Lemony Snicket - The Penultimate Peril

"Of course I'm who you think I am," he said, feeling as if he were talking in code, although in a code he did not know. "I'm a concierge."

"I see," said Frank or Ernest, as unfathomable as ever. "I'm grateful for your assistance, concierge. Not many people have the courage to help with a scheme like this."

Without another word, the manager left, and Klaus was alone in the sauna. Carefully, he walked through the steam and felt his way to the window, which he managed to unlatch and open, swinging a shutter marked d out over the pond. As will happen when a very hot room is exposed to cold air, the steam raced through the window and evaporated. With the steam gone, Klaus could see the wooden walls and benches that comprised the sauna, and he only wished that everything were as clear in his own head as it was in Room 613. In silence, he attached one end of the birdpaper to the windowsill, his head spinning with his mysterious observations as a flaneur and his mysterious errand as a concierge, and in silence he dangled the rest outside, where it curved stiffly over the pond like a slide at a playground. In silence he gazed at this strange arrangement, and wondered which manager had requested such an odd task. But before he could leave the sauna, Klaus's silence was shattered by an enormous noise.

The clock in the lobby of the Hotel Denouement is the stuff of legend, a phrase which here means "very famous for being very loud." It is located in the very center of the ceiling, at the very top of the dome, and when the clock announces the hour, its bells clang throughout the entire building, making an immense, deep noise that sounds like a certain word being uttered once for each hour. At this particular moment, it was three o'clock, and everyone in the hotel could hear the booming ring of the enormous bells of the clock, uttering the word three times in succession: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! As he turned away from the sauna's open window and walked back down the hall toward the elevator doors, Klaus Baudelaire felt as if the clock were scolding him for his efforts at solving the mysteries of the Hotel Denouement. Wrong! He had tried his best to be a flaneur, but hadn't observed enough to know exactly what Sir and Charles were doing at the hotel. Wrong! He had tried to communicate with one of the hotel's managers, but had been unable to discover whether he was Frank or Ernest. And- most Wrong! of all-he had performed his errand as a concierge, and now a strip of birdpaper was dangling out of the Hotel Denouement, where it would serve some unknown, sinister purpose. With each strike of the clock, Klaus felt wronger and wronger, and as he stepped inside the small elevator, he frowned in thought. He dearly hoped his two siblings had found more success in their errands, for as he walked through the sliding doors and pressed the button to return to the lobby, all the middle Baudelaire could think was that everything was wrong, wrong, wrong.

When the elevator reached the third story, Sunny bid good-bye to her siblings and stepped out into a long, empty hallway. Numbered doors lined the hallway, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, as well as large, ornamental vases that were taller than Sunny but not nearly as charming. The youngest Baudelaire walked on the smooth, gray carpet in nervous, uncertain steps. Pretending to be a concierge in order to be a flaneur, in the hopes of unraveling a mystery unfolding in an enormous, perplexing hotel, was a difficult enough task for her older siblings, but it was particularly difficult for someone just growing out of babyhood. Over the past few months, Sunny Baudelaire had improved her walking abilities, adopted a more standard vocabulary, and even learned how to cook, but she was still unsure whether she could successfully pass for a hotel professional. As she approached the guests who had rung for a concierge, she decided that she would adopt a taciturn demeanor, a phrase which here means "only communicate when absolutely necessary, so as not to call attention to her youth and relative inexperience in employment."

When Sunny reached Room 371 she thought at first there had been some mistake. Down in the lobby, either Frank or Ernest had told the Baudelaires that educational guests were staying in that particular room, but the youngest Baudelaire could not imagine what educational purpose could explain the unearthly sounds coming from behind the door, unless perhaps a teacher was giving a class on how to torture a small animal. Someone-or something-in Room 371 was making dreadful squeaks, strange moans, piercing whistles, irritating shrieks, mysterious mutterings, and, suddenly, a melodic hum or two, and the sounds were so loud that it was a moment before anyone heard Sunny's gloved fists knocking on the door.

"Who dares interrupt a genius when he's rehearsing?" said a voice that was loud, booming, and strangely familiar.

"Concierge," Sunny called.

"Concierge," the voice mimicked back to Sunny, in a high, squealing tone that the Baudelaire recognized instantly, and to her dismay the door opened and there stood a person she had hoped she would never encounter again.

If you have ever worked someplace and then, later, not worked there, then you know there are three ways you can leave a job: you can quit, you can be fired, or you can exit by mutual agreement. "Quit," as I'm sure you know, is a word which means that you were disappointed with your employer. "Fired," of course, is a word which means that your employer was disappointed with you. And "exit by mutual agreement" is a phrase which means that you wanted to quit, and your employer wanted to fire you, and that you ran out of the office, factory, or monastery before anyone could decide who got to go first. In any case, no matter which method you use to leave a job, it is never pleasant to run into a former employer, because it reminds both of you of all the miserable time you spent working together. I once threw myself down a flight of stairs rather than face even one moment with a milliner, at whose shop I quit working after discovering the sinister truth about her berets, only to find that the paramedic who repaired my fractured arm was a man who had fired me from a job playing accordion in his orchestra after only two and half performances of a certain opera. It would be difficult to say whether Sunny ended her brief stint-a word which here means "dreadful period of time"-working as an administrative assistant at Prufrock Preparatory School by quitting, getting fired, or exiting by mutual agreement, as she and her siblings were removed from the boarding school after a scheme of Count Olaf's almost succeeded, but it was still unpleasant to be face-to-face with Vice Principal Nero after all this time.

"What do you want?" Nero demanded, brandishing the violin that had been making all that dreadful noise. Sunny was not pleased to see that Nero's four pigtails, which were quite short when she had first made the vice principal's acquaintance, had grown into long, stringy braids, and that he still liked to wear a necktie decorated with pictures of snails.

"You rang," Sunny said, as taciturnly as she could.

"You rang," Nero mimicked immediately. "Well, so what if I did? Ringing for you is no excuse for interrupting me while I'm practicing the violin. I have a very important violin recital on Thursday, and I plan on rehearsing every moment until then."

"Please, boss," said another familiar voice, and Nero turned around, his greasy braids swinging behind him. Sunny saw, to her dismay, that Nero was sharing Room 371 with two other figures from the Baudelaires' past. "You said we could stop for a lunch break," continued Mr. Remora, who had been Violet's teacher at Prufrock Preparatory School, although it would be difficult to say exactly what kind of teacher he was, as all he liked to do was tell short, pointless stories, and eat banana after banana, occasionally smearing the yellow pulp all over his mustache, which was as dark and thick as a gorilla's thumb.