The Vile Village asoue-7

by Lemony Snicket

  "The harpoon hit the ladder!" Isadora called down to her friends in despair. "The rope is coming unraveled!"

  It was true. As the crows began to settle in at Nevermore Tree, the Baudelaires could see more clearly, and they stared up at the ladder in horror. The harpoon was sticking out of one of the ladder's thick ropes, which was slowly uncurling around the hook. It reminded Violet of a time when she was much younger, and had begged her mother to braid her hair so she could look like a famous inventor she had seen in a magazine. Despite her mother's best efforts, the braids had not held their shape, and had come unraveled almost as soon as she had tied their ends with ribbons. Violet's hair had slowly spun out of the braid, just as the strands of rope were spinning out of the ladder now.

  "Climb faster!" Duncan screamed down. "Climb faster!"

  "No," Violet said quietly, and then said it again so her siblings could hear. More and more crows were taking their places in the tree, and Klaus and Sunny could see Violet's grim face as she looked down at them in despair. "No." The eldest Baudelaire took another look at the unraveling rope and saw that they couldn't possibly climb up to the basket of Hector's self-sustaining hot air mobile home. It was just as impossible as her mother ever braiding her hair again. "We can't do it," she said. "If we keep trying to climb up, we'll fall to our deaths. We have to climb down."

  "But — " Klaus said.

  "No," Violet said, and one tear rolled down her cheek. "We won't make it, Klaus."

  "Yoil!" Sunny said.

  "No," Violet said again, and looked her siblings in the eye. The three Baudelaires shared a moment of frustration and despair that they could not follow their friends, and then, without another word, they began climbing down the unraveling ladder, through the murder of crows still migrating to Nevermore Tree. When the Baudelaires climbed down nine rungs, the rope unbraided completely and dropped the children onto the flat landscape, unhappy but unharmed.

  "Hector, maneuver your invention back down!" Isadora called. Her voice sounded a bit faint from so far away. "Duncan and I can lean out of the basket and make a human ladder! There's still time to retrieve them!"

  "I can't," Hector said sadly, gazing down at the Baudelaires, who were standing up and untangling themselves from the fallen ladder, as Detective Dupin began to stride toward them in his plastic shoes. "It's not designed to return to the ground."

  "There must be a way!" Duncan cried, but the self-sustaining hot air mobile home only floated farther away.

  "We could try to climb Nevermore Tree," Klaus said, "and jump into the control basket from its highest branches."

  Violet shook her head. "The tree is already half covered in crows," she said, "and Hector's invention is flying too high." She looked up in the sky and cupped her hands to her mouth so her voice could travel all the way up to her friends. "We can't reach you now!" she cried. "We'll try to catch up with you later!"

  Isadora's voice came back so faintly that the Baudelaires could scarcely hear it over the muttering of the crows, who were still settling themselves in Nevermore Tree. "How can you catch up with us later," she called, "in the middle of the air?"

  "I don't know!" Violet admitted. "But we'll find a way, I promise you!"

  "In the meantime," Duncan called back, "take these!" The Baudelaires could see the triplet holding his dark green notebook, and Isadora holding hers, over the side of the basket. "This is all the information we have about Count Olaf's evil plan, and the secret of V.F.D., and Jacques Snicket's murder!" His voice was as trembly as it was faint, and the three siblings knew their friend was crying. "It's the least we can do!" he called.

  "Take our notebooks, Baudelaires!" Isadora called, "and maybe someday we'll meet again!"

  The Quagmire triplets dropped their notebooks out of the self-sustaining hot air mobile home, and called out "Good-bye!" to the Baudelaires, but their farewell was drowned out by the sound of another click! and another swoosh! as Officer Luciana fired one last harpoon. After so much practice, I'm sorry to say, her aim had improved, and the hook hit exactly what Luciana hoped it would. The sharp spear sailed through the air and hit not one but both Quagmire notebooks. There was a loud ripping noise, and then the air was filled with sheets of paper, tossing this way and that in the rustling wind made by the flying crows. The Quagmires yelled in frustration, and called one last thing down to their friends, but Hector's invention had flown too high for the Baudelaires to hear it all. ". . . volunteer . . ." the children heard dimly, and then the self-sustaining hot air balloon floated too high for the orphans to hear anything more.

  "Tesper!" Sunny cried, which meant "Let's try to gather up as many pages of the notebooks as we can!"

  "If 'Tesper' means 'All is lost,' then that baby isn't so stupid after all," said Detective Dupin, who had reached the Baudelaires. He opened his blazer, exposing more of his pale and hairy chest, and took a rolled-up newspaper out of an inside pocket, looking down at the children as if they were three bugs he was about to squash. "I thought you'd want to see The Daily Punctilio" he said, and unrolled the newspaper to show them the headline. "baudelaire orphans at large!" it read, using a phrase which here means "not in jail." Below the headline were three drawings, one of each sibling's face.

  Detective Dupin removed his sunglasses so he could read the newspaper in the fading light. "Authorities are trying to capture Veronica, Klyde, and Susie Baudelaire," he read out loud, "who escaped from the uptown jail of the Village of Fowl Devotees, where they were imprisoned for the murder of Count Omar." He gave the children a nasty smile and threw The Daily Punctilio down on the ground. "Some names are wrong, of course," he said, "but everybody makes mistakes. Tomorrow, of course, there will be another special edition, and I'll make sure that The Daily Punctilio gets every detail correct in the story about Detective Dupin's supercool capture of the notorious Baudelaires."

  Dupin leaned down to the children, so close that they could smell the egg salad sandwich he'd apparently eaten for lunch. "Of course," he said, in a quiet voice so only the siblings could hear him, "one Baudelaire will escape at the last minute, and live with me until the fortune is mine. The question is, which Baudelaire will that be? You still haven't let me know your decision."

  "We're not going to entertain that notion, Olaf," Violet said bitterly.

  "Oh no!" an Elder cried, and pointed out at the flat horizon. By the light of the sunset, the Baudelaires could see a small, slender shape sticking out of the ground, while the Quagmire pages fluttered by. It was the last harpoon Luciana had fired, and it had hit something else after destroying the Quagmire notebooks. There, pinned to the ground, was one of the V.F.D. crows, opening its mouth in pain.

  "You harmed a crow!" Mrs. Morrow said in horror, pointing at Officer Luciana. "That's Rule #1! That's the most important rule of all!"

  "Oh, it's just a stupid bird," Detective Dupin said, turning to face the horrified citizens.

  "A stupid bird?" an Elder repeated, his crow hat trembling in anger. "A stupid bird?' Detective Dupin, this is the Village of Fowl Devotees, and — "

  "Wait a minute!" interrupted a voice from the crowd. "Look, everyone! He has only one eyebrow!"

  Detective Dupin, who had removed his sunglasses to read the paper, reached into the pocket of his blazer and put them back on again. "Lots of people have one eyebrow," he said, but the crowd paid no attention as mob psychology began to take hold again.

  "Let's make him take off his shoes," Mr. Lesko called, and an Elder knelt down to grab one of Dupin's feet. "If he has a tattoo, let's burn him at the stake!"

  "Hear, hear!" a group of citizens agreed.

  "Now, wait just a minute!" Officer Luciana said, putting down the harpoon gun and looking at Dupin in concern.

  "And let's burn Officer Luciana, too!" Mrs. Morrow said. "She wounded a crow!"

  "We don't want all these torches to go to waste!" cried an Elder.

  "Hear, hear!"

  Detective Dupin opened his mouth to speak, and the children could
see he was thinking frantically of something to say that would fool V.F.D.'s citizens. But then he simply closed his mouth, and with a flick of his foot, kicked the Elder who was holding on to his shoe. As the mob gasped, the Elder's crow-shaped hat fell off as she rolled to the ground, still clutching Dupin's plastic shoe.

  "It's the tattoo!" one of the Verhoogens cried, pointing at the eye on Detective Dupin's — or, more properly, Count Olaf's — left ankle. With a roar, Olaf ran back to his motorcycle and, with another roar, he started the engine. "Hop aboard, Esmé!" he called out to Officer Luciana. The Chief removed her motorcycle helmet with a smile, and the Baudelaires saw that it was indeed Esmé Squalor.

  "It's Esmé Squalor!" an Elder cried. "She used to be the city's sixth most successful financial advisor, but now she works with Count Olaf!"

  "I heard the two of them are dating!" Mrs. Morrow said in horror.

  "We are dating!" Esmé cried in triumph. She climbed aboard Olaf's motorcycle and tossed her helmet to the ground, showing that she cared no more about motorcycle safety than she did about the welfare of crows.

  "So long, Baudelaires!" Count Olaf called, zooming through the angry crowd. "I'll find you again, if the authorities don't find you first!"

  Esmé cackled as the motorcycle roared off across the flat landscape at more than twice the legal speed limit, so within moments the motorcycle was as tiny a speck on the horizon as the self-sustaining hot air mobile home was in the sky. The mob stared after the two villains in disappointment.

  "We'll never catch up to them," an Elder said with a frown. "Not without any mechanical devices."

  "Never mind about that," another Elder replied. "We have more important things to attend to. Hurry, everyone! Rush this crow to the V.F.D. vet!"

  The Baudelaires looked at one another in astonishment as the citizens of V.E.D. carefully unpinned the crow and began to carry it back into town. "What should we do?" Violet asked. She was talking to her siblings, but a member of the Council of Elders overheard and turned back to answer her. "Stay right here," he said. "Count Olaf and that dishonest girlfriend of his may have escaped, but you three are still criminals. We'll burn you at the stake as soon as this crow has received proper medical attention."

  The Elder ran after the crow-carrying mob, and in a few seconds the children were alone on the flat landscape with only the shuffling papers of the Quagmire notebooks for company. "Let's gather these up," Klaus said, stooping down to pick up one badly ripped page. "They're our only hope of discovering the secret of V.F.D."

  "And of defeating Count Olaf," Violet agreed, walking over to where a small stack of pages had blown together.

  "Phelon!" Sunny said, scrambling after one that seemed to have a map scrawled on it. She meant "And of proving that we're not murderers!" and the children paused to look at The Daily Punctilio, which still lay on the ground. Their own faces stared back at them, below the headline "baudelaire orphans at large!" but the children did not feel at large. The Baudelaires felt as small as could be, standing alone on the bare outskirts of V.F.D., chasing down the few pages of the Quagmire notebooks that were not gone forever. Violet managed to grab six pages, and Klaus managed to grab seven, and Sunny managed to grab nine, but many of the recovered pages were ripped, or blank, or all crumpled from the wind.

  "We'll study them later," Violet said, gathering the pages together and tying them in a bundle with her hair ribbon. "In the meantime, we have to get out of here before the mob returns."

  "But where will we go?" Klaus asked.

  "Burb," Sunny said, which meant "Anywhere, as long as it's out of town."

  "Who will take care of us out there?" Klaus said, looking out on the flat horizon.

  "Nobody," Violet said. "We'll have to take care of ourselves. We'll have to be self-sustaining."

  "Like the hot air mobile home," Klaus said, "that could travel and survive all by itself."

  "Like me," Sunny said, and abruptly stood up. Violet and Klaus gasped in surprise as their baby sister took her first wobbly steps, and then walked closely beside her, ready to catch her if she fell.

  But she didn't fall. Sunny took a few more self-sustaining steps, and then the three Baudelaires stood together, casting long shadows across the horizon in the dying light of the sunset. They looked up to see a tiny dot in the sky, far far away, where the Quagmire triplets would live in safety with Hector. They looked out at the landscape, where Count Olaf had ridden off with Esmé Squalor, to find his associates and cook up another scheme. They looked back at Nevermore Tree, where the V.F.D. crows were muttering together for their evening roost, and then they looked out at the world, where families everywhere would soon be reading all about the three siblings in the special edition of The Daily Punctilio. It seemed to the Baudelaires that every creature in the world was being taken care of by others — every creature except for themselves.

  But the children, of course, could care for one another, as they had been caring for one another since that terrible day at the beach. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked at one another and took a deep breath, gathering up all their courage to face all the bolts from the blue that they guessed — and, I'm sorry to say, guessed correctly — lay ahead of them, and then the self-sustaining Baudelaire orphans took their first steps away from town and toward the last few rays of the setting sun.

  About the Author

  LEMONY SNICKET is the author of quite a few books, all dreadful, and has been accused of many crimes, all falsely. Until recently, he was living someplace else.

  BRETT HELQUIST was born in Ganado, Arizona, grew up in Orem, Utah, and now lives in New York City. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Brigham Young University and has been illustrating ever since. His art has appeared in many publications, including Cricket magazine and The New York Times.

  TO MY KIND EDITOR,

  PLEASE EXCUSE THE WORD STOP AT THE END OF EVERY SENTENCE STOP. TELEGRAMS ARE THE QUICKEST WAY TO DELIVER A MESSAGE FROM LAST CHANCE GENERAL STORE, AND IN A TELEGRAM, STOP IS THE WAY TO SIGNAL WHEN A SENTENCE STOPS STOP.

  THE NEXT TIME YOU ARE INVITED TO A PARTY, WEAR YOUR THIRD NICEST SUIT AND PRETEND TO NOTICE A SPOT STOP THE NEXT DAY, TAKE THE SUIT TO THE DRY CLEANERS FOR CLEANING STOP. WHEN YOU COME TO PICK IT UP, YOU WILL RECEIVE INSTEAD A SHOPPING BAG CONTAINING MY ENTIRE ACCOUNT OF THE BAUDELAIRE CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES IN THIS AREA ENTITLED "THE HOSTILE HOSPITAL" ALONG WITH AN INTERCOM SPEAKER, ONE OF THE LAMPS MISTAKENLY DELIVERED TO HAL, AND A HEART-SHAPED BALLOON THAT HAS POPPED STOP. I WILL ALSO INCLUDE A SKETCH OF THE KEY TO THE LIBRARY OF RECORDS, SO THAT MR. HELQUIST CAN ILLUSTRATE IT PROPERLY STOP REMEMBER, YOU ABE MY LAST HOPE THAT THE TALES OF THE BAUDELAIRE ORPHANS CAN FINALLY BE TOLD TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC STOP.

  WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, LEMONY SNICKET PS YOUR SUIT WILL BE MAILED TO YOU LATER STOP.

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