Lemony Snicket - The Slippery Slope

"There's a word for the way she's preparing the fish," the hook-handed man said, "but I can't remember what it is."

"Lox," Sunny said, but no one heard her over the sound of Count Olaf storming out of his tent, followed by Esmé and the two sinister visitors. Olaf was clutching the Snicket file and glaring down at Sunny with his shiny, shiny eyes.

"Put that smoke out at once!" he ordered. "I thought you were a terrified orphan prisoner, but I'm beginning to think you're a spy!"

"What do you mean, Olaf?" asked the other white-faced woman. "She's using Esmé's cigarette to cook us some fish."

"Someone might see the smoke," Esmé snarled, as if she had not been smoking herself just moments ago. "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

The man with a beard but no hair picked up a handful of snow and threw it onto the weeds, extinguishing the Verdant Flammable Device. "Who are you signaling to, baby?" he asked, in his strange, hoarse voice. "If you're a spy, we're going to toss you off this mountain."

"Goo goo," Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of "I'm going to pretend I'm a helpless baby, instead of answering your question."

"You see?" the white-faced woman said, looking nervously at the man with a beard but no hair. "She's just a helpless baby."

"Perhaps you're right," said the woman with hair but no beard. "Besides, there's no reason to toss a baby off a mountain unless you absolutely have to."

"Babies can come in handy," Count Olaf agreed. "In fact, I've been thinking about recruiting more young people into my troupe. They're less likely to complain about doing my bidding."

"But we never complain," the hook-handed man said. "I try to be as accommodating as possible."

"Enough chitchat," said the man with a beard but no hair. "We have a lot of scheming to do, Olaf. I have some information that might help you with your recruiting idea, and according to the Snicket file, there's one more safe place for the volunteers to gather."

"The last safe place," said the sinister woman. "We have to find it and burn it down."

"And once we do," Count Olaf said, "the last evidence of our plans will be completely destroyed. We'll never have to worry about the authorities again."

"Where is this last safe place?" asked Kevin.

Olaf opened his mouth to answer, but the woman with hair but no beard stopped him with a quick gesture and a suspicious glance down at Sunny. "Not in front of the toothy orphan," she said, in her deep, deep voice. "If she learned what we were up to, she'd never sleep again, and you need your infant servant full of energy. Send her away, and we'll make our plans."

"Of course," Olaf said, smiling nervously at the sinister visitors. "Orphan, go to my car and remove all of the potato chip crumbs from the interior by blowing as hard as you can."

"Futil," Sunny said, which meant something like, "That is an absolutely impossible chore," but she walked unsteadily toward the car while Olaf's troupe laughed and gathered around the flat rock to hear the new scheme. Passing the extinguished fire and the covered casserole dish where she would sleep that night, Sunny sighed sadly, thinking that her signal plan must have failed. But when she reached Olaf's car and gazed down at the frozen waterfall, she saw something that lightened her spirits, a phrase which here means "an identical plume of green smoke, coming from the very bottom of the slope." The youngest Baudelaire looked down at the smoke and smiled.

"Sibling," she said to herself. Sunny, of course, could not be certain that it was Violet and Klaus who were signaling to her, but she could hope it was so, and hope was enough to cheer her up as she opened the door of the car and began blowing at the crumbs Olaf and his troupe had scattered all over the upholstery.

But at the bottom of the frozen waterfall, the two elder Baudelaires did not feel nearly as hopeful as they stood with Quigley and watched the green smoke disappear from the highest peak.

"Someone put out the Verdant Flammable Device," Quigley said, holding the green tube to one side so he wouldn't smell the smoke. "What do you think that means?"

"I don't know," Violet said, and sighed. "This isn't working."

"Of course it's working," Klaus said. "It's working perfectly. You noticed that the afternoon sun was reflecting off the frozen waterfall, and it gave you the idea to use the scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light — just like you did on Lake Lachrymose, when we were battling the leeches. So you used Colette's hand mirror to catch the sun's rays and reflect them onto the end of the Verdant Flammable Device, so we could light it and send a signal."

"Klaus is right," Quigley said. "It couldn't have worked better."

"Thank you," Violet said, "but that's not what I mean. I mean this code isn't working. We still don't know who's up on the peak, or why they were signaling us, and now the signal has stopped, but we still don't know what it means."

"Maybe we should extinguish our Verdant Flammable Device, too," Klaus said.

"Maybe," Violet agreed, "or maybe we should go up to the top of the waterfall and see for ourselves who is there."

Quigley frowned, and took out his commonplace book. "The only way up to the highest peak," he said, "is the path that the Snow Scouts are taking. We'd have to go back through the Vernacularly Fastened Door, back down the Vertical Flame Diversion, back into the Volunteer Feline Detective cave, rejoin the scouts and hike for a long time."

"That's not the only way up to the peak," Violet said with a smile.

"Yes, it is," Quigley insisted. "Look at the map."

"Look at the waterfall," Violet replied, and all three children looked up at the shiny slope.

"Do you mean," Klaus said, "that you think you can invent something which can get us up a frozen waterfall?"

But Violet was already tying her hair out of her eyes again, and looking around at the ruins of the V.F.D. headquarters. "I'll need that ukulele that you took from the caravan," she said to Klaus, "and that half-melted candelabra over there by the dining room table."

Klaus took the ukulele from his coat pocket and handed it to his sister, and then walked over to the table to retrieve the strange, melted object. "Unless you need any further assistance," he said, "I think I might go examine the wreckage of the library and see if any documents have survived. We might as well learn as much from this headquarters as we can."

"Good idea," Quigley said, and reached into his backpack. He brought out a notebook much like his own, except it had a dark blue cover. "I have a spare notebook," he said. "You might be interested in starting a commonplace book of your own."

"That's very kind of you," Klaus said. "I'll write down anything I find. Do you want to join the search?"

"I think I'll stay here," Quigley said, looking at Violet. "I've heard quite a bit about Violet Baudelaire's marvelous inventions, and I'd like to see her at work."

Klaus nodded, and walked off to the iron archway marking the entrance of the ruined library, while Violet blushed and leaned down to pick up one of the forks that had survived the fire.

It is one of the great sadnesses of the Baudelaire case that Violet never got to meet a man named C. M. Kornbluth, an associate of mine who spent most of his life living and working in the Valley of Four Drafts as a mechanical instructor at the V.F.D. headquarters. Mr. Kornbluth was a quiet and secretive man, so secretive that no one ever knew who he was, where he came from, or even what the C or the M stood for, and he spent much of his time holed up in his dormitory room writing strange stories, or gazing sadly out the windows of the kitchen. The one thing that put Mr. Kornbluth in a good mood would be a particularly promising mechanical student. If a young man showed an interest in deep sea radar, Mr. Kornbluth would take off his glasses and smile. If a young woman brought him a staple gun she had built, Mr. Kornbluth would clap his hands in excitement. And if a pair of twins asked him how to properly reroute some copper wiring, he would take a paper bag out of his pocket and offer some pistachio nuts to anyone who happened to be around. So, when I think of Violet Baudelaire standing in the wreckage of the V.F.D. headquarters, carefully taking the strings off the ukulele and bending some of the forks in half, I can imagine Mr. Kornbluth, even though he and his pistachios are long gone, turning from the window, smiling at the Baudelaire inventor, and saying, "Beatrice, come over here! Look at what this girl is making!"