The world was never quiet

Lie 16 : I need to be left alone

Sorry for the interruption. I was writing on an old typewriter when one of my many enemies impolitely interrupted me in the middle of my sentence. It's rather funny to see that more people hate me than I do. A nice frozen bath in Lake Lachrymose soothed him, don't worry. Oh, it makes me wonder if I asked him whether or not he ate beforehand…

Never mind. Lemony. When I reached the kitchen, I saw him struggling with the woman with hair but no beard who was trying to grab the file that appeared from his pocket. My knife still bloody, I dashed on her to rip her from Lemony. She screamed, stunned, while I pinned her to the nearest wall. Trying my best to keep her still – and that wasn't simple, Arsonists jiggle very hard, I stared at her while I ask my dear unfortunate companio:

"A strap, if you please. Or whatever string you can find to keep her still." He didn't say anything. I sighed, annoyed. "I'm not going to do all the work, Le…

- Cassandre."

His voice sounded like a warning and, suddenly, like Jacques'. I shivered and, slowly, turned my head. He was facing me, arms crossed behind his back by the man with a beard but no hair who apparently recovered from his knife in the thigh. Without a word, I twisted my catch's arms and turned her in front of them. I put my blade on her throat. She stopped jiggling.

There was a long, long silence during which the man watched me without a pause. Lemony's eyes didn't leave me either, but it actually didn't matter. The thing that mattered was that they were both gauging me, wondering if I would cut her throat, given the opportunity. Yes, the answer's yes. But if I did, the man would do the same to Lemony.

"Take the file!" my catch yelped. "In his pocket.

- Don't touch this file," I contradicted her. "If you do, you may as well say farewell to your colleague.

- You wouldn't do it.

- Watch me."

I slowly traced a red line with my knife all around the Arsonist's throat. She tensed and winced. No shit. The man had his hand near the file, but he froze. Was it really worth a life? Given that I didn't really know what was inside, I couldn't say. But I wanted to believe a few pages couldn't be worth a life.

I know that the question that always comes back is did I really have to do what I did. After all, Lemony was already dead for most people, it wouldn't have changed anything if he'd finally died here. After all, Lemony wasn't anything but a stern travel companion for me, back then. What happened in the bathroom didn't happen again and despite our conversation in the car, I didn't know yet how much we were alike. After all, his eyes were ordering me to give up on the damned file. But I didn't do it. And maybe it's the sign that I had definitively crossed the Schism line. Or, at least, that I danced flawlessly on this line.

When the man grabbed the file in Lemony's pocket, my hand acted on its own, as if to keep a promise. I felt the blood's heat on my hands, the woman with hair but no beard's body sagging in my arms and a dull nausea distorting my stomach. The man blinked and, while he was rendered unable to move by stupefaction, Lemony hit his wound with his foot. He yelled and ran – staggered, really, to the library, the file in his hand. I followed him without waiting to know if Snicket was fine and wiped the blood on my face. Blood sticks, if you wonder, like glue or overcooked rice.

"Give me the file," I croaked. "Or you'll end up like her.

- I won't give you the time, bitch!"

What followed… Is what always follows the Arsonist, I suppose. He took out a lighter and, before me or Lemony managed to stop him, ignited the file. His toothy grin shined with dementia, as if the flames that already licked his fingers had awaken some feral instinct. He threw the burning papers on a sofa that, in turn, started to brun. I didn't have time to react: Lemony grabbed my sleeve and pulled me to the kitchen. He slammed the door and, without a word, opened wide a door I thought closed. He gestured me to follow him in the dark corridor it led to.

He slammed it again, enough for the corridor to echo the bang. If I'd looked behind me, I would have seen the door was covered with a complicated mechanism that couldn't be opened without answering three questions. But I didn't look. I followed Lemony to what looked like a chimney. But the top-down version of a chimney.

"We need to go down," he told me with a raspy voice. "There are not many grips and there may be smoke. Be careful.

- The flames will reach…

- The door is fireproof."

His tone didn't ask for a reply. He slipped inside the hole and started to climb it down slowly. With a last look around, and after having put my folded knife in my pocket, I followed him

The descent was awfully long, so I won't describe it. All you need to know was that the atmosphere was suffocating, that there weren't many grips indeed and the few that we managed to grab were inhabited by spiders, and that it took us long minutes before we reached our destination. To think the Baudelaire did the same trip the other way… But anyway.

If you've read Lemony's book, you know that we landed in a cave that would soon be occupied by a bunch of snow scouts. At this point in time, it was still empty and it was better off this way. He didn't take the time to dust himself or catch his breath and immediately walked to the cave's exit. I followed. It took us another few minutes to find the road and the taxi. And once found, another second to leave.

Sitting at the back like always, I kept quiet. Dazed would be a better world. My brain struggled to register what just happened within… What? Thirty minutes? Barely? As I was lowering my eyes to look at my hand, I felt my stomach getting knotted again. The blood on my hand had dried and came off my skin like confetti every time I moved. My sleeves were stiffen. My breath speeded up as I harshly brushed my hands against each other to get rid of any trace of what happened. I got rid of the jersey I was wearing. I didn't care about being half naked.

Bad writers always write that when their character killed for the first time, something broke in them when their blade entered their victim's flesh. Afterward, most of the time, they kill like you would eat a tuna sandwich – not necessarily with pleasure, but without any hard feeling. Let me tell you something: it's all crap. Killing my father didn't break something in me, at least not the act of killing. Killing Olaf's henchman didn't break anything, didn't make anything easier. I'm not more capable of killing than I was when my greatest fear was my piano lesson. And when I have to do it, I don't feel better than I did when I found my way out the 667 Dark Avenue.

Even though I made sure I couldn't see any more blood, my hands were shaking. My skin was painful were blood had dried. My heart beat fast in my chest and I felt nauseous. I wasn't fine. Killing is not like eating a tuna sandwich. There's nothing like killing.

"Thanks," Lemony simply said, as if he had no idea how terrible I felt. "For what you've done.

- For killing a woman?" I chuckled sinisterly. "You're welcome. After all I'm a murderer, am I not? One more murder is nothing, really.

- You saved our lives. That's all that matters.

- Oh yeah? Well, you'll tell that to Jacques if you ever see him again. He didn't see that as a good enough reason."

Jacques, Jacques, Jacques. It's scary how he always comes back when I'm close to jumping from a bridge. Well, rather from a car. The other day it was an actual bridge – the one where I pushed my enemy into the lake, actually.

In a way, I know that I did could have been, or should have been, a vengeance. After all, this duo took my father from me more than Olaf did. They had triggered this absurd set of events. I'd got rid of one and the second was presumably seriously injured – why couldn't I be satisfied? The answer can be found a few lines above: a murder is never a way to feel better. If you're lucky and severely twisted, you may feel better for a few seconds, but then the horror of what you did eventually hits you. You never feel better after killing someone, even if you saved yourself, even if you got revenge, even if you didn't have the choice. One day, someone told me we always have the choice, and we just have to make the good one; I'd like to slap this person who evidently lived a very simple life.

"They were the… Bosses, if you can say it like that, of the other side of the Schism.

- You should have told me! I feel so much better now that I know I got rid of a murderous arsonist by killing and burning her.

- Your cynicism does not hide…

- I'm not hiding anything." I looked away from my hand, closed my eyes and rested my head on the window. "Just drive and stop talking. I need to be left alone."

That wasn't true. I needed him, but I needed him to shut up. Lemony was trying to somehow help me accept what I'd done, no knowing that the best way to do it was to leave me alone. I needed a few hours, a day perhaps, to bury this murder very deep in my mind's meanders. But I couldn't do it alone. His presence, even quiet, even a bit contemptuous, reminded me I was alive and I could bury it all. Of course it would come back to haunt me from time to time, but it's just like any scar: you eventually get used to the itching. It's weird, right, to talk about a life's end as an itching? You also get used to that. You just need to be selfish.

He didn't talk to me for long, very long hours. I think I fell asleep at some point, and it was better like since I felt a bit better when I woke up. My mind was clearer and my hands were not burning anymore, at least. He didn't see that I was awake. I ran a hand through my hair and winced when I realized whole strands were gummed together.

"We'll stop in the first motel we'll find," he finally said. "Is that okay?

- I suppose." I shrugged. And looked at him in the rear view mirror. "You're not tired?

- It takes more than that to tire me.

- Well, it was tiring enough for me. The VFD training includes resisting to stressful and potentially lethal situations?

- Amongst others things."

I never spoke about childhood with Jacques. I guess we would have done it later, given the chance. As far as I know, the whole training stuff is more or less confidential and it's rather frowned upon to talk about it. I didn't figure out I was always in training myself, that my father and my teachers spent their time trying to teach me everything I had to know to react correctly in an emergency situation. I know what you think: it doesn't make sense. If my father really wanted to keep distance from VFD, why would he have trained me? Why was I supposed to begin my apprenticeship with Kit Snicket, the doom day when the world stopped turning? You have to ask him. I never quite understood. But without his insidious training, I wouldn't have survived all this. So I guess I owe him some gratitude. All things considered, no, I don't.

"Who trained you?

- A woman.

- Alright", I sighed. "Call me when you're in the mood of…

- I thought you were more purposeful.

- I'm tired of asking all the questions.

- That is because you only ask the wrong questions."

An amused smile floated on his lips, as if he'd just come up with the funniest joke ever. I didn't understand it and still don't, but his smile at least showed he was in a relatively good mood. Good for him. He glanced at me in the rear view mirror – poor mirror, it'd turned into our best communication medium, and rested his head on his clenched fist, his elbow against the window.

"She was called S. Theodora Markson.

- Was?

- Wrong question again." He paused. "Don't take that as a reproach. I was never able to ask the right questions. At least that's what she said. She wasn't wrong, look at me now.

- Are you close?

- No really, no." I raised an eyebrow. "That doesn't mean I don't like her."

It actually did mean that he didn't like her, for me. Honestly I never had the time or the desire to dwell on this Theodora Markson. Everything I know about her – and it doesn't mean much, I know it from Lemony and what I randomly found during my researches on VFD. Since those information never really overlap (they mostly tend to contradict each other), I never cared much about them. Maybe one day I'll engage in the subject. Maybe I'll understand Lemony a bit better. Or maybe I'll realize that everything he told me was a lie. But anyway, that's not the subject. It took me a few seconds to continue.

"No one trained me." Well, as far as I knew back then, at least. "Even my father…

- I believe my sister was supposed to be your chaperone.

- She was the one… We were going to meet?

- In all likelihood." He shrugged. "But you've already been trained. By your father, and by the teachers he appointed. He was a fairly good chaperone, before your birth.

- You talk about him as if you knew him," I retorted, remembering what he said in the shower. "Is it the case?"

He lost his smile. More precisely, his smile froze. My dear father was well-known within VFD, not always for good reasons, and hated by the Arsonist, this time probably for good reasons. But even if everyone said they did know my father, when I asked about him, that was a whole other story. Some sort of awkwardness surrounded him, awkwardness probably caused by the fact that he literally set up his wife and mother of his daughter's murder. And still everyone say the right side of the Schism is flawless. Lemony eventually replied, perhaps because he wouldn't have appreciated to find himself in front of such awkward answer. Or lack of.

"I didn't know him very well. We weren't part of the same generation, and he was already a VFD agent when I went through my apprenticeship. He was one of the thinking heads, though.

- And my mother?

- She was younger than him." He sighed. "I knew her better, yes. We were acting together, Olaf, Beatrice Baudelaire, her and I. She was an excellent actress.

- But how did she…

She was your father's apprentice. But he shouldn't have been her chaperone, let alone her husband. They were too… Different."

You don't say, Lemony. Most of VFD's records burnt, so checking this information was impossible. That being said, I believe him. If they'd been made for each other, maybe I would still have a mother, for lack of a father. Maybe it would have changed everything. Or maybe not.

Last time I talked about my parents with someone – under the guise of being interested by the history of the terrible Cassandre Dupin, the conversation ended up on a scornful gaze and a very simple sentence: a bad influence is always stronger than a good one anyway. Which implied that I had turned like my mother instead of following my father's path, of course. But I can't believe it's all so simple, that my mother was a monster whereas my father was blameless. And I can't believe the contrary either, that everyone would lie, and that my father would be the monster and my mother, the glorious martyr. That wouldn't make any sense. So I find myself with my mother's label stuck on my face without even knowing what it means, if I'm a monster or if I have a few qualities left.

But at this point, it was not this aspect of her description that surprised me. It was rather what he said before. Still the wrong questions, Lemony, right?

"She was an actress?

- An incredible one," he let out. "On occasions she also wrote, but she preferred to act. She had this… Talent to turn any play into an interesting one, as long as she appeared in it.

- Did you like her?

- She was a bright woman, but she never learnt to ask the right questions." He smiled again. "You resemble her, actually. Not just physically.

- I wouldn't be a good actress.

- You already are."

Of course it wasn't just about the fact that my mother was a good actress. It was a whole package neither I or him wanted to talk about. It was a whole package that led my mother to an early grave, and a whole package that seemed, at least back then, to foreordain me for the same fate. I can't say if this idea saddened him, nor if it saddens him today, but it was disturbing enough for him not to imagine it.

Lemony, this man everyone believed to be a dangerous fugitive. Me being by his side didn't always do him good – but it did me so much good. I never said I was selfless. Will never be. That's exactly the reason why I'm going to meet him at Briny Beach, where everything that lost itself in the sea always ends up. My heart included.