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.