“The question on my mind,” I said, “is whether or not you’ve seen a young woman. Her name is Cleo Knight, and she’s a brilliant chemist.”
“As you probably know,” the colonel said, “the man who runs this clinic has been trying for a very long time to restore me to health. He’s employed all sorts of scientists to help him over the years.”
“It doesn’t look like Dr. Flammarion is doing much of that lately,” I said. “This clinic is entirely empty.”
His bandaged head gave a slow nod. “This clinic used to be a bustling place,” he said, “but now I’m the only patient left and Dr. Flammarion had to take a job as someone’s private apothecary.”
“He is working for the Knight family,” I said. “It’s their daughter Cleo who has disappeared, and I came looking for her.”
“I see. Have I been helpful to you at all?”
“You’ve been very helpful, Colonel. A number of things that had looked sinister now have very simple explanations. But you still haven’t answered my question, Colonel Colophon. Was Cleo Knight here?”
He looked at me and then at the fire, and a cold breeze seemed to rustle through the room. “Yes,” he said finally. “She would come here from time to time to study chemistry with Dr. Flammarion. Sometimes she would help as he tried a new treatment on my burns.”
I asked the question one last time, the one on the cover of this book.
“Just yesterday,” the colonel replied. “She’d had a flat tire, and Dr. Flammarion drove her out here to say good-bye to me. She told me she was tired of chemistry and was running away to join the circus. You see, lad? There’s nothing sinister going on at all. It’s just that people are moving out of town. Stain’d-by-the-Sea is fading, and its problems are fading along with it. There’s nothing here to concern yourself with.”
I nodded. “That’s a good story,” I said. “It answers all of the questions I asked you. But I guess I was asking the wrong questions, wasn’t I?”
The slit in the bandages frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I should have asked you why you called the name you did, when I was coming up the stairs whistling that tune.”
“What name?”
“You know what name.”
“You must have misheard me, lad.”
“You heard the tune,” I said, “and you thought you knew who was whistling it. You were afraid that a certain girl had found you at last. You were afraid that she was bringing you the item you asked her to steal, and you’d have to let her father go free.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you don’t want to let Armstrong Feint go free,” I said, “or Cleo Knight. You and your society aren’t done with them. You have a wicked plan.”
The man tossed the flowers into the fire. “How dare you call me wicked?” he snarled hoarsely. “I’m a war hero.”
“You almost had me thinking you were,” I said. “Colonel Colophon is a teetotaler. You should have hidden that glass of wine, Hangfire.”
Now his voice changed, now that I’d told him who he was. This voice, if it was his real voice, was much, much worse. “ ‘Teetotaler’ is a very fancy word for a little boy to use. Let’s test your vocabulary a little more, shall we? Do you know the word ‘defenestration’?”
With a flourish he drew back the heavy curtains, and the wind rushed in. The window had been broken—not shattered, but there was a big, jagged hole in the middle of the pane, roughly the shape of a man. “Defenestration” is a word which means throwing someone out a window. It had clearly happened recently. Hangfire hooked his bandaged fingers around my neck and dragged me to peer out through the jagged hole at the rain and the trees and the dark waters of the swimming pool, where the real Colonel Colophon had fallen. The waters were troubled, churning in the rain like a storm at sea.
“Listen,” he hissed in my ear. “Listen carefully, Snicket.”
Through the sound of rain and the wind in the trees, I heard another sound. It was a sort of rumbling, or a sort of hum. Hangfire pushed me closer to the window, and I struggled against him. It was a tense dance. My mossy foot slipped on the carpet, and when my hands grabbed at his coat, one of his medals poked my finger right where the tadpole had bitten me. The sound grew louder.
“Do you hear it?” he hissed.
“Dilemma,” I managed to say.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “It’s no dilemma for me to destroy you, Snicket.”
“That’s not the sort of Dilemma I mean,” I said, and his eyes widened beneath his bandages. A dilemma can refer to a difficult choice, of course, but the sound I had heard, over the rain and the wind, was the engine of a fancy automobile, the sort that can crash through a wall and emerge without a dent or a scratch, although the building might collapse. I had heard this many times but had never seen it tested until tonight. The Dilemma emerged through the trees, skidded around the swimming pool, and crashed into the back of the Colophon Clinic. It was something to see. Like all big accidents, it looked wrong somehow, as if it were impossible that it had actually happened. But it had happened. It rattled the roof. It shook the entire building. It sent a large crack down the wall, with a noise like someone’s leg breaking. It knocked the villain to the floor.
I stood up, freed from Hangfire’s grasp. There he is, I thought, and here you are. The villain got to his feet and backed away from me, toward the broken and chilly window. One of his hands reached up to his face, and he unpeeled one of the bandages slightly. I didn’t like looking at it. Then Hangfire stood on his tiptoes and reached up over his head. He stuck the edge of the bandage on a jagged edge of broken glass, like he was hanging a hat on a hook. Then he spread his arms out wide and took a step back from me, and another.
In three steps he was out the window. The bandage unraveled as he fell, and when I leaned out, I saw him grasping the unfurling bandage and dragging his feet against the cracked outside wall of the clinic, slowing and softening his fall. The building kept shaking and kept creaking. It was too dark to see his face, of course. Like all villains, he was a coward and would not face me unmasked. I saw the dim figure of Hangfire let go of the bandage and jump the rest of the way, landing at the edge of the swimming pool. The bandage made a little rustle as it unwrapped—the sound a spider might make when it spun a web, if you got close enough to hear it. The water splashed, like one of his shoes had fallen in, or perhaps something had splashed out of the water. I couldn’t see. He paused for a moment and ran nimbly into the trees. There he goes, I thought, and here you are. You are out of his clutches. Now you’ve got to rescue everyone else.
CHAPTER TWELVE
No one was after me, but I still ran all the way down the stairs. The sound of the rain grew louder as I hurried, until at last I was in the room with all of the wooden tables. The tables were still there. The benches were still there, and the fish tanks, and the shackles. But where the window had been was now a wonder of an automobile, shiny with raindrops, having come to a stop in a pile of broken glass. They were right, the manufacturers of the Dilemma. Not a dent, not a scratch. But Jake Hix, unhooking his seat belt and opening the door of the car, looked as shaken as the building.
“Where’s my sweetheart?” he asked me, shouting over the rain.
“Some people park their cars,” I said, “and walk through the door.”
“The door was locked,” Jake said. “I could see people moving around inside, but nobody would let me in. There was a taxi parked out front, but there was nobody in it. Where is she, Snicket?”
Something in the building groaned, the groan of metal and bricks that are beginning to give up. “I can’t find her, but she’s here somewhere.”
“How do you know?”
“Hangfire was very eager for me to think there was nothing here to concern myself with.”
“Who’s Hangfire?”
“Just think of someone rotten, Jake. I’ll explain later.”
For a moment I
thought that Jake Hix had thought of someone so rotten that it made him scream. But Jake’s mouth was closed and worried. The screams were from someplace else, muffled but frantic, with some thumpings along with them. He and I looked at each other and looked around, but it was hard to tell, over the rain, where the screams were coming from.
It is awful. It is a wretched feeling to know that someone needs help and you are not helping. I had already asked it once in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the question “Where is that screaming coming from?” and although it had not been the wrong question, the answer was still terrible.
I ran over to the bottom of the spiral staircase and peered back up at where I had been. The screams weren’t coming from there. Jake stepped carefully through the broken window and scanned the rain and the trees and the rippling pool. I shook my head to him and he shook his head to me, and we walked toward each other until we were in the middle of the room. Somehow the screams were louder. But the room is empty, I thought to myself. Think, Snicket. Jake Hix works at a diner, but you’ve been taught what to do in these situations. I looked above me but saw only the rafters of the room. I leaned down to look under the tables, although Hangfire couldn’t hide a screaming girl unnoticed under a table any more than my sister could hide her diary unnoticed under her pillow. Nevertheless, the screams were louder when I looked. I knelt down on the rug, and they were louder still. The rug I hadn’t looked at much. It was blood red, with small black swirls patterned in a row. The swirls, I saw, were little sea horses with sharp teeth and vicious eyes. Even on a rug the Bombinating Beast was something horrible.
I stood up and pushed at one of the tables. “Help me move this,” I said, and Jake understood immediately. The screams continued, along with a few thumps, as we pushed a table as far as we could, knocking over benches. We moved those too. The rug was very large, and we had to move all the furniture to the walls, quickly. Fish tanks shattered to the ground. We didn’t care what happened to anything. I’d never done something like that and, even under the circumstances, it was a little fun. I understood bullies better. I understood why you’d want to push things around without caring if you caused any damage.
The screams were quite clear now. Help! is what the screams were saying.
“Hang on, Cleo!” Jake called, with his hands cupped to his mouth. We kicked a few more benches into a corner, and then the rug was clear, and Jake and I rolled it up together. The rug was thick and didn’t want to be rolled up. We rolled it up. Then there was only the wooden floor, pale and dusty, with a large hatch in the middle of it. It was metal, with a circle of bolts along the edges and a big dark ring you could pull to open it. Over the ring there were two initials etched into the metal. It takes a long time to etch letters into metal, and it made me furious. The reason it made me furious was that I knew my sister was probably standing in front of a hatch with etched initials, perhaps at the very same moment. They were different initials, but there in the rainy room, with the screams and thumps below us, it didn’t matter. It felt the same. Adults etching initials into a hatch and then shutting a hatch so nobody could reach the important secrets, the noble people, the secret formula that might save the town. The hatch was the problem, the hatch with the initials i.s. etched into it, for “Inhumane Society,” and I was going to get it open.
I knelt down and tugged, and Jake knelt down and tugged with me. The ring was big enough for both of our hands, and then all four of our hands, tugging together. It was like tugging on the world. It did not move. “Cleo!” Jake shouted every so often, and the screams continued. Help! Help! Someone help me! I did not shout anything. I was afraid I would shout my sister’s name. We tugged and tugged, and finally Jake Hix looked at me.
“It’s not budging.”
“I know it’s not budging,” I said. “We need to pull harder.”
“Maybe it opens from the inside.”
“No, the handle is here.”
Jake looked at me and rubbed his eyes a little bit. “But how do you know it’s possible, Snicket? How do you know we can do it?”
“Hangfire did it,” I said. “We need to open this hatch, Jake. We need to open it now.”
“My aunt always says that if you put your mind to it, you can do absolutely anything,” Jake said. “Is that true?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nonsense. But we can open this hatch. Come on now, Hix. On the count of three.”
It is never seven that you count to, before you do something difficult. It is never at the count of two. It is always three, and it is strange. One, two, three, and then Jake and I pulled on the ring very hard. Our hands strained together at the task, and our faces had terrible frowns. We probably looked ridiculous, and we probably sounded ridiculous. But ridiculous or not, we were going to open the hatch. It doesn’t matter if you look ridiculous, not if you are with people you know and trust. If you are with people you know and trust and you put your mind to it, you cannot do absolutely anything. I said this to myself and I meant it. But you can do this, Snicket. You can open the hatch and rescue the screaming girl.
But it wasn’t the girl who was screaming. The hatch flung open after a long pull, just flung open with a loud, easy clang that rang in my ears. It was so quick it was as if the hatch had been joking about being difficult to open. Jake and I looked at each other in astonishment and then scurried through the hatch and down a short metal ladder into a room with a low ceiling and someone screaming in it. The rest of the room was a long laboratory table piled with all sorts of scientific equipment. There were glass tubes and bubbling containers. There were electronic boxes with lights and switches, and blackboards with equations scrawled across them. And there was a girl several years older than I was. She had hair so blond it looked white and glasses that made her eyes look very small. She had a frown on her face, and she was rubbing one of her wrists, which looked swollen and sore. I could see, snaked on the surface of the table, another shackle with the letter C wide open at the end of it. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking into the corner of the room, at the person who was screaming. It was Dr. Flammarion, quivering and stumbling with fear at the girl who was frowning her way toward him. And the girl was Cleo Knight, of course—the real Cleo Knight.
“Help!” screamed Dr. Flammarion again. “Someone help me!”
Jake hurried to his sweetheart. “Hello, Cleo,” he said. “I missed my Miss Knight. I’m glad to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you too, Jake,” Cleo said, although she hardly looked at him. Her eyes were locked in a glare at the shivering figure of the apothecary. She moved calmly but it was too calmly. “I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you earlier,” she said, in a calm and even voice, “but I was chained up in a basement and forced to continue my experiments. I had it worse than that girl in that book, who goes to live with that family the Reeds, and everyone is cruel to her.”
“It’s a wonderful book,” I couldn’t help saying, and I reminded her of the title.
“This guy’s named Snicket,” Jake said. “He’s the one who figured out that you’d been kidnapped, instead of just hiding out like we planned. He’s the one who figured out that you were locked up here and made us come and get you.” He looked at her wrists and the shackle. “Although it doesn’t seem like you needed rescuing, really.”
“It was an ordinary enough pin tumbler lock,” she said, gesturing to the shackle. “The trick was getting Flammarion to lend me a hairpin. But of course I needed you to come, Jake. I needed someone to open that hatch. And I needed someone to help me take this terrible man to the police.”
The building groaned again, and Dr. Flammarion squealed another cry for help, and now Cleo Knight was no longer calm. In two quick steps she tipped over the laboratory table and sent everything crashing to the floor. There was a shattering of glass and the squawking of electrical devices, and a puddle of liquid hissed and steamed on the floor. But Cleo Knight didn’t even flinch, a word for the usual reaction people have to a loud noise or an unfort
unate event. I didn’t know what I had expected to find when I found this brilliant chemist. I suppose I had thought she might be quiet and shy, from all the time she spent in her bedroom working on a formula for invisible ink. But instead she kept walking toward the quivering man in the corner, and pointed a finger at him as furious as the bruise on her wrist.
“You’re a monster,” she said. It was an angry voice and a quiet voice, and it made me flinch. “You drugged my parents until they couldn’t think straight,” she said. “You destroyed the note I left for my parents and Zada and Zora. You vandalized my car and lured me into your clutches. You locked me down here and made me work on invisible ink so you could fill this clinic with children and continue your treachery. But that story is over now, Flammarion. You’ll never get your hands on my formula, and I’ll never rest until Stain’d-by-the-Sea is a proper town again.”
When I was eight, one of my instructors took us out to the woods to spend several nights. A friend of mine captured her first bat, and my brother learned how quickly wasps can get angry. But what I gained was a lesson the instructor taught me, that a wild animal, when cornered, may suddenly and desperately defend itself. This is why I try not to spend any more time outdoors than is absolutely necessary. Dr. Flammarion stopped his whimpering and turned around to face all of us, with a wide smile full of unbrushed teeth.
“This story isn’t over,” he said, and then for some reason he sneered at my muddy shoe. “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into. You call me a monster, but you have no idea what monsters are coming. You’ll never get your hands on Armstrong Feint. You’ll never get your hands on Hangfire. And before long we will get our vengeance on your puny, careless town. Now get out of my way. You’re just some uppity children, and I’m a fully grown adult with a friend who is good with a knife, and we are miles away from the police or anyone else who can help you.”
And then there was the sound of a siren. It was a wonderful sound, over the rain, even though I knew it was not a real siren and not a wonderful person making the sound. It is surprising whom you are happy to see when you are in a basement with a madman. The siren grew louder, and I heard the familiar rattle of the Mitchum station wagon. Cleo grabbed one of Dr. Flammarion’s arms, and Jake Hix grabbed the other. They dragged him up the ladder, and I walked behind them. It felt something like a very strange wedding ceremony, and the reception was held in the wrecked dining room, with the wind and rain as guests, the Officers Mitchum as the rabbi, and Stew Mitchum as a sneering flower girl, following his parents through the broken window to behold us.