Lemony Snicket - The Slippery Slope

"Sakesushi," Sunny said quietly, which meant "I don't think you'll enjoy salmon if it's not cooked."

"Stop your baby talk and wash these dishes," Olaf ordered. "They're covered in lousy food."

"You know, Olaf," said the white-faced woman who had asked for sugar, "it's none of my business, but we might put someone else in charge of cooking. It was probably difficult for a baby to prepare a hot breakfast without a fire."

"But there is a fire," said a deep, low voice, and everyone turned around to see who had arrived.

Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do it makes you want to hide under the coffee table. An aura of menace is simply a distinct feeling of evil that accompanies the arrival of certain people, and very few individuals are evil enough to produce an aura of menace that is very strong. Count Olaf, for example, had an aura of menace that the three Baudelaires had felt the moment they met him, but a number of other people never seemed to sense that a villain was in their midst, even when Olaf was standing right next to them with an evil gleam in his eye. But when two visitors arrived at the highest peak of the Mortmain Mountains, their aura of menace was unmistakable. Sunny gasped when she saw them. Esmé Squalor shuddered in her snowsuit. The members of Olaf's troupe — all except the hook-handed man, who was busy fishing for salmon and so was lucky enough to miss the visitors' arrival — gazed down at the snowy ground rather than take a further look at them. Count Olaf himself looked a bit nervous as the man, the woman, and their aura of menace drew closer and closer. And even I, after all this time, can feel their aura of menace so strongly, just by writing about these two people, that I dare not say their names, and will instead refer to them the way everyone who dares refer to them refers to them, as "the man with a beard, but no hair" and "the woman with hair, but no beard."

"It's good to see you, Olaf," continued the deep voice, and Sunny realized that the voice belonged to the sinister-looking woman. She was dressed in a suit made of a strange blue fabric that was very shiny, decorated with two large pads, one on each shoulder. She was dragging a wooden toboggan — a word which here means "a sled big enough to hold several people," which made an eerie scraping sound against the cold ground. "I was worried that the authorities might have captured you."

"You look well," said the man with a beard but no hair. He was dressed identically to the woman with hair but no beard, but his voice was very hoarse, as if he had been screaming for hours and could hardly talk. "It's been a long time since we've laid eyes on one another." The man gave Olaf a grin that made it seem even colder on the mountain peak, and then stopped and helped the woman lean the toboggan against the rock where Sunny had served breakfast. The youngest Baudelaire saw that the toboggan was painted with the familiar eye insignia, and had a few long leather straps, presumably used for steering.

Count Olaf coughed lightly into his hand, which is something people often do when they cannot think of what to say. "Hello," he said, a bit nervously. "Did I hear you say something about a fire?"

The man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard looked at one another and shared a laugh that made Sunny cover her ears with her hands. "Haven't you noticed," the woman said, "that there are no snow gnats around?"

"We had noticed that," Esmé said. "I thought maybe snow gnats were no longer in."

"Don't be ridiculous, Esmé," said the man with a beard but no hair. He reached out and kissed Esmé's hand, which Sunny could see was trembling. "The gnats aren't around because they can smell the smoke."

"I don't smell anything," said Hugo.

"Well, if you were a tiny insect, you'd smell something," replied the woman with hair but no beard. "If you were a snow gnat, you'd smell the smoke from the V.F.D. headquarters."

"We did you a favor, Olaf," the man said. "We burned the entire place down."

"No!" Sunny cried, before she could stop herself. By "No!" she meant "I certainly hope that isn't true, because my siblings and I hoped to reach V.F.D. headquarters, solve the mysteries that surround us, and perhaps find one of our parents," but she had not planned to say it out loud. The two visitors looked down at the youngest Baudelaire, casting their aura of menace in her direction.

"What is that?" asked the man with a beard but no hair.

"That's the youngest Baudelaire," replied Esmé. "We've eliminated the other two, but we're keeping this one around to do our bidding until we can finally steal the fortune."

The woman with hair but no beard nodded. "Infant servants are so troublesome," she said. "I had an infant servant once — a long time ago, before the schism."

"Before the schism?" Olaf said, and Sunny wished Klaus were with her, because the baby did not know what the word "schism" meant. "That is a long time ago. That infant must be all grown up by now."

"Not necessarily," the woman said, and laughed again, while her companion leaned down to gaze at Sunny. Sunny could not bear to look into the eyes of the man with a beard but no hair, and instead looked down at his shiny shoes.

"So this is Sunny Baudelaire," he said in his strange, hoarse voice. "Well, well, well. I've heard so much about this little orphan. She's caused almost as many problems as her parents did." He stood up again and looked around at Olaf and his troupe. "But we know how to solve problems, don't we? Fire can solve any problem in the world."

He began to laugh, and the woman with hair but no beard laughed along with him. Nervously, Count Olaf began to laugh, too, and then glared at his troupe until they laughed along with him, and Sunny found herself surrounded by tall, laughing villains. "Oh, it was wonderful," said the woman with hair but no beard. "First we burned down the kitchen. Then we burned down the dining room. Then we burned down the parlor, and then the disguise center, the movie room, and the stables. Then we moved on to the gymnasium and the training center, and the garage and all six of the laboratories. We burned down the dormitories and schoolrooms, the lounge, the theater, and the music room, as well as the museum and the ice cream shop. Then we burned down the rehearsal studios and the testing centers and the swimming pool, which was very hard to burn down. Then we burned down all the bathrooms, and then finally, we burned down the V.F.D. library last night. That was my favorite part — books and books and books, all turned to ashes so no one could read them. You should have been there, Olaf! Every morning we lit fires and every evening we celebrated with a bottle of wine and some finger puppets. We've been wearing these fireproof suits for almost a month. It's been a marvelous time."

"Why did you burn it down gradually?" Count Olaf asked. "Whenever I burn something down, I do it all at once."

"We couldn't have burned down the entire headquarters at once," said the man with a beard but no hair. "Someone would have spotted us. Remember, where there's smoke there's fire."

"But if you burned the headquarters down room by room," Esmé said, "didn't all of the volunteers escape?"

"They were gone already," said the man, and scratched his head where his hair might have been. "The entire headquarters were deserted. It was as if they knew we were coming. Oh well, you can't win them all."

"Maybe we'll find some of them when we burn down the carnival," said the woman, in her deep, deep voice.

"Carnival?" Olaf asked nervously.

"Yes," the woman said, and scratched the place where her beard would have been, if she had one. "There's an important piece of evidence that V.F.D. has hidden in a figurine sold at Caligari Carnival, so we need to go burn it down."