“Is there anything I can assist you with?” Prosper Lost said, and clasped his dusty hands together. I thought suddenly of another word for obsequious that was much more insulting.
“Yes,” I said, and handed him the books wrapped in newspaper. “Can you please hold this package for me?”
“Oh yes,” he said, kowtowing.
“Thank you,” I said. “I think someone might ask for it very soon.”
“At this hour?” he asked.
“You’d be surprised what might happen at this hour,” I said, and walked out of the hotel to knock on the side of Bellerophon Taxi. Pip opened his eyes and rolled down the window.
“Egad, Snicket, don’t you ever sleep?” he asked.
“Doesn’t your father ever drive this heap?” I replied.
“He’s sick, like I told you,” Pip said. “You need a ride?”
“You need a tip?”
“Sure.”
“I think you might be right about the tap dancer book.”
“That’s not a tip.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s late. Can I owe you one?”
Pip looked down and nudged his brother. “Wake up, Squeak. We have a fare.”
“Where are we going?” Squeak asked from the brake pedals.
“Thirteen Hundred Blotted Boulevard,” I said.
“There’s nothing there, Snicket,” Pip said. “Out of all the empty neighborhoods in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, that’s got to be the emptiest.”
“There’s not a single building left on Blotted Boulevard,” Squeak agreed as I climbed into the backseat.
“You know when someone tells you there’s a monster under the bed?” I asked them. “And you know, of course, that there’s no such thing, but you just have to check under the bed anyway? Well, that’s what we’re doing here.”
“Sounds like a wild ride to me,” Pip said, starting the engine.
“Speaking of wild rides, if you haven’t read The Wind in the Willows, you really should,” I told them.
“Now that’s a tip,” Pip said. “Let’s get a move on.”
We got a move on. With a roaring engine and squeaky brakes, the Bellerophon brothers took us quickly out of the less faded neighborhoods of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, and we were soon on streets without a single business on them. Then we were on streets without a single light on them—even the automated stoplights had vanished from the corners. And then we were on Blotted Boulevard, and as Squeak had said, there was not a single building as far as the eye could see. The taxi paused on the very first block of the Boulevard, and on either side of the wide street were flat, empty lots, stretching out for thirteen blocks with only the occasional small pile of rubble asking for attention.
Ellington Feint was not being held captive at 1300 Blotted Boulevard, but I had Pip and Squeak take us all the way down the street anyway, until we stopped at a particularly flat, particularly empty lot. I thought of some of the secret passageways underneath certain buildings back in the city, but I could see at once there wasn’t a door or anything else that could lead to a secret. There was simply nothing.
“What did I tell you?” squeaked Squeak.
“You were right,” I said. “Sorry to waste your time. Let’s head back.”
“You’re not wasting our time, Snicket,” Pip said with a tired grin. “You and your chaperone are the most interesting thing to happen in this town in quite some time.”
I grinned back, and judging by the sound of the brakes, I guessed Squeak was smiling, too. “Good night,” I said when we were back at the Lost Arms. Prosper Lost was standing on the sagging porch of the hotel, watching us pull up.
“Good evening,” he said in his thin voice. “Welcome back.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “Did anyone come for the package?”
“A gentleman came as soon as you left,” he said. “He took the package but seemed most displeased, so I sent him up to the Far East Suite.”
“You did what?” I asked.
“Sent him up to your room, so he might have a word with Ms. Markson,” Prosper Lost said, with the tiniest of smiles.
I hurried past him through the lobby. The owner of the Lost Arms followed me, without even pretending to be interested in dusting something. When we reached the stairs, I could hear somebody scream.
“Should I call the police?” Prosper asked me.
“No,” I said. “Find a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil, and sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each,” and I left him gaping at me and ran up the stairs. The door to the Far East Suite was wide open, with a stain on the doorknob that looked green and sticky. Get scared later, I told myself.
S. Theodora Markson could have been an opera singer. Her screams were quite loud even through the handkerchief that had been tied around her mouth. The handkerchief matched the white strips of cloth that were tied around her arms and her legs as she wriggled this way and that on the bed, like a butterfly whose cocoon turns out to be more difficult than planned. The rest of the place was ransacked, a word for something that is fun to do to someone else’s room but no fun to have done to yours. Every scrap of Theodora’s clothing had been flung out of the chest of drawers, and my suitcase had been dragged out from under the cot and emptied all over the floor. It is embarrassing to see someone’s clothing tossed everyplace, although it is hard to say why. The table had been tipped over and the shutters torn down from the open window. I checked the bathroom, but no one was there. Hangfire had left through the window. The only thing that hadn’t been wrecked in the room was the painting of a little girl holding a dog with a bandaged paw. She looked like she wanted to remind me to untie Theodora. I tried to untie the handkerchief first, but the knot was complicated. Theodora wagged her head and blinked her eyes in the direction of the bathroom and indicated that I might find a knife there. I looked but found no knife. Theodora indicated that I should look again. There wasn’t a knife when I looked again. Finally, with much more complicated head motions and faster blinking, she made clear that she didn’t mean a knife but some nail clippers. I found them and, with much effort, cut through the handkerchief over her mouth so she could yell at me freely.
“This is your fault, Snicket!”
When someone is tied up, it is almost always the fault of whoever did the tying. Also, when someone is tied up, they are likely to be very upset and to say things they might not mean. “What did he look like?” I said, starting on the cloth that bound her arms. It was a ripped sheet, I realized, but the edges were too jagged to have been cut, and there was moisture here and there on the jagged edges. He had used his teeth. I did not like to think about a person ripping a sheet into strips with their teeth. It seemed too fierce or too wild a thing to do.
“He was wearing a mask,” Theodora said. “He said he was going to kill me.” Her eyes kept blinking. She was crying. Crying is like the opposite of scolding, because adults are hardly ever allowed to do it. “He’s going to kill us both, Snicket, if he doesn’t get his hands on that statue. He’s a terrible man. He’s despicable. He’s loathsome, a word which here means terrible and despicable. We have to give the Bombinating Beast to him.”
“That’s not what we promised,” I reminded her as a strip of sheet slipped away from her wrists. “We promised to return the Bombinating Beast to its rightful owner.”
Theodora took a deep breath and the nail clippers from me to free her feet. “Then why don’t we just give the statue to Mrs. Sallis?”
“That wasn’t Mrs. Sallis,” I said. “That was an actress. This whole assignment has been a scheme, and Hangfire has been behind it. He imitates voices on the phone. He threatens people. He’s doing everything he can to get his hands on that statue. We can’t give it to him.”
“You are just an apprentice on probation,” Theodora said sternly. “You will do whatever your chaperone says. Now get out of here. I can hardly stand to look at you.”
“But, Theodora—”
“Get out!” she cried, an
d buried her head in the ransacked bed. Her shoulders began to shake beneath her hair. I wiped the doorknob clean with my handkerchief and shut the door quietly behind me and left the Far East Suite very tired. This was the second person I had rescued today from Hangfire’s treachery, and neither of them had been grateful. Although I did not drink coffee, I understood what Ellington had said about needing something restorative, and walked out of the Lost Arms, passing Prosper Lost, who was bent over a piece of paper, counting on his fingers. I tossed my ruined handkerchief in the garbage. It smelled salty and wretched. Outside, Pip and Squeak were asleep again in the taxi, and I did not have the heart to wake them. I walked. Caravan and Parfait was closer than I thought. As before, there appeared to be no one in the place, although the piano was playing that interesting and complicated tune, and the shiny machinery was ready to make me either B or C. But I was looking instead at A, and at the metal staircase that led up out of the only reason a friend of mine ventured into town.
Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed that most of the mail was now gone from the big room at the top of the stairs. I should have paid attention. But instead I just looked at the person with her back to me. Next to her were a large, striped suitcase and an oddly shaped case perfect for holding an old-fashioned record player. Hanging from her shoulder was a green purse shaped like a long, zippered tube as she stood and looked at the shelves filled with stenciled bags of coffee. Then she turned around, and I paid attention to her dark, dark hair, and her eyebrows, each one coiled over like a question mark, and her green eyes underneath.
“Lemony Snicket,” she said.
“Ellington Feint,” I said, and it was only then that I saw that smile of hers, the one that could have meant anything.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Shall we get some coffee?” Ellington asked me.
“That’s the wrong question,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “You don’t drink it. Well, there’s no root beer here, or tea or milk. I don’t even think Black Cat Coffee has water.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said.
“I know what you mean,” Ellington said, and strode past me. Her feet clang, clang, clanged as she began to walk down the metal stairs. “You mean, ‘How could you have stolen that statue from me, Ellington?’ Well, if it makes you feel any better, somebody stole it from me. It was supposed to be right here in this attic, but now it’s gone, and I’m lost if I don’t get it back.”
“I have it,” I said.
The girl stopped. Ellington pointed one of her long, black nails at me. “You have the Bombinating Beast?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Mr. Snicket, please give it to me,” she said, clanging back up to look me in the eye. “It’s very valuable. I need it. I need to have it by morning.”
“It’s not valuable, Ms. Feint,” I said. “It’s just a piece of junk.”
“It’s valuable to me,” Ellington said, and I could see it was true. Anything and everything, she’d said.
“Why?” I asked. “What is it for? What does it do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how can it be valuable to you?”
Ellington looked around the room as if someone might be hiding among the envelopes and coffee beans. “Because it’s valuable to Hangfire,” she said finally. “If I give it to him, he will free my father.”
“I thought so,” I said.
“I thought you thought so,” she said.
“I’d like to help you rescue your father,” I said, “but I promised to give the Bombinating Beast back to its rightful owner.”
“You also promised to help me,” she reminded me. “If you don’t give it to me, I may never see my father again.”
“You can’t trust this man Hangfire,” I said. “The last person who helped him in his schemes was almost drowned.”
“Mrs. Sallis?”
“It wasn’t Mrs. Sallis,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter. Hangfire is a villain, Ms. Feint. He’s a terrible man. You can’t associate with him.”
“I don’t care about Hangfire,” Ellington said. “I care about my father.” She sighed and put down the long, zippered tube. “Hangfire’s kidnapped a number of people in order to get them to participate in his schemes. My father is one of them. I’ve been following them for a long time, but I was always too far behind. Then, just a few days ago, my father called me and told me to come to Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Hangfire was holding him there, he told me, but he would be set free in exchange for the Bombinating Beast.”
“That’s funny,” I said, “because you just called me a little while ago and told me to come to Thirteen Hundred Blotted Boulevard. You were being held there, but Hangfire would set you free in exchange for the same thing.”
Ellington blinked at me in confusion. “I did no such thing.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “Hangfire has the ability to mimic people’s voices. That’s how he manages to perform his treachery while still staying in the background. He wore a mask when he attacked Theodora. Probably very few people know what he even looks like.”
“Then how can we find him?”
“Well, he must be close by,” I said, and Ellington looked nervously down the stairs. “He’d have to be someplace where he could keep an eye on Mrs. Sallis—and on you.”
“Then I’ve got to give him the statue,” Ellington said, her green eyes fierce and worried. “Hangfire told me that I must have it by morning. Every part of my plan went perfectly. Once I learned that the statue belonged to the Mallahans, I moved into Handkerchief Heights and waited for days for an opportunity to break into the lighthouse and take it. Then one night I saw you and your wild-haired associate go into the lighthouse and leave through the hawser. You even had the luck to drop right into my tree. When you showed me the Bombinating Beast, I knew the time had come.”
“You would have gotten away with it,” I said, “except you told me all about Black Cat Coffee. Why?”
Ellington shrugged, and her cheeks got a little red. “Because I like you, Mr. Snicket,” she said. “I thought you might find this place interesting, even if you don’t drink coffee.”
“I do find it interesting,” I said. “I find this whole story interesting. I promised to help you, Ms. Feint, and I will. Your father has fallen into wicked hands, but it is not necessary to be wicked ourselves. We can rescue him without kowtowing to a villain like Hangfire.”
“What does ‘kowtowing’ mean?”
“To behave in an obsequious manner.”
“I could play this game all night, Mr. Snicket. What does ‘obsequious’ mean?”
“We’ll have to play the game all night,” I said. “I can’t get the Bombinating Beast until morning. We’ll return it to the Mallahans, and then we will find your father and defeat Hangfire.”
I had hoped I sounded more confident than I felt, but when Ellington frowned at me, I knew I’d sounded just as unsure as I was that someone like Hangfire could be defeated. “How can two young people defeat him alone?” she asked.
“We’re not alone,” I said. “I have associates.”
“The woman with the hair?”
“Other people.”
“Are they nearby?”
I said nothing for a moment and listened to the piano playing downstairs. No other noises reached me. It was getting late. It was entirely possible that the person I was thinking of was deep underground. “Not as near as I’d like them to be,” I said.
“You’re a mystery, Mr. Snicket,” Ellington said to me. “I’ve told you all about how I came to this town, but you haven’t said a word about why you are here.”
“I had an unusual education, like I said,” I said. “My schooling is over, but now I’m an apprentice for S. Theodora Markson. Out of fifty-two possible chaperones, she was ranked dead last.”
“You deserve better than that,” Ellington said.
“I chose her on purpose,” I said. “I thought that it wou
ld allow me more time to do what I really need to do.”
“And what is that? Are you looking for your father, too?”
“My father is alive and well,” I said, thinking with a shudder of the man in the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Store. “What I need to do is dig a tunnel to the basement of a museum.”
“Whatever for?”
“There’s something there,” I said. “Something on display that needs to be in the right hands.”
“But why do you have to be the one to do it?” Ellington asked me. “It sounds like a job for an adult. Why aren’t your parents helping you?”
I thought of my parents, and then of the people who pretended to be my parents, and the eerie cloud that rose from the alley when Theodora poured out the laudanum that had been in my tea. I felt a complicated worry in my chest, like a tangle of wires or weeds, and when Ellington put her hand on my shoulder, I imagined that her long fingers would be good at untangling things. “My parents can’t help me,” I said. “They’re helpless.”
“Like my father,” Ellington said quietly, and I allowed myself a few seconds to miss my parents very much. I thought of my father’s face first, and then my mother’s, and both of them were smiling. Just a few seconds, Snicket, I told myself, blinking very fast, because in a few seconds Ellington will ask you another question.
“But who are these other people?” she asked. “Some kind of club?”
“It’s a secret,” I said. “In fact, this whole story is a secret.”
“If it’s a secret, why are you telling me?”
“Because I like you, Ms. Feint,” I admitted. “I thought you might find it interesting.”
Ellington Feint gave me a slow, sympathetic nod, and we clanged down the staircase together. Ellington pressed the A button to close up the attic and then rested her green purse on the counter while the machinery made her a coffee. I turned my eyes from Ellington Feint to the steam rising out of the top of the elaborate device. It was a nice thing to watch. The piano kept playing, and eventually I laid my head down on the counter. The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was Ellington’s smile, and it was the first thing I saw when I woke up.