It was past midnight when I let myself in. For a moment it looked like the Far East Suite was covered in confetti. I could hear Theodora snoring. After all this time it was a familiar sound to me, but I couldn’t say that I was used to it. I stepped to the bathroom and turned on the light and left the door open a crack so I could see. The reason it looked like the room was covered in confetti was that it was covered in confetti. There were a few streamers taped to the walls, and I could see a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice. Theodora was asleep on her bed, with a bright pink party hat tilted on her head. She had fallen asleep in the middle of her celebration for solving the case of Cleo Knight.
I sat on my bed. My feet hurt from the walk back to town. Above me was the usual painting of a little girl holding a dog with a bandaged paw. It had been a long day, and I don’t mind saying that I cried a little bit. There is nothing wrong with crying at the end of a long day. I tried to be quiet, but Theodora jerked awake and sat up and looked at me.
“You got your hair cut,” she said.
I nodded and wiped my eyes. I’d had my hair cut the last time she saw me. At least she had noticed now.
“Where were you?” she asked. “Visiting your little friend in jail?”
“Ellington’s not in jail anymore,” I said.
“What?”
“At least, I don’t think so.”
Theodora stood up from the bed in a cloud of confetti. She took off her hat and threw it to the ground. “This is a disaster,” she said. “If the culprit has escaped, then we’re failures, Snicket.”
“Ellington Feint is not the culprit,” I said. “She has nothing to do with the case.”
This was almost true, and Theodora almost believed it. “What are we going to do?”
“I already did it,” I said. “I’ll write up a report in the morning, and you can sign your name to it.”
“I’m not sure I like your tone.”
“I don’t like it either, Theodora. But it’s the right tone for someone who has solved the mystery but is still mystified.”
“Tell me how you solved the mystery.”
I faced my chaperone, S. Theodora Markson. “Tell me what the S stands for,” I said.
“Such a tone!” she said, in such a tone. “Not proper, Snicket. Be sensible.”
“I’ll be sensible later,” I said. “Right now I want to get some sleep.”
But there was a knock on the door. And then, when nobody answered it, another one. “Mr. Snicket,” came the voice of Prosper Lost. “You have a young visitor waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Just one minute,” I said, and I heard the footsteps of the proprietor pad back down the hall. I looked at the girl in the painting. She was busy with the dog. Theodora glared at me and then lay back down on her bed. In the morning, I knew, I would be responsible for sweeping up the confetti. It was part of my job as an apprentice. It could be anyone, I told myself. There’s no reason, walking down the stairs, that you should think it’s Ellington Feint waiting for you in the lobby of the Lost Arms.
Sure enough, standing in the middle of the room, just under the statue of the armless woman, was somebody else.
“It’s not your fault, Snicket,” he told me right away. He’d always had a philosophy that you should not hesitate.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Can we talk here?”
“No,” I said. I knew without looking that Prosper Lost was close by with his ear to the ground, a phrase which here means “his ear to our conversation.”
“Can we take a walk, then?”
I nodded. My feet ached. The day wasn’t over yet, not even after midnight. I followed my associate out of the hotel and down the street. Naturally, we walked toward the library, though we stopped in the middle of the lawn, where the ruined statue glinted in the moonlight. I could see lights on in the police station, where the Officers Mitchum were arguing over whose fault it was that Ellington had slipped out of the cell, while Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander sat, handcuffed and forced to listen. The library looked closed and locked up, although I thought I saw a few moths fluttering near the entrance, now that their home, a tall, broad tree, was gone. I wondered if Dashiell Qwerty had finished all the work he was doing in the library. Perhaps he was sleeping there now. “What happened?” I asked finally.
“Kit’s been arrested,” my associate said. “My sources tell me they got her just as she was trying to open the hatch. It was too heavy for her to open by herself.”
I closed my eyes. It was even darker that way. “She was not supposed to be by herself,” I said.
“Snicket, I said before, it’s not your fault.”
“You can say it as many times as you want.”
“Kit knew you wouldn’t be there. She decided to try anyway. And I can’t blame her. The Museum of Items hasn’t had an exhibit like that in years.”
“Eighty-four years,” I said. “If we don’t get the item now, we won’t have another opportunity in our lifetimes.”
“She got the item, but she got arrested too. There will be a trial, Snicket. She may very well go to prison.”
“Where is the item now?”
“Nobody knows.”
“We’ve got to find out.”
“Aye,” my associate said with a slow nod. It was his way of saying yes. “You know I’d help you if I could. But I told Headquarters that I had to explore this area. When they find out there’s no more water here, they’ll confiscate my submarine.”
“You’ll get it back.”
“Not soon enough.”
“You shouldn’t have come, I guess.”
“I wanted you to know, Snicket. Your sister put her mind to it, but she couldn’t open the hatch to get out of the museum.”
“Thank you,” I said, “for telling me.”
“You know I’d help you if I could,” he said again.
I leaned against the statue and took off my shoe. “Then tell me if you know what this is,” I said.
“It’s your shoe.”
“No, the muddy stuff on it.”
“Mud? Moss?”
“It’s something else, I think.”
Widdershins frowned, and took the shoe from me. He sniffed at it. “Fishy,” he said.
“Yes.”
“We have it as a snack on board the submarine sometimes. Caviar. Fish eggs. Gustav loves the stuff.”
“Thanks,” I said, and put my shoe back on.
“Is this part of the case you’re working on?”
“It might be.”
“What’s happening in this town, Snicket?”
“There’s a villain named Hangfire,” I said. “He kidnapped a naturalist and forced the naturalist’s daughter to steal a statue of a mythological beast. He had a chemist abducted so he could steal her formula for invisible ink. He’s part of a group of people called the Inhumane Society, and they’re planning more treachery. He was last seen pretending to be a war hero named Colonel Colophon, who was injured during an explosion that turned this statue into a lump of metal, and he’s planning on capturing a number of children for some terrible purpose.”
My associate tapped his finger on the remains of the statue and then nodded at me. “How much of this does your chaperone know?”
“How much does your chaperone know,” I asked, “about your secret trip here?”
He smiled at me. “You can’t tell them everything,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.”
“Who taught you that?”
“You did, Snicket. Remember? You said we could make our organization greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to our instructors and found new ways to fix the world. It was quite a speech you gave. It almost got you thrown out for good.”
“Maybe they should have thrown me out. In Stain’d-by-the-Sea the world looks harder to fix.”
“Remember what our associate said,” my associate reminded me. “No reality has the power to dispel a dream.”
“Hangfire is dreaming up something awful,” I said, “and I don’t know how to stop him. I don’t even know where to begin.”
A bell rang then, the clanging alarm from the tower. I pictured the Wade Academy, abandoned on Offshore Island, where Cleo Knight’s secret ingredient could be found.
“I heard about this,” Widdershins said. “Do we have to put masks on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might be a superstition.”
“How can you be certain?”
I sighed. “I’m scarcely certain of anything, Widdershins.”
Widdershins gave me one last nod. “That sounds like apprenticeship to me,” he said. “None of us are certain of anything.” He waved and began to walk away. He couldn’t stay. I watched him go, and then I climbed up to the top of the ruined sculpture. The shape of the lump of metal made it a difficult climb, but at the top there was enough room to lie down and look at the sky. The metal was cold beneath me, but it was better than the bed in the Far East Suite, with the ruins of a wrong celebration. I don’t know what I thought of, lying there. I thought of the silver mask, and the face of the Bombinating Beast. I thought of the bandages covering Hangfire’s face and the ones around Moxie’s wound. I thought about the smell of laudanum, and the mud on my shoe. I thought about the hatch at the clinic and the hatch at the museum and the initials etched into the metal on both of them. I thought about Ellington Feint and her smile, the smile that could have meant anything. I looked at the sky. “No reality has the power to dispel a dream” means that no matter what happens in the world, you can keep thinking about something, particularly if it’s something you like.
I lay on the statue and thought, and the world went on without me. Moxie Mallahan was tucked into her bed, and Cleo Knight let herself into Handkerchief Heights, where her scientific equipment waited for her. Jake Hix started cooking up breakfast at Hungry’s, and the Bellerophon brothers put an old-fashioned record player and a huge stack of papers in the attic of Black Cat Coffee. S. Theodora Markson slept, and the Officers Mitchum bickered. Ignatius and Doretta Knight received news that their daughter was safe, and Zada and Zora celebrated with something delicious, and Polly Partial discovered that two honeydew melons had been returned to her establishment, while Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander sat handcuffed and waiting for a train that would rattle across bridges that were no longer over water, to the city where I no longer worked. And of course Hangfire lurked wherever he was lurking, and Ellington Feint hid wherever she was hiding, and the Bombinating Beast stared out at the world with its empty and evil eyes. All this happened without me, while I watched the night until I’d had enough, and I slid off the statue and got to my feet. I headed toward the Lost Arms and our next case. The bell rang again, signaling the all-clear. I didn’t know where I fit in, but I had an occupation. I wasn’t certain of anything, but I had a job to do.