"But you didn't have the courage to go through with it," Esmé said with a mocking smile. "You volunteers are never brave enough to do something for the greater good."
"Throwing people into pits isn't the greater good!" Quigley cried. "It's villainous treachery!"
"If you weren't such an idiot," Esmé said, "you'd realize that those things are more or less the same."
"He is not an idiot," Violet said fiercely. She knew, of course, that it was not worthwhile to get upset over insults from such a ridiculous person, but she liked Quigley too much to hear him called names. "He led us here to the headquarters using a map he drew himself."
"He's very well-read," Klaus said.
At Klaus's words, Esmé threw back her head and laughed, shaking the crackling layers of her enormous dress. "Well-read!" she repeated in a particularly nasty tone of voice. "Being well-read won't help you in this world. Many years ago, I was supposed to waste my entire summer reading Anna Karenina, but I knew that silly book would never help me, so I threw it into the fireplace." She reached down and picked up a few more pieces of wood, which she tossed aside with a snicker. "Look at your precious headquarters, volunteers! It's as ruined as my book. And look at me! I'm beautiful, fashionable, and I smoke cigarettes!" She laughed again, and pointed at the children with a scornful finger. "If you didn't spend all your time with your heads stuck in books, you'd have that precious baby back."
"We're going to get her back," Violet said firmly.
"Really?" Esmé said mockingly. "And how do you propose to do that?"
"I'm going to talk to Count Olaf," Violet said, "and he's going to give her back to me."
Esmé threw back her head and started to laugh, but not with as much enthusiasm as before. "What do you mean?" she said.
"Just what I said," Violet said.
"Hmmm," Esmé said suspiciously. "Let me think for a moment." The evil girlfriend began to pace back and forth on the frozen pond, her enormous dress crackling with every step.
Klaus leaned in to whisper to his sister. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Do you honestly think that we can get Sunny back from Count Olaf with a simple conversation?"
"I don't know," Violet whispered back, "but it's better than luring someone into a trap."
"It was wrong to dig that pit," Quigley agreed, "but I'm not sure that walking straight into Olaf's clutches is the right thing to do, either."
"It'll take a while to reach Mount Fraught again," Violet said. "We'll think of something during the climb."
"I hope so," Klaus said, "but if we can't think of something — "
Klaus did not get a chance to say what might happen if they couldn't think of something because Esmé clapped her hands together to get the children's attention.
"If you really want to talk to my boyfriend," she said, "I suppose I can take you to where he is. If you weren't so stupid, you'd know that he's very nearby."
"We know where he is, Esmé," Klaus said. "He's at the top of the waterfall, at the source of the Stricken Stream."
"Then I suppose you know how we can get there," Esmé said, and looked a little foolish. "The toboggan doesn't go uphill, so I actually have no idea how we can reach the peak."
"She will invent a way," Quigley said, pointing at Violet.
Violet smiled at her friend, grateful for his support, and closed her eyes underneath her mask. Once more, she was thinking of something she had heard sung to her, when she was a very little girl. She had already thought of the way that the three children could take Esmé with them when they ascended the hill, but thinking of their journey made her think of a song she had not thought of for many years. Perhaps when you were very young, someone sang this song to you, perhaps to lull you to sleep, or to entertain you on a long car trip, or in order to teach you a secret code. The song is called "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," and it is one of the saddest songs ever composed. It tells the story of a small spider who is trying to climb up a water spout, but every time its climb is half over, there is a great burst of water, either due to rain or somebody turning the spout on, and at the end of the song, the spider has decided to try one more time, and will likely be washed away once again.
Violet Baudelaire could not help feeling like this poor spider as she ascended the waterfall for the last time, with Quigley and Klaus beside her and Esmé Squalor on her toboggan behind them. After attaching the last two forks to Klaus's shoes, she had told her companions to tie the leather straps of the toboggan around their waists, so they could drag the villainous girlfriend behind them as they climbed. It was exhausting to approach the peak of Mount Fraught in this manner, particularly after staying up all night digging a pit, and it seemed like they might get washed back down by the dripping water of the Stricken Stream, like the spider Violet had heard about when she was a little girl. The ice on the slope was weakening, after two fork-assisted climbs, a toboggan ride, and the increasing temperatures of False Spring, and with each step of Violet's invention, the ice would shift slightly. It was clear that the slippery slope was almost as exhausted as they were, and soon the ice would vanish completely. "Mush!" Esmé called from the toboggan. She was using an expression that arctic explorers shouted to their sled dogs, and it certainly did not make the journey any easier.
"I wish she'd stop saying that," Violet murmured from behind her mask. She tapped the candelabra on the ice ahead of her, and a small piece detached from the waterfall and fell to the ruins of headquarters. She watched it disappear below her and sighed. She would never see the V.F.D. headquarters in all its glory. None of the Baudelaires would. Violet would never know how it felt to cook in the kitchen and gaze at the two tributaries of the Stricken Stream, while chatting with the other volunteers. Klaus would never know how it felt to relax in the library and learn all of the secrets of
V.F.D. in the comfort of one of the library's chairs, with his feet up on one of the matching V.F.D. footstools. Sunny would never operate the projector in the movie room, or practice the art of the fake mustache in the disguise center, or sit in the parlor at tea time and eat the almond cookies made from my grandmother's recipe. Violet would never study chemical composition in one of the six laboratories, and Klaus would never use the balance beams at the gymnasium, and Sunny would never stand behind the counter at the ice cream shop and prepare butterscotch sundaes for the swimming coaches when it was her turn. And none of the Baudelaires would ever meet some of the organization's most beloved volunteers, including the mechanical instructor C. M. Kornbluth, and Dr. Isaac Anwhistle, whom everyone called Ike, and the brave volunteer who tossed the sugar bowl out the kitchen window so it would not be destroyed in the blaze, and watched it float away on one of the tributaries of the Stricken Stream. The Baudelaires would never do any of these things, any more than I will ever see my beloved Beatrice again, or retrieve my pickle from the refrigerator in which I left it, and return it to its rightful place in an important coded sandwich. Violet, of course, was not aware of everything she would never do, but as she gazed down at the vast, ashen remains of the headquarters, she felt as if her whole journey in the Mortmain Mountains had been as useless as the journey of a tiny arachnid in a song she had never liked to hear.
"Mush!" Esmé cried again, with a cruel chuckle.
"Please stop saying that, Esmé," Violet called down impatiently. "That mush nonsense is slowing our climb."
"A slow climb might be to our advantage," Klaus murmured to his sister. "The longer it takes us to reach the summit, the longer we have to think up what we're going to say to Count Olaf."
"We could tell him that he's surrounded," Quigley said, "and that there are volunteers everywhere ready to arrest him if he doesn't let Sunny go free."
Violet shook her mask. "He won't believe that," she said, sticking a fork-assisted shoe into the waterfall. "He can see everything and everyone from Mount Fraught. He'll know we're the only volunteers in the area."
"There must be something we can do," Klaus said. "We didn't make this journey in
to the mountains for nothing."
"Of course not," Quigley said. "We found each other, and we solved some of the mysteries that were haunting us."
"Will that be enough," Violet asked, "to defeat all those villains on the peak?"
Violet's question was a difficult one, and neither Klaus nor Quigley had the answer, and so rather than hazard a guess — a phrase which here means "continue to expend their energy by discussing the matter" — they decided to hazard their climb, a phrase which here means "continue their difficult journey in silence, until they arrived at last at the source of the Stricken Stream." Hoisting themselves up onto the flat peak, they sat on the edge and pulled the leather straps as hard as they could. It was such a difficult task to drag Esmé Squalor and the toboggan over the edge of the slope and onto Mount Fraught that the children did not notice who was nearby until they heard a familiar scratchy voice right behind them.
"Who goes there?" Count Olaf demanded.
Breathless from the climb, the three children turned around to see the villain standing with his two sinister cohorts near his long, black automobile, glaring suspiciously at the masked volunteers.
"We thought you'd get here by taking the path," said the man with a beard but no hair, "not by climbing up the waterfall."
"No, no, no," Esmé said quickly. "These aren't the people we're expecting. These are some volunteers I found at headquarters."
"Volunteers?" said the woman with hair but no beard, but her voice did not sound as deep as it usually did. The villains gave the children the same confused frown they had seen from Esmé, as if they were unsure whether to be scared or scornful, and the hook-handed man, the two white-faced women, and the three former carnival employees gathered around to see what had made their villainous boss fall silent. Although they were exhausted, the two Baudelaires hurriedly untied the straps of the toboggan from their waists and stood with Quigley to face their enemies. The orphans were very scared, of course, but they found that with their faces concealed they could speak their minds, a phrase which here means "confront Count Olaf and his companions as if they weren't one bit frightened."
"We built a trap to capture your girlfriend, Olaf," Violet said, "but we didn't want to become a monster like you."
"They're idiotic liars!" Esmé cried. "I found them hogging the cigarettes, so I captured them myself and made them drag me up the waterfall like sled dogs."
The middle Baudelaire ignored the wicked girlfriend's nonsense. "We're here for Sunny Baudelaire," Klaus said, "and we're not leaving without her."
Count Olaf frowned, and peered at them with his shiny, shiny eyes as if he were trying to see through their masks. "And what makes you so certain," he said, "that I'll give you my prisoner just because you say so?"
Violet thought furiously, looking around at her surroundings for anything that might give her an idea of what to do. Count Olaf clearly believed that the three masked people in front of him were members of V.F.D., and she felt that if she could just find the right words to say, she could defeat him without becoming as villainous as her enemies. But she could not find the words, and neither could her brother nor her friend, who stood beside her in silence. The winds of the Mortmain Mountains blew against them, and Violet stuck her hands in her pockets, bumping one finger against the long bread knife. She began to think that perhaps trapping Esmé had been the right thing to do after all. Count Olaf's frown began to fade, and his mouth started to curl upward in a triumphant smile, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, Violet saw two things that gave her hope once more. The first was the sight of two notebooks, one a deep shade of purple and the other dark blue, sticking out of the pockets of her companions — commonplace books, where Klaus and Quigley had written down all of the information they had found in the ruined library of V.F.D. headquarters. And the other was a collection of dishes spread out on the flat rock that Olaf's troupe had been using for a table. Sunny had been forced to wash these dishes, using handfuls of melted snow, and she had laid them out to dry in the sunshine of False Spring. Violet could see a stack of plates, each emblazoned with the familiar image of an eye, as well as a row of teacups and a small pitcher for cream. But there was something missing from the tea set, and it made Violet smile behind her mask as she turned to face Count Olaf again.
"You will give us Sunny," she said, "because we know where the sugar bowl is."
Chapter Thirteen
Count Olaf gasped, and raised his one eyebrow very high as he gazed at the two Baudelaires and their companion, his eyes shinier than they had ever seen them. "Where is it?" he said, in a terrible, wheezing whisper. "Give it to me!"
Violet shook her head, grateful that her face was still hidden behind a mask. "Not until you give us Sunny Baudelaire," she said.
"Never!" the villain replied. "Without that big-toothed brat, I'll never capture the Baudelaire fortune. You give me the sugar bowl this instant, or I'll throw all of you off this mountain!"
"If you throw us off the mountain," Klaus said, "you'll never know where the sugar bowl is." He did not add, of course, that the Baudelaires had no idea where the sugar bowl was, or why in the world it was so important.
Esmé Squalor took a sinister step toward her boyfriend, her flame-imitating dress crackling against the cold ground. "We must have that sugar bowl," she snarled. "Let the baby go. We'll cook up another scheme to steal the fortune."
"But stealing the fortune is the greater good," Count Olaf said. "We can't let the baby go."
"Getting the sugar bowl is the greater good," Esmé said, with a frown.
"Stealing the fortune," Olaf insisted.
"Getting the sugar bowl," Esmé replied.
"Fortune!"
"Sugar bowl!"
"Fortune!"
"Sugar bowl!"
"That's enough!" ordered the man with a beard but no hair. "Our recruitment scheme is about to be put into action. We can't have you arguing all day long."
"We wouldn't have argued all day long," Count Olaf said timidly. "After a few hours — "
"We said that's enough!" ordered the woman with hair but no beard. "Bring the baby over here!"
"Bring the baby at once!" Count Olaf ordered the two white-faced women. "She's napping in her casserole dish."
The two white-faced women sighed, but hurried over to the casserole dish and lifted it together, as if they were cooks removing something from the oven instead of villainous employees bringing over a prisoner, while the two sinister visitors reached down the necks of their shirts and retrieved something that was hanging around their necks. Violet and Klaus were surprised to see two shiny silver whistles, like the one Count Olaf had used as part of his disguise at Prufrock Preparatory School, when he was pretending to be a coach.
"Watch this, volunteers," said the sinister man in his hoarse voice, and the two mysterious villains blew their whistles. Instantly, the children heard an enormous rustling sound over their heads, as if the Mortmain Mountain winds were as frightened as the youngsters, and it suddenly grew very dim, as if the morning sun had also put on a mask. But when they looked up, Violet, Klaus, and Quigley saw that the reason for the noisy sky and the fading light was perhaps more strange than frightened winds and a masked sun. The sky above Mount Fraught was swarming with eagles. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, flying in silent circles high above the two sinister villains. They must have been nesting nearby to have arrived so quickly, and they must have been very thoroughly trained to be so eerily silent. Some of them looked very old, old enough to have been in the skies when the Baudelaire parents were children themselves. Some of them looked quite young, as if they had only recently emerged from the egg and were already obeying the shrill sound of a whistle. But all of them looked exhausted, as if they would rather be anywhere else but the summit of the Mortmain Mountains, doing absolutely anything rather than following the orders of such wretched people.
"Look at these creatures!" cried the woman with hair but no beard. "When the schism occurred,
you may have won the carrier crows, volunteers, and you may have won the trained reptiles."
"Not anymore," Count Olaf said. "All of the reptiles except one — "
"Don't interrupt," the sinister woman interrupted. "You may have the carrier crows, but we have the two most powerful mammals in the world to do our bidding — the lions and eagles!"
"Eagles aren't mammals" Klaus cried out in frustration. "They're birds!"
"They're slaves," said the man with a beard but no hair, and the two villains reached into the pockets of their suits and drew out two long, wicked-looking whips. Violet and Klaus could see at once that they were similar to the whip Olaf had used when bossing around the lions at Caligari Carnival. With matching, sinister sneers the two mysterious villains cracked their whips in the air, and four eagles swooped down from the sky, landing on the strange thick pads that the villains had on their shoulders.
"These beasts will do anything we tell them to do," the woman said. "And today they're going to help us with our greatest triumph." She uncurled the whip and gestured to the ground around her, and the children noticed for the first time an enormous net on the ground, spread out over almost the entire peak and just stopping at their fork-assisted climbing shoes. "On my signal, these eagles will lift this net from the ground and carry it into the sky, capturing a group of young people who think they're here to celebrate False Spring."
"The Snow Scouts," Violet said in astonishment.
"We'll capture every one of those uniformed brats," the villainous man bragged, "and each one of them will be offered the exciting opportunity to join us."
"They'll never join you," Klaus said.
"Of course they will," said the sinister woman, in her deep, deep voice. "They'll either be recruited, or they'll be our prisoners. But one thing is for certain — we'll burn down every single one of their parents' homes."
The two Baudelaires shuddered, and even Count Olaf looked a bit uneasy. "Of course," he said quickly, "the main reason we're doing all this is to get our hands on all those fortunes."
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