I'm back! Because of the pandemic, my school district has been closed indefinitely, so you'll be seeing chapters more frequently.
Review Responses:
JustVildaPotter: Thank you! Glad you enjoyed!
Number Ten: Isadora started the song, and then Olaf added some parts of it when he got the notebooks.
Alysscassandra: You're welcome, and here you go:
Chapter Seventeen
"We have to get out of here!" Isadora exclaimed. It was moments after we last left our other heroes in Chapter Fifteen, standing in Room 524 of the Hotel Denouement, and watching flames make their slow ascent from the ground to the upper floors.
Klaus said nothing, just hopped off the bed, walked over to the projector, and began to roll up the film. "We still have time before the fire reaches our floor. Stop worrying."
"'Stop worrying'? Are you insane?"
"No, my mental functions are in proper working order, thank you."
"Then you know that we have to find the nearest staircase and get out of here!" Isadora was frantically running through a thousand different escape plans in her head, trying to figure out the best one.
"I wouldn't say that we have to do that specific thing," said Klaus, still in a calm and composed manner. "If we ran downstairs, we would end up in a room full of fire, and there would be no chance of escape then." He finished rolling up the film and stored the projector and canisters back in their rightful locations. Next, he walked to the window, shut it, and took Isadora's hand. "Come on."
Isadora let him pull her along; out of the room and down the hall, finally coming to a stop in front of a pair of elevator doors. Rather than pressing either the "Up" or the "Down" button, Klaus pressed both at the same time. The elevator doors slid open with a ding!
Klaus began to step in, but Isadora pulled him back. "You know that an elevator is the worst possible place to be, right?"
Klaus nodded. "Normally, it would be. But Hotel Denouement elevators become fireproof rooms in the event of a fire." Klaus pulled Isadora into the small, metal enclosed room and pointed to a sign on the wall, just above the panel of buttons.
"In case of fire," the sign read, "please use the elevators."
Isadora let out a nervous laugh. "You read everything. I love you!"
Klaus smiled, but Isadora thought the smile seemed a little forced. "I know you do."
Meanwhile, on the ground, several minutes after Klaus and Isadora hid in an elevator, but only moments before their refuge became a trap, Quigley was yelling at Duncan. Again.
"Duncan! What are you doing?" Quigley yelled, watching Duncan rip the pages of Isadora's notebook with his foot, unsure what he should do to stop it.
Duncan said nothing. He kept moving his foot back and forth, back and forth, watching the words of his sister's poem disappear among scraps of paper.
A siren blared, Duncan stopped what he was doing and turned to look at the fire trucks that were driving up to the Hotel Denouement. He stepped off of the notebook. Quigley bent down to pick it up, hoping he could somehow piece the pages back together. But the damage was done. The two pages containing Isadora's poem had been completely destroyed.
As Quigley flipped through the other pages to check for other impacts of Duncan's mass destruction, something a few pages in caught his eye. A short journal entry, dated just after the Quagmire triplets' birthday, two years prior:
"What is the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone? If you asked me, I would say that the worst thing is what happened to my family two days ago. To make a long story short, our house burned down, killing my parents and Quigley, one of my brothers.
"If you need any more evidence as to what makes this the worst thing, all you have to do is look at Duncan, my only remaining brother. He can barely stand to look at fire, even just the flame on a stove. He won't speak to me or anyone else. Mrs. Poe, the wife of the banker we're staying with, gave us a copy of this morning's Daily Punctilio, featuring the family picture we took with our parents this year. When no one was looking, he took the front page up to our shared room and ripped it into tiny pieces. I think he's hoping that when Mr. and Mrs. Poe find the pieces, the blame will fall on their two sons. Of course, I can only guess, because he won't talk to me. It's as if he disappeared into himself, and he isn't showing any signs of coming back out.
"And me? Well, considering that I'm writing in a notebook as if it's a person, I must say my hopes aren't high. I think I'm going crazy. All I can say is that I hope things get better soon."
"Duncan," Quigley said softly, tucking the notebook into his pocket. "You know Isadora's going to be fine."
"No, I don't," Duncan muttered back.
"But you can believe it, can't you?"
"Considering you don't believe it yourself, no, I can't."
"Survivor of the fire!" Sunny piped up, which meant: "Isadora and Klaus will survive!"
"Exactly," Quigley agreed. "They're going to be fine."
"And what if they aren't?" Duncan demanded. "I know you want me to pretend that everything will be fine, but I've been throughout too much misfortune to pretend."
"I know. And if everything turns out wrong, I can promise that I'll be here, as long as you don't disappear." Quigley pulled the notebook back out and showed Isadora's letter to Duncan, who read it and nodded.
And suddenly, it was as if everything that had happened in the past two years had never happened. Duncan was hugging Quigley, and Quigley was hugging him back, and Sunny had wrapped her arms around Quigley's legs, and the two Quagmire boys felt that, for once, everything was going to be alright. Even if it wasn't.
Back in the hotel elevator, Isadora was beginning to smell smoke, which must have meant that the fire was making it's way to the fifth floor. It tickled her throat, causing her to cough, and Isadora was thinking, over and over and over again: Don't panic. Trust Klaus. Don't panic. Trust Klaus. DON'T PANIC. TRUST KLAUS.
"Don't panic!" Isadora shouted.
"I'm not panicking!" Klaus shouted back from his seated position on the floor. He gave Isadora a questioning look.
"Sorry," Isadora came to sit next to him. "I'm trying not to freak out."
"That seems to be going well."
"Shut up."
"Shutting up." Klaus put his pointer finger and thumb together, then dragged them across his mouth, as if he were closing his lips with an invisible zipper.
"So," said Isadora, after a random moment of silence where she and Klaus stared at each other and made weird faces. "What were you doing all day before you came to show me a most horrible movie?"
Klaus shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Not much, just...normal hotel stuff."
"Stuff which involves?"
"Nothing very interesting. Sunny saved a guy from death by chili, though that was yesterday."
"Come on, tell me!" Isadora insisted. "What secrets are you hiding?"
"I'm not hiding anything!" Klaus said quickly.
"Yes you are! I've spent enough time around Duncan to learn what people look like when they're hiding something."
Klaus sighed and muttered something that sounded like: "Curse your journalist brother." Isadora looked at him intently , waiting for him to go on. Klaus sighed again. "Okay. I assume Sunny told you about the trial?"
"The trial between you and Count Olaf? Yeah, she mentioned it."
"Well, this morning, my sisters and I went to see Count Olaf this morning, to discuss...the trial."
"Okay..." Isadora said, unsure where this explanation was going.
"And we came up with a sort of, um, deal. Then, I came up to see you."
"That's all? Really?"
"That's all," said Klaus. "Really."
"Hmm. What sort of deal?"
"You know, that's really not-" A sound from outside the elevator stopped Klaus from finishing his sentence. "Did you hear that?"
"Did I hear wha-" Isadora stopped before finishing her sentence, as she, too, heard what Klaus had heard.
My dear reader, I will never know exactly what the two children heard, as I wasn't there, but somewhere so close, yet so far. I can only give you the description I have been given, which was that it was a voice with a worse sound than fingernails on a chalkboard (a sound that, ironically, I have never actually heard either). It was a voice that Klaus had heard that morning, and a tone that Isadora had hoped to never hear again.
It was the voice of Count Olaf, in the tone he used to threaten orphans when he had them right where he wanted them. "Klaus Baudelaire! I know you're up here!"
Klaus watched Isadora's eyes widen in disbelief as she looked at him. "How does he know that you're up here?" Klaus mumbled something. "What?"
Klaus swallowed. "Because I told him I would be."
Now, I must take some time to mention the whereabouts of Violet Baudelaire and Fiona Widdershins.
They were on the ground, busy having a heated conversation with Kit Snicket.
"What do you mean you 'can't go looking for them now'?" Fiona snapped. "The fire department is here! What else are you waiting for?"
"First of all, the fire needs to be put out before anyone goes in there," Kit explained with a sigh. "And second of all, one of our Volunteer Fire Department members has just reported that the room containing the samples of Medusoid Mycelium was broken into mere hours ago."
Violet turned pale. "And what does that mean?"
"It means that we will fight the fire from the outside until we're sure that a deadly fungus is not loose in the hotel."
"Is there anything we can do to speed up that process?" Fiona asked. "I've been studying mycology all my life, and I'm sure I could-"
"No, Ms. Widdershins, I'm afraid you cannot."
"Kit," said Violet, "Fiona had every fungus book imaginable on board the Queequeg. I think that if you let her help, she could really-"
"The adults will take care of it from here, Ms. Baudelaire."
Violet looked like she had been slapped across the face. Before Kit could say anything more, she turned on her heel and ran, right through the front doors of the Hotel Denouement.
"You told him you were coming up here?" Isadora cried. "Why on earth would you do that?"
"We had a deal, Klaus Baudelaire," Count Olaf called from outside the elevator. "Now tell me where you are!"
"Iz, I can explain," said Klaus. "And I will. But first, I have to-"
"Klaus Baudelaire!" Count Olaf shouted again.
Klaus stood up and walked over to the panel of elevator buttons. He was about to reach his hand out and press the "Open doors" button when Isadora jumped up and pulled his arm back.
"Don't you dare," she growled. "I have spent too much time running from him to have you put us back in danger."
"I brought you a present," sang Count Olaf. " It's green, deadly, and whoops!"
"Sorry, Iz," Klaus said, reaching up and pressing the button with his free hand. The elevator doors slid open with a ding! but it sounded ominous. "I'm over here! In the elevator!"
Isadora heard the sound of Count Olaf's footsteps padding down the carpeted hallway. Then she heard a thud, an "Ah!", and the smash of something breaking. She couldn't see exactly what had happened, because smoke had filled the hall while she and Klaus had been hiding in the elevator.
Klaus saw the tall, slender shale of Count Olaf ride to his feet once again, and felt something seedy slip down his throat as Olaf came closer. Next to him, Isadora made a face and coughed. Klaus realized what must have happened. "We need to get out of the hotel," he whispered. "Now."
"I'm not going anywhere with you until you explain yourself," replied Isadora.
Klaus pulled her back into the elevator, closed the doors, and began to explain.
It was a couple hours earlier in the day. The three Baudelaires were taking the stairs to the lobby, in order to avoid the crowd waiting for the elevator.
When they reached the lobby, Violet walked to the concierge desk and struck up an animated conversation with Fiona, while Klaus and Sunny walked sneakily past the desk to a cupboard just behind it.
Sunny kept a lookout for any innocent passersby while Klaus unlocked the cupboard door with a key Kit Snicket had given them. The youngest Baudelaire then ran over to the eldest, to pull on her pant leg and inform her that the cupboard was open. Violet picked Sunny up and smiled at Fiona, waiting for her to get back to concierge work before dashing into the cupboard.
"That was close," Count Olaf remarked, when all three Baudelaires were safely inside the cupboard with the door closed, though perhaps "safely" isn't the right word. "Surely there's a less conspicuous place to have this conversation?"
"There would be, if you weren't chained inside here with only a dictionary for company," Klaus said, indicating the handcuffs that attached Count Olaf to a ring on the wall, and the Count's correct use of the word "conspicuous".
"But you three are smart enough to do something about that, aren't you? After all, you didn't read an annoying amount of books for nothing, did you?"
"We will help you get out of this," Violet said slowly, "if you do something for us first."
"Hmm?"
"You'll stop this trial from happening," instructed Violet.
"And then you'll disappear," said Klaus.
"And you'll keep your hands off our fortune."
"Begone," squeaked Sunny, which meant: "We never want to hear from you again!"
"Alright, alright." Olaf agreed. "Let's get started."
Violet pulled a bobby pin from her hair, knelt down, and picked the lock on the metal cuff chaining Olaf to the cupboard floor. She exited the closet to once again distract Fiona, while Sunny and Klaus snuck Olaf out of the cup and into the elevator. Luckily, the few people in the lobby at this time in the afternoon were too oblivious to notice the convicted murderer being smuggled across the room.
The two younger Baudelaires rode down to the basement, keeping their eyes on the criminal next to them. Reaching the bottom floor, they stepped out, following Olaf as he purposefully strode toward the laundry room.
"The Sugar Bowl isn't in there," Klaus warned, walking quickly to catch up.
"I know that," Olaf said. "But there's something else in here that I need of you want me to go through with your plan."
Klaus looked confused. Olaf brushed this off and ordered the boy to open the Vernacularly Fastened Door to the laundry room. Klaus obeyed, letting Olaf push past him into the room when the door was opened. The villain picked something up from a laundry cart; Klaus couldn't quite tell what it was.
"Now, to stop the trial," Olaf announced dramatically. He looked around the room, seeming confused. "But...how do we do that?"
Sunny stepped forward to propose and idea. "Arson," she said with no emotion, featuring to the jugs of bleach and detergent piled on a corner.
At this, Olaf's eyes lit up. "It seems I wasn't completely useless as a guardian after all!" He fished in his pocket for the lighter he always had on him, while Klaus picked up and opened a jug of detergent.
The middle Baudelaire felt, as he handed the open jug to Count Olaf, before turning and running from the room in search of Isadora, alone upstairs, that this was the only thing that could be done.
Was this confusing? I sincerely apologize if it is, as I haven't written in a long while.
I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and I'll see you in the next chapter!