Gunther never showed up in the lobby."

  "You mean Gunther still hasn't left the building?" Violet asked.

  "Of course not," the doorman said. "I'm here all day and all night, and I haven't seen him leave. I promise you that Gunther never walked out of this door."

  "When do you sleep?" Klaus asked.

  "I drink a lot of coffee," the doorman answered.

  "It just doesn't make any sense," Violet said.

  "Sure it does," the doorman said. "Coffee contains caffeine, which is a chemical stimulant. Stimulants keep people awake."

  "I didn't mean the part about the coffee," Violet said. "I meant the part about Gunther. Esmé--that's Mrs. Squalor--is positive that he left the penthouse last night, while we were at the restaurant. But you are equally positive that he didn't leave the building. It's a problem that doesn't seem to have a solution."

  "Every problem has a solution," the doorman said. "At least, that's what a close associate of mine says. Sometimes it just takes a long time to find the solution--even if it's right in front of your nose."

  The doorman smiled at the Baudelaires, who watched him walk over to the sliding elevator doors. He opened the bottle of glue and made a small globby patch on one of the doors, and then held the wooden starfish against the glue in order to attach it. Gluing things to a door is never a very exciting thing to watch, and after a moment, Violet and Sunny turned their attention back to their lunch and the problem of Gunther's disappearance. Only Klaus kept looking in the direction of the doorman as he continued to decorate the lobby. The middle Baudelaire looked and looked and looked, and kept on looking even when the glue dried and the doorman went back to his post at the door. Klaus kept facing the ocean decoration that was now firmly attached to one of the elevator doors, because he realized now, after a tiring morning of searching the penthouse and an exhausting afternoon of eavesdropping on the stairs, that the doorman had been right. Klaus didn't move his face one bit, because he realized that the solution was, indeed, right in front of his nose.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  When you know someone a long time, you become accustomed to their idiosyncrasies, which is a fancy word for their unique habits. For instance, Sunny Baudelaire had known her sister, Violet, for quite some time, and was accustomed to Violet's idiosyncrasy of tying her hair up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes whenever she was inventing something. Violet had known Sunny for exactly the same length of time, and was accustomed to Sunny's idiosyncrasy of saying "Freijip?" when she wanted to ask the question "How can you think of elevators at a time like this?" And both the young Baudelaire women were very well acquainted with their brother, Klaus, and were accustomed to his idiosyncrasy of not paying a bit of attention to his surroundings when he was thinking very hard about something, as he was clearly doing as the afternoon wore on. The doorman continued to insist that the Baudelaire orphans could not return to the penthouse, so the three children sat on the bottom step of 667 Dark Avenue's lengthy stairwell, ate food they had brought down with them, and rested their weary legs, which had not felt this sore since Olaf, in a previous disguise, had forced them to run hundreds and hundreds of laps as part of his scheme to steal their fortune. A good thing to do when one is sitting, eating, and resting is to have a conversation, and Violet and Sunny were both eager to converse about Gunther's mysterious appearance and disappearance, and what they might be able to do about it, but Klaus scarcely participated in the discussion. Only when his sisters asked him a direct question, such as "But where in the world could Gunther be?" or "What do you think Gunther is planning?" or "Topoing?" did Klaus mumble a response, and Violet and Sunny soon figured out that Klaus must be thinking very hard about something, so they left him to his idiosyncrasy and talked quietly to each other until the doorman ushered Jerome and Esmé into the lobby.

  "Hello, Jerome," Violet said. "Hello, Esmé."

  "Tretchev!" Sunny shrieked, which meant "Welcome home!"

  Klaus mumbled something.

  "What a pleasant surprise to see you all the way down here!" Jerome said. "It'll be easier to climb all those stairs if we have you three charming people for company."

  "And you can carry the crates of parsley soda that are stacked outside," Esmé said. "Then I don't have to worry about breaking one of my fingernails."

  "We'd be happy to carry big crates up all those stairs," Violet lied, "but the doorman says we're not allowed back in the penthouse."

  "Not allowed?" Jerome frowned. "Whatever do you mean?"

  "You gave me specific instructions not to let the children back in, Mrs. Squalor," the doorman said. "At least, until Gunther left the building. And he still hasn't left."

  "Don't be absurd," Esmé said. "He left the penthouse last night. What kind of doorman are you?"

  "Actually, I'm an actor," the doorman said, "but I was still able to follow your instructions."

  Esmé gave the doorman a stern look she probably used when giving people financial advice. "Your instructions have changed," she said. "Your new instructions are to let me and my orphans go directly to my seventy-one-bedroom apartment. Got it, buster?"

  "Got it," the doorman replied meekly.

  "Good," Esmé said, and then turned to the children. "Hurry up, kids," she said. "Violet and what's-his-name can each take a crate of soda, and Jerome will take the rest. I guess the baby won't be very helpful, but that's to be expected. Let's get a move on."

  The Baudelaires got a move on, and in a few moments the three children and the two adults were trekking up the sixty-six-floor-long staircase. The youngsters were hoping that Esmé might help carry the heavy crates of soda, but the city's sixth most important financial advisor was much more interested in telling them all about her meeting with the King of Arizona than in buttering up any orphans. "He told me a long list of new things that are in," Esmé squealed. "For one thing, grapefruits. Also bright blue cereal bowls, billboards with photographs of weasels on them, and plenty of other things that I will list for you right now." All the way up to the penthouse, Esmé listed the new in items she had learned about from His Arizona Highness, and the two Baudelaire sisters listened carefully the whole time. They did not listen very carefully to Esmé's very dull speech, of course, but they listened closely at each curve of the staircase, double-checking their eavesdropping to hear if Gunther was indeed behind one of the apartment doors. Neither Violet nor Sunny heard anything suspicious, and they would have asked Klaus, in a low whisper so the Squalors couldn't hear them, if he had heard any sort of Gunther noise, but they could tell from his idiosyncrasy that he was still thinking very hard about something and wasn't listening to the noises in the other apartments any more than he was listening to automobile tires, cross-country skiing, movies with waterfalls in them, and the rest of the in things Esmé was rattling off.

  "Oh, and magenta wallpaper!" Esmé said, as the Baudelaires and the Squalors finished a dinner of in foods washed down with parsley soda, which tasted even nastier than it sounds. "And triangul
ar picture frames, and very fancy doilies, and garbage cans with letters of the alphabet stenciled all over them, and--"

  "Excuse me," Klaus said, and his sisters jumped a little bit in surprise. It was the first time Klaus had spoken in anything but a mumble since they had been down in the lobby. "I don't mean to interrupt, but my sisters and I are very tired. May we be excused to go to bed?"

  "Of course," Jerome said. "You should get plenty of rest for the auction tomorrow. I'll take you to the Veblen Hall at ten-thirty sharp, so--"

  "No you won't," Esmé said. "Yellow paper clips are in, Jerome, so as soon as the sun rises, you'll have to go right to the Stationery District and get some. I'll bring the children."

  "Well, I don't want to argue," Jerome said, shrugging and giving the children a small smile. "Esmé, don't you want to tuck the children in?"

  "Nope," Esmé answered, frowning as she sipped her parsley soda. "Folding blankets over three wriggling children sounds like a lot more trouble than it's worth. See you tomorrow, kids."

  "I hope so," Violet said, and yawned. She knew that Klaus was asking to be excused so he could tell her and Sunny what he had been thinking about, but after lying awake the previous night, searching the entire penthouse, and tiptoeing down all those stairs, the eldest Baudelaire was actually quite tired. "Good night, Esmé. Good night, Jerome."

  "Good night, children," Jerome said. "And please, if you get up in the middle of the night and have a snack, try not to spill your food. There seem to be a lot of crumbs around the penthouse lately."

  The Baudelaire orphans looked at one another and smiled at their shared secret. "Sorry about that," Violet said. "Tomorrow we'll do the vacuuming if you want."

  "Vacuum cleaners!" Esmé said. "I knew there was something else he told me was in. Oh, and cotton balls, and anything with chocolate sprinkles on it, and . . ."

  The Baudelaires did not want to stick around for any more of Esmé's in list, so they brought their plates into the nearest kitchen, and walked down a hallway decorated with the antlers of various animals, through a sitting room, past five bathrooms, took a left at another kitchen, and eventually made their way to Violet's bedroom.

  "O.K., Klaus," Violet said to her brother, when the three children had found a comfortable corner for their discussion. "I know you've been thinking very hard about something, because you've been doing that unique habit of yours where you don't pay a bit of attention to your surroundings."

  "Unique habits like that are called idiosyncrasies," Klaus said.

  "Stiblo!" Sunny cried, which meant "We can improve our vocabulary later--tell us what's on your mind!"

  "Sorry, Sunny," Klaus said. "It's just that I think I've figured out where Gunther might be hiding, but I'm not positive. First, Violet, I need to ask you something. What do you know about elevators?"

  "Elevators?" Violet said. "Quite a bit, actually. My friend Ben once gave me some elevator blueprints for my birthday, and I studied them very closely. They were destroyed in the fire, of course, but I remember that an elevator is essentially a platform, surrounded by an enclosure, that moves along the vertical axis via an endlessly looped belt and a series of ropes. It's controlled by a push-button console that regulates an electromagnetic braking system so the transport sequence can be halted at any access point the passenger desires. In other words, it's a box that moves up or down, depending on where you want to go. But so what?"

  "Freijip?" Sunny asked, which, as you know, was her idiosyncratic way of saying "How can you think of elevators at a time like this?"

  "Well, it was the doorman who got me thinking about elevators," Klaus said. "Remember when he said that sometimes the solution is right under your nose? Well, he was gluing that wooden starfish to the elevator doors right when he said that."

  "I noticed that, too," Violet said. "It looked a little ugly."

  "It did look ugly," Klaus agreed. "But that's not what I mean. I got to thinking about the elevator doors. Outside the door to this penthouse, there are two pairs of elevator doors. But on every other floor, there's only one pair."

  "That's true," Violet said, "and that's odd, too, now that I think of it. That means one elevator can stop only on the top floor."

  "Yelliverc!" Sunny said, which meant "That second elevator is almost completely useless!"

  "I don't think it's useless," Klaus said, "because I don't think the elevator is really there."

  "Not really there?" Violet asked. "But that would just leave an empty elevator shaft!"

  "Middiow?" Sunny asked.

  "An elevator shaft is the path an elevator uses to move up and down," Violet explained to her sister. "It's sort of like a hallway, except it goes up and down, instead of side to side."

  "And a hallway," Klaus said, "could lead to a hiding place."

  "Aha!" Sunny cried.

  "Aha is right," Klaus agreed. "Just think, if he used an empty elevator shaft instead of the stairs, nobody would ever know where he was. I don't think the elevator has been shut down because it's out. I think it's where Gunther is hiding."

  "But why is he hiding? What is he up to?" Violet asked.

  "That's the part we still don't know," Klaus admitted, "but I bet you the answers can be found behind those sliding doors. Let's take a look at what's behind the second pair of elevator doors. If we see the ropes and things you were describing, then we know it's a real elevator. But if we don't--"

  "Then we know we're on the right track,"

  Violet finished for him. "Let's go right this minute."

  "If we go right this minute," Klaus said, "we'll have do it very quietly. The Squalors are not going to let three children poke around an elevator shaft."

  "It's worth the risk, if it helps us figure out Gunther's plan," Violet said. I'm sorry to say that it turned out not to be worth the risk at all, but of course the Baudelaires had no way of knowing that, so they merely nodded in agreement and tiptoed toward the penthouse's exit, peeking into each room before they went through to see if the Squalors were anywhere to be found. But Jerome and Esmé were apparently spending the evening in some room in another part of the apartment, because the Baudelaires didn't see hide or hair of them--the expression "hide or hair of them" here means "even a glimpse of the city's sixth most important financial advisor, or her husband"--on their way to the front door. They hoped the door would not squeak as they pushed it open, but apparently silent hinges were in, because the Baudelaires made no noise at all as they left the apartment and tiptoed over to the two pairs of sliding elevator doors.

  "How do we know which elevator is which?" Violet whispered. "The pairs of doors look exactly alike."

  "I hadn't thought of that," Klaus replied. "If one of them is really a secret passageway, there must be some way to tell."

  Sunny tugged on the legs of her siblings' pants, which was a good way to get their attention without making any noise, and when Violet and Klaus looked down to see what their sister wanted, she answered them just as silently. Without speaking, she reached out one of her tiny fingers and pointed to the buttons that were next to each set of sliding doors. Next to one pair of doors, there was a single button, with an arrow printed on it pointing down. But next to the second pair of doors, there were two buttons: one with a Down arrow, and one with an Up arrow. The three children looked at the buttons and considered.

  "Why would you need an Up button," Violet whispered, "if you were already on the top floor?" and without waiting for an answer to her question, she reached out and pressed it. With a quiet, slithery sound, the sliding doors opened, and the children leaned carefully into the doorway, and gasped at what they saw.

  "Lakry," Sunny said, which meant something like "There are no ropes."

  "Not only are there no ropes," Violet said. "There's no endlessly looped belt, push-button console, or electromagnetic braking system. I don't even see an enclosed platform."

  "I knew it," Klaus said, in hushed excitement. "I knew the elevator was ersatz!"

  "Ersatz"
is a word that describes a situation in which one thing is pretending to be another, the way the secret passageway the Baudelaires were looking at had been pretending to be an elevator, but the word might as well have meant "the most terrifying place the Baudelaires had ever seen." As the children stood in the doorway and peered into the elevator shaft, it was as if they were standing on the edge of an enormous cliff, looking down at the dizzying depths below them. But what made these depths terrifying, as well as dizzying, was that they were so very dark. The shaft was more like a pit than a passageway, leading straight down into a blackness the likes of which the youngsters had never seen. It was darker than any night had ever been, even on nights when there was no moon. It was darker than Dark Avenue had been on the day of their arrival. It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea. The Baudelaire orphans had never dreamed that anything could be this dark, even in their scariest nightmares, and as they stood at the edge of this pit of unimaginable blackness, they felt as if the elevator shaft would simply swallow them up and they would never see a speck of light again.

  "We have to go down there," Violet said, scarcely believing the words she was saying.

  "I'm not sure I have the courage to go down there," Klaus said. "Look how dark it is. It's terrifying."

  "Prollit," Sunny said, which meant "But not as terrifying as what Gunther will do to us, if we don't find out his plan."

  "Why don't we just go tell the Squalors about this?" Klaus asked. "Then they can go down the secret passageway."

  "We don't have time to argue with the Squalors," Violet said. "Every minute we waste is a minute the Quagmires are spending in Gunther's clutches."

  "But how are we going to go down?" Klaus asked. "I don't see a ladder, or a staircase. I don't see anything at all."

  "We're going to have to climb down," Violet said, "on a rope. But where can we find rope at this time of night? Most hardware stores close at six."