Lemony Snicket - Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS

“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”

“When Did You See Her Last?”

“Shouldn’t You Be in School?”

“Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”

ADDITIONAL REPORTS

File Under: Thirteen Suspicious Incidents

Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

First published in Great Britain 2015

by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building

1 Nicholas Road

London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2015 Lemony Snicket

Art copyright © 2015 Seth

ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company, New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted

First e-book edition 2015

978 1 4052 5624 7

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1233 0

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Stay safe online. Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

TO: B., P. Bellerophon

FROM: LS

FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; murder, investigations of; Hangfire; Bombinating Beast

4/4

cc: VFDhq

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? First published in Great Britain 2015 by Egmont UK Limited The Yellow Building 1 Nicholas Road London W11 4AN Text copyright © 2015 Lemony Snicket Art copyright © 2015 Seth ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket reprinted by arrangement with Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Illustrations published by arrangement with Little, Brown, and Company, New York, New York, USA. All rights reserved. The moral rights of the author and artist have been asserted First e-book edition 2015 978 1 4052 5624 7 Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1233 0 www.egmont.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Stay safe online. Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

There was a town, and there was a train, and there was a murder. I was on the train, and I thought if I solved the murder I could save the town. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question “Is it more beastly to be a murderer or to let one go free?” Instead, I asked the wrong question—four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of the last.

I was in a small room, not sleeping and not liking it. The room was called the Far East Suite, and it sat uncomfortably in the Lost Arms, the only hotel in town. It had a chest of drawers and a little table with a metal plate that was responsible for heating up a number of very bad meals. A puzzling shape on the ceiling was someone’s idea of a light fixture, and a girl on the wall, holding an injured dog, was someone else’s idea of a painting. There was one window and one shutter covering it, so the room was far too dark except in the morning. In the morning it was far too light.

But most of the room was a pair of beds, and most of what I didn’t like slept in the larger one. Her name was S. Theodora Markson. I was her apprentice and she was my chaperone and the person who had brought me to the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea in the first place. She had wild hair and a green automobile, and those are the nicest things I could think of to say about her. We’d had a fight over our last big case, which you can read about if you’re the sort of person who likes to know about other people’s fights. She was still mad at me and had informed me I was not allowed to be mad at her. We had not talked much lately, except when I occasionally asked her what the S stood for in her name and she occasionally replied, “Stop asking.” That night she had announced to me that we were both going to bed early. There is nothing wrong with an early bedtime, as long as you do not insist that everyone has to go with you. Now her wild hair lay sprawled on the pillow like a mop had jumped off a roof, and she was snoring a snore I’d never heard before. It is lonely to lie on your bed, wide awake, listening to someone snore.

I told myself I had no reason to feel lonely. It was true I had a number of companions in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, people more or less my own age, who had similar interests. Our most significant interest was in defeating a villain named Hangfire. My associates and I had formed an ad hoc branch of the organization that had sent me to this town. “Ad hoc” means we were all alone and making it up as we went along. Hangfire worked in the shadows, scheming to get his hands on a statue of a mythical creature called the Bombinating Beast, so my friends and I had also started to keep our activities quiet, so that Hangfire would not find out about us. We no longer saw each other as much as we used to, but worked in solitude, in the hopes of stopping Hangfire and saving Stain’d-by-the-Sea.

The distant whistle of a train reminded me that so far my associates and I hadn’t had much success. Stain’d-by-the-Sea was a town that had faded almost to nothing. The sea had been drained away to save the ink business, but now the ink business was draining away, and everything in town was going down the drain with it. The newspaper was gone. The only proper school had burned down, and the town’s schoolchildren were being held prisoner. Hangfire and his associates in the Inhumane Society had them hidden in Wade Academy, an abandoned school on Offshore Island, for some reason that was surely nefarious, a word which here means “wicked, and involving stolen honeydew melons and certain equipment from an abandoned aquarium.” The town’s only librarian, Dashiell Qwerty, had been framed for arson, so now the town’s only police officers would take the town’s only librarian out of his cell and put him on the town’s only train, so he could stand trial in the city.