The Slippery Slope asoue-10

by Lemony Snicket

  Chapter Twelve

  Not too long ago, in the Swedish city of Stockholm, a group of bank robbers took a few prisoners during the course of their work. For several days, the bank robbers and the prisoners lived together in close proximity, a word which here means "while the police gathered outside and eventually managed to arrest the robbers and take them to jail." When the prisoners were finally freed, however, the authorities discovered that they had become friends with the bank robbers, and since that time the expression "Stockholm Syndrome" has been used to describe a situation in which someone becomes friendly with the people who are holding them prisoner.

  There is another expression, however, which describes a situation that is far more common, when a prisoner does not become friends with such people, but instead regards them as villains, and despises them more and more with each passing moment, waiting desperately for an opportunity to escape. The expression is "Mount Fraught Syndrome," and Sunny Baudelaire was experiencing it as she stood at the top of Mount Fraught, gazing down at the frozen waterfall and thinking about her circumstances.

  The young girl had spent another sleepless night in the covered casserole dish, after washing the salmon out of it with a few handfuls of melted snow. It was chilly, of course, with the winds of the Mortmain Mountains blowing through the holes in the lid, and it was painful, because once again her teeth were chattering in the cold and giving her tiny cuts on her lips, but there was another reason Sunny did not sleep well, which is that she was frustrated. Despite her best spying attempts, the youngest Baudelaire had been unable to eavesdrop on the villains' conversation and learn the location of the last safe place where V.F.D. would be gathering, or learn any more about the dreadful recruitment scheme planned by the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard. When the troupe gathered around the flat rock for dinner, they discussed these things, but every time Sunny tried to get close enough to hear what they were saying, they glared at her and quickly changed the subject. It seemed to Sunny that the only thing she had accomplished all evening was preparing a meal that the troupe enjoyed. When she had presented her platter of False Spring Rolls, no one had complained, and every single villainous person had taken second helpings.

  But something crucial had escaped the attention of Count Olaf and his comrades during the meal, and for that Sunny was very grateful. As she had told her siblings, the youngest Baudelaire had prepared an assortment of vegetables wrapped in spinach leaves, in honor of False Spring. Her recipe had required the bag of mushrooms, the can of water chestnuts, and the frozen hunk of spinach, which she had thawed by holding it underneath her shirt, as she had when preparing toast tartar. But Sunny had decided at the last minute that she would not use the enormous eggplant. When Violet mentioned that the eggplant must weigh as much as Sunny did, the youngest Baudelaire had an idea, and rather than chopping the eggplant into small strips with her teeth, she hid it behind the flat tire of Count Olaf's car, and now, as the sun rose and the group of villains began their usual morning bickering, she was retrieving the eggplant and rolling it to the casserole dish. As she rolled it past the automobile, Sunny looked down at the frozen waterfall, which was looking less and less frozen in the morning sun. She knew her siblings were at the bottom with Quigley, and although she couldn't see them, it made her feel better knowing they were relatively nearby and that, if her plan worked out, she would soon be joining them.

  "What are you doing, baby?" Sunny had just slipped the eggplant under the cover of the casserole dish when she heard the voice of one of Olaf's comrades. The two white-faced women were standing just outside their tent and stretching in the morning sun.

  "Aubergine," Sunny replied, which meant "I've concocted a plan involving this eggplant, and it doesn't matter if I tell you about it because you never understand a single word I say."

  "More babytalk," said the other white-faced woman with a sigh. "I'm beginning to think that Sunny is only a helpless baby, and not a spy."

  "Goo goo ga — " Sunny began, but the flap of Count Olaf's tent opened before she could utter the last "ga." The villain and his girlfriend stood in the morning sun, and it was clear that they expected the new day — Saturday — to be an important one, because they were dressed for the occasion, a phrase which here means "wearing such strange clothing that the youngest Baudelaire was too surprised to say the final 'ga' she had been planning." Amazingly, it appeared that Count Olaf had washed his face, and he was wearing a brand-new suit made out of material that at first seemed to be covered in tiny polka dots. But when Sunny took a closer look, she saw that each dot was a small eye, matching Olaf's tattoo and the V.F.D. insignia and all of the other eyes that had plagued the Baudelaires since that terrible day on the beach, so that looking at Count Olaf in his new suit felt like looking at a crowd of villains, all staring at Sunny Baudelaire. But no matter how unnerving Olaf's fashion choice was, Esmé Squalor's outfit was worse to behold. Sunny could not remember when she had ever seen a dress so enormous, and was surprised that such an article of clothing could have fit in the tent and still leave room for villains to sleep. The dress was made of layers upon layers of shiny cloth, in different shades of yellow, orange, and red, all cut in fierce triangular shapes so that each layer seemed to cut into the next, and rising from the shoulders of the dress were enormous piles of black lace, sticking up into the air in strange curves. For a moment, the dress was so huge and odd that Sunny could not imagine why anyone would wear it, but as the wicked girlfriend stepped farther out of the tent, it became horribly clear. Esmé Squalor was dressed to look like an enormous fire.

  "What a wonderful morning!" Count Olaf crowed. "Just think, by the end of the day I'll have more new members of my troupe than ever before!"

  "And we'll need them," Esmé agreed "We're all going to have to work together for the greater good — burning down the last safe place!"

  "Just the idea of the Hotel Denouement in flames makes me so excited, I'm going to open a bottle of wine!" Count Olaf announced, and Sunny covered her mouth with her hands so the villains would not hear her gasp. The Hotel Denouement, she realized, must be the last safe place for volunteers to gather, and Olaf was so excited that he had uttered the name inadvertently, a word which here means "where the youngest Baudelaire could hear it."

  "The idea of all those eagles filling the sky makes me so excited, I'm going to smoke one of those in green cigarettes!" Esmé announced, and then frowned. "Except I don't have one. Drat."

  "Beg your pardon, your Esméship," said one of the white-faced women, "but I see some of that green smoke down at the bottom of the waterfall."

  "Really?" Esmé asked eagerly, and looked in the direction Olaf's employee was pointing. Sunny looked, too, and saw a familiar plume of green smoke at the very bottom of the slope, getting bigger and bigger as the sun continued to rise. The youngest Baudelaire wondered why her siblings were signaling her, and what they were trying to say.

  "That's strange," Olaf said. "You'd think there'd be nothing left of the headquarters to burn."

  "Look how much smoke there is," Esmé said greedily. "There must be a whole pack of cigarettes down there. This day is getting even better!"

  Count Olaf smiled, and then looked away from the waterfall and noticed Sunny for the first time. "I'll have the baby go down and get them for you," Count Olaf said.

  "Yessir!" Sunny said eagerly.

  "The baby would probably steal all the cigarettes for herself," Esmé said, glaring at the young girl. "I'll go."

  "But climbing down there will take hours " Olaf said. "Don't you want to be here for the recruitment scheme? I just love springing traps on people."

  "Me, too," Esmé agreed, "but don't worry, Olaf. I'll be back in moments. I'm not going to climb. I'll take one of the toboggans and sled down the waterfall before anyone else even notices I'm gone."

  "Drat!" Sunny couldn't help saying. She meant something along the lines of, "That is exactly what I was planning on doing," but once agai
n no one understood.

  "Shut up, toothy," Esmé said, "and get out of my way." She flounced past the youngest Baudelaire, and Sunny realized that there was something sewn to the bottom of the dress that made it make a crackling noise as she walked, so that the wicked girlfriend sounded as much like a fire as she looked like one. Blowing a kiss to Count Olaf, she grabbed the toboggan belonging to the sinister villains.

  "I'll be right back, darling," Esmé said. "Tell that baby to take a nap so she won't see what we're up to."

  "Esmé's right," Olaf said, giving Sunny a cruel smile. "Get in the casserole dish. You're such an ugly, helpless creature, I can scarcely stand to look at you."

  "You said it, handsome," Esmé said, and chuckled meanly as she sat at the top of the waterfall. The two white-faced women scurried to help, and gave the toboggan a big push as Sunny did as she was told, and disappeared from Olaf's sight.

  As you may imagine, the sight of a grown woman in an enormous flame-imitating dress tobogganing down from the source of the Stricken Stream to the two tributaries and the half-frozen pool at the bottom of the waterfall is not the sort of thing to pass unnoticed, even from far away. Violet was the first to see the colorful blur heading quickly down the slope, and she lowered Colette's hand mirror, which she had used once again to catch the rays of the rising sun and reflect them onto the Verdant Flammable Devices, which she had put in a pile in front of the pit. Wrinkling her nose from the bitter smell of the smoke, she turned to Klaus and Quigley, who were putting one last piece of weakened wood across the pit, so their trap would be hidden from view.

  "Look," Violet said, and pointed to the descending shape.

  "Do you think it's Esmé?" Klaus asked.

  Violet squinted up at the tobogganing figure. "I think so," she said. "Nobody but Esmé Squalor would wear an outfit like that."

  "We'd better hide behind the archway," Quigley said, "before she spots us."

  The two Baudelaires nodded in agreement, and walked carefully to the library entrance, making sure to step around the hole they had dug.

  "I'm happy that we can't see the pit anymore," Klaus said. "Looking into that blackness reminded me of that terrible passageway at 667 Dark Avenue."

  "First Esmé trapped your siblings there," Violet said to Quigley, "and then she trapped us."

  "And now we're fighting fire with fire, and trapping her," Quigley said uncomfortably.

  "It's best not to think about it," Violet said, although she had not stopped thinking about the trap since the first handful of ashes and earth. "Soon we'll have Sunny back, and that's what's important."

  "Maybe this is important, too," Klaus said, and pointed up at the archway. "I never noticed it until now."

  Violet and Quigley looked up to see what he was referring to, and saw four tiny words etched over their heads, right underneath the large letters spelling "V.F.D. Library."

  "'The world is quiet here,'" Quigley read. "What do you think it means?"

  "It looks like a motto," Klaus said. "At Prufrock Preparatory School, they had a motto carved near the entrance, so everyone would remember it when they entered the academy."

  Violet shook her head. "That's not what I'm thinking of," she said. "I'm remembering something about that phrase, but just barely."

  "The world certainly feels quiet around here," Klaus said. "We haven't heard a single snow gnat since we arrived."

  "The smell of smoke scares them away, remember?" Quigley asked.

  "Of course," Klaus said, and peered around the archway to check on Esmé's progress. The colorful blur was about halfway down the waterfall, heading straight for the trap they had built. "There's been so much smoke here at headquarters, the gnats might never come back."

  "Without snow gnats," Quigley said, "the salmon of the Stricken Stream will go hungry. They feed on snow gnats." He reached into his pocket and opened his commonplace book.

  "And without salmon," he said, "the Mortmain Mountain eagles will go hungry. The destruction of V.F.D, headquarters has caused even more damage than I thought."

  Klaus nodded in agreement. "When we were walking along the Stricken Stream," he said, "the fish were coughing from all the ashes in the water. Remember, Violet?"

  He turned to his sister, but Violet was only half listening. She was still gazing at the words on the archway, and trying to remember where she heard them before. "I can just hear those words," she said. "The world is quiet here. " She closed her eyes. "I think it was a very long time ago, before you were born, Klaus."

  "Maybe someone said them to you," Quigley said.

  Violet tried to remember as far back as she could, but everything seemed as misty as it did in the mountains. She could see the face of her mother, and her father standing behind her, wearing a suit as black as the ashes of V.F.D. headquarters. Their mouths were open, but Violet could not remember what they were saying. No matter how hard she tried, the memory was as silent as the grave. "Nobody said them to me," she said finally. "Someone sang them. I think my parents sang the words 'the world is quiet here' a long time ago, but I don't know why." She opened her eyes and faced her brother and her friend. "I think we might be doing the wrong thing," she said.

  "But we agreed," Quigley said, "to fight fire with fire."

  Violet nodded, and stuck her hands in her pocket, bumping up against the bread knife again. She thought of the darkness of the pit, and the scream Esmé would make as she fell into it. "I know we agreed," Violet said, "but if V.F.D. really stands for Volunteer Fire Department, then they're an organization that stops fire. If everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke."

  "I see what you mean," Quigley said. "If the V.F.D. motto is 'The world is quiet here,' we ought to be doing something less noisy and violent than trapping someone, no matter how wicked they are."

  "When I was looking into the pit," Klaus said quietly, "I was remembering something I read in a book by a famous philosopher. He said, 'Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.'" Klaus looked at his sister, and then at the sight of Esmé approaching, and then at the weakened wood that the three children had placed on the ground. "'Abyss' is a fancy word for 'pit,'" he said. "We built an abyss for Esmé to fall into. That's something a monster might do."

  Quigley was copying Klaus's words into his commonplace book. "What happened to that philosopher?" he asked.

  "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 lik
e 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 — "