The world has never been quiet

Lie 2 : I promise everything will be fine.

The day after, as promised, I got ready to go with Violet, Klaus and Sunny to Briny Beach. I had passed a terrible night, a sleepless night, emptier than those pages I write on. I imagined it all, from kidnapping for a ransom to terrorism, but then I remembered that our fortune was ludicrous next to the Baudelaire's, for example, and there was no terrorism anymore in this city.

I think this all-nighter was the second worst I've had in my short life. The first would come later, when I would dwell on the horrors that my first and last love told me, and those I told him back. Truths, all in all, except one. Well here it was the same, but the other way around : of all the hypotheses I built, all were wrong but one.

Beatrice's clothes, less outmoded than I thought, fit almost perfectly and I could go out without being cold or hot. Even if I had no idea of the value of what I was carrying, I knew it was the last thing I had from home except, well, home, so I took it with me.

The journey was quiet, respectful and awkward. The poor children didn't know what to say or what to do, fearing they would hurt me, and I wasn't in the mood of helping them. It's only when we reached the crossing of their street and mine that I finally spoke.

"Go ahead, I'll join you later," I said with a poor smile. "I must get some stuff from home.

- You're sure? We can come, if you want.

- No, it's okay. Go ahead.

- But mother does not want us to leave you," Klaus hesitated. "She said you shouldn't…

- I promise everything will be fine and I'll find you later."

It took some encouragements for them to leave in the direction of the beach. I waited for them to disappear from my field of vision before I turned to go home. Of the two promises I just made, I only managed to keep one of them - not the one I wanted to keep. But I didn't have the choice. Neither did they. Neither did almost every protagonists of this sinister story.

The house was just as I'd left it so I entered without really looking. Bertrand had cleaned everything that had fallen in the debacle so I had to unclean everything to pack everything my bag could still carry. This time, I wasn't searching for proves or clues : I wanted to take everything that reminded me of my father. I put his tuning fork in my pocket, his cigarettes in another and walked the long corridors until I found his room.

It was a sanctuary, his room. I didn't enter it for years because I didn't have the right to. While mine had been painted again and again, his was the most simple and less decorated room of the house. It was desperately white and empty, except for a closet, a bed and a nightstand that I was emptying. If I'd known those white walls were in fact covered with a fluorescent paint, I would have been more careful. I would have taken photos. Instead, and perhaps it was better off this way, I took his old notebook hidden under multiple books. It was full of bookmarks and added sheets so it hardly fit into my bag. I was trying to make room for it when I heard a glass explode and footsteps. Voices followed.

Run, my father said. This time, I didn't run. I slipped inside his closet, praying every gods and every spirits that no one would open the door, and I waited, my heart beating hard my chest and my hands shaking. I'd left the drawer on the floor. If anyone saw it, they would know someone came and this someone was still there.

If only I'd died at this exact moment! I would have taken my father's secrets to the graves, even those I knew nothing about, and this teeny tiny thing that would cause so much pain, so much suffering and so many deaths. But fate had decided otherwise and, after multiple bangs and bumps, silence came back. I then took a chance on checking outside the closet.

Everything seemed fine. The house seemed empty. I was trying to find the backdoor, to leave the place without getting noticed when I realized someone wasn't fine and nothing was fine. The door was stuck, even if there was no lock, and a thick white smoke was crawling all around the house. It came from the library.

What I discovered there had me terrified and, I have to admit it now, fascinated. The library was burning. Books had been knocked down and flames were licking them, one by one, until they completely consumed them. A draft from the living-room was feeding those flames and suddenly redoubled their intensity. The lamps on the shelves exploded. I was stupid, although perhaps not more than today, so I didn't move when the pieces of shattered glass reached and cut me here and there. But flames were dancing before my eyes, destroying my house and everything I'd ever known and I couldn't get myself to look away. It was like those ballets I went to with my father. Gracious, slow. Dangerous. Beautiful.

I actually didn't move until the smoke became too thick for me to breath. At this point only I realized I had to run and I had to do it quickly. The few minutes I'd spent on contemplating my library's demise had been enough for the flames to spread to the corridors, the living room and the kitchen. They'd reached the second floor when I arrived in the entrance.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but when I saw that this door wasn't opening either, a sudden nausea tore my insides. I was stuck in a burning house. I was alone in a burning house, motionless when I should have been running. So that's what I did. I got out of breath searching for a way out, wasting the little oxygen I had left.

I ended up in the storeroom, but the fire was gaining ground. Hunched up in a corner of the room, I was squeezing, almost compulsively, a piece of paper I'd grabbed in my dash through the corridors. It was a picture of my father and I, he sitting in front of the piano and me sitting next to him, taken my Beatrice Baudelaire a year before. He was calmly smiling, as always, and smoked placidly. Happily.

Nothing to do with the panic that had taken me and drove me, between two coughing fits, to scream, beg for help, when I knew that if anyone was indeed there, this wasn't going to help me escape his arson. It's common sense right? We never put out fires we start. And still I screamed, screamed louder than ever, screamed with all the breath that still were in my lungs while smoke slowly surrounded me like a grey shroud.

I've been told what happened then. All I personally remember is me passing out a few seconds after hearing another window shattering, and the feeling of something or someone taking me away. And as I'm not writing someone else's memories but mine, I stop here.

When I finally opened my eyes, the first thing that came to my mind was the thought that I was dead. But heaven couldn't look like the seedy room in which I was, nor like the mattress with prominent springs I was lying on. My throat burned and I smelt of burning. My whole body was sore but I was alive. Well and truly alive. My bag was on the floor near the bed and my creased photo was leaning on the wall on the bedside.

"You're awaken," I heard when I grabbed it. "I thought you would never open your eyes.

- Who…"

My hoarse voice sounded unfamiliar to me and my throat refused to utter any articulated sound. I instinctively put my hand on my neck and gulped with difficulties. My vision was blurry. I didn't recognize the man who was in front of me, talking to me, leaning on the prop of a door that looked as seedy as the rest of the room.

It took me several blinks to finally see him correctly. He was tall, rather well dressed. Nothing in him really popped out except for two things : his eyes and his eyebrows. Well, his eyes and his eyebrow. An unique eyebrow, slightly curved with curiosity. And his eyes, two marbles of the most vivid and intelligent green. He had a gentle gaze, almost soft, and, that was the most important thing, he vaguely looked like my father. I know why today, but it was something in the behaviour, in the bearing and in the way he looked at me.

"Who…" I tried again, wincing. "Where…

- Don't push it. You've spent too much time in there and I can't even imagine what would have happened if I had not… Anyway." He shook his head and came closer to lean on the bedside. "I'm Jacques Snicket. We are in a hotel, on the edge of the city.

- My… House?

- It burnt down. I am sorry."

And he was. He really was, I know for sure. There was compassion in those green eyes that didn't leave me for a second. And in mine, there were tears that rolled down my face for ages, though I don't down if it was because of the smoke or because of the fact that everything I had left had burnt. Both, surely.

He stayed at my bedside, though. He didn't put a comforting hand on my shoulder, he didn't hold me in his arms like Beatrice. He just stayed there, quiet but there, reasonably far from me. I know from experience that he didn't comfort me out of sheer safety – he didn't know how I exactly was. He couldn't be certain, anyway. He ended up sitting at the other end of the mattress, near my right feet, and sighed.

"I know this is not the right time, but I need to ask you questions. Just nod to answer, right?" Nod. "Are you Cassandre Dupin?" Nod. "You were supposed to be with the Baudelaire right? " Nod. "Then why… No, forget it.

- Needed… Stuff… Father…

- I know. Don't worry.

- Vio… Aus… Su…" A new coughing pits. "Where..?

- Many things happened. You don't need to learn everything in one go."

And tears rushed down again because I could very well imagine everything I didn't know. Too well. He didn't insist and went out, to let me sleep or flee this rather one-sided conversation, I have no idea. For my part, my clouded brain didn't leave me any choice and took me down again in a deep and heavy sleep. A sick sleep.

I didn't wake up in the seedy hotel room, but at the back of a car, lying on the passenger seats. It took me a few seconds to remember everything that happened or, at least, everything I could remember. In front of me, Jacques was driving and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. He slightly smiled.

"Hello, Cassandre.

- Why are we…" My voice was a tad less hoarse and sounded more like what I was used to. "I…

- You must be hungry. And thirsty. There is some things to eat in the bag at your feet. We have plenty of time to speak, believe me."

And I was hungry. And thirsty, so I didn't try to push him and ate up everything that was in the bag. I watered everything with the bottle of orange juice that went with the sandwiches and the biscuits before I remembered that I wasn't supposed to stroll with an obscure man whose neither the name or first name rang a bell.

"You remember my name, do you?

- You are Jacques Snicket," I replied. "But I don't know you.

- No, you don't. But I know you. I've known your parents, your father especially. A good man. A noble heart.

- Have you found him?

- Sadly, no. So many things piled up, this last week…"

He slowly shook his head and sighed. I stared at him, even if it mostly meant that I stared at the mirror that partly reflected the face of the man who saved me from the flames that ate up my house. He wasn't old, but wasn't young either; he was pretty much around my father's age, but looked older. The way his eyebrows, no, his eyebrow, was frowned, the sadness of his eyes, the way he had to cast glances at him, nothing evoked youth in him.

"But who are you? Why am I here?

- I came to see you. I hoped we could talk, when I found your house in flames and you, almost dead," he explained with a calm, almost erudite voice. "I am… An investigator. I wanted to help you find your father.

- No one helps people without hoping for something in return.

- Your father is a friend and we were part of the same… Group. I owe him that."

He turned his eyes on the road. Perfect excuse, really: if there was something Jacques Snicket never learned to do correctly, it was lying. I've always been better than him at this game, even if he hated the idea. I already knew he was lying and it wasn't just about friendship, but I postponed my doubts and need of truth to go on with other questions.

"And the Baudelaire ? You talked about them, I remember. We should go see them, Beatrice gave me a few clothes to…

- Their house burnt too." His voice had turned duller, heavier. His eyes were lost in the admiration of the road in front of him. Of us. "Beatrice and Bertrand are dead. I am sorry.

- They are… And the children? Where are they?

- They're minors. Law requires them to be placed with a tutor until they're legally adults. They just… Changed home.

- Why can't I take care of them? I'm of age and I'm a friend of the family!"

He didn't answer. And for the longest seconds of my life, I didn't say anything either. Yeah, well, it's cliché, all those silences but can you imagine? I was alone in a car with a man I barely knew, still nauseous and half-conscious. I just learnt that my father was still missing, that my closest friends, those who had taken me in, were dead and that their children were already tossed around from homes to homes when I had promised them I would find them. Believe me, it's hard to register.

But if my silence was perfectly justified, Jacques' wasn't. He was supposed to talk, supposed to tell me all the horrors that had happened while I was down, while I was going from chaotic waking to long hours of semi-coma. A full week, fuller than the nineteen last years of my life. I was waiting for answers to question I didn't want to ask. Answers he didn't give me.

"Answer me!" I exploded, well, exploded. Tried to scream, rather, until my voice broke and I got stopped by a painful coughing pit. "Why don't you talk? I want to know what's going on!

- You can't take care of them. It's not possible.

- But why? I'm sure it's what Beatrice and Bertrand would have wanted. I have money, and even if I don't have a house I…

- You're dead, Cassandre. For the whole country, you died in your house's arson."

With the years, I imagined a countless times how I would die. Strangely, I see myself dying in flames, in the middle of a huge blaze lighted by one of my many enemies… Or friends, for that matter. At some point, I thought I would die by a bullet in the head, something of the sort. From time to time, I even imagine myself jumping from Mortmain Mountains and hit the frozen waters of the Stricken Stream.

But at that time, even after everything I'd already heard, I wasn't ready to hear that. To hear of my own death, when I didn't even feel like I lived it. I gulped with even more difficulties than before and ran a shaking hand in my tangled hair.

"But I promised I would… Find them, I can't…

- They're fine. We need to focus on your father, find him and… Then he will be able to take them in.

- They're alone, their parents are dead and they believe me dead because they didn't insist enough for me to follow them," I let out with a hardly controlled agressivity. "How can you even believe they're fine ?

- They're safe now. We can't say the same of us."

Of all the lies Jacques Snicket tried to make me believe, I think this one is the worst. The worst, because, for a minute, I believed him. I believed the Baudelaire orphans were safe in a loving and understanding home. I believed that not matter what happened before, it was over and they could find a bit of comfort with this new tutor.

But he was lying. It wasn't for lack of sincerity, I'm sure he really thought they were safe. But he was lying, lying like all those who would tell me the same thing over and over again. Because there were only two safe places in this world, and neither one or the other the place the Baudelaire were going to. The two of them, however, would end up in flames and ashes in the following months.

The second part of his speech was true, though. We were not safe, even if I didn't know where we were going nor why we were going there. I wasn't wary enough, wasn't alerted enough to have the presence of mind to use the knife I had taken back home against this driver and his drawling voice to force him to tell me what he was scheming.

Later on, I wouldn't be wary enough to it again. But naïve enough to believe this man and follow him everywhere he would take me, believe everything he would tell me even if I knew he was lying. And naïve enough to, still today, remember him as the one and only noble heart I've ever known.