“Oh!” Ornette’s cry was a piercing one, like a baby nobody likes, and she stumbled toward Stew with her hands out in front of her. “My mask is blinding me!” she cried. “I need someone strong to help me because I’m helpless!”
“Hold on there, girlie,” Stew said. “Let Stewart help you.” He hurried to her without another glance at the other students. Ornette continued to stumble away from us, and Stew followed eagerly.
“She’s good,” Moxie said.
“This is our chance,” Jake said. “Let’s go, gang.”
We made our way right quick, ducking behind shrubs and boulders to stay out of view, clambering past the deep brick well and the fire pond I didn’t want to think about. When we reached the wagon the four of us moved to the corners and pushed it awkwardly across the difficult landscape. Finally, we stood at the gate of the Wade Academy. I had us tilt the wagon as best we could. Then we threw it on the count of three. It was something to see. You have probably thrown something yourself, something unusual that perhaps you were not supposed to throw, just to see it curve through the air. It almost looked natural, as if wagons soared through the air all the time, up over a brick wall and then down, out of sight. I braced for the noise in case I was wrong, but there was only a muffled crinkling, like wrapping paper when the gift is opened. But it’s not wrapping paper, I thought. What is it?
“Well, that’s done,” Cleo said, her voice wheezy in the mask, “although I must say this still doesn’t make any sense, Snicket.” She leaned down and uncurled a long piece of bark from a shrub that looked like it needed a nap. “Surely we have better things to worry about than a wagon.”
“We do,” I said, and then I said something I’d been wanting to say for quite some time. “Listen,” I said. “None of you has to volunteer to do anything more. All of you can leave.”
“It would be hard to get off the island by ourselves,” Moxie said. “We might as well wait for the school bus.”
“I don’t mean leave this school,” I said. “I mean leave this town. You could walk down to the inkwells and find a ride into the city. You could hop on the train when it winds its way through here. You could even take your chances in the Clusterous Forest. You could go somewhere else and never worry about Stain’d-by-the-Sea again.”
“And what will happen to the people here?” Jake asked.
“Don’t think about them,” I said. “Think about yourselves. All of you are very brave and resourceful people, but some of the bravest and most resourceful people in the world have come to bad ends.”
There is no reason to flip back through these pages. It is true I was saying the same thing Theodora had said to me. I understood her reasons better, standing near the fire pond, dark and deep.
“Stop your nonsense,” Moxie said, and the others nodded in agreement. “Tell us what’s next.”
“You’ll have to move quickly,” I said.
“Move quickly where?” Jake asked.
“To the library,” I said.
“The one full of blank books?”
“You need to empty it,” I told them.
Cleo crossed her arms. “What are we going to do with a bunch of blank books?”
“Throw them over the wall,” I said.
Moxie put a hand on my shoulder. “Snicket, are you sure that bump on the head didn’t knock something loose?”
“Leave him alone,” Jake said. “Snicket’s sneaky, but he’s not loopy. If he says this will help, that’s enough for me.”
“Me too,” Cleo said, pocketing the bark.
“Me too, of course,” Moxie said. “I just wish I knew the whole story. I’m still a journalist, even without a typewriter.”
“We’ll get you a new typewriter,” I said, “so you can write up the whole story, when all of this is over.”
“When all of this is over,” Moxie repeated quietly. “When will that be?”
“That’s the wrong question,” I said. “The right question is, when did it start?”
“We’re the ones who ought to get started,” Jake said. “Come on. We’ll see you at Hungry’s, Snicket.”
“When the bell rings,” I said, and looked up at Wade Academy. My associates nodded and turned around and went one way. I walked in the opposite direction, until I was standing under the tower. I felt a little dizzy looking up at it. Of course it’s towering over you, I thought. It’s a tower. You and your associates managed to distract Stew, but what about everyone else from the Inhumane Society?
For a second I thought I saw a figure, and then for a second I didn’t. Maybe it was Hangfire. Maybe it was Ellington Feint. Armstrong Feint. Sharon Haines. Lizzie Haines. Kenneth Grahame.
I breathed through the mask and stared up toward the tower and felt dizzy and perplexed and a little sick and more than a little scared. Get scared later, I told myself, just as I’d advised my associates. Get scared later, and if you’re scared now remember what Kit always said. If you’re not scared, she told me, it’s not bravery. And you want to be brave, don’t you, Snicket? Of course you do.
Of course I did, but I still felt sick. It was a sickness in my stomach and in my mouth and even in my heart. The symptoms were nervousness and dread. I don’t know what the illness is called. I’ve had it since I was a child.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A very long time ago, my brother and I played a game each morning while we waited for the school bus to arrive. We called the game Beethoven, and my sister refused to play because she thought it was inane. “Inane” is a word which here means that my brother and I would pretend we couldn’t hear each other very well while we were talking.
“Jacques,” I would say, beginning the game, “what do you think of the weather this morning?”
“Feather?” he would say. “I’m not wearing a feather this morning. This is just a hat.”
“Just a cat?” I would say. “Why would you wear a cat on your head?”
“A bat in your bed?” he would say. “How terrifying! No wonder you look so sleepy.”
“A book that’s creepy?” I’d say, and my sister would groan and we’d keep playing until the bus arrived. Kit was right. The game was inane. But it was something to do while waiting for the bus.
It was no fun to play it by myself. I missed my brother and I missed my sister. My breath in my mask felt hot and crowded. I crouched behind a shrub and waited. Gated? I said to myself. Yes, the school grounds are gated. That’s why they’ll sneak out on the bus. Freak out and cuss? There’s no need for panic or bad words. A flock of birds? I stared up at the sky and cut it out. It only made me miss everybody all over again. I could have snuck back to Ellington’s room. I could have gone and helped my associates as they made trips back and forth from the library to the Wade Academy’s front gate, doing their part in a fragmentary plot. But instead I just sat and readied myself. Everyone needs a moment on the diving board, before jumping into the depths that wait below.
I looked at Kellar’s compass. It told me where north was. I thanked it very much. Instead of saying you’re welcome, it told me it could also find south, east, west, northwest, and my stomach said it was sorry to interrupt but that it was hungry, and then the front gate opened and a school bus made its way across the grounds to stop at the front door of the Wade Academy, where the students were waiting. The bright yellow reminded me of two sets of painted fingernails, and sure enough Sharon Haines was driving, with Kellar stuck sitting behind her, their two masks an eerie sight in the windshield as the bus went past. I slipped out through the gate while it was still open, and walked quickly to where the wagon was waiting. There are the books, I thought, tossed hither and yon on that leafy, paper pile. But it’s not leaves, is it, Snicket? It’s leafy but it’s not leaves, it’s papery but it’s not paper.
Pip and Squeak were there in the taxi, masked and ready. When you find the sort of people who will show up to give you a ride exactly when they’ve promised to do so, hold on to them for life.
“Morning, Snick
et,” Pip said. “I took the liberty of bringing you a couple of doughnuts from Hungry’s, in case you hadn’t had breakfast.”
“You and your brother are the noblest people on earth,” I said. “I was up all night without food or sleep.”
“Yikes,” said Squeak.
“It’s OK. It was my part.”
Pip tilted his mask at me. “Your part?”
“Have you read any of those mysteries,” I said, “with the Belgian detective in the funny hat?”
“Of course,” Pip said. “Our favorite is the one where the girl gets murdered while bobbing for apples.”
“Have you read the one that takes place on a train?”
They hadn’t.
“Well,” I said, spoiling the book for them and for you, “the crime turns out to have been committed by a great number of people working together. But they plotted together in such a way that nobody knew exactly what the other person was doing.”
“A fragmentary plot,” Squeak said.
“Precisely,” I said. “I’m involved in one right now that could save a crucial aspect of this town.”
They looked at each other, but they didn’t need to know anything more. “Tell us what to do,” Pip said.
“Do you see that wagon teetering on top of that pile of bark?”
Pip blinked. “Yes, Snicket. I see that wagon teetering on that pile of bark. If I get home to my bedroom and there’s an elephant sitting in the middle of it, I’ll see that too.”
“Do you think you could hitch it to your taxi?”
Squeak crawled up from his position on the brakes. “We can do that.”
“Then do that,” I said, “and we’ll load everything piled there onto the wagon.”
“Everything? I think I see some books.”
“Everything, including the books,” I said. “We’ll put the books on the bottom and that crinkly stuff on top, and let’s hurry, because soon a school bus will drive out of that gate and we need to follow it to wherever it’s going. Let’s get started.”
“We’ll get started,” Pip said gently. “You sit in the back and have your breakfast, Snicket. You’re worn out.”
I thanked them. I was worn out. I got in the back of the cab and tackled the difficult task of eating doughnuts with a mask on. It’s not hard if you’re not afraid of looking foolish. The one with cinnamon was my favorite. I was surprised they were as good as Hungry’s doughnuts usually were, without Jake behind the counter cooking them. Perhaps I had underestimated his aunt. A cranky old woman who makes good doughnuts is better than a cranky old woman who doesn’t. It doesn’t excuse the crankiness, of course, but it helps. It probably helps even in Calcutta. I finished off the doughnuts and leaned back in the seat and got jostled as the brothers hooked up the wagon. You have fine associates, I told myself. Don’t think about the end of the train book, when the Belgian detective catches each and every one of the plotters.
The Bellerophon brothers finished with just enough spare time to hop back in the cab as the school bus approached, its wheels cranky on the uneven surface of Offshore Island. We lay low as it passed, so the cab might look deserted to anyone looking out at it. Maybe it even looked deserted to Moxie Mallahan, whom I glimpsed as the school bus went by, masked beneath her hat and giving the cab a tiny salute. They made it, I thought. They handled the business with the books and still managed to get aboard the bus. Good people, I thought. Brave people, and I sat up carefully and watched the bus until it was a small yellow rectangle in the odd landscape of the drained sea.
“Never in my life have I liked a school bus,” Pip said. “You can’t get the windows open and someone’s always fighting.”
“You think they’re exciting?” I asked, when he started the motor. “I’ve always found school buses dull myself.”
“I said fighting.”
“Something’s wrong with the lighting?”
“Fighting.”
“Yes, I do quite a bit of writing, actually.”
The taxi turned to follow the school bus. I heard the wheel squeak on the wagon. “What’s wrong with you, Snicket?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m worn out.”
I kept playing Beethoven in my head. It was easier if I leaned back and closed my eyes. The mask rattled against the bump on my head whenever the taxi met a particularly jagged stretch of road, but other than that I felt fairly comfortable. I was more comfortable masked in the back of a rattly taxi than I’d ever been in the Far East Suite. I liked it better unsupervised. Maybe Unsupervised was my first name after all.
In my dream my sister was showing me a compass.
“Wake up, Snicket,” Pip’s voice said, after a while.
I woke up. “What time is it?”
“Almost one. You missed the all-clear. Take off your mask.”
I took off my mask.
“That’s a very handsome bump you have there,” Squeak squeaked.
“It’s not just handsome,” I said. “It hurts, too. Where’s the school bus? Did you lose it?”
“Snicket,” Squeak said patiently, “it wasn’t hard to follow a bright yellow school bus into town.”
I looked around. The taxi was stopped in front of Hungry’s diner. “Did they see you?”
“If they did, they didn’t do anything about it. When they pulled to the curb I kept going so we didn’t look suspicious.”
“And where did they stop?”
“Around the corner,” Pip said. “Right by Partial Foods, it looked like. You know that place, right?”
“I was once arrested there.”
Squeak crawled up from the brakes. “What are you up to this time?”
“My fragment,” I said. “My part of the plot.”
“All right, then. Thanks for the tip about the train mystery,” Pip said. “I’ll have to look for that at the library.”
“That’s exactly what I want you to do,” I said. “A stop at the library and then a ride back to Offshore Island.”
Squeak frowned. “Snicket, what do you mean?”
Snicket told them what he meant. They wished him luck. He needed it.
I walked around the corner with the mask in my hands, waiting for the bell. It’ll ring again, I thought. Ellington will do her part at one o’clock sharp. It didn’t ring, but I decided to skulk anyway, creeping around the corner so I could approach the school bus as quietly as possible.
But there was no school bus.
I walked into Partial Foods. That felt empty too, but I walked around to be sure. Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only supermarket, like the town it was in, seemed to become more and more meager each day. A barrel of grapes by the front door had gone unpurchased for so long that they were being sold as raisins. A dusty bottle of tomato juice had finally tumbled off its rickety shelf and lay spilled on the floor next to a toppled roll of paper towels. Even the vitamins looked unhealthy, and so did the only person I found. Polly Partial, the owner of Partial Foods, was in a surprised heap on the floor near the soup, rubbing her elbow and blinking around her in confusion.
“What happened?” she asked me dazedly.
“That was my question,” I said.
She blinked slowly at me. “You’re that Snicket kid.”
“And you’re that Partial lady. Anyone else here?”
“He didn’t give his name,” Polly Partial said, “although he reminded me of someone.”
“Who?”
“Oh, it was years ago.”
“OK,” I said, “but what happened today?”
She gave me a shaky frown. “I had an omelet for breakfast,” she said slowly, “and I sang folk songs in the shower.”
“Skip to the part where you ended up on the floor,” I suggested.
“He asked me something, when I’d just locked up the loading dock and was organizing prunes.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What did he ask?”
“If I had any fire. You know, for his cigarett
e. And then…” She trailed off and wrinkled her nose.
“And then you smelled something?” I asked. “Something sweet that made you sleepy and dizzy and of no real help?”
“That does ring a bell,” she said, and then the bell rang. I pictured Ellington in the bell tower, waiting for one o’clock sharp. Maybe she’d brought a book with her, to pass the time until one o’clock. Polly Partial blinked at me.
“Just stay here for a while,” I said. “The effects of laudanum will pass.”
“My mask,” she said. “It’s over by the cash register.”
“You don’t need it,” I said, donning mine. “Nobody does.” I took one more look around the empty store and retraced my steps outside. Think, Snicket. They stopped in front of Partial Foods, but the store is deserted and the bus is gone. So whatever they want, whatever Hangfire needs them to fetch, isn’t here. Then why dose Polly Partial with laudanum, just when she was organizing prunes?
The loading dock, she’d said. Out back.
I looked for an alley and found one, a particularly grimy one that curled around Partial Foods like something stuck to its shoe. There were garbage cans, dented and lonely, and a rat hurrying along to foil whatever treachery rats cook up for each other. There were a few doorways too dark to look through, and a child’s bicycle, chained to a fence, that was more rust than transportation. I walked past it wondering where the child was who had ridden it. Somewhere else, I hoped. Nowhere near here.
The alley spat me out at the back of the building, and there was the school bus, parked at the loading dock for Partial Foods. It must have been a bustling place, back when Stain’d-by-the-Sea was a bustling town. It wasn’t bustling now. The cement ramp where trucks would unload groceries was crumbling away. There were train tracks where imported foods could be dropped off, but the only train left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea would soon take Dashiell Qwerty to jail. And the loading dock itself, a raised platform leading from the tracks to the back door of Partial Foods, wasn’t bustling either, although it was crowded. A line of masked schoolchildren stood still and silent, my associates among them, while the masked figure of Sharon Haines struggled with the lock on the door, using some object to try to get it open, and not using it very well. It was probably a skeleton key, I thought, a key that could open any door. But a skeleton key is like a skeleton. It doesn’t do much good if you don’t know how to use it. Stew Mitchum paced impatiently up and down the crumbling ramp while she struggled and struggled. He had a large black stick in his hands. A club, I thought. A cudgel, a staff, a wedge. I had a feeling it matched the bump on my head. At last Sharon Haines got the door open, and then she turned around to the students of Wade Academy and shouted something.
Shouldn't You Be in School? Page 12