Chapter 5
Often when someone is kidnapped or taken hostage by villains who are good at what they are doing, they find themselves undergoing a series of extremely unfortunate events. They are often bound and gagged, a phrase which here means "tied up tightly with ropes and having their mouth stuffed up with something called a gag." Then they are placed in perilous situations, such as under a large knife or over a lake of flesh-eating leeches. Of course, this is all under the pretense that the villains who have done the kidnappings are villains who are good at kidnapping and other such activities. This was not the situation that Klaus had found himself in. Olaf was not good at anything except scheming to steal fortunes, and though the kidnapping itself had gone as well as could have been hoped, the hostage keeping was not going as horribly as it might have been.
"Hello, hello, hello, Baude-brat," Olaf said as soon as the hook-handed man, otherwise known as Fernald, had his hooks violently entangled in Klaus's shirt. "It looks like we've got you once again! Tee hee torture chamber!"
"You cannot escape our clutches!" laughed Esmé. "Ha ha humphrey! I think I'll slap you with my tagliatelle grande, which is a very unpleasant and somewhat sticky experience!"
Klaus had a split second to look up before a rather large piece of sticky pasta slapped him in the face. As Esmé had warned him, it was an unpleasant and somewhat sticky experience, but not all that torturous. Klaus was determined to see the best in this, but this was the only best he could find.
"So we've got one of the cakesniffers!" Carmelita Spats chimed in. When someone chimes in, it means that they are agreeing with someone, like a wind chime when one chime rings and then hits all the other chimes, causing them to all ring at once. But in Carmelita's case, "chiming in" had a different meaning. Her voice was so high-pitched, and squeaky, and often off-key even when she wasn't trying to sing, that it sounded like a wind chime that someone buys at the flea market because nobody wants that never makes a beautiful chiming noise but produces the most horrible and annoying ringing that can leave one with a headache for hours. "May I reproduce a villainous laugh, Esmé?"
"Of course you may, dear," Esmé said fondly.
"All right, then! I will laugh at this cakesniffer in the face! Haha…" And there she stopped. Apparently, though Carmelita had a high-pitched, squeaky voice with which to give people throbbing headaches, her villainous skills, particularly those in the laughter department, were severely lacking, a phrase which here means "she could not laugh as Count Olaf and crew had deemed correct." "…Hahaha!" she finished lamely.
"Oh, Carmelita dear, that was marvelous!" Esmé said, wiping tears from her eyes. "That was amazing! Doesn't everyone else think so?" And then Esmé brandished the tagliatelle grande, as if anyone who didn't think so was about to undergo a very unpleasant and somewhat sticky experience.
"Um…yes! That was amazing!" said the hook-handed man, who was still trying to detach his hooks from the front of Klaus's shirt.
"It was the best villainous laughter I've ever seen!" someone else cried from the far reaches of the room.
"Amazing!"
"Great!"
"Wow! I can see the headline now!" cried the woman who was seated next to Esmé. "Carmelita Spats wows villainous crowd with evil laughter! Wait until the readers of the Daily Punctilio read that!"
Klaus looked up suddenly, recognizing the voice. To his surprise, he recognized the woman from the Village of Fowl Devotees, Heimlich Hospital, and the Caligari Carnival. "Hey," he cried out, "you're that reporter who—"
"Silence, orphan!" Count Olaf thundered. When Klaus immediately clammed up, a phrase which here means "went all silent like a clam that has shut its shell," he grinned wickedly. "Don't even think about talking to any of our allies, even Geraldine Julienne! Tiggle tiggle triumph!"
"Countie," Carmelita whined, and her whining was worse than her regular speaking, "you haven't complimented my evil laugh yet."
"Yes, Olaf, you need to tell Carmelita how wonderful she is," Esmé said, prodding Count Olaf in the shoulder.
Now Olaf clammed up. He looked sideways at Carmelita and back at the table and then mumbled something unintelligible, a word which here means "unable for anyone to hear it and tell if it was a compliment or something else."
"What?" Carmelita asked as sweetly as she could, which was not very sweetly. It sounded like someone had plugged up her nose.
"Good job, Carmelita," he murmured.
Carmelita grinned and started to tap dance in celebration, which caused most of the villainous villains to clap their hands over their ears. But two villains, who each had one end of the table all to themselves, immediately got to their feet. The one at the far end of the table was a man with a beard and no hair, and the one at the near end of the table was a woman with hair and no beard. Klaus recognized them immediately. "You two were on Mount Fraught with Count Olaf! You burned down the V.F.D. headquarters!"
"Yes, young orphan, we did," said the man with a beard but no hair. "Olaf, stop this nonsense. This child is not an evil cohort. She's an annoying, tap-dancing little brat who cannot laugh villainously. Please take her away, or we will be forced to get ugly."
Klaus recoiled at the very thought as Esmé and Carmelita gasped in unison, a phrase which here means "because the man had insulted Carmelita." "How could you insult our precious little Carmelita?" Esmé asked in shock, but quietly, because the man and woman gave everyone in the room, including Klaus, a shiver down his or her spine. Olaf, on the other hand, looked as happy as if he had finally stolen the Baudelaire fortune. Carmelita began to sniffle uncontrollably.
"Put the orphan somewhere else," ordered the woman with hair but no beard, "and let us commence with our meeting, will you? We have much more important things to discuss than the placement of a pink ballerina."
"Like the immediate training of everyone in the room to laugh our villainous laugh?" Olaf asked hopefully.
"No, you fool! To discuss the location of the sugar bowl!" the man with a beard but no hair shouted.
Esmé got to her feet. "Go wash the dishes in the Vicinity For Dining kitchen, orphan. Carmelita, watch him so he doesn't get away."
"I'm…sniffle…sob…sniffle sniff…recovering," Carmelita sniffled and sobbed.
"Then get Triangle Eyes to do it!" Esmé ordered, trying her best to wipe away Carmelita's spurious, a word which here means "made up to weasel her way out of watching the middle Baudelaire do dishes," tears.
Klaus's head snapped around so fast it made his neck ache. He had, up until this point in the proceedings, completely forgotten about Fiona. But there she sat silently, at the far corner of the table, her eyes hidden behind fogged triangle-shaped glasses, and a frown etched upon her face. Klaus felt like a large stone had been dropped into his stomach, which would have been very unpleasant if he could have gotten his mouth around a large stone. They both sat there, staring at each other, until Klaus felt a large poke in the back of his head. The hook-handed man had poked him with the edge of his hook. "Get moving," he ordered.
Slowly, Klaus took a couple steps toward the kitchen door. "I said get moving!" the hook-handed man roared, shoving him forward again ferociously, a word which here means "in a manner which caused Klaus to have an extremely sore spot on the back of his head." Klaus stumbled forward a few steps and then silently walked over to the kitchen door, pausing to let Fiona through first. Then he took a deep breath and took the plunge, a phrase which here means "stepped inside the filthy kitchen to talk to Fiona for the first time since she had defected."
Fiona stood in a corner, silently staring at the floor. Klaus stepped over a few dirty dishrags to reach the sink, which had piles and piles of soiled platters and grimy utensils from the luncheon. "How much have they eaten already?" he said, more to himself than to Fiona since she didn't seem to be listening. When she didn't answer (he hadn't expected her to), Klaus moved over to the sink and turned on the water. It was clear and cool. Klaus let his hands soak for a minute, as if he could wash away the memories of 667 Dark Avenue burning down less than an hour before.
"You must think I'm a fool," Fiona said suddenly, causing Klaus to knock over a rather large plate into the sink. Surprisingly, it didn't shatter. He turned back to look at her. "Do you?" she asked him, blinking.
"No," Klaus said automatically, a word which here means "not really thinking about the lie he was telling her." "Yes," he said after reconsidering. "No matter how much you want to be with your brother, you should not be defecting and joining Count Olaf. To me…" He sighed. "That is the most foolish thing a person could do."
"Everyone will end up under his thumb in some way or another," Fiona told him. "Look at you. You're washing dishes for him. Isn't that working for him?"
"But I'm here because they caught me. You're here because you wanted to come. You say that everyone will end up under his thumb. I want to at least try to do the right thing. Don't you?"
Fiona sighed, a large mound of fog forming on her glasses again. "I do. But what is right, anyway? Who are we to decide who's right and who's wrong? Who's good and who's evil? Isn't it all just from people's perspective?"
Klaus opened his mouth to tell her no, that it wasn't just from people's perspective, that some things in the world were obviously right and glaringly wrong, and that people had to decide for themselves or everyone would be swept away and devoured in fires, but he realized that it was no use trying to convince Fiona of something on which she had already made up her mind. He took out a long bread knife from the pile, soaked it in water, and tried to get the orange pasta sauce off of it. From his perspective, the sauce seemed like flames licking the metal, and the water was putting it out. "If I can't reason with you, I can't have a conversation with you," he finally told Fiona, not looking at her. "I suppose you could call that my personal philosophy."
Fiona eyed him and hesitated, acting against her father's personal philosophy for the second time since she had adopted it as her own. "She who hesitates is lost," is a good personal philosophy for some, but others take pleasure in hesitating, as they take pleasure in reading books and/or writing coded messages. Hesitating can be a good and positive thing, as can reading books and/or writing coded messages. For example, if you had a personal philosophy, "Never read happy books," and then found one whose summary really delighted you, then it would be a good idea to put down this book this very minute and read that one, so you will not float away in a lake of your own tears. If you had a personal philosophy, "Against all odds, do not put things into code or horrible coincidences will happen to you," and then you were forced into a small helicopter and had to drop a message on the ground in code so only the right people could read it, then it would be a good idea to do that very thing. Once upon a time, my personal philosophy was, "Do not contact Beatrice or you might find yourself in grave danger," but then I was forced to make contact in order to get myself out of grave danger, which incidentally put her into even more danger. And it was a good idea for Fiona to hesitate, because it gave her a chance to reflect, a word which here means "feel rueful that she had joined up with Count Olaf." But after a few moments of reflection, Fiona gathered up her courage and her personal philosophy and stopped hesitating.
"Aye! Count Olaf is too powerful to be resisted. You'll join him some day, Klaus, or die. I would hope that you could be prudent enough to choose the former. Aye." The last "aye" was a said little sigh of remorse, as if Fiona was hoping that she could change her mind. "He's going to do something horrible to the hotel as soon as he finds the sugar bowl."
Klaus stole a glance at her, hoping she wouldn't see him looking as he wiped more pasta sauce off countless other dining utensils. "He's not going to burn it down, is he?"
"Oh, no. Something worse. Far, far worse." She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to block out all the horrible horror that would ensue if Olaf could enact his plan. "He's going to open the helmet."
Klaus reeled in horror, a phrase which here means "could not believe that Olaf would do such a dastardly thing, even if he was an evil villain scheming to steal innumerable fortunes." The helmet in question contained a quarantine of Medusoid Mycelium, which was extremely poisonous. Breathing in even one spore would cause death within an hour. Klaus only knew this because he and Violet had frantically researched to save their little sister only a day before. It seemed like a lifetime ago…Klaus sadly wiped his glasses and continued to scrub the dishes free of villainous grime, only with less vigor than before.
"Triangle Eyes!" called a high-pitched, annoying voice. Both Klaus and Fiona cringed as Carmelita flounced into the room. She had apparently recovered from the insult dealt to her by the man with a beard and no hair and the woman with hair and no beard and was ready and raring to go, a phrase which here means "completely prepared to be mean to orphans and children with triangle-shaped glasses."
"Esmé wants you to go back into the luncheon!" Carmelita said shrilly. "I get to tap dance and sing for the cakesniffing orphan!"
Fiona cast one last sad look at Klaus and trudged out of the grimy kitchen to the Vicinity For Dining, while Carmelita prepared herself to begin her reign of terror, a phrase which here means "singing and tap-dancing." As soon as she opened her lopsided mouth, Klaus got a splitting headache and stood there, washing plates, all day and all night and into the next morning, wishing that his siblings would come and rescue him.
As Klaus washed grimy, filthy, villainous dishes long into the night, Sunny Baudelaire whimpered in fear as her captor lifted her up, put a hand over her mouth, and carried her out of the Hotel Denouement kitchen. She was either so terrified or so tired that she could not muster up the energy to bite down on the offending hand, and so she was carried up an elevator and into a hotel room. The woman who had taken her (for it was a woman) placed her softly on a bed just her size and began to creep away, apparently thinking that Sunny had fallen asleep again. However, this woman had never met Sunny Baudelaire, and therefore did not know that Sunny was not the kind of child to fall asleep after being kidnapped. Sunny began to whimper as soon as the woman inched away.
"Quiet," the woman hushed. "Experto crede." And the woman silently crept away.
Experto crede is a phrase in Latin which means, "Trust one who has had experience." Sunny had no way of knowing this, as she was very small and still mastering English, but somehow it soothed her and allowed her to drift off into sleep. If I had been Sunny Baudelaire, which I am not and therefore anyone reading this may disregard it, or better yet put the book down altogether and go have adventures in a land full of fairies and not a book full of misery…If I was Sunny Baudelaire, I would have leapt to my feet and run after the woman, because I knew her identity and all the information she could hold that could save mine and Sunny Baudelaire's lives, but Sunny did not know such things, and so fell asleep until a ray of sunshine poked through the windows and woke her up.
A ray of sunshine poked through the windows and woke her up. Sunny blinked a few times, trying to remember how she had ended up in such a place, when she had quite clearly fallen asleep on the kitchen floor with her sister, Quigley, Phil, and the Dalloways, but then she remembered how the strange black-clad woman had stolen her away in the night, a phrase which here means "taken her from her sister and friends while it was dark," and brought her here, while saying things in a foreign language. Sunny looked around and did something she had not really done for a long time: she began to cry.
It is a disheartening thing to hear a young girl crying, just as it is disheartening to fall down a mountain after being blown off by the wind. You hear the sound of wailing and then you are compelled to let go of whatever you are doing. In the case with the mountain, it usually ends up in death or dismemberment, but in the case of crying, you run to see what is the matter. A woman burst through the doors to see what was the matter.
"Sunny Baudelaire!" she cried. "Why are you crying?"
Sunny sniffled. "No friends," she told the woman.
"Why, that's not true!" the woman exclaimed, a small smile on her lips. Sunny looked up for a moment and scrutinized the woman carefully. On her feet, which were usually the first things Sunny noticed, she had on sleek black shoes that looked like they had never squeaked in their life. On her long, slender legs were a pair of black pants, perfect for sneaking to places or slipping into disguises. She had long, thin arms ending in long, thin fingers, and her shirt was made of the same material as her pants. She had smile-lines, which are small grooves on your face that show that you smile a lot and are generally a happy person, and her eyes sparkled at Sunny from under a lot of curly brown hair that draped neatly over her back. "That's not true, Sunny," she said again, "because I am a friend."
"Friend?" Sunny asked her. "Experto?"
"'Experto crede' means 'trust one who has had experience,'" the woman answered. "And I have had experience. You may not have heard of me, but I was a good friend of your parents'. My name is—"
"AYE! BEATRICE!" yelled a familiar voice.
The woman sighed. "Yes, that's my name. My name is Beatrice."
And I wish I could tell you that I was there too, to take her away from that horrible place, or rather the horrible events that would happen at other horrible places, but I was not, and so I shall bow out, a phrase which here means "not insert myself into the story yet," and continue to tell Sunny Baudelaire's woeful tale.
A man charged into the room, wearing an extremely conspicuous diving suit with a portrait of a white-bearded man on the front who seemed to stretch out over the vastness of the real man's stomach. The man's face was also broad, and his upper lip was hidden by a mustache that curled up at the ends like a pair of parentheses. Sunny was rather astounded, a word that here means "surprised," to see him.
"Captain!" she exclaimed.
"Aye! Sunny Baudelaire!" the man cried, for he was, indeed, Captain Widdershins. "Aye! I knew you'd make it! You didn't hesitate to come find us! Aye! Because he who hesitates is lost!"
"She," Sunny added.
"Or she! Aye! Beatrice, we have problems! Aye! We have issues! Aye! We may need counseling! Aye! There's been kidnapping afoot! Aye!" When he said "afoot," he didn't mean "an appendage at the end of a leg," but "around here in this area." "They've got my stepdaughter Fiona! Aye! And she's wearing Edgar Guest! Aye! He was a writer of limited skill, who wrote awkward, tedious poetry on hopelessly sentimental topics! Aye! We've got to rescue her from such a horrible wardrobe! Aye!"
"Some of whom have licentia vatum should have it removed," Beatrice remarked.
"Vatum?" Sunny asked.
"Licentia vatum is poetic license," Beatrice explained.
"Fiona defected," Sunny told Captain Widdershins, which meant something along the lines of, "Your stepdaughter betrayed us and went over to Count Olaf's side."
"No! She wouldn't! She's not that hopelessly sentimental! Aye!" Captain Widdershins protested loudly, his parentheses mustache quivering.
"No cum bak," Sunny told him, which meant, "You didn't return to the Queequeg; we were worried about you and Phil."
"Beatrice came and got us! Aye! And we didn't hesitate! Aye! Because he or she who hesitates is lost!"
"I came and retrieved him because I know something he didn't," Beatrice said quietly. "And I came and retrieved you because if Olaf doesn't know your whereabouts, your siblings are safe. He won't harm them if he doesn't have you in his clutches."
"Whaddyuno?" Sunny asked, which meant something along the lines of, "Please give me your knowledge; it could be very important."
"I know," said Beatrice, "where the sugar bowl is."
Sunny's eyes widened, and she looked at Captain Widdershins. "Reely?" she asked.
"Really," Beatrice answered. "You see, a long time ago, it was in the hands of Esmé Squalor, and then my friend took it from her to keep it out of Olaf's clutches at the time of the schism. He gave it to me, and I came here and hid it. We'll have to retrieve it quickly and leave this place. I have a feeling that if it falls into Count Olaf's hands, there could be severe consequences. Combined with the Snicket file, we could be in grave danger."
Sunny nodded.
Just then, the door burst open again and a person rushed in. Sunny's eyes widened and in sudden realization she cried, "Jayess!" That word had many meanings. It meant, "Look! A person!" It meant, "The person to whom Quigley also sent his Volunteer Factual Dispatch!" It meant, "The person to whom the Verbal Fridge Dialogue was addressed!" It meant, "The person with the initials J and S!" But most of all, the one that everyone understood, was the meaning of, "Jerome Squalor!"
There are times when someone can instantly sense if something is wrong or missing. You may be stepping into the shower and instantly realize that the water is ice cold. You could be going on a walk in a wildlife park and all of a sudden notice that there are no animals, but there are a lot of men around with eye tattoos on their ankles dressed up as animals, and who do not look at all like animals the way a teddy bear does not really resemble a panda. I was once tied up and forced underwater with a heavy ball chained to my ankles, and all of a sudden I realized that I knew my captor's middle name. Often the brightest people are acutely aware of all that is happening around them.
Unfortunately, this was not the case when Violet, Quigley, Phil, and the Dalloways woke up that next morning. Though Sunny Baudelaire was small, she was not easily missed, but the volunteers had been worrying about what would happen with their Veronal Fulminating Desserts, and so they did not think to take a head count, a phrase which here means "make sure Sunny Baudelaire had not been kidnapped."
"They look ready," Violet said, scrutinizing each dessert carefully. On any normal day she would have asked Sunny if they looked ready, since Sunny was the chef in the family, but it was not a normal day and had not been a normal day for quite some time, perhaps since the terrible fire that had destroyed her home. And so Violet quite forgot to make sure her little sister was well enough to check on the desserts.
"They smell ready," Quigley said, sniffing one of them. Quigley also did not think to ask Sunny how she thought they smelled, since she had cooked on board the Queequeg and had much more experience than he did.
"Should I taste them to see if they taste ready?" Phil asked.
"No!" the four younger volunteers cried out at him.
"I just thought it would be quite all right since I was one of the ones who made them so they wouldn't possibly affect me adversely," Phil said optimistically.
"I'll find trays to carry them on," Clarissa volunteered, and she immediately began rummaging through many drawers and cupboards, searching for trays.
"I'll look for anything else we might need," Ronald volunteered, and he began to search through nooks and crannies near him.
"We'll need disguises," Violet said thoughtfully.
"True," said Quigley.
"Will these do?" Ronald asked, straightening up. He held out a rather large hamper marked, "Vesicle Full of Disguises."
"Those will do perfectly," Violet said, "though I hate the thought of more disguises." She frowned slightly, thinking back to the time when she and her siblings had been forced to wear horrible pinstriped suits, and how Sunny's was too big for her. Quigley frowned and thought of the time on top of the Mortmain Mountains when Sunny had been able to sneak away by disguising an eggplant as herself. And Phil smiled brightly and thought of the time when the three siblings had been putting on underwater suits on the Queequeg, and how Sunny had been too small, and so she had had to curl up in her diving helmet. And all three of them realized the exact same thing at the exact same time.
"Sunny!" Violet exclaimed.
"Sunny!" Quigley said.
"Where could the youngest Baudelaire have crawled off to?" Phil asked cheerfully.
"She wouldn't have left without telling me," Violet said worriedly, "unless it was extremely urgent and very important."
"Maybe she needed fresh air," Phil said. "She's probably having the time of her life. Just in case she comes back, I'll stay in the kitchen and wait for her while you four go serve the Veronal Fulminating Desserts to the villains."
"I guess," Violet said, biting her lip. "I hate to think of Sunny somewhere in the hotel by herself. Let's go to the luncheon. Phil, if she doesn't come back in half an hour, alert the front desk."
"I will," Phil promised brightly. "You kids get dressed and go."
Ronald passed out waiter costumes he had found in the Vesicle Full of Disguises and they all put them on reluctantly, a word which here means "feeling as if they were transforming themselves into villains." Clarissa had located four trays on which to place their secretive substances, and within ten minutes they were filing out of the Hotel Denouement kitchen, Clarissa leading the way and Violet at the end. The latter gave one last sad look to Phil, who gave her a happy thumbs-up. Quigley touched her hand lightly as they proceeded across the hotel lobby and to the Vicinity For Dining door. Clarissa gave five light taps in quick succession with her fist.
"Go away," a rude voice said from beyond the door.
"Your desserts are served, monsieurs," Clarissa said in a very realistic French accent.
"Acting," Ronald whispered to them as the door opened.
"It's about time!" snarled the person who had opened the door. Violet was slightly scared to see that it was the hook-handed man, Fernald. "Where have you waiters been? We've been waiting for our desserts since yesterday evening! Get in the room!"
They filed inside, none daring to really get a good look around. Violet was the only one who took everything in fully. Her mouth dropped open.
Every single villainous person whom she had met since her parents had perished, and some she hadn't, was seated around an enormous, elaborately decorated table. It had about twelve centerpieces, which defeated the purpose since none of them were actually in the center. They all looked at the crowd of short waiters disdainfully, a word which here means "what looked to Violet Baudelaire as if they didn't believe they were really waiters." Violet gulped. Though she was coming in here to save her brother (who, incidentally, was nowhere in sight), she felt as if she was walking right into Count Olaf's clutches.