“As your chaperone,” my chaperone said, “I have a right to inspect all of your correspondence. You should have paid more attention during your training at headquarters.”
“I’m sure headquarters would be shocked to hear that a chaperone plans on inspecting her apprentice while he’s bathing,” I said, and shut the door quickly. Threatening nudity is a powerful way to be left alone, and alone is the best way to do certain important tasks. Reading a mysterious letter certainly counted as important, I thought, sitting on the edge of the tub.
The envelope had my name on it in the wavering letters of a failing typewriter, and below it were the name and address of the Lost Arms. There was no return address, but the postmark told me the letter came from the city. There were many people in the city, of course, but I hoped that this letter brought me news of my sister, who was not only in the city but in a heap of trouble besides. But the letter was about another matter entirely.
Dear Mr. Snicket,
I have heard of your noble work and write to ask you a favor. I was recently in your town studying the Yamgraz. One afternoon I needed a break, so I took a walk to the Swinster Pharmacy and sat at the counter, enjoying a tangerine soda and writing postcards to various acquaintances in the city. Most of the messages I wrote were just friendly greetings, but on one postcard I wrote a very important message. My plan was to mail them at Stain’d Station, before I caught my train home. But when I went to mail them, my important message was gone. I believe I left it at the soda counter, but the pharmacy hasn’t answered the phone, although I called either two or three times. Mr. Snicket, I implore you to help by finding this postcard and mailing it to the recipient. “Implore” means “beg,” by the way. Because of the importance of the message, I ask you to look only at the picture side, which shows Blotto the Octopus, a character from a comic strip that I understand used to run in the newspaper. It’s very important. I mean this sincerely.
Sincerely,
Lois Dressing
I frowned at the letter and decided to skip my morning bath. I wondered if Theodora would notice. I wondered what kind of crucial information Ms. Dressing put on a postcard, which anyone can read, and while I was wondering, I wondered what in the world “Yamgraz” was. It can be frustrating when someone tells you the definition of a word you know, such as “implore,” but not one you don’t. It induces a state of discomfiture.
I told Theodora, who was brushing her hair with a third brush, that I needed some fresh air to go with my necessary nutrients, and I walked out of the Lost Arms onto the streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The Swinster Pharmacy, I knew, was a building with a mysterious reputation in a part of town known as Flounder Ponds. Perhaps there had once been ponds and perhaps they’d been full of flounder, a fish shaped like it had been stepped on. Now the whole neighborhood looked stepped on, with only a few struggling businesses left open and a lot of empty houses. It was remarkable, I thought, how many neighborhoods were named after the things that used to be there before the neighborhood came along and changed the neighborhood.
I found the Swinster Pharmacy easily enough, even though I’d never been there. It looked like all mysterious buildings look when you approach them. It’s difficult to describe, but imagine a creature, heavy and enormous, sleeping in great, loud breaths with its eyes closed. The eyes are the windows of the mysterious building. Now imagine that you must not wake it up. My hands were a little nervous on the door handle, and when I walked inside, the door closed behind me with a faint hiss I didn’t care for.
The place was flyblown, a word which here means “squalid,” a word which here means I wanted to leave immediately. The floor was very dark and the ceiling was very low. The windows had curtains that looked half-eaten. There were shelves of vitamins, painkillers, and other cures for ailments, but all the jars and bottles looked sticky and bruised. There was a rack of books I wouldn’t read if you begged me, and along the far wall was the counter where Lois Dressing said she’d enjoyed a tangerine soda. It was very dusty, with padded seats ripped here and there and lonely striped linoleum that looked like it also wanted to leave immediately. I couldn’t imagine enjoying anything there, let alone something tangerine-flavored.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Hello,” a voice replied, so close I jumped. What I’d thought was some tubes of wrapping paper turned out to be the legs of an extremely tall man. He was as tall as three tall things stacked up on top of each other, with a white jacket with faint, tall stripes that made him look taller. His face was pale and old, and he either was wearing an unusual hat or his head fit neatly into one of the pharmacy’s light fixtures.
“Are you ill?” the man asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m Lemony Snicket. Are you Swinster?”
“There is no Swinster,” said the man.
“I’m here to help a woman who was in here recently.”
“Is she ill?”
“I hope not,” I said. “She has troubles enough. She was in here recently and left an important postcard behind.”
“I found no postcard.”
“She tried to get ahold of you, but you didn’t answer the phone.”
“The phone is ill,” said the man.
“Do you remember her, at least? She had a tangerine soda. Dressing was her name.”
The man gave me a slow, tall blink, and then nodded. I watched carefully. It wasn’t a hat. “Slightly,” he said. “I don’t pay much attention to people unless they’re ill. She asked directions to Stain’d Station and I told her. But then she looked at her book and hurried out the door in the opposite direction.”
“Did you happen to notice the name of the book?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. I almost expected to hear the ceiling crack. “The cover had a virus on it,” he said.
“A virus?”
“Possibly a bacteria. It made the book look ill.”
“And the woman didn’t leave anything here?”
“A few coins, to pay for the soda.”
“Nothing else?”
“A few more coins, as a tip.”
“Do you mind if I look around?”
He said no, but it was me who minded. The Swinster Pharmacy was a creepy place to look around, and I knew I wasn’t going to find anything, and I didn’t. There was nothing on the counter, behind it, or near it or far from it. There was nothing anywhere. I didn’t even know what Blotto the Octopus looked like.
The door hissed behind me again as I left, and I wondered if there was anything more I could do. I did not know Lois Dressing and felt a little put out that she had written me out of the blue and sent me on a search that was none of my business. But “put out” is a phrase which here means “troubled,” and I knew the feeling of being put out by a crucial, missing item. My biggest case revolved around an item that kept disappearing and reappearing all over town. I decided to go to the train station, the only other place I knew Ms. Dressing had been, and looked up at the street sign so I might figure out which way to go.
YAMGRAZ DRIVE
I looked at it a minute. Sometimes when you encounter a new word, you begin to see it everywhere. A mystery is solved with a story, but there was something about Lois Dressing’s story that I hadn’t understood from the beginning. Yamgraz Drive took me in the direction of the library, the long way around, and my sixty-nine servings of necessary nutrients hadn’t provided me with enough fuel to make the journey comfortably. I was tempted to stop at Hungry’s for a sandwich. My associate Jake Hix made good sandwiches. I decided they were so good that one could be a reward for a job well done rather than a break from a job not yet completed.
Dashiell Qwerty, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only librarian and a splendid one, was busy behind his desk. At first glance, I thought he was swatting moths, continuing a fierce battle between librarian and insect I had witnessed with every visit to the library, but when I looked closely, he was holding a book open and shaking it vigorously over his desk. It looked like he was encour
aging the book to spit up something it was choking on.
“Good morning, Qwerty.”
“Good morning,” Qwerty replied. “Don’t mind me. A certain reader in town always leaves things behind in the books she borrows. Last month I found two shed snakeskins and a doily that was quite finely made.”
I was barely listening. There were enough lost small objects in my life. I had been in the library long enough to know where the best dictionary was, and I told Qwerty I needed it and he told me to help myself, but in a moment I needed more help than myself could give me.
“Qwerty, it’s not here.”
“What’s not here?” Qwerty said, coming out from behind his desk.
“A word I need defined. It’s not in the dictionary.”
“Did you use the good one?”
“Of course, Qwerty,” I said, reminding myself to ask him sometime why he kept mediocre dictionaries on the shelf.
“What’s the word?”
“Yamgraz.”
Qwerty smiled like I’d given him the right answer. “Put the dictionary away,” he said. “That’s a proper noun.”
“And what does it properly mean?”
“The Yamgraz were the people who lived in this area first.”
“Before Stain’d-by-the-Sea, you mean?”
“Oh, yes, long before. The Yamgraz lived on the shoreline, near where the Clusterous Forest is now. They were shellfishing people, I believe, who ate the innards of the oyster and used the shells as tools and castanets.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“We live here now,” Qwerty said, and he sounded a little sad about it. “Fishing boats arrived, then ink was discovered, and then the railway, which started transporting oysters to the city for fancy parties. Look here.”
The librarian had led me to the local history section, with which I was also familiar. The books there had taken me back in time through Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s mysterious history, to the days of fierce battles and troubling myths, but I’d never gone as far back as the Yamgraz, who were now nothing more than a street sign in a town that was hardly much more than nothing at all. I stared at the spines of the books and took one out immediately. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the cover. An oyster shell can look like a virus, particularly if you are looking at it from a great height.
“Anything more I can get you?” Qwerty asked me with a smile.
“No,” I said, looking down at the spine. “This book should cough up what I’m looking for.”
The conclusion to “Vanished Message” is filed under “Message Received,” here.
TROUBLESOME GHOST.
I woke up early and uncomfortable under my heavy blanket. Outside the window the morning was gray, and the air felt like a heavy blanket. At the other end of the Far East Suite was the figure of S. Theodora Markson, snoring in bed. She looked like a heavy blanket. When everything reminds you of a heavy blanket, you are probably going to have a grumpy day. I grumped out of bed and put on my clothes. They felt like a heavy blanket.
I knew one of Theodora’s meager breakfasts was not going to improve my mood, so I walked downstairs and nodded at Prosper Lost on my way out of the Lost Arms. He nodded back, or maybe the proprietor of the hotel was asleep. Stain’d-by-the-Sea once had a great number of restaurants, most of them specializing in seafood. With the sea drained away, the seafood was in very scarce supply, so now most of the town’s restaurants specialized in being closed and boarded up. But Hungry’s, where my associate Jake Hix cooked up marvelous things behind the counter, was still around, and I thought a Hix breakfast might improve my morning. I took the short walk through the quiet streets. The morning fog hung slow and thick around the streetlights. I probably don’t need to tell you what that reminded me of.
I expected to be Hungry’s only customer, but when I walked in, Jake was serving up a plate of banana waffles to a worried-looking man in overalls that looked worried, too. If you’ve ever had a good banana waffle, you know it’s nothing to worry about, and Jake’s waffles were very good. His secret was that he caramelized the bananas first, although there’s no reason to tell him who you learned that from.
“Good morning, Snicket. My waffle iron’s still hot, if you’re interested.”
“I’m definitely interested,” I said.
“And a cup of tea to go with it?”
“I’m interested in that, too.”
“And a ghost story? Would you be interested in that?”
I just gave him a look. Everyone’s interested in ghost stories. If you ask if anyone wants to hear a ghost story, no one is going to say, “No thanks, I’d rather just sit here,” and neither did I. Jake gestured to his other customer, and the worried-looking man shook my hand, and when he was done with his bite of waffle, told me his name.
“Hans Mann,” he said.
“Lemony Snicket,” I said.
“You’re not from around here,” the man said.
“Snicket’s only been in town a little while,” Jake said, busy with bananas at the stove, “but he’s helped out a lot of people.”
“I wish he’d help out my mother,” Hans said, “but I’m afraid it’s too late now.”
Jake tilted the sizzling bananas into a bowl of batter. “Hans used to work at the Stain’d Playhouse,” he said. “He built all the sets for the big productions, and Old Lady Mann ran the box office.”
“We put on some terrific shows back then,” Hans said wistfully. “We had a huge pirate ship with all the rigging for Shiver Me Timbers. Sally Murphy rose to the ceiling on invisible wires when she played the title role in Mother of Icarus. We even had a train wreck onstage when we performed Look Out for That Train Wreck.”
“I remember that,” Jake said, whisking briskly. “I could never figure out how you split that passenger car in two every night.”
“The whole thing was held together with chains,” Hans explained. “When the actor playing the cowboy shouted ‘I wonder what’s taking Margery so long,’ Billy Becker and I would give the apparatus a good tug and it would split apart. The chains were hidden behind the train car so the audience couldn’t see them, and after the shepherd discovered his identical twin in the last scene, the curtain would come down and we’d push the two halves of the train car back together for the next performance.”
“And now you’re doing a play about ghosts?” I asked.
“I don’t build sets anymore,” Hans said with a sigh. “When the Playhouse closed down, I moved to the city and found work in a staple gun factory.”
“Most of the actors and stagehands have left town,” Jake said to me. “Billy Becker and Sally Murphy are the only ones still in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Billy lives in an old shack in what used to be the Anchovy District, and spends his time trying to catch rats in an old pillowcase, and you know what Sally Murphy’s up to.”
“I do indeed,” I said grimly, thinking of my biggest case.
“Becker and Murphy aren’t the only ones,” Hans said. “My mother’s still here. She’s old and her legs ache and she hardly ever leaves the house, but she’s still around.”
“What does she do all day?” Jake asked.
“Reads,” Hans replied, “plays the harmonium, and maintains the fish scale mosaics.”
“I thought she donated those to a museum someplace,” Jake said. “Those mosaics are worth a fortune.”
“She wants them in her house until the day she no longer lives there,” Hans said, “but I’m afraid that day has come. I drove in from the city today to get my mother to come live with me. It’s nothing like our grand home here in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but there’s a small spare room waiting for her in my apartment, and the staple gun factory has agreed to let her work part-time in the Customer Complaints Department.”
“Listening to people complain about their staple guns can’t be as fun as playing the harmonium,” I said.
“You got that right, brother,” Hans said, “but you can’t always have the life you want
most. I wish my mother could live in the Mann mansion forever, but she’s too frightened of my father’s ghost to live out here by herself anymore.”
“Waffles are ready,” Jake said, and gave me mine. I dug in. It was a good time to eat, now that we were at the ghost part of the ghost story, although any time would have been a good time to dig into these waffles. Hix had put a thin layer of whipped cream, real whipped cream that wasn’t too sweet, in between them, making each bite crisp and light, the opposite of a heavy blanket and the heavy sigh Hans gave me as he continued his story.
“A few weeks ago,” he said, “my mother woke up in the middle of the night to a loud noise coming from the East Wing. She put on her slippers and walked downstairs to see what it was. She told me it sounded clanky and rattly, but when she got there, the noise stopped, and she didn’t see anything unusual in the sitting room, the game room, or the solarium. Thinking it was her imagination, she returned to her room, but she was kept up all night by a sinister muttering that was coming from under the bed. She turned on the lights and searched everywhere but couldn’t find anything, even though the muttering continued all night, along with squeaks and scrapes that lasted until dawn. When she finally went down the west staircase to have her morning tea in the morning tea room, she was a wreck, and when she went back upstairs to change out of her robe, she found that the chest at the foot of her bed had been opened and all of its contents thrown around the room.”
“What were its contents?” Jake asked. “Was there anything valuable inside the chest?”
“It was nothing but heavy blankets,” replied Hans.
“Hmm,” I said.
“You need maple syrup, Snicket?” Jake asked.
“No thanks,” I said. I never need maple syrup. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s like drinking the blood of a tree. “What happened next, Hans?”
“What happened next was the same thing the next night,” Hans said, “and the next and the next and the next. Clanking in some distant part of the house, and then muttering and scraping under the bed.”