CHAPTER SEVEN

“What’s the news?” I asked, and sat down on one of the compartment’s wooden benches. I was talking to my associates, but I was still looking at the two Bombinating Beasts on the table. I stared and stared, unsteady from the rattling train and from the eerie sight. What are you, I asked them silently. What do you want with me? Since I’d arrived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the questions about a mysterious item had hovered in my mind like stars, bright and cold and impossible to get ahold of. Now there were two of them, right in front of me, but I felt no closer to understanding what was really going on.

“We’ve stumbled into quicksand,” Moxie said with a sigh. “Remember when we all agreed to work quietly, so Hangfire wouldn’t learn of our plot to defeat him? Well, Haines and I both worked quietly on the same scheme.”

Kellar kicked at the bad carpet. “I asked Ornette if she could make a copy of the Bombinating Beast,” he said, “and then I got a message to Hangfire arranging to trade the statue for the safe return of my sister.”

“The jig is up,” Moxie said glumly. “Hangfire received both of our messages, so he knew we were tricking him.”

“But the train made its unscheduled stop,” Kellar said.

“That was to trick us,” Moxie replied. “There’s no way he came aboard.”

“Do you think so, Snicket?” Kellar asked. “Do you think the jig is really up?”

I thought so and I told him so. He took it as well as he could, a phrase which here means he looked defeated and sad. Moxie put her hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Haines,” she said.

Kellar patted her hand. “It’s not your fault,” he said, “but I thought for a moment we could defeat Hangfire.”

“If he’d come aboard, he’d be caught like a rat in a trap,” Moxie said.

Kellar looked out the window of the train. It was not too dark to see the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest, billowing like smoke and coming closer and closer as the train rattled along. “If he’d come aboard,” he said quietly, “I might have rescued my sister.”

“Ornette must have realized what was going on,” I said, and took the folded train out of my pocket. “She knew there’d be trouble on The Thistle of the Valley.”

“I caught a glimpse of you at Stain’d Station, Snicket,” Kellar said, “but just when I was about to approach you, I was spotted.”

Moxie put a fresh piece of paper in her typewriter, and began typing this up. “Who spotted you?” she asked.

“My mother,” Kellar said darkly. “I guess a mother can’t miss her own child in a crowd.”

That made me think of something, but it was Moxie who asked the question. “What was she doing at the station?”

“Trying to stop me from coming aboard,” Kellar said grimly. “I can’t believe she’s still working with the Inhumane Society.”

“Mothers do all sorts of things nobody can believe,” I said. “We’re in the middle of a quagmire, a word which here means ‘heap of trouble.’”

Moxie gave me a small smile. “Why do you always say that—which here means?”

“I’ll probably outgrow it,” I said.

Her smile stopped. “What is it, Snicket? Where have you been all this time? What happened when you were listening to the prisoners’ car?”

“Something’s happened,” Kellar said. “I knew it the minute you found me on board. What is it?”

What it was then was a knock on the door, and Moxie looked frantically at the two statues on the table. I went to the door and reached for the latch, while Kellar stood in front of the table with his arms out wide to block the view as best he could, as if the Bombinating Beasts were a birthday present no one had bothered to wrap yet.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

“Kenneth Grahame,” came the reply, and of course when I opened the door it was not one Scottish author but one chemist and one cook who were sweethearts of each other’s and associates of mine. My spirits rose a little. With Jake Hix and Cleo Knight aboard, we had a full team of volunteers, honest and brave and with a fierce enthusiasm for literature. It might not be enough to defeat the evil aboard The Thistle of the Valley, I thought, but it is better to fail among friends.

“We came as soon as we got the message,” Jake said, and took out a folded paper train identical to mine. “Cleo drove the Dilemma at top speed.”

The Dilemma was an automobile, powerfully handsome and handsomely powerful, that had gotten us out of a few troublesome situations and was very fun to ride around in when there were no troublesome situations to be found. “I thought I saw your headlights out the window,” I said.

Cleo nodded. “I thought we were going to have to pull some crazy stunt to get on board The Thistle of the Valley. I wanted to leap onto the train and use the railings to climb aboard, but Jake said it was too dangerous.”

“Those railings would never hold,” Jake said.

“Not for long, anyway,” I agreed, with a still-sore knee.

“But then the train stopped at Offshore Island,” Cleo said, “and we managed to sneak aboard. We practically had to canvass the train to find you. What’s the plan? What’s with those statues? How are we going to defeat Hangfire? How did you get him to come aboard?”

“Hangfire’s not here,” Kellar said. “He saw through our scheme like it was a fishbowl. Moxie and I both tried to lure him onto The Thistle of the Valley, but it’s no dice.”

“No dice” is an expression which means “That is not going to happen,” but Jake shook his head as if there were plenty of dice after all. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Cleo and I saw a masked figure climb aboard, just as the train pulled to a stop.”

“Hangfire?” Moxie said.

“Who else could it be?” Jake asked.

“Stew Mitchum opened the door for him,” Cleo said, her mouth curled down the way any of our mouths did when we talked about Stew, “in the very back of the very last car.”

“The Officers’ Lounge,” I remembered, “in the very back of the prisoners’ car.”

“The car where Qwerty was locked up,” Moxie said thoughtfully.

“And Ellington Feint,” I said.

“Never mind Ellington Feint,” Moxie said with a frown.

“If Hangfire’s here,” Kellar said hopefully, “maybe our messages fooled him after all.”

I shook my head. “Hangfire knew it was a trick,” I said, “but he came aboard anyway. He’s the one who’s set a trap, and all of us are the rats in it.”

“Don’t call us rats, Snicket,” Jake said. “Hangfire boarded alone. There are more of us than there are of him. Whatever treachery he’s planning, we can stop it before it starts.”

“It started already,” I said. “It started before The Thistle of the Valley left Stain’d-by-the-Sea. It started before my early bedtime. It started before I read a single book Dashiell Qwerty recommended.”

This was the sort of thing that Moxie would normally type up, but she wasn’t even looking at her typewriter. She was looking at me.

“What is it, Snicket?” she said.

“Sit down,” Cleo said to me gently. “You’re looking pale.”

She helped me onto a bench, and Moxie reached over to put a hand on my cheek. It was something my sister used to do to me, when I was very young, to show me she was listening. Dear Kit, I thought. I very much hate to deliver bad news.

“Snicket?” Moxie asked. “What happened?”

“I have some bad news” is what managed to come out of my mouth, as shaky as the train.

Moxie kept one hand on me, but she put the other on the typewriter. “I knew it,” she said. “What happened in the prison car?”

“Something awful,” Kellar said. “I can tell.”

“Tell us, Snicket,” Moxie said, and I told them.

The Thistle of the Valley shook and clattered, but nobody else said anything. Bad news can hit you like a train. It will knock you over and leave you flat, but everybody else keeps rushing along.

“It’s not true,” Moxie said. “It can’t be true.”

I stayed where I was. There was no need to say it was true.

Jake rubbed at both his eyes with both his fists. “I wouldn’t know who Eleanor Estes was if it weren’t for Qwerty,” he said. “I wouldn’t know Lowry. I wouldn’t know Snyder. Dashiell Qwerty was a great, great librarian.”

“One of the greatest,” I agreed.

Cleo shivered. “And they really think Theodora killed him?”

“Well, they locked her in a cell,” I said.

Moxie reached toward her typewriter, but I watched her fingers tremble on the keys. “A real journalist knows that a murder is a big story,” she said. “She’d type up her notes and cry about it later.”

“There’s nothing wrong with mourning the death of a librarian,” I said.

Moxie looked at me. “Then why aren’t you crying, Snicket?”

“I planned on doing it later,” I said, but I cried a little right then. Everyone joined me. There is no point in delaying crying. Sadness is like having a vicious alligator around. You can ignore it for only so long before it begins devouring things and you have to pay attention. I cried and then cried a little more and thought. Poor Qwerty, is what I thought. Poor sub-librarian. He keeps watch over Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s library for ten years, and then it ends on a rattly train. Lemony Snicket comes into town, I thought, and everything gets worse for you, Qwerty. Snicket’s a nice enough kid, but when you allow him into a library, you might as well flood the place and kill the brave and careful man who runs it. All of us cried in the rattling room, and the beasts watched over us and said nothing.

“How could she do it, Snicket?” Moxie said finally, wiping her eyes. “How could she kill him?”

“Take some notes,” I told her, and then I told her about what I’d heard when I eavesdropped on Theodora and Qwerty. I told her about my canvassing of The Thistle of the Valley, and I told her about the three so-called witnesses who helped my chaperone get railroaded. Moxie was still shaky at first, but by the time I described the shattering of glass, the typewriter was going lickety-split.

“It sounds like Qwerty was in V.F.D., too,” Jake said, “and we didn’t even know it.”

“I thought he might be,” I said. “Most librarians are, of course.”

Kellar scratched the spike in his hair. “Why didn’t you ask him if he was one of us?”

“You don’t ask if someone has integrity and pluck and has read a great many books in the hope of repairing the world,” I said. “You just watch them, and figure it out for yourself.”

“Why would Theodora,” Cleo said, “kill someone who has integrity and pluck and has read a great many books in the hope of repairing the world?”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure, Snicket?” Kellar asked me. “Not so long ago, she wanted to leave town and abandon Stain’d-by-the-Sea to Hangfire’s treachery.”

“I have many complaints about my chaperone,” I said, “but that doesn’t make her a murderer.”

“She’s not a murderer,” Jake said, with a disgusted wave of his hand, “just like Dashiell Qwerty was no arsonist. It couldn’t have happened like those witnesses said.”

“I know it didn’t,” I agreed. “I stood in that cell myself. It was full of broken glass. If Theodora had thrown the weapon out the window, like the witnesses told me, the glass would have fallen outside.”

“But how do you explain Theodora stealing that uniform?” Cleo asked.

“She wanted to talk to a prisoner,” I said. “Conductors are the only ones who would be allowed into the cells in the prison car. She argued with Qwerty, but he was killed by somebody else.”

“I can’t imagine Dashiell Qwerty having too many enemies,” Jake said.

“Anyone who finds a crucial secret ends up with enemies,” I said. “Qwerty had information that could stop Hangfire, and now he’s dead.”

“Do you think Hangfire snuck aboard this train and killed him?” Moxie asked.

I looked at the cardboard beasts and then at the dark, fast view out the window. “Hangfire doesn’t do all of his treachery himself,” I said. “He has plenty of people to help him.”

“You’re thinking of Ellington Feint again,” Moxie said, with a severe frown.

“I’m thinking of everyone,” I said. “Sally Murphy, Gifford and Ghede, Stew Mitchum—there are countless suspicious people on board The Thistle of the Valley, and those are just the ones we know about.”

“Why not go to the Mitchums again,” Cleo asked, “and tell them everything?”

“Because I don’t know everything,” I said. “Not yet. According to the law from the outskirts of town in the hinterlands to the boundary of the Clusterous Forest, the case is closed. But I can’t seem to get the case open. Wherever I go on this train, there’s a piece of a sinister plot, but I can’t put the pieces in order.”

“Dashiell Qwerty was murdered in his cell,” Jake said. “That’s the biggest piece.”

“And there’s Theodora, wrongly accused,” Cleo said.

Moxie looked at her notes. “There are three librarians,” she said, “dishonest and scared.”

Kellar looked at the table. “There are two Bombinating Beasts, both decoys.”

“There’s Gifford and Ghede,” I said, “disguised as conductors. And there’s Sally Murphy, preparing for the role of a lifetime.”

“And there are all those children at Wade Academy,” Moxie said, with a shudder, “in the clutches of the Inhumane Society, stealing honeydews and preparing for goodness knows what.”

“It’s all a big question mark,” Jake said, with a grim grin, and I gave him a fraught frown to match. Question marks made me think of Ellington Feint’s curved eyebrows, and the smile she always gave me, that could have meant anything. It made me unsteady to think of all of it, and the train rattling made me feel unsteadier still.

“What are we going to do about it?” Moxie asked. “We have to try something. There’s too much at stake. Like Theodora’s freedom.”

“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.”