“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
“Sure I could trust you,” I said. “You lied to me before.”
“Of course you can trust me,” Jake Hix said. “We read the same books.”
“Will there be room for everybody in the cab?” Moxie asked, snapping shut the typewriter case.
“If we squeeze,” Squeak squeaked.
Jake shook his head. “I’ll take the Dilemma,” he said. “It’ll only take me a second to change the tire. I’ll meet you all at the Colophon Clinic.”
“You’ll find two melons under the car,” I said. “I’d be grateful if you’d return them to Partial Foods.”
Jake was so worried he didn’t ask me why. In a second we were outside and he was sprinting around the corner to Cleo’s car. It was getting chilly. There was a cranky wind, and here and there I could see white papers blowing hither and yon and then hither again. They looked like dried-up plants that had broken from their roots and let the wind roll them anyplace. I’d seen them once on a trip to the mountains with my parents. Tumbleweeds. But these were the posters for Cleo Knight’s disappearance, blowing away. MISSING. If we don’t find her soon, I thought, she’ll be gone forever.
Moxie turned to me as we got into the taxi. “Are you sure you can trust me, Snicket?”
“Sure I’m sure,” I said, “and that goes for you two up front as well.”
“Much obliged,” Squeak said. He meant “thank you,” and his brother said it in the regular way.
“If you trust me,” Moxie said, “why do I have the feeling there are things you’re not telling me?”
“There are things you’re not telling me, too,” I said. “There are things everyone isn’t telling everybody.”
That ended the chitchat. The taxi rattled its way through the streets and then along a long, straight road out of town. I kept my eyes forward. Nobody spoke. The Bellerophon brothers didn’t even ask for a tip. Had they asked, I would have told them about a book I was thinking about on the drive. It was a book about a girl named Kit who acquires a reputation for witchcraft. It gets her into a lot of trouble, but she does manage to find someone she can trust. His name is Nathaniel, and he names a ship after her. The ship is called The Witch, but I couldn’t remember the name of the author. I also didn’t want to think about who liked this book more than I did, someone whose name was also Kit. She and I had something in common about now. We were both heading for the wrong place, an enormous, dark place that looked like it was going to swallow us up. In my case it was tall, iron gates, much taller and fiercer than gates usually need to be. On one gate it said COLOPHON, and the other said CLINIC. The gates were already open, wide open, like a hug from someone you don’t like. We went in through the gates. It was night now, and the gates closed behind us with a deep clang as soon as we drove through, like they weren’t tall and fierce to keep people out, but tall and fierce to keep people in.
The Bellerophon brothers stopped the cab. It was dead quiet. In my sister’s case it was probably worse, I told myself, but do you think she’s as scared as you are? What do you think, Snicket? Do you think you can be as brave as she is? I didn’t feel brave. I stared out at the night, where all my questions might be answered, but the shivers on my spine told me I was nowhere near brave enough.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Colophon Clinic didn’t have to look wicked to be a wicked place, but it did. It was made of black stone with small, narrow windows cut into it here and there, as if someone had taken a knife to the building. To get to the front door, you had to go up a set of broken stairs growing slick black moss in the cracks. There was a tower stuck into the top, very tall and very thin, and there were sharp-looking shingles all over the roof. I don’t know why wicked places generally look wicked. You’d think they’d look nice, to fool people, but they hardly ever do. Even the sky was helping out by looking like it would rain. Even the bushes, even the flowers on the bushes, looked like they wanted to hurt somebody. Pip peered at the place doubtfully through the windshield. “This doesn’t look good, Snicket.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “You can let me out here in the driveway. I’ll see you back in town.”
“Oh, sure, I’ll let you out,” Pip said. “ ‘See you back in town,’ he says. Let you out in front of a place like this and see you back in town. Sure, that’s something nice guys like me and my brother would do. Nothing wrong with leaving a guy all alone in a dangerous place. Maybe on our way into town we can find a puppy to run over because we’re such nice guys.”
“We’re staying here, Snicket,” Squeak translated, crawling up to sit next to his brother. “The gates closed behind us anyway.”
“And you know you’re stuck with me,” Moxie said.
“You look like I could talk you out of that,” I said.
She smiled and frowned and shook her head.
“What’s going to be in there?” Pip asked.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “Maybe Cleo Knight. Maybe Dr. Flammarion and his needles and Nurse Dander and her knives and maybe the whole Inhumane Society with a trained cackle of vicious hyenas. We won’t know until we go in.”
“You’re not much of a detective, are you?”
“I’m not a detective at all,” I said. It was something they told us again and again, over the course of our childhoods, from the day we could understand what the words meant to the day we graduated and were sent out into the world. “It looks like I’m solving mysteries, but I’m not. I’m just poking around. What we do, my associates and I, is like wandering the stacks of a library. We don’t really know what we’ll find. We just hope it will be helpful.”
“That’s a strange job,” Pip said.
“It’s more of an occupation.”
“It’s a strange occupation, then.”
“Admittedly, it’s sometimes hard to find volunteers.”
“Why would anybody volunteer to do something like that?”
“Why do you drive this cab?”
“You know why, Snicket,” Squeak said. “We do it because our father is sick and can’t do it himself.”
“I do what I do for basically the same reason.”
“I don’t understand,” Moxie said quietly.
I brushed my hands on my pants, like I was getting rid of something stuck to me. “Who else is going to do it?” I said. “Let’s get to work. They closed the gates, which means they saw us coming. But they don’t know how many of us there are. It would be foolish to walk in all together. Who has a watch?”
“I have my father’s,” Moxie said, rolling up her sleeve to show me.
“I have my father’s, too,” Squeak said.
“Moxie and I will go in together,” I said. “Wait ten minutes and then walk in yourself. Ask for your money for the trip out here. Be loud and rude about it. OK?”
“OK,” Pip said.
“We’d better synchronize our watches,” Moxie said, and held her wrist next to Squeak’s. They adjusted their watches so the times matched up exactly. “It’s precisely three minutes until eight o’clock,” she said, “now.”
“At seven minutes after, expect the Bellerophon brothers,” Squeak said.
“Lie low until then,” I said, and got out of the car. The rain dropped its first few tries. Moxie and I started toward the steps. I remembered a lesson of mine, and walked over to the bushes and quickly picked a good handful of flowers.
“Do you have a ribbon, Moxie?”
“What?”
“A hair ribbon, a length of string, anything like that?”
“I have my typewriter ribbon,” Moxie said, gesturing to her case, “but I can’t type without it, and they’re very hard to find in town.”
“Never mind then,” I said. I held the flowers in my hands in a rough bouquet. They might fool somebody and they might not. I was dressed well enough. We walked up the steps. One of my feet slid in a path of slick moss, leaving a muddy smell on my
shoe. A drop of rain hit the moss and sizzled. I had not seen rain sizzle on moss. It made me stop.
Moxie took my arm. “Come on,” she said. “Remember what you told me back at the Sallis mansion? Get scared later, Snicket.”
The doors were heavy and glass, and it took the two of us to open one of them. Then we were inside a tall room, full of windows doing the best they could to make the room light and airy. They were doing a bad job of it. There were some expensive sofas to sit on, and here and there were the kind of paintings that make people say their five-year-olds could paint them. Gloomy five-year-olds, in this case. In the middle of the room was a large desk towered with papers, and sitting at the desk with her hands folded was Nurse Dander. She looked right at us, and her fingers rippled. I didn’t like it. Never in my life have I liked a receptionist.
“Yes?” she said.
“Delivery,” I said. “Flowers for a…” I made a big show of looking at a label that wasn’t there. “Colonel Colonic?”
“Colonel Colophon,” Nurse Dander corrected.
“Colonel Colophon.”
“There is no such person at the Colophon Clinic.”
“If there’s no such person as Colonel Colophon at the Colophon Clinic, how did you know what name I meant?”
“Leave the flowers here and get out. I’ll give them to Colophon.”
I shook my head. “I’m supposed to give them directly to the colonel.”
Nurse Dander flushed. “Don’t provoke me,” she said. “The police were notified the moment you drove onto our grounds. This is private property.”
“Well, these are private flowers.”
Moxie put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the nurse, in her best polite voice. “A person of your great skill shouldn’t be bothered by troublesome underlings. If you just let my associate deliver these flowers, I promise I’ll discipline him severely.”
Nurse Dander stood up. She was still wearing her white coat, and one of her hands slid into a pocket. “I’ll take him to the colonel myself,” she said, “although I can’t say he’ll be pleased to have a visitor.”
“I’ll wait here,” Moxie said, and put down her case on the heavy desk, between two large piles of papers. “Take your time. I’m sure I can find something interesting to read.”
Nurse Dander took her hand out of her pocket and put it on top of one of the piles of papers. I looked at the top sheet. I recognized it. I recognized it from a small cottage near the sea, when Stain’d-by-the-Sea had a sea, and from a shabby apartment above an abandoned aquarium. They were Ellington Feint’s papers, the written record of her search for her father. They were important to Ellington, and now they were in the hands of one of Hangfire’s associates. The nurse looked from the papers to me to Moxie. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, just a little bit. She’d been told to make sure nobody entered the building and to make sure nobody took the papers on the desk. She couldn’t do both.
“I’ll find my own way,” I said. Nurse Dander didn’t answer but kept her eyes on Moxie. This is the dangerous part, I wanted to tell her. This is why I didn’t want to have you along. But the journalist looked calm. She was opening her typewriter case and paused only to tap her fingers a couple of times on the face of her watch as I walked by the desk and turned a corner to begin my exploration of the clinic. She was right. There probably wasn’t much time. I had no watch. Everything my father had given me I had left at a train station some time ago.
One way to mark time, if you have no watch, is to whistle or hum a piece of music you know by heart. If the piece of music is five minutes long, then when it’s over, five minutes have passed. Of course, you have to know how long the tune is. I didn’t know how long this one was. I didn’t even know what it was called. But I knew it by heart, from hearing it on Ellington’s old-fashioned record player and from the music box her father had left behind. I liked the tune. It made for good company.
A clinic is very much like a hospital, and something is wrong when a hospital is empty. When I walked past the desk, I found myself in a hallway that looked like a painting of a hallway. No one was there—no doctors, no patients, nobody visiting anybody sick. There was a clean smell in the air, but it was not pleasant. Somebody had scrubbed at everything, and then the whole place had been painted. An empty wheelchair sat against one of the walls, and a few doors hung gaping open. I didn’t hear anything. I looked through the first door and saw a small bed. I didn’t like it. It was an ordinary hospital room, but the bed was too small. I could fit in it, but I wouldn’t be comfortable. There was nothing else in the room but something metal on the floor. From the doorway it looked like a snake, wound around one of the legs of the bed.
I stepped closer. It was a chain, thick and cold in my hands. One end was attached to the bed and the rest curled on the floor, ending in a curved metal shape. It looked like the letter O, hinged so it could open into the letter C. I opened it and closed it, opened it and closed it. A device like this is called a shackle. It’s an old word, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t use such contraptions anymore.
“I don’t know what I expected,” I said, “but I didn’t expect this.”
The shackle didn’t answer me. I started whistling the tune all over again.
The next three rooms were the same story, and it was not a story I liked. Like an underground tunnel, Moxie had said, and I thought of my sister, also walking alone in an empty place. The hallway curved this way and that, and all of the rooms looked identical. My shoes dirtied the clean floor a little, marking my path with bits of black moss. Finally I reached a large, open room. The tall windows, running from the ceiling to the rug, told me this was the back of the clinic, and I could see some tall, close trees, swaying a little in the rain and dropping leaves into the swimming pool, with its dark, wooden bench that I recognized from a photograph. At the far end of the room was the beginning of a winding staircase, narrow metal step after narrow metal step leading up to the tower. Cleo Knight was afraid of heights, I remembered. They would keep her in the tower.
If it seems like there’s something I’m not saying, something about the room, that’s because there is. The room had three very long tables, banked by very long benches. On the tables were long glass rectangles. It took me a few seconds. Then I recognized them. Fish tanks, from the aquarium. And placed at regular intervals were the same chains, with the same heavy shapes and hinges, that I had seen attached to the small beds.
They would chain them to the tables. And they would chain them to the beds. Nobody was here yet, but everything was ready for children to arrive at the Colophon Clinic and be prisoners of the Inhumane Society. The rain beat on the windows, and I walked up the stairs. It was narrower than I’d thought, very narrow. It was like climbing up a drinking straw. My shoes were loud, and my whistling echoed all the way up. I kept whistling. Why not? If there was anyone there, they knew I was coming.
Then there was a voice at the top, calling something. I stopped short.
“Ellington?” It was a man’s voice.
“Mr. Feint?” I called. “Armstrong Feint?”
I moved quicker, farther up the stairs. My footsteps clattered. It was true. It wasn’t like solving a mystery at all. I wasn’t even doing what I was supposed to be doing. I was supposed to be celebrating the end of the case with my chaperone in the Far East Suite. I was supposed to be deep under the city, moving quickly and quietly through a secret tunnel, or perhaps I would already be in the museum with the item in my hands, following my sister to the exit, which was also a secret. I wasn’t supposed to be here. Nobody thought Lemony Snicket should be climbing the steps of the Colophon Clinic on the outskirts of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It was reckless, what I was doing. It was careless. It was dangerous. It was the right thing to do. Nobody should be chained to anything. “Mr. Feint?” I called again. “Armstrong Feint?”
But it was not Armstrong Feint in the room at the top of the stairs. I was wrong again. This room was
fancier and brighter. It had none of the clean, empty feel of the rest of the clinic. There was nothing of the scrubbed smell. It was a room I wouldn’t mind living in, if I could bring some books. There weren’t any, but there was a big brass bed, all aflow with quilts and blankets and a pile of pillows that made me comfortable just looking at them. There was a large window closed up in curtains, and two tables, one on either side of the bed. One was crowded with a small plate with some bread crumbs and a napkin and a candle and a glass of wine and the bottle it came from. The other had nothing on it, which seemed odd. It had probably had something on it once. The rest of the room was a wide brick fireplace making everything orange. It was a nice fire, but the room was still cold. It probably wasn’t cold to the man who was standing by the fire, poking at it with a long iron spike. He’d gotten up from a big, elegant chair with a matching ottoman—a little wooden thing, with a round red cushion built into it—where he’d been putting up his feet. He was dressed in a military uniform that looked old but clean. It was dark gray, and over his heart was a row of medals and honors in different shapes and colors. But instead of shoes he was wearing a pair of curvy slippers, and everywhere his skin should have been—his face, his neck, his hands—there were bandages, wound round and round him like a mummy.
“Colonel Colophon,” I said.
The colonel gave me a stiff nod and sat down in his chair. His posture was bad, probably from his injuries. He moved the ottoman away from him and gestured for me to sit down. “I thought you were somebody else,” he said, in a faint, hoarse voice made even fainter through the slit in the bandages. “I don’t often get visitors.”
“I’m here to deliver these flowers,” I said. It was strange that I turned out to be doing what I had said I was doing. I’d lied, and now it was true.
The colonel took the flowers in one of his bandaged hands. “But that’s not the only reason you’re here,” he said. “I know the look of a young man who has a question on his mind.”