I looked at her face and saw it was true. Like Prosper Lost, she was a nicer person when she talked about people she loved.
“I last saw Jake getting into a van marked DEPARTMENT OF TRUANCY,” I said.
Hungry shook her head. “Never heard of it.”
I turned to the brothers. “But you have.”
Pip and Squeak looked at each other and then at me. “We’ve been hiding out from them,” Pip said. “Twice that van has chased us all over town, and we couldn’t risk it again. We parked and lay low for a few days, but our stomachs were growling.”
“No food at home?”
“Our father is still very ill,” Squeak squeaked.
“Let me take care of you,” I said, and walked behind the counter.
“You can’t do that!” Hungry said. “This is my place! It’s private property!”
“What it is is a kitchen,” I said, “and these are hungry people. Hungry people should be fed. It takes some people a long time to figure this out, so you think about it and have a seat. I’ll make enough for everybody.”
I poured the brothers some juice from a pitcher. If you haven’t eaten in a while, it’s good to start with juice. I opened the refrigerator and took out what I could find, which was chicken and tomatoes and green peppers and plain, smooth yogurt. I looked at them for a second. Cooking isn’t very difficult. You just take edible things and turn them into something you want to eat. I turned on the grill so it’d be hot when I needed it, and I looked around for some rice and found some and put it in a pot of water on the stove. I put the yogurt in a bowl and found where Jake kept his spices and shook out coriander and cumin and ginger and cardamom and cinnamon and cayenne. I chopped the tomatoes and the green peppers and the chicken, and I mixed it up in the spiced yogurt and then spread it out on the grill to cook. Pip and Squeak looked a little better with the juice in them. The chicken and the vegetables changed color in the heat. I checked to make sure the chicken was cooked, and it was, so I found four plates and divvied up the rice and put the food on top.
“Dig in,” I told everybody.
“What is it?” Hungry asked.
“Tandoori chicken with vegetables,” I said. “Sort of. Real tandoori chicken is cooked in a special oven, in India and other countries where they’re not afraid of spices.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Hungry said. “I married a man from Calcutta.”
“How’d that work out?” I asked.
“None of your business,” Hungry said, with her mouth full. Pip and Squeak didn’t say anything. They ate furiously. It is a nice feeling to watch people enjoy what you’ve made for them. A root beer would have made it better, but Stain’d-by-the-Sea just didn’t seem to have one. Not even one lonely bottle. There is no justice in this town, I thought, letting the pots soak.
“That hit the spot,” Pip said, when it was over. “That hit two spots, Snicket. Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome very much,” I said.
Squeak wiped his mouth and said thanks, too. “Now what can we do for you?”
“I need a ride,” I said. “I already put some stuff in back.”
“Of course,” Pip said. “Let’s go.”
Hungry licked her spoon and then pointed it at me. “Aren’t you forgetting the dishes?” she asked.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’ll remember the dishes as long as I live. See you later, Hungry. If all goes well, I’ll bring Jake back to you very soon.”
We left and got in the car. Squeak got down on the floor so he could work the pedals for the gas and the brakes, and Pip sat on a stack of books and adjusted the rearview mirror. “Where to?” he asked me.
I told them.
“You mean you want to go exactly where the Department of Truancy wanted to take us?” Squeak said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
“That’s dangerous and it’s far,” Pip said. “It’s a long way from home.”
“I’m already a long way from home,” I said. “I’m probably going to get even farther from home before I see my family again.”
“It’s hard when you’re missing your family,” Pip said, and started up the motor. “You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs. All right, Snicket. We’ll take you. But I hope you have a big tip ready.”
I’d been saving one. The agreement I had with the Bellerophon brothers meant I recommended a book to them for every ride they gave me, instead of money, which I didn’t have. “There’s a book I really like,” I said, “that begins on a dark and stormy night,” and Squeak hit the gas and we got going. I told them all about the book. In most cases I wouldn’t have told the whole story, but I went through every detail, from the scientist who disappears mysteriously to the frighteningly intelligent boy, from the haunted house to the curious woman with the crystal ball to the terrifying black cloud and the brain that can talk all by itself. It was a long ride to the Wade Academy, and we were nervous about going there. The story of the book filled the car with exciting adventures of the sort that are fun to read about, so we didn’t have to think about the exciting adventures of the sort that are no fun to live through.
The taxi made its way down the bumpy path that had once been a cliff overlooking the sea. It was the way I had first come to town, staring out the window of Theodora’s roadster at the bare, grim landscape of the ink industry, full of giant mechanized needles poking their way into deep wells where the area’s last octopi still lived and inked. Beyond that was the wild and lawless Clusterous Forest, with the wind rippling through the seaweed that had somehow survived the draining of the sea, looking as mysterious as it did on the day I arrived. With the sea gone, Offshore Island was just a pile of stones rising from the bare seafloor, with an eerie bridge hanging over the missing water, and a rickety platform that had once served as a stop for the train. The Bellerophons had to circle around the bridge to find a route to rattle us over the shoreline and up toward Wade Academy. The bell rang as we approached the faded brick wall that surrounded the school. The sound was louder than I’d ever heard it, or maybe I was just closer than I’d ever been. Pip reached over and opened the glove compartment.
“I have some of those masks in here,” he told me.
“I thought we didn’t really need them,” Squeak said from below.
“We want to look like people who think we need them,” I said, and Pip passed them around. It was dark inside the mask. My breath wheezed through the mechanism at the mouth. All three of us wheezed together in the car, as if we were fighting for our lives. Outside, the brick wall loomed over us like an eager dentist, casting a deep shadow over the taxi and the three nervous people inside. I could see a large pile of something, gathered together in a spot right near the wall. The pile was round and tall like a haystack, made of something leafy, or something papery. I looked closer, but I couldn’t see what it was.
“We’re here,” Pip said, his voice muffled behind his own mask.
“We certainly are,” I said.
“What now?” Squeak asked.
“Now,” I said, “you wish me luck.”
The Bellerophons looked at each other. “ ‘Wish me luck,’ he says,” Pip said to his brother, “like we’re just going to drop him off at this sinister place and go home and suck our thumbs.”
“I need you in town,” I said. “Whatever Hangfire is cooking up here will be brought to Stain’d-by-the-Sea. You two are the last competent and trustworthy people I know who aren’t locked up in one way or another. I want you to go back to town and see if you catch wind of anything. You can meet me back here in the morning and we can share information.”
“What if you need to get to town before then?”
“I’ll walk.”
“They might be watching the roads.”
I looked up at the strange landscape and saw the lighthouse looking back at me from the top of the cliffs. “If I have to,” I said, “I can climb back up there using safety ropes I can fa
shion from seaweed.”
Squeak crawled up from his position on the floor to look at me. “Someday,” he said, “you’ll have to tell us where you learned to do all these difficult things.”
“I bet it’s no more difficult than learning to drive,” I told them, and got out of the taxi. The ground was so steep and uneven that I was unsteady for a moment, the way you are when you get out of bed after a nightmare. I grabbed the phonograph and felt it want to roll away as far as it could go. Part of me wanted to do the same. But instead I tried to give the Bellerophon brothers a smile, before realizing they couldn’t see it behind the mask. I knocked on the hood of the car instead. They understood, I think. In any case, they drove away and left me.
I looked up at the wall. It was like standing at a towering, dull-looking book. I skipped ahead a few chapters until I found an iron gate that looked cold and threatening and very, very locked. But with the gentlest of pushes it groaned its way open on hinges that were a complicated arrangement of grinding gears. It was the sort of mechanism my sister would have admired.
Don’t think of her now, I thought.
When I stepped through, I was in a jagged landscape of big rocks and small shrubs. It stretched out very far. It looked like a desert, but the air still felt rainy. I felt sweat at the back of my neck, and on my face under the mask, and on my palms as I kept switching the phonograph to alternate hands, and then everywhere as I walked toward the school. The Wade Academy’s buildings were blank and brick. Here and there were slender windows, but there weren’t enough of them for my taste. The place looked like it was sleeping. It was even quieter than Stain’d Secondary, before it had burned down, and schools should not be quiet places. It was wrong. The only sounds I heard were my own awkward footsteps and the whirs and clicks of the sort of insects that show up in warm weather as dusk approaches. Each sort of insect has a different sort of noise it uses for communication, although to me all the noises sounded like they were telling me to do something else.
Wait until evening, I told myself. It’ll be dark soon. Only a fool would approach this school in the daytime. Of course, only a fool would be here to begin with. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe this school is perfectly harmless. Then why don’t you just walk right in there? Oh, leave me alone. I argued with me for a while and decided that I was right. I should wait. Behind a few shrubs was a large, abandoned wagon, longer than an automobile and wider, too. It looked like something a farmer might use, or people who traveled with all the books they owned, just in case they needed one of them. It was a good place to wait. When the light grew too dim to read Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, I put it in my shirt for safekeeping, and passed the rest of the time trying to remember everything that happens to a little bunny who appeared in books I didn’t like. He disobeys his mother and eats vegetables out of some man’s garden. He loses his jacket and shoes. He drinks chamomile tea. He gets his clothes cleaned by a hedgehog. He gathers onions. He helps his sister Flopsy. Before I knew it, it was dark.
I stood up. The insects were louder and the school seemed quieter. I could only see one light on in the whole place, flickering in front of a window. The phonograph felt heavier, and I kept stumbling on roots and rocks in the dark, but I tried to make my way closer to the light. It was impossible to know if the light was a good sign or a bad sign, if I was wise to walk toward it or if I’d be wiser to walk away from it. I couldn’t even be sure it was a light. It might have been just a small, round reflection, something shiny in a window. This, too, reminded me of something. I’d almost figured out what it was when I heard a noise behind me.
It was too late, though. I was already walloped, hard, on the head.
The world went dizzy. I dropped the phonograph and heard it smash, but it took me about a week to fall down myself. Who hit me? I thought. Flopsy? Mopsy? Harold Limetta? And then my body hit the stones on the ground and everything hurt and everything got darker. A blow like this, I thought to myself, is likely to make you unconscious. You might be unconscious now, Snicket. You’re already lying on the ground.
A shadow fell over me. I wasn’t unconscious yet. I could see eyes, blinking in the little slits in a mask.
“I think you should be in school,” the voice said.
I couldn’t answer, so I didn’t. The eyes blinked at me and I heard the pitter-pat pitter-pat on my mask and felt drops on my skin. The rain had finally begun. I took it personally. The mask bent closer—closer—
CHAPTER EIGHT
“We don’t have any ice,” I heard myself say, in a voice that was strange for me. My mask was off and my eyes were closed. I tried to breathe, but something sweet stuck in my throat. “Ice would reduce the swelling,” I was saying, “but all I have is this washcloth soaked in cold water.”
Something clammy lay down on my forehead. “I need you to wake up, Snicket,” I said, and sighed. The sigh helped the sweet smell slither deeper down into me. I didn’t like it and it reminded me of something. The Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop, I thought. Those people pretending to be your parents. You fell asleep there and your entire time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea has been a dream. Go back to sleep. I told myself I was right and it was a good idea and then something startling was under my nose.
“Wake up,” I said, loudly now. Whatever was under my nose chased the sweet smell away. Now I smelled dirt and cinnamon and it made me cough. The clammy washcloth pressed down on my forehead and I frowned and opened my eyes.
I saw a big poster shouting LEARNING IS FUN! It was a fine time to bring that up.
“Are you awake?” I asked me, but it wasn’t me who was talking. It hadn’t been all along. I turned my head and ached and blinked and found myself staring into a pair of green eyes. They blinked below a pair of eyebrows curled up like question marks, and after she blinked, the girl gave me a smile that might have meant anything.
“Lemony Snicket,” she said.
“Ellington Feint,” I said. Her hair was black again—last I’d seen her it had been blond, so she could disguise herself as Cleo Knight. It was longer now, and twisted into two skinny braids that looked like sleeping snakes.
“Don’t call me Ellington Feint,” she said, and put down a handkerchief she was holding. It was knotted to hold something that she’d put under my nose to wake me up. “Here I’m using a different name. I’ve registered at the Wade Academy under the name Filene N. Gottlin.”
“That’s scarcely believable,” I said.
“I changed the letters around in ‘Ellington Feint’ so my assumed name would be an anagram of my real one. I suppose you could think of a better one?”
“Lifelong Intent,” I said. “Entitling Felon. No Flint Gentile. I’ve been thoroughly trained in anagrams. But that’s not what I meant. I mean it’s hard to believe you’ve enrolled in this school. Do you know what goes on here?”
“I’m trying to find out,” Ellington said. “I’m not here for a top-drawer education, Snicket. I’m here to find my father.”
“What makes you think he’s here?”
Ellington frowned, and walked away from where I lay. I sat up and, taking the wet washcloth off my aching head, took my first good look around. I was in a small, plain room, containing little more than a desk, a chair, a set of drawers, and the poster on the wall. There was a sink with a mirror bolted above it that reflected my bruised and tired face, and there was one small window with rain rattling against the pane and two items sitting on the sill: a dented pair of binoculars and a flowerpot with some leaves growing out of it that looked sickly. Ellington had crossed to a scuffed door and had pressed her ear against it, listening. I didn’t hear anything, but as I listened I realized I was lying in Ellington’s bed, with her blankets tucked tightly around me. It was a strange feeling, to be tucked into her bed. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not sure anyone could.
“I thought I heard him coming,” Ellington said.
“Who?”
“Stew Mitchum. He polices these hallways day and nig
ht with a cigarette in his mouth and a smirk on his face.”
“There’s boys like that at every school.”
Ellington gave me a small smile and walked over to the window. “I saw him attack you,” she said, gesturing to the binoculars, “but he didn’t have the strength to drag you inside. He went to get help and I took a chance and snuck out.”
“Thank you for rescuing me,” I said, and put the washcloth back on my forehead. I could feel a bump growing there, like a cake rising in the oven, but I wasn’t thinking about the bump. I was thinking about Ellington Feint, dragging me to her room. She was stronger than Stew Mitchum, or maybe she just wanted something more than he did. Or maybe, Snicket, I thought to myself—
“Thank you for bringing back my phonograph,” she said, “though I’m afraid it got smashed up as badly as you did.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, “but I brought you something else.”
I reached under the blanket and unbuttoned my shirt. Ellington didn’t say anything until I brought the book out. She didn’t say anything then, either. But her face changed. It changed like water on a piece of paper, growing darker and sadder.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I said. “I’ll say it for you. You wanted to read this book for the same reason I did. We were both investigating the process by which caviar is made. But by the time we found out about Roe House, Hangfire had set up his fraudulent Department of Education. Before long, all the town’s schoolchildren had been transferred here, and Dashiell Qwerty was arrested for arson.”
Ellington gasped. “Qwerty’s been arrested?”
“He gave me this book right before the Mitchums took him away, and he’ll be on the train to the city soon for his trial.”
“There’s more to a library than the librarian,” Ellington said. “At least the information in the library is still safe.”
“We shouldn’t underestimate the villainy of a villain,” I said. “Just by lighting a few fires, Hangfire managed to get a powerful librarian out of his way and all of the town’s schoolchildren in his clutches. He killed two birds with one stone.”
Shouldn't You Be in School? Page 8