We reached the rock and then quietly, slowly, made our way around it. There was the fire pond, or at least I knew it to be there. It looked like nothing, just a large circle of rocks around a blackness so dark that I felt like I was floating just looking at it. The question was, how much trouble are you in? and the answer was I didn’t know. Nobody ever does.
Ellington put her hand on my shoulder and guided me to the very edge of the rock, like it was a diving board. I could feel the nothingness of the dark pond, just under the tips of my toes, and Ellington’s fingers on my shoulder.
If she pushes you, I thought, at last you will know. All of the reading and thinking you have done has pointed you toward a mystery of unspeakable size, and here it is, Snicket. Here’s the dark thing you imagine very late, on very terrible nights. It has been beckoning you since you were a baby, when you emerged from the darkness of the womb. You didn’t know it then, but from that moment on you would float toward another darkness, all the mysterious days and all the mysterious nights of your whole mysterious life. Here it is, Snicket. Listen for this mystery that has been stalking you since they first inked your ankle.
These thoughts did not appear out of thin air. They had a cause somewhere. All of the insects had stopped.
I held my breath in the quiet night until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I did it much longer. Then, slowly, there was something else. It began far away, far enough that at first I thought the insects had started up again, with a dull buzzing appearing in the far corners of the air. I thought of the growl I’d heard from Stew Mitchum, outside Black Cat Coffee, and then it was louder. Maybe he’d gotten better at it. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it wasn’t anyone. I thought of the hum of the engine of the Dilemma. Maybe it was a machine. It grew louder, fiercer, chopping the air like the spinning blades of a propeller, but rougher, and wetter, so that I decided it was no machine. It was something from the earth or the sky or the sea, or from a dream or the pages of a book I wasn’t yet old enough to read, about monsters I wasn’t brave enough to face. Soon it was an immense noise that rattled everything in my body. It was the sound of being chased in a nightmare, or the blind and violent fury of a bad parent, a tantrum that deafened the ears of the living and slithered across the bones of the dead. I felt its breath storm against me, filling my nose and my mouth with something salty and briny and my head and heart with fear and dread. It was real breathing, billowing in and out with a growling hunger and a growing rage, and real claws scraping against the rocks until they broke apart to scatter small pieces into the splashy depths below. It roared again. It wanted to do worse. But all it did was pour itself into the water, which churned and buzzed around it, and then with one ghastly gasp it was deep underwater and the last of its tail shook against a shrub and it was gone. The water bubbled after it and then stopped. It’s gone, I told myself, but nothing moved for a long time. Finally the insects started talking again. I’m sure they were asking what it was and where it had come from and when they would see it again. I listened to the air, full of their questions, but I only had one question myself.
“Why didn’t it attack us?” I said to Ellington.
Her hand trembled and stopped on my shoulder, trembled and stopped. She wasn’t certain, but she had an answer. I waited for it in the dark.
“It’s not old enough,” she said finally.
CHAPTER TEN
Coffee or creature, I was wide awake when we got back to Ellington’s room. My frightened teeth had chattered all the way, and I let them do all the talking. Not until Ellington had closed the door and we were alone in her room did I venture to say anything out loud.
“Was that real?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Ellington sat down on the bed. Her green eyes looked very far away. “For a while I thought it was a nightmare,” she said quietly. “It seemed wherever I went, there was something lurking around me—something dark and sinister that I could scarcely see.”
I slumped to the floor and sat leaning against Ellington’s desk. “I’ve had that feeling since I arrived in town,” I said.
Ellington nodded. “Whenever I seem to get close to finding my father, I hear that horrible thing.”
I thought of the terrible noises in the dark. Now, in Ellington’s room, it seemed that they could not have been possible. “It must be a trick of Hangfire’s,” I said. “He’s capable of imitating anyone’s voice. He tricked me with a tape recording. Maybe he’s trying to make us think there’s a monster out there, so we don’t investigate any further.”
“Some sort of decoy, maybe,” Ellington said thoughtfully.
I nodded. “So we won’t ask the questions we should be asking.”
Ellington hugged her knees to her chest. She looked much younger than she was, and her question sounded like a very young child’s. “When will I see him again?” she asked. “When will I find my father?”
There was a difficult pause. “I don’t know when you’ll see him again,” I said, when it was over, “but you can’t give Hangfire what he wants, even if you lose your father forever.”
“What do you mean?”
I pointed under the bed. “You told me that statue was confiscated,” I said.
Ellington’s eyes narrowed, and her hand let go of her braid. She leaned down and reached under her bed, and then the green tube was in the air being tossed to me. It was heavy when I caught it.
“Open it,” she said.
I unzipped the bag. Inside it looked smaller than I would have thought, but empty spaces can look small. There was nothing in it. It was the perfect size for holding the Bombinating Beast, but it was not to be seen inside.
“They did confiscate it, Snicket,” she said. “They took it away and left me holding the bag.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t lie to my friends,” she told me, and I believed her and I said I was sorry again.
“You should be,” she told me. “You should trust me by now. We should be on the same page, Snicket, of the same crucial book.”
She held up the book I had brought her, the one Dashiell Qwerty had been unable to deliver.
“The one that burns like a fire in the mind,” I said.
“Or like a building in a town,” she replied, and our talk drained away. She sat and looked at me for a minute as I listened to the rain and the night. Trying to understand Ellington Feint was like the drizzle on the window. Nothing got through. She took out the music box again, but she didn’t wind the crank one way or the other.
“My father never got around to reading me The Wind in the Willows,” she said.
“It’s about four talking animals,” I said.
“I usually don’t like that kind of story.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “My sister practically had to lock me in my room to get me to start reading it.”
“And where is your sister now?” she asked me.
“Locked in a room herself,” I said, and then, with much more to-ing and fro-ing, we talked about Kenneth Grahame and the mole and the water rat and the toad and the badger and one thing and another. We talked a long time. Outside the window it stayed dark. Our conversation finally started to droop, and Ellington caught herself yawning and covered her mouth with her hand.
“I’d better make more coffee,” she said.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not here,” she said. “Not lately. Not for a long time.”
“I’ll watch over you,” I said. “You’re running out of coffee, anyway. In fact—”
She looked at me. I can get shy in a roll of the dice.
“Snicket?”
I zipped the bag back up, for something to do, and slid it back under Ellington’s bed. Then I checked if my socks were dry and they mostly were, so I slid them on my feet and then put on my shoes and tied them and tied them in double knots. “I want to ask you something,” I said, when I could think of nothing else to waste my time with.
“I do.”
“Then do so.”
“I want to ask you to do something with me tomorrow night.”
Ellington smiled. “It depends what the something is. Is it a crime?”
“I’m sure it’s against the rules and regulations of this school.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I want you to sneak out and meet me tomorrow night,” I said. “Together we’ll go into town and go to Black Cat Coffee.”
“How will we get into town?”
“In the back of a wagon,” I said, “pulled by a taxi.”
“Are you inviting me on a hayride, Snicket?”
“I suppose it’s like a hayride.”
“Just you and me, underneath the stars?”
“You don’t have to make it sound so gooey,” I said. “I just thought it would be a nice way to spend an evening.”
“You’re up to something,” Ellington said. “Is this something with V.F.D.?”
I was quiet for a second. “I hope so,” I said.
“OK,” she said, and yawned. “I’ll go. Where shall we meet—the library? That’s a safe place.”
“All right.”
“I’ll be there, with all those blank books.”
“All right.”
“All right, Lemony Snicket.”
“All right, Filene N. Gottlin,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”
She frowned. “The laudanum—”
“You’ve had enough coffee to counteract a boatload of laudanum,” I said.
“That’s probably true,” she said, and she let her head rest on the pillow. She was asleep in minutes. I stayed still for a moment to make sure, and then reached into my pocket and retrieved the object Kellar Haines had slipped me. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but it still didn’t seem right when I saw what it was.
A compass, I thought, looking at it carefully. What good are you without a map? If you don’t know where you are, or where you want to go, a compass can only tell you what direction you’re facing.
I leaned my head against the desk and thought. Ellington was just on the other side of a small room, but the longer I thought, the farther away she seemed. It was like the growing distance I felt inside myself, between the person I wanted to be, the brave volunteer who would soon triumph against evil treachery, and the person I was, sitting in a room with damp socks and a bump on his head, turning a compass around and around in his hands. What are you doing here? I thought. What good are you? But I did not know if I was talking to the compass or the boy who was holding it.
The black sky turned gray in the window, and I stood up quietly and looked through Ellington’s binoculars at the fire pond. The surface of the water was as still as a held breath.
I rubbed my face and turned on the sink. I looked in the mirror and splashed water at my reflection, and then let the water get hot. I rinsed the cups and found another handkerchief and scooped coffee out of the flowerpot with my bare hands. I looked at the poor, sickly plant, trying to grow in the coffee grounds instead of the earth, where it belonged. I wondered what happened to things that grew up in the wrong place.
The bell rang me out of my thoughts, the sound low and loud from the nearby tower. Ellington stirred and frowned in her sleep, but it was the aroma of hot coffee that made her open her eyes.
“You made coffee,” she said in surprise, when we’d told each other good morning.
“As best I could,” I said.
“Thank you, Snicket,” she said, and took a sip. “Your mask is in the closet, along with mine.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“The bell rang, so we’d better wear them.”
“Yes.”
“Big day today.”
“Big day today,” she agreed.
“But I’ll see you tonight?”
“In the library.”
“In the library,” I repeated, although there was something about our conversation, calm and quiet while our minds were busy and worried, that made me wonder if that was true. I swallowed my coffee the way I’d made it—as best I could. I hoped it was good enough. “I’ll see you then,” I said. “Unless—”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Unless what?”
“Unless you want to tell me anything.”
“Anything about what?”
“About your part,” I said. “I know you’re not telling me everything.”
She took a long sip and gave me a long sigh. “You’re not telling me everything either, Lemony Snicket. I don’t really know your part, and you don’t really know mine. We can only hope that our two fragments fit together. So I’ll see you tonight. Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless something goes wrong,” Ellington said, almost in a whisper, and I finished my coffee and left her room with the bitter taste in my mouth.
Sneaking was easy business that morning. The hallways were full of masked children, walking numbly toward the front door of the Wade Academy. None of them paid any more attention to me than when I’d watched them at Stain’d Secondary School. I walked among them like I was a schoolchild too, quiet and dazed, with little idea of the treachery surrounding me. I almost envied them.
“Kenneth Grahame,” someone murmured at my elbow, and I saw it had been easy business for Moxie Mallahan to sneak up beside me. Her mask sat blank under her hat, but I had the suspicion she was smiling.
“Kenneth Grahame to you,” I replied, and she pulled me through one of the hallway doors. I found myself in a storage closet, lit only by a single lightbulb dangling from a worried string. The walls were lined with shelves lined with boxes. The boxes were all alike, with the word LAUDANUM stamped in silver on shiny black cardboard. The closet didn’t feel big enough to hold all those boxes and Moxie and me and the masked figures of Jake and Cleo, but apparently it was.
“Good morning, Snicket,” Jake said. “Take one if you need it.” He held out a few pieces of rolled bark. It must be killing a good cook like Jake, I thought, to be offering such a meager breakfast.
“Thanks, but I’ve had my coffee,” I said.
“I’ll take one of those,” came the voice of Ornette Lost, as she slipped through the door. “I’m feeling quite woozy this morning.”
“I thought we should meet before we boarded the bus,” Cleo explained, her voice muffled behind the mask. “Are we all here?”
“Not Kellar Haines,” I said.
“It’s hard for him to get away from his mother,” Moxie said, taking a bark cigarette. “They share a room.”
“Poor devil,” Jake said, shaking his head.
“I agree, but there’s no time to agree,” I said. “There’s work to be done.”
“Some secret errand for V.F.D.?” Jake asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said, a phrase which here means “No.” “There’s a wagon over by the gate. We need to throw it over the wall.”
There was the sort of pause that occurs whenever someone says something odd and unexpected. “Our secret errand is to smash up a wagon?” Cleo asked doubtfully.
“If we angle it right,” I said, “the wagon will land unharmed on something soft.”
Even with a mask on her face, I could tell Moxie was frowning. “Explain yourself, Snicket.”
“If we’re going to defeat Hangfire,” I said, “we need a fragmentary plot. That means each participant only knows his or her part of the plan. If someone’s caught, they can’t give away the whole show.”
“Except you,” Cleo pointed out.
“I’m not going to be caught,” I said.
“Those are big words for someone with a goose egg on his forehead,” Moxie said.
“I know you’re perplexed,” I said, “but we must be patient in the face of perplexity.” This was something I had read in a class called Philosophy and Smoked Fish. “It’s like a recipe that doesn’t taste good until the last minute, or a chemical re
action that happens very gradually, or a complicated series of articles in the newspaper that gradually solves a mystery.”
“A hangfire mechanism,” Moxie said, and everyone looked at me.
“I suppose it is,” I admitted quietly. “Now help me with the wagon and before long things will make sense.”
“But how are we going to sneak off and do that?” Moxie asked. “Stew’s outside taking his guard duties very seriously.”
“We need a distraction,” Cleo said thoughtfully.
Ornette spoke up. “My uncles always tell me I’m driving them to distraction,” she said, “so let me drive a little distraction Stew’s way, once we get outside.”
“Thanks for volunteering,” I said. “Not just you, Lost. Everyone.”
“Let’s save all the thank-yous for the victory party,” Jake said.
“Victory party?” Moxie repeated. “It’s a little early to be planning that, isn’t it?”
“Don’t mind Jake,” Cleo said. “He’s just thinking about new recipes so he won’t get scared.”
“It’s a good strategy,” I said. “Let’s all get scared later. Now let’s head out.”
We headed out, quietly shutting the closet door and joining the last of the schoolchildren trudging down the hallway to the Wade Academy’s front entrance.
“Line up!” Stew Mitchum was barking, when I stepped outside. The rain was gone and the morning sky looked so clear that if you’d asked about rain it would have told you it didn’t know what you were talking about. The students of Wade Academy were lining up on a flat part of the rocky landscape, under Stew’s watchful mask. If he recognized me, from my clothing or my posture, he said nothing. He said nothing at all but “Line up!” I saw no school bus, so there was no good reason for everyone to line up. There’s hardly ever a good reason to line up at school.
Shouldn't You Be in School? Page 11