“Do you know why he calls himself Hangfire?” I asked.
“Villains always choose spooky names,” Jake said.
“It was weeks before I thought to look it up in the dictionary,” I said. “It refers to something that takes a bit of time before it works. It usually describes explosions or blastings. But people use it in other circumstances, too. It can describe a slow-acting poison, or a tree that weakens for years before it falls. There’s a brand of old-fashioned phonograph called Hangfire, because it has a mechanism that allows the needle to hover over the record until the exact moment you want the music to play.”
There is a look people give you when they are interested but they do not know what you are talking about. Moxie opened up her typewriter and sat on the floor to take notes. “So?”
I pointed to the floor where the papers had lain, and my associates looked at the small rectangular marks that were there. “When this building was the Roe House,” I said, “they used special tanks for the baby sturgeons. But the tanks were moved from 350 Wayward Way to the Colophon Clinic, and then moved again to 421 Ballpoint Avenue, to concoct the ridiculous story about hating moths. The treacherous needle was hovering all the time, waiting to play a song that framed Dashiell Qwerty for arson.”
“But why would Hangfire do all that?” Cleo asked.
“That’s the wrong question,” I said sadly. “The right question is, what did they do with the rest of the equipment from Roe House?”
“You mean someone’s making caviar someplace?” Moxie said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Caviar is made from the eggs of fish. The eggs I’m thinking of hatch into tadpoles with very sharp teeth.”
Jake paced around the empty room. “I can’t make head or tail of that speech,” he said. “None of it makes sense. I thought we interrupted Hangfire’s plans. We rescued Cleo and shut down that horrible clinic.”
“All those shackles,” Cleo said, with a shudder, “ready to chain up hundreds of children.”
“And now all the children in town are in one place,” I said. “All of them but us.”
Moxie looked up from the typewriter and frowned in thought. “Does ‘truancy’ mean what I think it means?” she asked.
“It refers to people who neglect their duties,” I said, “but mostly it’s used to describe children who don’t show up at school. Why do you ask?”
She pointed at why she was asking. A beige van had pulled up to the curb, right ahead of Cleo’s Dilemma. It looked harmless enough except for the writing on the side. It did not say FLOWERS or PACKAGES or anything you want to come in a van. It said DEPARTMENT OF TRUANCY, and the doors of the van were opening.
“I suppose in a town with one school,” Jake said, “there’s no more need for a Department of Truancy than a Department of Education.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
Two people got out of the van. One was a man and one was a woman, I thought, although it was difficult to be sure. Both of them were wearing long coats, wrong for the heat, and both of them were wearing masks. I had seen these masks many times, but they still unnerved me. “Unnerved” is a word which here means I didn’t want to look at them. It didn’t matter. The people wearing them were coming toward us, whether I wanted to look at them or not. One figure—the man, if it was a man—was holding something behind his back. I didn’t want to see what it was. I was already scared quite enough.
“Why are they wearing masks?” Jake asked. “I didn’t hear the bell ring.”
“They’re the ones who ring the bell,” I said, and moved cautiously toward the far corner. The door, I thought. A back room, an exit someplace.
“How did they know where to find us?” Moxie asked, but they were already through the front door. For a moment we all faced each other. There are more of us, I told myself, than there are of them. But this is something all children say about all adults at one time or another, and it never seems to do any good.
“You children are truants,” the woman said, instead of “hello.” “We’re here to take you to school.”
“I don’t go to school,” Moxie said.
“None of us do,” Cleo said.
“Children like yourselves shouldn’t be messing around in abandoned buildings,” the woman said. Her voice was muffled and buzzy behind her mask, or maybe she was trying to disguise it. She needn’t have bothered. She wasn’t wearing her shiny pin, but even as I moved toward the back of the room, I could see her bright yellow fingernails. “Get in the van and you’ll learn the value of a top-drawer education.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say,” Moxie said. She was using her good, polite voice, which she’d been taught was the journalist’s best tool. It seemed unlikely to me that it was the right tool for the job. “We appreciate your interest in our ongoing development, but there’s no need to bother yourself with troublesome underlings. We’ll be on our way.”
The man pointed through the door to the waiting van, and then brought his other hand from behind his back to reveal a large, carved club, a little longer and a little thicker than a baseball bat. It was made of black wood, and the carvings were at the very end of it. They were rough, angled carvings, as if the carver had been angry when he used his knife. Still, though, I could see what they depicted. I could see the face of the Bombinating Beast. I trembled backward a few more steps, but my associates stepped toward the front door.
“We can’t get in that van,” I told them.
The man walked swiftly toward me, swinging his weapon. Cudgel, I thought, would be another word for it. Staff. Wedge. I tried to remember what a billet was, exactly. I wished Dashiell Qwerty were there with a dictionary.
“If this man attacks me,” I said, “with his club or cudgel or staff or wedge, you’ll have time to escape.”
“There’s no need to show off with words,” the masked woman said.
“It makes me feel better when I’m frightened,” I said, and the man stepped closer. I could see his eyes blinking behind the slits in the mask, and when I reached my hand back I felt the knob of the back door. “Would ‘billet’ be appropriate?” I asked him. “I can’t remember the exact definition of ‘billet.’ ”
He didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had.
“We can’t let him hurt you,” Moxie said.
I just looked at her bandaged arm. There are some things you cannot explain to anyone, even when they have been explained to you, over and over, almost since the day you were born.
“We’re not going to hurt Mr. Snicket,” the woman said calmly. “That’s the deal we struck. But you other four children are coming with us.”
“Four?” Cleo said, as Moxie and Jake looked around the room for a quick count.
The man reached behind me, and for a moment I felt his hand on mine as he turned the knob and the door heaved open. It felt like any other hand. Behind the door was just a small closet. It had a few buckets in it and a salty smell. It was damp, probably from a leak. And huddled on the ground was Kellar Haines. His wide eyes were frightened. All of him was frightened. The man reached down and hoisted him to his feet. Kellar met my eyes as he was dragged past me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know you tried to warn us.”
My associates watched in silence as the man brought Kellar to the front of the room. The woman put her hand on her son. The man looked back at me with the carved thing in his hand. You could just call it a stick, I thought.
“Don’t get into that van,” I said, and took a few steps in the adults’ direction. The man gestured with his weapon, just slightly. Just slightly was enough.
“You act like we’re doing some terrible thing,” the woman said to me. “We’re simply taking four young people to school.”
“Then why are you wearing masks?” I asked.
The man hoisted the club in his hand and brought it smashing down onto Moxie’s typewriter. Everything shook with the blow, and the journalist’s device shattered
across the room in a galaxy of pieces. Somebody shrieked in surprise—Jake, I think. The rest of us just stared at the savage, lost sight of the ruined typewriter that lay scattered like alphabetical bones. Then the woman opened the door, and Kellar, then Jake and Cleo, then Moxie with her eyes on the mechanical bits on the floor, and lastly the masked man walked out of the building. Moxie looked back at me.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why aren’t they taking you?”
“I’m in a special program,” I said, and followed them out. The air still felt like rain. The man ushered everyone into the van, but he still didn’t say anything. His voice could have sounded like anything. He could imitate the voice of anyone, anyone at all. He might not have even had a real voice, not anymore. When Theodora and I had first arrived at the Department of Education, he’d asked us if we had any fire just to see if we recognized him. We hadn’t. It was wrong not to recognize him. I was wrong to watch the van pull away from the curb. It drove down the street and turned a corner and my friends disappeared and it was all wrong, all of it exactly wrong.
CHAPTER SEVEN
S. Theodora Markson was on the floor of the Far East Suite, picking up glitter with her bare hands. She did not look up when I opened the door. I noticed that the yellow polish on her nails was almost gone. Here and there were little bits of it, but the rest of it had been scratched away. I felt the same way.
“Where have you been?” she asked me, still facing the ground.
“I might ask you the same question.”
“I forbid you to talk to me that way,” Theodora said, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “I am the chaperone and you are the apprentice. I demand a complete account of your whereabouts since we last spoke.”
I looked around the rest of the room. Things were missing. Theodora’s suitcase was on her bed, closed up tight.
“I waited for you to come home all night,” I said, “and slept a little bit, and then I got up and got dressed and went to breakfast.”
“And then?”
“And then some friends of mine were abducted under the threat of violence and forced into a van.” I knew better than to call them associates in front of Theodora, whose definition of “associate” was “someone who has completed our organization’s formal training.” My definition was more useful.
“Did you get the license number of the van?”
“I don’t need the license number,” I said. “I know who was driving, and I know where it was going.”
One of Theodora’s hands opened, and I could see the glitter she’d piled up inside it. Nothing else moved. “What are you going to do now?” she asked finally.
“The abductors thought nobody would come after them,” I said. “They were wrong. I’m going to rescue them.”
“You can’t,” my chaperone said, on the floor. “The case has been solved, Snicket. I’ve packed up my things, and I expect you to do the same. We are leaving Stain’d-by-the-Sea on the next train.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“I’m not wrong. I’ve packed my suitcase.”
“You have enough wrong to fill fifty suitcases and a garment bag,” I said.
Theodora pounded her fist on the floor, and the glitter fluttered briefly and then fell back down, like a flock of pigeons when you walk through them. Then, finally, she raised her head to look at me. There was a bruise on her face, long and oddly shaped, running up from her cheek to curl near her eye. I knelt down quickly. If you have a bruise you do not want it touched, but everyone who cares about you will want to touch it, in the hope of somehow making it better.
“What did they do to you?” I asked.
“I think you can see for yourself,” she said.
“They struck you.”
“They struck a deal,” she corrected. “We leave town and you don’t have to go to that school.”
“They’re monsters,” I said. “We’ll go straight to the Mitchums and tell them what’s going on.”
She shook her head. It made her wince. Her hair looked like it might be wincing, too.
“We have a job to do,” I said. “Something terrible is going on in this town, and we have to stop it.”
“That’s not our job,” she said quietly. “We’re not detectives and we’re not lifesavers, Snicket.”
“If we’re not going to help people, why did we come here?”
“You can’t help them. You’re only an apprentice—and a child.”
“But you’re more than that.”
Theodora shook her head and crawled over to sit on the bed, next to her suitcase. “I’m not like you,” she said, with a great, shuddering sigh. “I’m not smart, Snicket. I don’t ask the right questions and I never find the right answers.”
“Neither do I.”
“You could have had your pick of chaperones, and you chose one ranked fifty-second out of fifty-two.” She kicked at the glitter on the ground. “May I ask why?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I was asking the wrong questions, too. Hangfire’s been using us from the beginning, to advance his schemes. The theft of the Bombinating Beast, the disappearance of Cleo Knight, the burning of Stain’d Secondary School—all of our big cases have turned out to be part of Hangfire’s treachery, and we’re still no closer to defeating him.”
“All the more reason to leave town,” Theodora said. “We can be transferred to another location, and we’ll never have to worry about Stain’d-by-the-Sea again.”
“And what will happen to the people here?”
“Don’t think about them,” she said to me. “Think about your sister, Snicket.”
The room spun a little. It’s like that when you are shocked. “What do you mean?” I said.
“You know precisely what I mean,” she said. “If we return to the city, maybe we can get her out of prison.”
“You have no way of knowing that.”
“I know that if we don’t leave she won’t be saved.”
“You don’t know that, either,” I said. “My sister is very brave and very resourceful.”
“Some of the bravest and most resourceful people in the world have come to bad ends,” Theodora said, and rubbed her cheek. I watched her. It was tempting to leave town. I wanted to do it. My empty suitcase was under the bed, watched over by the painting of the girl with the dog with the bandaged paw. There were very few things I wanted to bring with me. I looked at the bruise on Theodora’s cheek and thought about the bandage on Moxie’s arm. People getting hurt was one reason I never should have come to this town, I thought. But it was also the reason to stay. I leaned down on the floor and hoisted something from under the bed, but it wasn’t my suitcase. It was a small box with a funnel growing out of it and a crank clinging to its side.
Theodora frowned. “You’re making the wrong choice, Snicket. As your chaperone, I am obliged to warn you of this.”
“And as your apprentice, I am obligated to remind you that I am under your supervision. You can’t leave town without me.”
“I’ll drag you out of here if I have to.”
“You and your gal pal?” I couldn’t help saying, and pointed at the splinters of yellow on her fingernails. “You may not be able to trust your friends, but I can trust mine.”
“You’re unsupervised, Snicket,” she said, as if Unsupervised were my first name. “I might be required to stay in town, but I’m not required to go wherever you are going.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to go with me,” I said. “I only work with competent associates I can trust.”
Theodora gasped, as if someone had struck her again. It was a rude thing I’d said to her. I had called her incompetent, which meant she couldn’t do anything right. And I had called her untrustworthy, which meant I didn’t know if she would even try to do the right thing. I couldn’t decide if it was true, what I’d said about her. It was just something that had said itself. I didn’t have time to worry about it.
“I’ll have Prosper Lost send up som
e ice,” I said. “Wrap some in a towel and hold it to your cheek while you’re unpacking. It will reduce the swelling.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’d like to see for myself the value of a top-drawer education,” I said, and left with Ellington’s old-fashioned phonograph under one arm and the library book she’d requested under the other. I walked down the stairs and told Prosper Lost about the ice, and then I went into the phone booth and called the Officers Mitchum. I asked Harvey how Qwerty was doing. Mimi said he was fine. I asked Mimi if I could talk to him, and Harvey said no. I asked Harvey if I could talk to him later, and Mimi said nobody could talk to Dashiell Qwerty and that he would be locked up until the train arrived to take him into the city. Both of them asked me why I was asking all these questions, and I said it was because I was finally interested in becoming a schoolchild like their adorable son Stew and then I asked both of them if Stew got his adorable qualities from his mother or from his father and then I let the phone dangle when they started to argue over it and walked out of the lobby feeling a little bit better.
It was still hot. The rain was closer. I lugged the phonograph over to Hungry’s, and out in front was the Bellerophon brothers’ taxicab, just as I’d hoped. It was empty, just as I hadn’t. I put the phonograph in the back and then went inside. The Bellerophon brothers were there. They looked pale and sickly, but Hungry was yelling at them anyway. “Go on, get out of here!” she said, shooing them with a rag. “You’re not getting another free meal from us.”
“Be a sport, Hungry,” Pip said. “We could eat a horse.”
“We haven’t had anything for almost three days,” Squeak said.
“Go whine about it to Jake, if you can find him,” Hungry said.
“He’s at school,” I told her.
She frowned. “He doesn’t need any more learning. He reads too much as it is.”
“It wasn’t his idea,” I reassured her.
“Well, he should have told me,” she said. “He promised me he’d be right back. I’ve been worrying about him.”
Shouldn't You Be in School? Page 7