“Like Lizzie’s life,” Kellar said.
“Like our whole town’s survival,” Cleo said quietly. “Can we do it, Snicket? Can we really save Stain’d-by-the-Sea before it’s gone completely?”
“Do we want it enough?” I asked. “Enough to do anything and everything?”
“V.F.D. represents the true human tradition,” Moxie said, quoting a speech I had given to my associates at Wade Academy. “We represent the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.”
“I don’t know if we have everything necessary to be victorious over cruelty and chaos,” I said.
She looked up from her typewriter and tilted her hat at me. “What is necessary?”
“Cruelty and chaos,” I said, and stood up.
Moxie stopped typing. “Where are you going, Snicket?”
“To see Hangfire,” I said.
Jake frowned. “Don’t kid around.”
“I’m not the kind of kid who kids,” I told him. “Hangfire’s at the middle of this mystery. It’s my job to investigate it. I was wrong to canvass The Thistle of the Valley and look for suspects, when all along I knew this was his handiwork. I’m going to find him and talk to him.”
“And what will you say?” Cleo asked.
“I think I’ll start with ‘Good evening.’”
Kellar shook his head. “You said yourself it’s a trap, Snicket.”
“I did,” I said, “but I’m wrong all the time.”
Moxie started to pack up her typewriter. “We’re going with you.”
“No,” I said. “You stay here, all of you. It’s time for you to stop working separately. Continue this investigation as best you can, so you can have a complete report in case.”
“In case what?” Jake asked.
I looked out the window. The Clusterous Forest was getting closer. “In case I don’t come back,” I said.
“You’re crazy to go by yourself,” Kellar said. “Hangfire has associates on this train. You still have bruises from some of them.”
Cleo nodded. “How are you going to roam around this train without getting caught?” she asked, but then the question was answered by a noise out the window. It was the bell at Wade Academy, sounding the alarm, fainter than I’d ever heard it because of the distance the train had taken us. But it was loud enough to work. Moxie walked over to the other bench and lifted up the hinged seat. The silver masks were waiting there, like lifejackets aboard a sinking ship. She handed me one and gave me a sort of salute. A salute, if done right, is like a handshake, a hug, and some brave and noble words, all rolled into one silent gesture. I gave her one back that I hoped was as good.
“Kenneth Grahame,” she told me.
“He’s not the only noble author,” I said. “There’s Dahl.”
“Sendak,” Moxie said, and all my associates chimed in.
“Konigsburg.”
“Brown.”
“Gorey.”
“Grimm,” I said. It was a good way to leave. Outside the compartment I put the silver mask on my face and heard my own breathing turn sinister. The train shook in the dark, and I stood in the corridor and thought of the dark and shaky things surrounding me. I reached into my pocket and brought out the object I had retrieved from the floor. You should have told them about it, I thought. You said it was time to stop working separately. But if you had shown it to them, perhaps they never would have let you go. It was Ornette Lost’s most impressive work yet. I kept looking at it. She had taken one of her business cards—if I looked carefully, I could still see the typed word “sculptor”—to make a round base, and then somehow attached a small square of black cardboard which was fashioned into a familiar shape. And then something I recognized but couldn’t identify was attached on the top, a wafting of folded steam so delicate it fluttered with my breath. The whole sculpture looked so convincing that for a moment I thought it would shatter if it fell.
It was a tiny cup, the kind that holds coffee, steaming and perched on a saucer. You could be wrong, I reminded myself. You’ve been wrong about so much. But still, there’s no reason to stop now. Keep going, no matter how wrong you are. Keep on the tracks, cross the bridges over the empty sea, clatter down to the edge of the Clusterous Forest. Get to the end of the mystery, Snicket. It’s wrong for a young man to walk alone through a train moving alone through a valley of darkness, but it would be wrong to do anything else.
The Café Compartment looked for the most part like every other compartment. They’d removed one of the benches and put up a counter with a bowl of fruit that looked as tired as Moxie had said. The rack above the counter had sacks of coffee beans, and there was coffee bubbling away in a pot that smelled like last week’s campfire. There was a small table with two little chairs, and in one of the chairs was a masked figure, staring out the window and holding a sad-looking apple. The figure made no move as I came in, and said nothing as I walked to the counter and looked things over.
“Let’s see,” I said. “What’s the freshest fruit?”
“Blueberries,” said the figure at the window. “Blueberries picked in a field at the height of summer, miles and miles and miles from anywhere this train will go.”
“And how’s your apple?” I asked.
“I can’t get it into my mouth, not with a mask on.”
“We have to wear these masks, though,” I said. “It’s because of water pressure.”
“So they say.”
“Or maybe it’s salt lung, or seaweed breath.”
“Yes, they also say that.”
“Of course, some say that wearing these masks is just a superstition, left over from the old myths.”
“Then why are you wearing one?”
“To disguise my identity,” I said. “How about you?”
“The same reason.”
“I don’t think it’s working,” I said.
“Your disguise isn’t working either. I knew the moment you walked in here that you were Lemony Snicket.”
I took the mask off. It didn’t affect my breathing. Still, I felt as if I were in danger of drowning, or at least swimming in waters that were perilous in some way. “Perilous” means dangerous. If you are in a room with a perilous person, you should leave it. I stood there in the room looking at the figure who was removing a mask and facing me. “And I knew,” I said, “from the moment that I walked in, that you were Ellington Feint.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ellington stood up, and we stood together unmasked, thinking about each other. The world continued to rotate. I’d learned long ago, as everybody learns, that the earth turns around something called an axis, which is a word for a line that goes down the middle of something. It’s not a real line. The axis is imaginary, a line that exists only in your mind. I had never understood it until that moment in the train compartment. Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment, and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her.
“Hello,” I said.
“Same to you,” she said. “How did you find me?”
“This is the only place on the train where you can find coffee,” I said, and showed her the tiny folded cup. She raised her curious eyebrows, shaped like question marks, and finally gave me the smile she always gave me, the smile that could have meant anything. “That looks like the work of Ornette Lost,” she said.
“I suspect she’s on board.”
If Ellington was surprised, she did not show it. She reached underneath the table and retrieved a dark green bag I recognized at once. It was tube-shaped and had a secret compartment that had held a book called Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, and the book in turn held a secret. But the book was gone now, and Ellington glanced at me and then reached in and tugged at a smooth black panel in the bag, and from under the false bottom she retrieved something that looked like a glass pitcher, with some kind o
f metal pump on the top and a sieve that fitted perfectly in the middle of the thing.
“What is that?” I asked her.
“This,” she said, “is one of the greatest inventions mankind has ever known. It’s called a French press, and it’ll make much better coffee than that slop over there. I’ll show you.”
She showed me. She found an electric kettle and plugged it in, and then stood on tiptoe to take down a sack of coffee. She slid the pump out of the pitcher and poured in several handfuls of the ground coffee beans, almost as dark as her hair. The kettle steamed, and Ellington carefully poured hot water into the pitcher, onto the coffee, and balanced the pump on top of the pitcher but didn’t lower it in.
“And now?” I asked.
“Now we wait,” she said, and we sat at the small table. The water and the coffee mixed and clouded, like bad weather or troubled thoughts. She reached into a pocket of her rumpled clothing and brought out a small music box. She did not use the small crank to open the small panel that held a photograph I did not want to see, showing her missing father, a man with kind eyes and an open smile. She wound the crank the other way, and the music box began to sound out the small, melancholy tune I always remembered and never knew the name of. The song settled in the room, and we looked out the window at the darkness hurrying past. I put the little folded cup down between us and looked at its crinkly steam. I couldn’t think of what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I was not quite certain what I wanted to think about, so I tried not to think at all. I had no idea what to do, so nothing is what I did, as the sad tune played until it was over.
“Shall we talk now, Snicket?” she said, winding the crank again.
“Certainly,” I said. “You could start by telling me why you’re sitting in the Café Compartment, talking to me, when you should be locked in a cell in the prison car.”
Her eyes watched me carefully. “You want to know about the prison car?”
“I want to know how you got out.”
“The Mitchums let me out.”
“Why would the Mitchums let you out?”
She looked away. “Out of the kindness of their hearts.”
“Don’t be absurd. The Mitchums may be less than perfect, but they wouldn’t release a criminal from a cell.”
She nodded. “Yes they would,” she said, “if they thought something more important was at stake.”
“Like murder?” I said.
Her eyes slid off mine and scuttled to the window. She wouldn’t even meet my gaze when it was reflected in the window, but she still nodded a tiny nod.
“Dashiell Qwerty was a fine librarian,” I said.
“I know he was,” she said. Her body trembled in a small shudder that didn’t look right, and she grasped the handle of the French press and lowered the pump until all of the coffee grounds were trapped at the bottom, separated from the coffee. “I guess a fine librarian is no match for a ruthless villain.”
“Hangfire killed Qwerty?” I said.
“Of course,” Ellington replied, and went to the counter to retrieve two cups. Ellington Feint had taught me to drink coffee but not to like it. Nobody can teach you how to like something. You can like it, or you can pretend to like it, in order to make someone happy. Of course, that other person might be pretending too, and so on and so on and so on, with all the world in a chain of pretense and distrust. “Who else would kill him?”
“Anyone in the Inhumane Society,” I said. “Anyone who associates with Hangfire.”
“I don’t think Hangfire would trust anyone else to do something so important,” she said, “or so treacherous.”
“Hangfire lurks in the background,” I reminded her, “imitating people’s voices and making mysterious phone calls. He doesn’t do anything himself.”
Ellington poured the coffee. “Well, this time he did,” she said. “He shot Qwerty with a poison dart and threw the weapon out the window. Then he slipped into a nearby compartment and frightened the librarians into serving as false witnesses.”
She set a cup in front of me. I watched her through the steam. The song played on.
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“You haven’t tried it yet, Snicket.”
“I don’t mean French press coffee,” I said. “I mean your story.”
“What don’t you like about it?”
“Maybe I don’t like that you can calmly pour hot coffee while talking of cold-blooded murder. Maybe I don’t like that I was in the corridor right after the murder, and there was no sign of anyone slipping into a nearby compartment. Or maybe I don’t like the idea that Hangfire wasn’t even on the train until a few minutes ago.”
“Are you sure?”
“My associates saw a masked figure board the train when it stopped.”
“A masked figure could have been anyone.” She leaned over and blew on her coffee, sending the steam up into my eyes.
“Who else could it have been?”
“It could have been the person you least suspect. Even the noblest of volunteers can associate with the wrong people.”
“I can think of an example,” I said, “sitting right across from me.”
It was dark outside, but the room felt darker when she stood up. “What kind of villain do you think I am?” she said, her eyes desperate and blinking fast.
“I think you’ve helped the worst sort of villain,” I said. “Hangfire has quite the menu of misdeeds. He framed Qwerty for arson and Theodora for murder. He’s done everything he could to stop Cleo Knight from finishing her formula for invisible ink, a formula that might save Stain’d-by-the-Sea once and for all. He has a horde of schoolchildren at his mercy at Wade Academy, stealing melons from Partial Foods. He’s destroyed libraries and schools and every piece of evidence that might give away his scheme.”
“You’re the one who got that book destroyed,” Ellington said. “I was trying to keep it safe, and you wrecked my plan. You’ve wrecked every plan since you’ve set foot in this town. Maybe I’m wrong about what kind of person you are, Snicket. And maybe you’re wrong about who Hangfire is.”
“I hope I am,” I said, “because I think you’re waiting in this Café Compartment to give him the last crucial item he needs for his plan.”
“I don’t have the Bombinating Beast,” she said wearily. “It was confiscated at Wade Academy. If Hangfire doesn’t have it, I don’t know who does. Search my bag again if you must.”
She picked up the green tube and threw it to me, but I let it fall onto the floor with a heavy thump that rattled the compartment. “I don’t need to search,” I said. “I know you have that statue, Ellington. That’s why Hangfire’s on this train. That’s why the bell’s just rung again and everyone’s in masks. The Bombinating Beast is the last thing he needs to complete his plan, and you’re going to give it to him.”
She knelt down to pick up the bag, and then leaned close to me. The song seemed to get sadder, and her eyes were very dark and very green. “You’re wrong, Snicket,” she said.
“I hope you’re right about that,” I said. “If Hangfire gets his hands on the Bombinating Beast, he’ll probably kill you as surely as he killed Qwerty.”
Ellington lowered her head. “He won’t kill me,” she said, very quietly. “Not after all I’ve done for him.”
“Does it bother you, when you think about it?” I asked her. “Does it trouble you to think of all the things you’ve done since you arrived in this town?”
The tune had ended again, and Ellington picked up the music box and wound the crank, this time the other way. The photograph of her father fell into her hand. He was still smiling. I could not imagine what there was to smile about.
“Everything I did,” Ellington said, “was to rescue this man. He’s a kind man, Snicket. You’d like him.”
“I’m sure I would,” I said.
“He’s a brilliant scientist. A naturalist like him could help save Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”
r /> “That’s probably true,” I said.
“And he’s a wonderful father,” she said. “He taught me everything I know.”
“Everyone should have a wonderful father,” I said.
“Then you understand why I want him back, Snicket. And you promised to help me. Remember?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I didn’t promise to like it,” and I took a sip of coffee. It felt very heavy and very strong, like the darkness rushing by outside the window. In that darkness, I knew, beyond the reach of the law, was the vast expanse of the Clusterous Forest, full of shivering secrets that might never come to light. The coffee was like those strange, unknown secrets, a shuddering darkness inside me, but I kept drinking more and more.
Someone else dies, in this account. You might as well know that now, before you think to continue. Someone dies, and it is my fault. I wish I could say I was sorry about it, but all I can manage is that I’m sorry I’m not sorry, which is a sorry state of affairs.
“Do you like it now?” Ellington asked me, after a long pause.
“No,” I said.
“I don’t mean the story,” she said. “I mean the coffee.”
“No,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’ll be honest with you,” she said, and hesitated. “I have a feeling this is our last time together.”
“I hope not,” I said. “I hope we know each other forever, and I hope we travel farther than this. There are many wonderful places, Ellington—places we’ll like better than Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I hope we see them together.”
She finished her cup. “Why do you want to see those places with me?”
“Because I enjoy your company,” I said.
“But why?” she said. “That’s the mystery I can’t figure out, Snicket. Why would you associate with me, after all I’ve done? Why would you help me?”
I never got to tell Ellington Feint the answer to that question, although she gasped, right then, a sharp, sudden gasp, so sharp and so sudden that for a moment I thought I’d given her an answer that had shocked her. But I was wrong. She hadn’t gasped because of anything I’d said. The reason for her gasp was the same as the reason she stood up. It was the same as the reason she clutched her hands, first one and then both, to her throat, dropping the music box to the table, where it broke to pieces and sent the photograph of her father drifting down to the carpet. It was the reason she stumbled back into her chair and then off the chair to fall limp to the floor. The reason was in her hand. I saw it as each finger fell open, one by one, each with a fingernail painted as dark and shiny as her hair as it fell over her face like a shroud. It was a poison dart, fired by the man who was standing behind me.