The Penultimate Peril

by Lemony Snicket

  Violet stared critically at the boat. "I'll attach the drag chute to the figurehead," she said. "I should be able to tie a Devil's Tongue knot around the helmet of the diver." She paused for a moment. "That's where the Medusoid Mycelium is hidden," she said. "Count Olaf kept it there, where no one would think of looking."

  Klaus stared critically at his notes. "I'll angle the sail to catch the wind," he said. "Otherwise, a heavy object like this would fall straight down into the water." He paused for a moment, too. "That's what happened to the sugar bowl," he said. "Dewey Denouement let everyone think it had fallen into the laundry room, so no one would find it in the pond."

  "Spatulas as oars," Sunny said, pointing to the implements that Hugo had used to flip over the sunbathers.

  "Good idea," Violet agreed and gazed out to the gray, troubled waters of the sea. "Maybe our friends will find us. Hector should be flying this way, with Kit Snicket and the Quagmires."

  "And Fiona," Klaus added.

  "No," Sunny said.

  "What do you mean?" Violet asked, stepping carefully from the edge of the pool onto the side of the boat, where she began to climb a rope ladder up to the figurehead.

  "They said they would arrive by Thursday,"Klaus said, helping Sunny climb aboard and then stepping onto the boat himself. The deck was about the size of a large mattress, big enough to hold the Baudelaires and perhaps one or two more passengers. "It's Wednesday afternoon."

  "The fire," Sunny said, and pointed at the smoke as it rose toward the sky.

  The two older Baudelaires gasped. They had almost forgotten that Kit had told them she would be watching the skies, looking for a signal that would cancel Thursday's gathering.

  "That's why you thought of lighting the fire," Violet said, hurriedly tying the sheets around the figurehead. "It's a signal."

  "V.F.D. will see it," Klaus said, "and know that all their hopes have gone up in smoke."

  Sunny nodded. "The last safe place," she said, "is safe no more."

  It was an impressive sentence for the youngest Baudelaire, but a sad one.

  "Maybe our friends will find us anyway,"

  Violet said. "They might be the last noble people we know."

  "If they're truly noble," Klaus said, "they might not want to be our friends."

  Violet nodded, and her eyes filled with tears. "You're right," she admitted. "We killed a man."

  "Accident," Sunny said firmly.

  "And burned down a hotel," Klaus said.

  "Signal," Sunny said.

  "We had good reasons," Violet said, "but we still did bad things."

  "We want to be noble," Klaus said, "but we've had to be treacherous."

  "Noble enough," Sunny said, but the building trembled again, as if shaking its head in disagreement. Violet hung on to the figurehead and Klaus and Sunny hung on to each other as the boat bumped against the sides of the swimming pool.

  "Help us!" Violet cried to the adults, who were still staring at the rising smoke. "Grab those spatulas, and push the boat to the edge of the roof!"

  "Don't boss me around!" Olaf growled, but he followed the judge to a corner of the roof where the spatulas lay, their mirrors reflecting the afternoon sun and the sky as it darkened with smoke. Each adult grabbed one spatula, and poked at the boat the way you might poke at a spider you were trying to get out of your bathtub. Bump! Bump! The sailboat bumped against the edge of the pool, and then jostled its way out of the pool, where it slowly slid, with a loud scraping sound, to the far edge of the roof. The Baudelaires hung on tightly as the front half of the boat kept sliding across the mirrors of the salon, until it was hanging over nothing but the smoky air. The boat tipped this way and that, in a delicate balance between the roof of the hotel and the sea below.

  "Climb aboard!" Violet cried, giving her knots one last tug.

  "Of course I'll climb aboard!" Olaf announced, narrowing his eyes at the helmet of the figurehead. "I'm the captain of this boat!" He threw his spatula onto the deck, narrowly missing Klaus and Sunny, and then bounded onto the ship, making it teeter wildly on the edge of the building.

  "You too, Justice Strauss!' Klaus called, but the judge just put down her spatula and looked sadly at the children.

  "No," she said, and the children could see she was crying. "I won't go. It's not right."

  "What else can we do?" Sunny said, but Justice Strauss just shook her head.

  "I won't run from the scene of a crime," she said. "You children should come with me, and we'll explain everything to the authorities."

  " They might not believe us," Violet said, readying the drag chute, "or there might be enemies lurking in their ranks, like the villains in the High Court."

  "Perhaps," the judge said, "but that's no excuse for running away."

  Count Olaf gave his former neighbor a scornful look, and then turned to the Baudelaires. "Let her burn to a crisp if she wants," he said, "but it's time for us to go."

  Justice Strauss took a deep breath, and then stepped forward and put her hand on the hideous wooden carving, as if she meant to drag the whole boat back onto the hotel. "There are people who say that criminal behavior is the destiny of children from a broken home," she said, through her tears. "Don't make this your destiny, Baudelaires."

  Klaus stood at the mast, adjusting the controls of the sail. "This boat," he said, "is the only home we have."

  "I've been following you all this time," she said, her grip tightening on the figurehead. "You've always been just out of my grasp, from the moment Mr. Poe took you away from the theater in his car to the moment Kit Snicket took you through the hedges in her taxi. I won't let you go, Baudelaires!"

  Sunny stepped toward the judge, and for one moment her siblings thought she was going to step off the boat. But then she merely looked into the judge's weeping eyes, and gave her a very sad smile.

  "Good-bye," she said, and the Baudelaire opened her mouth and bit the hand of justice. With a cry of pain and frustration, Justice Strauss let go of the figurehead, and the building trembled again, sending the judge tumbling to the ground, and the boat tumbling off the roof, just as the clock of the Hotel Denouement announced the hour for the very last time.

  Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! The clock struck three times, and the three Baudelaires screamed as they hurtled toward the sea, and even Count Olaf cried "Mommy!" as it seemed for a terrible moment that their luck had run out at last, and that the boat would not survive the fall, due to the force of gravity. But then Violet let go of the dirty sheets, and the drag chute billowed into the air, looking almost like another patch of smoke against the sky, and Klaus moved the sail to catch the wind, and the boat stopped falling and started to glide, the way a bird will catch the wind, and rest its wings for a few moments, particularly if it is tired from carrying something heavy and important. For a moment, the boat floated down through the air, like something in a magical story, and even in their panic and fear the Baudelaires could not help marveling at the way they were escaping. Finally, with a mighty splash! the boat landed in the ocean, quite a distance from the burning hotel. For another terrible moment, it felt like the boat was going to sink into the water, just as Dewey Denouement had sunk into the pond, guarding his underwater catalog and all its secrets, and leaving the woman he loved pregnant and distraught. But the sail caught the wind, and the figurehead righted itself, and Olaf picked up his spatula and handed it to Sunny.

  "Start rowing," he ordered, and then began to cackle, his eyes shining bright. "You're in my clutches at last, orphans," he said. "We're all in the same boat."

  The Baudelaires looked at the villain, and then at the shore. For a moment they were tempted to jump overboard and swim back toward the city and away from Olaf. But when they looked at the smoke, pouring from the windows of the hotel, and the flames, curling around the lilies and moss that someone had grown with such care on the walls, they knew it would be just as dangerous on land. They could see the tiny figures of people standing outside the hotel, fiercely pointing
toward the sea, and they saw the building tremble. It seemed that the Hotel Denouement would soon be sent toppling, and the children wanted to be far away. Dewey had promised them that they wouldn't be at sea anymore, but at this moment the sea, for the Baudelaires, was the last safe place.

  Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. "Who knows when some slight shock," he asks, "disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?" It is a difficult question to read, almost as if it is in some sort of code, but after much research I have been able to make some sense of its mysterious words. "Social order," for instance, is a phrase which may refer to the systems people use to organize their lives, such as the Dewey Decimal System, or the blindfolded procedures of the High Court. And "thirsty aspiration" is a phrase which may refer to things people want, such as the Baudelaire fortune, or the sugar bowl, or a safe place that lonely and exhausted orphans can call home. So when Mr. Wright asks his question, he might be wondering if a small event, such as a stone dropping into a pond, can cause ripples in the systems of the world, and tremble the things that people want, until all this rippling and trembling brings down something enormous, such as a building.

  The Baudelaires, of course, did not have a copy of Native Son on the wooden boat that served as their new home, but as they gazed across the water at the Hotel Denouement, they were asking themselves a question not unlike Mr. Wright's. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny wondered about all the things, large and small, that they had done. They wondered about their observations as flaneurs, which left so many mysteries unsolved. They wondered about all their errands as concierges, which brought about so much trouble. And they wondered if they were still the noble volunteers they wanted to be, or if, as the fire made its wicked way through the hotel, and the building threatened to topple, it was their destiny to become something else. The Baudelaire orphans stood in the same boat as Count Olaf, the notorious villain, and looked out at the sea, where they hoped they could find their noble friends, and wondered what else they could do, and who they might become.

  LEMONY SNICKET

  LEMONY SNICKET grew up near the sea and currently lives beneath it. To his horror and dismay he has no wife or children, only enemies, associates, and the occasional loyal manservant. His trial has been delayed, so he is free to continue researching and writing the tragic tales of the Baudelaire orphans for HarperCollins.

  Visit him on the Web at www.harperchildrens.com/lsnicket/ or E-mail to I snicket@harpercollins.com

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