Lemony Snicket - The Carnivorous Carnival

Esmé gave the older Baudelaires a large false smile, and leaned forward to pat them each on the head again. "Don't worry your heads over whether or not she deserves to be devoured," she said, and then smiled down at Chabo. "You don't deserve to be half wolf, do you?" she asked. "People don't always get what they deserve in this world."

"It still seems like a wicked thing to do," Klaus said.

"I don't think so," Hugo said. "It's giving people what they want, just like Lulu says."

"Why don't you sleep on it?" Esmé suggested, and stood up from the table. "Right after tomorrow's show, Count Olaf is heading north to the Mortmain Mountains to take care of something important, and if Madame Lulu is eaten by then, you'll be allowed to join him. You can decide in the morning whether you want to be brave members of a theater troupe, or cowardly freaks in a rundown carnival."

"I don't need to sleep on it," Kevin said.

"Me neither," Colette said. "I can decide right now."

"Yes," Hugo agreed. "I want to join Count Olaf."

"I'm glad to hear that," Esmé said. "Maybe you can convince your coworkers to join you in joining me joining him." She looked scornfully at the three children as she opened the door to the caravan. The hinterlands sunset was long over, and there was not a trace of blue light falling on the carnival. "Think about this, Beverly and Elliot, and Chabo, too," she said. "It just might be a wicked thing, throwing Madame Lulu into a pit full of carnivorous lions." Esmé took a step outside, and it was so dark that Olaf's girlfriend looked like a ghost in a long, white gown and a fake extra head. "But if you don't join us, where can you possibly go?" she asked. The Baudelaire orphans had no answer for Esmé Squalor's terrible question, but Esmé answered it herself, with a long, wicked laugh. "If you don't choose the wicked thing what in the world will you do?" she asked, and disappeared into the night.

The curious thing about being told to sleep on it — a phrase which here means, as I'm sure you know, "to go to bed thinking about something and reach a conclusion in the morning" — is that you usually can't. If you are thinking over a dilemma, you are likely to toss and turn all night long, thinking over terrible things that can happen and trying to imagine what in the world you can do about it, and these circumstances are unlikely to result in any sleeping at all. Just last night, I was troubled by a decision involving an eyedropper, a greedy night watchman, and a tray of individual custards, and this morning I am so tired that I can scarcely type these words. And so it was with the Baudelaire orphans that night, after Esmé Squalor had told them to sleep on it, and decide the next morning whether or not to throw Madame Lulu to the lions and join Count Olaf's troupe. The children, of course, had no intention of becoming part of a band of villains, or tossing anyone into a deadly pit. But Esmé had also asked them what in the world they would do if they decided not to join Olaf, and this was the question that kept them tossing and turning in their hammocks, which are particularly uncomfortable places to toss and turn. The Baudelaires hoped that instead of joining Count Olaf, they would travel through the hinterlands in a motorized roller-coaster cart of Violet's invention, accompanied by Madame Lulu, in her undisguised identity of Olivia, along with the archival library from underneath the table of the fortune-telling tent, in the hopes of finding one of the Baudelaire parents alive and well at the V.F.D. headquarters in the Mortmain Mountains. But this plan seemed so complicated that the children worried over all that could go wrong and spoil the whole thing. Violet thought about the lightning device that she planned to turn into a fan belt, and worried that there wouldn't be sufficient torque to make the carts move the way they needed to. Klaus worried that the archival library wouldn't contain specific directions to the headquarters, and they would get lost in the mountains, which were rumored to be enormous, confusing, and filled with wild animals. Sunny worried that they might not find enough to eat in the hinterlands. And all three Baudelaires worried that Madame Lulu would not keep her promise, and would reveal the orphans' disguise when Count Olaf asked about them the next morning. The siblings worried about these things all night, and although in my case the dessert chef managed to find my hotel room and knock on my window just before dawn, the Baudelaire orphans found that when morning came and they were done sleeping on it, they hadn't reached any other conclusion but that their plan was risky, and the only one they could think of.

As the first rays of the sun shone through the window onto the potted plants, the Baudelaires quietly lowered themselves out of their hammocks. Hugo, Colette, and Kevin had announced that they were ready to join Count Olaf's troupe and didn't need to sleep on it, and as so often happens with people who have nothing to sleep on, the children's coworkers were sleeping soundly and did not awaken as the siblings left the caravan to get to work on their plan.

Count Olaf and his troupe had dug the lions' pit alongside the ruined roller coaster, so close that the children had to walk along its edge to reach the ivy-covered carts. The pit was not very deep, although its walls were just high enough that nobody could climb out if they were thrown inside, and it was not very large, so all the lions were as crowded together as they had been in the trailer. Like the Baudelaires' coworkers, the lions must not have had much to sleep on, and they were still dozing in the morning sun. Sound asleep, the lions did not look particularly ferocious. Some of their manes were all tangled, as if no one had brushed them for a long time, and sometimes one of their legs twitched, as if they were dreaming of better days. On their backs and bellies were several nasty scars from the whippings Count Olaf had given them, which made the Baudelaires sore just looking at them, and most of the lions were very, very thin, as if they had not eaten a good meal in quite some time.

"I feel sorry for them," Violet said, looking at one lion who was so skinny that all of its ribs were visible. "If Madame Lulu was right, these lions were once noble creatures, and now look how miserably Count Olaf has treated them."

"They look lonely," Klaus said, squinting down into the pit with a sad frown. "Maybe they're orphans, too."

"But maybe they have a surviving parent," Violet said, "somewhere in the Mortmain Mountains."

"Edasurc," Sunny said, which meant something like, "Maybe someday we can rescue these lions."

"For now, let's rescue ourselves," Violet said with a sigh. "Klaus, let's see if we can untangle the ivy from this cart in front. We'll probably need two carts, one for passengers and one for the archival library, so Sunny, see if you can get the ivy off that other one."

"Easy," said Sunny, pointing to her teeth.

"All the caravans are on wheels," Klaus said. "Would it be easier to hitch up one of the caravans to the lightning device?"

"A caravan is too big," Violet replied. "If you wanted to move a caravan, you'd have to attach it to an automobile, or several horses.

We'll be lucky if I can rebuild the carts' engines. Madame Lulu said that they were rusted away."

"It seems like we're hitching our hopes to a risky plan," Klaus said, tearing away at a few strands of ivy with the one arm he could use. "But I suppose it's no more risky than plenty of other things we've done, like stealing a sailboat."

"Or climbing up an elevator shaft," Violet said.

"Whaque," Sunny said, with her mouth full of plants, and her siblings knew she meant something along the lines of, "Or pretending to be surgeons."