To Bertrand-darling,dearest,dead
Chapter One-The Sinister Start
I don't know about you, but most people I know love to read stories with happy endings. Some people, including two women and two men who I don't particularly like to talk about, love to read stories that end with woe, misery, grief and smoke, because that, to them, makes them happy. Other people prefer endings that are not really endings, because there are so many questions left unanswered and that gives them something to think about. However, there are some endings that you cannot avoid, whether or not you like the ending, because, unfortunately, the ending is true. I'm sad to say that this story has an ending just like that. Whether or not you like unhappy endings, this story has an ending so wretched that I could barely bring myself to write about it, and as early as now I advise you to stop reading it.
The story begins with a woman calling a man's name.
"Arnold!" Felicia Baudelaire-Quagmire called from the third story of her mansion. Her husband, who had been climbing up the stairs after a hard week's spying, rushed into his wife's arms and they kissed passionately.
"I thought you'd never be able to come back!" said Felicia.
The man chuckled. "It was hardly anything."
"Have you heard anything about my brother?"
The man stopped. "Let's not talk about that now, Felicia."
At that moment one of their three children entered the room. "Mother, Dad, look at this map of Winnipeg that I completed when Dad was away!"
Felicia gave her husband a worried look, and her son a sad look. "Sweetie, you can show that to us later. But your father and I have something to talk about. Something very important."
The boy scowled. He always hated it when his parents had one of those ''important talks," the type they never let the children hear about. He left the room.
"Now, you were saying, Arnold?"
"I've found out something during my trip," he said. "Here."
He knelt down and opened the suitcase he had been carrying all the while, and brought out something that made Felicia gasp in terror.
"Arnold! Why did you get that? Oh no, if Esme finds out-"
"Felicia, calm down. Like I've told you a million times before, Esme is not noble, and we had been wrong to allow her to be in charge of our affairs. This last trip to Winnipeg is a desperate attempt to get rid of her control of our fortune. On the way, I had to visit your brother's wife's former lover, and he told me to keep this for a moment, because Esme was hunting him down, and he had a plan."
"And what sort of plan is that, Arnold?" Felicia groaned.
"Well, I tried to talk to him out of it, but he said that he was trying to infiltrate Olaf's home and find out just what he and Esme were up to next. I talked to his sister, Kit, but then..."
His voice trailed off, and after awhile Felicia realized why.
"Arnold, is that...smoke?" Felicia asked worriedly, sniffing the air.
"Get Quigley," Arnold hissed. "Now!"
In a moment, Felicia was sprinting down the stairs, coughing through the growing smoke. Luckily enough, she saw her son, Quigley, eating some apples in the library, his nose buried in a book about the Finite Forest.
"Mother, I just heard the breaking of the glass-"
Felicia ignored him and took his arm, and she headed for the main hall.
"Where are your siblings?" she cried.
"In the beach," Quigley replied. "But I think they just arrived home. Mother, I-"
They had reached the main hall, but the smoke was so terrible that Felicia said, "let's get back to the library. I know where to go."
They dashed back to the library. Felicia removed the rug, revealing a trapdoor Quigley had never seen before. "Wait for me here," she said, gently pushing Quigley down and shutting the trapdoor.
"Mother, wait-"
The trapdoor shut, and everything seemed to grow darker and darker. Quigley tried to pull himself together-a phrase which here means, ''calm himself down as he heard his parents and siblings screaming and his house burning to the ground."
Quigley remembered his last map, and how he wasn't able to show it to his parents. He had left the map in the kitchen, and he could imagine it burning to crisp, along with everything else. He waited and waited for his parents to return, but they never did.
It is useless for me to describe the grief, misery and woe Quigley felt in the following days trapped inside the mysterious passageway. It is also useless for me to describe how my brother's former lover's husband's sister and her husband burned to death in their mansion, all alone, unable to rescue their son.
My name is Kit Snicket, and I vow to tell the story of Quigley, Isadora and Duncan Quagmire as accurately as I could, and no matter how miserable.