The Slippery Slope

by Lemony Snicket

  "They're two terrible people, a man and a woman, who have quite an aura of menace," Violet said. "Even Count Olaf is a little afraid of them."

  "What are they all doing up there?" Klaus asked.

  "They're having some sort of villainous meeting," Quigley said. "We heard them mention something about a recruitment plan, and a large net."

  "That doesn't sound pleasant," Klaus said.

  "There's more, Klaus," Violet said. "Count Olaf has the Snicket file, and he found out about some secret location — the last safe place where the V.F.D. can gather. That's why Sunny stayed up there. If she overhears where the place is, we'll know where to go to meet up with the rest of the volunteers."

  "I hope she manages to find out," Klaus said. "Without that piece of information, all that I've discovered is useless."

  "What have you discovered?" Quigley asked.

  "I'll show you," Klaus said, and led the way to the ruins of the library, where Violet could see he'd been working. His dark blue notebook was open, and she could see that several pages were filled with notes. Nearby were several half-burnt scraps of paper, stacked underneath a burnt teacup Klaus was using for a paperweight, and all of the contents of the refrigerator were laid out in a careful half circle: the jar of mustard, the container of olives, three jars of jam, and the very fresh dill. The small glass jug, containing one pickle, and the bottle of lemon juice were off to one side. "This is some of the most difficult research I've ever done," Klaus said, sitting down next to his notebook. "Justice Strauss's legal library was confusing, and Aunt Josephine's grammatical library was dull, but the ruined V.F.D. library is a much bigger challenge. Even if I know what book I'm looking for, it may be nothing but ashes."

  "Did you find anything about Verbal Fridge Dialogue?" Quigley asked, sitting beside him.

  "Not at first," Klaus said. "The scrap of paper that led us to the refrigerator was in a large pile of ashes, and it took awhile to sift through it. But I finally found one page that was probably from the same book." He reached for his notebook and held up his flashlight so he could see the pages. "The page was so delicate," he said, "that T immediately copied it into my commonplace book. It explains how the whole code works."

  "Read it to us," Violet said, and Klaus complied, a word which here means "followed Violet's suggestion and read a very complicated paragraph out loud, explaining it as he went along."

  "'Verbal Fridge Dialogue,'" he read, '"is an emergency communication system that avails itself of the more esoteric products in a refrigerator. Volunteers will know such a code is being used by the presence of very fr — '" He looked up from his notebook. "The sentence ends there," he said, "but I assume that 'very fr' is the beginning of 'very fresh dill.' If very fresh dill is in the refrigerator, that means there's a message there, too."

  "I understand that part," Violet said, "but what does 'esoteric' mean?"

  "In this case," Klaus said, "I think it refers to things that aren't used very much — the things that stay in the refrigerator for a long time."

  "Like mustard and jam and things like that," Violet said. "I understand."

  "'The receiver of the message should find his or her initials, as noted by one of our poet volunteers, as follows,'" Klaus continued. "And then there's a short poem:

  "The darkest of the jams of three contains within the addressee."

  "That's a couplet," Quigley said, "like my sister writes."

  "I don't think your sister wrote that particular poem," Violet said. "This code was probably invented before your sister was born."

  "That's what I thought," Klaus said, "but it made me wonder who taught Isadora about couplets. They might have been a volunteer."

  "She had a poetry teacher when we were young," Quigley said, "but I never met him. I always had cartography class."

  "And your mapmaking skills," Violet said, "led us to the headquarters."

  "And your inventing skills," Klaus said, "allowed you to climb up to Mount Fraught."

  "And your researching skills are helping us now," Violet said. "It's as if we were being trained for all this, and we didn't even know it."

  "I never thought of learning about maps as training," Quigley said. "I just liked it."

  "Well, I haven't had much training in poetry," Klaus said, "but the couplet seems to say that inside the darkest jar of jam is the name of the person who's supposed to get the message."

  Violet looked down at the three jars of jam. "There's apricot, strawberry, and boysenberry," she said. "Boysenberry's the darkest."

  Klaus nodded, and unscrewed the cap from the jar of boysenberry jam. "Look inside," he said, and shined the flashlight so Violet and Quigley could see. Someone had taken a knife and written two letters in the surface of the jam: J and S.

  "J.S.," Quigley said. "Jacques Snicket."

  "The message can't be for Jacques Snicket " Violet said. "He's dead."

  "Maybe whoever wrote this message doesn't know that," Klaus said, and continued to read from the commonplace book. '"If necessary, the dialogue uses a cured, fruit-based calendar for days of the week in order to announce a gathering. Sunday is represented by a lone — ' Here it's cut off again, but I think that means that these olives are an encoded way of communicating which day of the week a gathering will take place, with Sunday being one olive, Monday being two, and so on."

  "How many olives are in that container?" Quigley asked.

  "Five," Klaus said, wrinkling his nose. "I didn't like counting them. Ever since the Squalors fixed us aqueous martinis, the taste of olives hasn't really appealed to me."

  "Five olives means Thursday," Violet said.

  "Today's Friday," Quigley said. "The gathering of the volunteers is less than a week away.

  The two Baudelaires nodded in agreement, and Klaus opened his notebook again. '"Any spice-based condiment,'" he read, "'should have a coded label referring volunteers to encoded poems.'"

  "I don't think I understand," Quigley said.

  Klaus sighed, and reached for the jar of mustard. "This is where it really gets complicated. Mustard is a spice-based condiment, and according to the code, it should refer us to a poem of some sort."

  "How can mustard refer us to a poem?" Violet asked.

  Klaus smiled. "I was puzzled for a long time," he said, "but I finally thought to look at the list of ingredients. Listen to this: 'Vinegar, mustard seed, salt, tumeric, the final quatrain of the eleventh stanza of "The Garden of Proserpine," by Algernon Charles Swinburne, and calcium disodium, an allegedly natural preservative.' A quatrain is four lines of a poem, and a stanza is another word for a verse. They hid a reference to a poem in the list of ingredients."

  "It's the perfect place to hide something," Violet said. "No one ever reads those lists very carefully. But did you find the poem?"

  Klaus frowned, and lifted the teacup. "Under a burnt wooden sign marked 'Poetry,' I found a pile of papers that were burned practically beyond recognition," he said, "but here's the one surviving scrap, and it's the last quatrain of the eleventh stanza of 'The Garden of Proserpine,' by Algernon Charles Swinburne."

  "That's convenient," Quigley said.

  "A little too convenient," Klaus said. "The entire library was destroyed, and the one poem that survived is the one we need. It can't be a coincidence." He held out the scrap of paper so Violet and Quigley could see it. "It's as if someone knew we'd be looking for this."

  "What does the quatrain say?" Violet asked.

  "It's not very cheerful," Klaus said, and tilted the flashlight so he could read it:

  "That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."

  The children shivered, and moved so they were sitting even closer together on the ground. It had grown darker, and Klaus's flashlight was pratically the only thing they could see. If you have ever found yourself sitting in darkness with a flashlight, you may have experienced the feeling that something is lurking just beyond the circle of ligh
t that a flashlight makes, and reading a poem about dead men is not a good way to make yourself feel better.

  "I wish Isadora were here," Quigley said. "She could tell us what that poem means."

  "Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea," Violet repeated. "Do you think that refers to the last safe place?"

  "I don't know," Klaus said. "I couldn't find anything else that would help us."

  "What about the lemon juice?" Violet asked. "And the pickle?"

  Klaus shook his head, although his sister could scarcely see him in the dark. "There might be more to the message," he said, "but it's all gone up in smoke. I couldn't find anything more in the library that seemed helpful."

  Violet took the scrap of paper from her brother and looked at the quatrain. "There's something very faint here," she said. "Something written in pencil, but it's too faint to read."

  Quigley reached into his backpack. "I forgot we have two flashlights," he said, and shone a second light onto the paper. Sure enough, there was one word, written very faintly in pencil beside the last four lines of the poem's eleventh stanza. Violet, Klaus, and Quigley leaned in as far as they could to see what it was. The night winds rustled the fragile paper, and made the children shiver, shaking the flashlights, but at last the light shone on the quatrain and they could see what words were there.

  "Sugar bowl," they said in unison, and looked at one another.

  "What could that mean?" Klaus asked.

  Violet sighed. "When we were hiding underneath the car," she said to Quigley, "one of those villains said something about searching for a sugar bowl, remember?"

  Quigley nodded, and took out his purple notebook. "Jacques Snicket mentioned a sugar bowl once," he said, "when we were in Dr. Montgomery's library. He said it was very important to find it. I wrote it down on the top of a page in my commonplace book, so I could add any information I learned about its whereabouts." He held up the page so the two Baudelaires could see that it was blank. "I never learned anything more," he said.

  Klaus sighed. "It seems that the more we learn, the more mysteries we find. We reached V.F.D. headquarters and decoded a message, and all we know is that there's one last safe place, and volunteers are gathering there on Thursday."

  "That might be enough," Violet said, "if Sunny finds out where the safe place is."

  "But how are we going to get Sunny away from Count Olaf?" Klaus asked.

  "With your fork-assisted climbing shoes," Quigley said. "We can climb up there again, and sneak away with Sunny."

  Violet shook her head. "The moment they noticed Sunny was gone," she said, "they would find us. From Mount Fraught, they can see everything and everyone for miles and miles, and we're hopelessly outnumbered."

  "That's true," Quigley admitted. "There are ten villains up there, and only four of us. Then how are we going to rescue her?"

  "Olaf has someone we love," Klaus said thoughtfully. "If we had something he loves, we could trade it for Sunny's return. What does Count Olaf love?"

  "Money," Violet said.

  "Fire," Quigley said.

  "We don't have any money," Klaus said, "and Olaf won't trade Sunny for a fire. There must be something he really loves — something that makes him happy, and would make him very unhappy if it were taken away."

  Violet and Quigley looked at one another and smiled. "Count Olaf loves Esmé Squalor," Violet said. "If we were holding Esmé prisoner, we could arrange a trade."

  "That's true," Klaus said, "but we're not holding Esmé prisoner."

  "We could take her prisoner," Quigley said, and everyone was quiet. Taking someone prisoner, of course, is a villainous thing to do, and when you think of doing a villainous thing — even if you have a very good reason for thinking of doing it — it can make you feel like a villain, too. Lately, the Baudelaires had been doing things like wearing disguises and helping burn down a carnival, and were beginning to feel more and more like villains themselves. But Violet and Klaus had never done anything as villainous as taking somebody prisoner, and as they looked at Quigley they could tell that he felt just as uncomfortable, sitting in the dark and thinking up a villainous plan.

  "How would we do it?" Klaus asked quietly.

  "We could lure her to us," Violet said, "and trap her."

  Quigley wrote something down in his commonplace book. "We could use the Verdant Flammable Devices," he said. "Esmé thinks they're cigarettes, and she thinks cigarettes are in. If we lit some of them, she might smell the smoke and come down here."

  "But then what?" Klaus asked.

  Violet shivered in the cold, and reached into her pocket. Her fingers bumped up against the large bread knife, which she had almost forgotten was there, and then found what she was looking for. She took the ribbon out of her pocket and tied her hair up, to keep it out of her eyes. The eldest Baudelaire could scarcely believe she was using her inventing skills to think up a trap. "The easiest trap to build," she said, "is a pit. We could dig a deep hole, and cover it up with some of this half-burned wood so Esmé couldn't see it. The wood has been weakened by the fire, so when she steps on it. ."

  Violet did not finish her sentence, but by the glow of the flashlights, she could see that Klaus and Quigley were both nodding. "Hunters have used traps like that for centuries," Klaus said, "to capture wild animals."

  "That doesn't make me feel any better," Violet said.

  "How could we dig such a pit?" Quigley said.

  "Well," Violet said, "we don't really have any tools, so we probably have to use our hands. As the pit got deeper, we'd have to use something to carry the dirt away."

  "I still have that pitcher," Klaus said.

  "And we'd need a way to make sure that we wouldn't get trapped ourselves," Violet said.

  "I have a rope," Quigley said, "in my backpack. We could tie one end to the archway, and use it to climb out."

  Violet reached her hand down to the ground The dirt was very cold, but quite loose, and she saw that they could dig a pit without too much trouble. "Is this the right thing to do?" Violet asked. "Do you think this is what our parents would do?"

  "Our parents aren't here," Klaus said. "They might have been here once, but they're not here now."

  The children were quiet again, and tried to think as best they could in the cold and the dark. Deciding on the right thing to do in a situation is a bit like deciding on the right thing to wear to a party. It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier. It might seem right to wear a navy blue suit, for instance, but when you arrive there could be several other people wearing the same thing, and you could end up being handcuffed due to a case of mistaken identity. It might seem right to wear your favorite pair of shoes, but there could be a sudden flood at the party, and your shoes would be ruined. And it might seem right to wear a suit of armor to the party, but there could be several other people wearing the same thing, and you could end up being caught in a flood due to a case of mistaken identity, and find yourself drifting out to sea wishing that you were wearing deep-sea diving equipment after all. The truth is that you can never be sure if you have decided on the right thing until the party is over, and by then it is too late to go back and change your mind, which is why the world is filled with people doing terrible things and wearing ugly clothing, and so few volunteers who are able to stop them.

  "I don't know if it's the right thing to do," Violet said, "but Count Olaf captured Sunny, and we might have to capture someone ourselves, in order to stop him."

  Klaus nodded solemnly. "We'll fight fire " he said, "with fire."

  "Then we'd better get started," Quigley said and stood up. "When the sun rises, we can light the Verdant Flammable Devices with the mirror again, like we did when we were signaling Sunny."

  "If we want the pit to be ready by dawn," Violet said, "we'll have to dig all night."

  "Where shall we put the pit?" Klaus asked.

&nb
sp; "In front of the entrance," Violet decided. "Then we can hide behind the arch when Esmé approaches."

  "How will we know when she's fallen in," Quigley asked, "if we can't see her?"

  "We'll hear it," Violet replied. "We'll hear the breaking of the wood, and Esmé might scream."

  Klaus shuddered. "That's not going to be a pleasant sound."

  "We're not in a pleasant situation," Violet said, and the eldest Baudelaire was right. It was not pleasant to kneel down in front of the ruined library entrance, and dig through the ashes and dirt with their bare hands by the light of two flashlights, as all four drafts of the valley blew around them. It was not pleasant for Violet and her brother to carry the dirt away in the pitcher, while Quigley tied his rope to the iron archway, so they could climb in and out as the pit grew bigger and deeper, like an enormous dark mouth opening wider and wider to swallow them whole. It was not even pleasant to pause and eat a carrot to keep up their energy, or to gaze at the shiny white shape of the frozen waterfall as it glinted in the moonlight, imagining Esmé Squalor, lured by the smoke of the Verdant Flammable Devices, approaching the ruined headquarters to become their prisoner. But the least pleasant part of the situation wasn't the cold dirt, or the freezing winds, or even their own exhaustion as it grew later and later and the children dug deeper and deeper. The least pleasant part was the idea, shared by the two Baudelaires and their new friend, that they might be doing a villainous thing.

  The siblings were not sure if digging a deep pit to trap someone, in order to trade prisoners with a villain, was something that their parents or any other volunteers would do, but with so many of the V.F.D. secrets lost in the ashes, it was impossible to know for sure, and this uncertainty haunted them with every pitcherful of dirt, and every climb up the rope, and every piece of weakened wood they laid on top of the pit to hide it from view.

  As the first rays of the morning sun appeared on the misty horizon, the elder Baudelaires gazed up at the waterfall. At the summit of the Mortmain Mountains, they knew, was a group of villains, from whom Sunny was hopefully learning the location of the last safe place. But as Violet and Klaus lowered their gaze to their own handiwork, and looked at the dark, deep pit Quigley had helped them dig, they could not help wondering if there were also a group of villains at the bottom of the slippery slope. As they looked at the villainous thing they had made, the three volunteers could not help wondering if they were villains, too, and this was the least pleasant feeling in the world.