This is my version of what might have happened after the series. There are spoilers here for The Beatrice Letters and The End. All characters belong to Daniel Handler.
Chapter 1
Ten years. For ten years my research on the Baudelaires had hit a brick wall. (Not a literal one, like the one an enemy once tried to entomb me with in an underground cellar. I shouldn't have believed him about the Amontillado. No, this was a figurative wall, equally frustrating to a writer, though not as deadly.)
The Hotel Denouement fire had left the V.F.D. in confusion, not only because of the deaths and scattering into hiding of so many members, but also the loss of all the evidence we had brought to the trial. My regular sources of information were exhausted. Dewey Denouement was dead, my sister Kit was missing, and so were Captain Widdershins, the Quagmires, and many others I had desperately hoped to see again.
My publishers were holding up all the manuscripts I had sent to them. They refused to publish the books without a conclusion. My last book consisted entirely of the words "I have been completely unable to find out what happened to the Baudelaires after they left the Hotel Denouement with Count Olaf in his boat. The End."
I am writing for my own records an account of how I came to be able to finish the books and what followed. Since I don't intend to publish this, I will not include the usual warning to the reader to avoid reading this at all costs lest you are driven mad with grief. Just in case, if you do somehow find this manuscript, avoid reading it at all costs lest you are driven mad with grief.
I speculated that the Baudelaires had been shipwrecked, so I tried several times to shipwreck myself in hopes of arriving at the same place they did. I pushed off onto a stormy stream in a rented canoe with holes in it. I set out to sea in a large wooden boat in the path of a storm, with a notebook and pen poised to take notes. Neither shipwreck worked, and the experiences were so harrowing that I did not dare to keep trying.
At long last, I received a completely unexpected message. It purported (a word which here means "claimed") to have been delivered by long-distance swimmers and swans, but the good condition of the paper made that unlikely. It also purported to come from Beatrice Baudelaire, the woman I loved and who I believed was long dead. Could it really be from her? Had she perhaps survived and gone into hiding? She used the phrase "My Silence Knot," her old pet name for me.
More likely, this was from some villainess out to trick me. With trembling hands, I did as the letter suggested and wrote in the margin the initial of the person I suspected had sent it: "E?".