"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (11 page)

“They were trying to lure you and your father out of your home,” I said. “It’s someone who’s interested in that statue. They were hoping to steal it themselves while your house was empty.”

“But my house isn’t empty, Snicket.”

“The trick didn’t work,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter. The statue’s not there anymore, but whoever called doesn’t know that.”

“Do you know who it is?”

I shook my head.

“Well, someone’s been lurking around,” Moxie said. “Handkerchief Heights is supposed to be locked up tight, but it looks like somebody’s been
living here. Somebody’s been using the coffeepot. Somebody’s been drinking out of the cups. And somebody lit a fire with the wood that was piled up outside.”

“And somebody’s been eating your porridge,” I muttered, looking quickly around the room.

“What?”

“Nothing. Was someone using an old-fashioned record player? Or a pair of binoculars? Or a suitcase full of clothing?”

“We never had anything like that here,” Moxie said. “Why are you asking? What’s going on? Who was here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true. I had talked to Ellington Feint, but I did not know what I knew about her. And you promised, Snicket, I told myself. You promised to help her. I stalked out of the cottage and found the ladder she’d used to get to the top of the tree, leaning against the side of Handkerchief Heights. I thought
of the ladder I had hidden in the bathroom of the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop. If you hadn’t put that ladder there, you wouldn’t be here now, Snicket. You wouldn’t be in this mess, or this mystery, or this messy mystery, or this mysterious mess. You’d be deep in a hole in the city with a measuring tape your friend gave you, doing something else you’d promised to do instead. I got mad and I kicked the ladder, and then I realized I was still holding the bag of coffee and threw it to the ground. It burst open. I picked up the torn paper of the bag so I wouldn’t be littering, but there was nothing I could do about all the coffee in the grass. Maybe earthworms would want it. Theodora was probably drinking coffee right this minute, I thought to myself, waiting in the Far East Suite for me to bring her the statue I’d promised would be there in the morning. No wonder I was still on probation. I stared at the ripped, stenciled cat in my hands, and then out at the enormous, eerie
view of the Clusterous Forest. I imagined it had been a pretty view of the sea back when the sea had been here. The water would have been very choppy, with small patches of foamy white darting this way and that. Like handkerchiefs, I thought, and the newspapers on the hawser, flapping in the breeze, would have looked like handkerchiefs, too. Washerwoman, she’d said. Laundry. Ellington Feint was a liar. I glared out at the rustling seaweed for quite some time.

Sometimes you have the time, the effort, and even the chutzpah to give someone a good scolding, but there’s nobody around who deserves it.

Moxie came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. “So?” she asked.

“So?”

“What’s going on, Snicket? Who do you think was living in the cottage? How do you think they broke in? When do you think they got there?” I didn’t reply, but when I turned to face Moxie Mallahan, she didn’t look interested in the answers
to these questions. She wasn’t even looking at me. Instead, her eyes were focused everywhere else, as if she were scanning for the answers at the lighthouse, or back in the cottage, or down a ways in the Sallis mansion, or off the edge of the cliff where I had first arrived in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Then she asked a new question, and this question had my full attention. It is a question I had been asked three times before, and each time the answer was unpleasant. The answer is always unpleasant, because it is an unpleasant question.

“Where is that screaming coming from?” is what she asked.

CHAPTER NINE

There’s an easy method for finding someone
when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper. Even Moxie closed her typewriter up into its case with a brisk snap as we ran quickly through the trees.

There was no one in the trees or on the
brown grass. There was no one in trouble on the side of the cliff. It was as I feared. The screaming was coming from the Sallis mansion.

Moxie and I approached the mansion from the side, our feet crackling on birdseed dropped on the lawn. It was terrible to hear someone scream and be unable to help them. It went against all of my training. The confusing shapes of the building, with so many different styles of mansions jammed together, made it hard to tell exactly where the screams were coming from. One moment the desperate voice seemed to be coming from the tallest tower, but the next it seemed to be coming from the garden, with its fancy fountains and gray tent rippling in the breeze. The only things I knew for sure were that the screams were female and that I hoped they were Ellington’s. I did not like to think about whether I was hoping she was in trouble or hoping I could rescue her.

Moxie was frowning at the mansion. “How
are we going to get inside?” she asked me. “Do you know how to pick a lock?”

“Not really,” I said. “I received a grade of Incomplete. I know how to throw a rock through a window.”

“Everyone knows how to throw a rock through a window,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go around to the front.”

The screams didn’t let up for a minute as we circled the building until we were standing at the driveway where Theodora and I had arrived just yesterday. “Hello?” I called, but there were only screams in reply. They were a bit louder now, and I could see why. The enormous front door was hanging wide open, like an arm bent very hard the very wrong way. That reminded me of another thing I had never been able to learn properly.

There was something I was always very good at, however, and that was teaching myself not to be frightened while frightening things are going
on. It is difficult to do this, but I had learned. It is simply a matter of putting one’s fear aside, like the vegetable on the plate you don’t want to touch until all of your rice and chicken are gone, and getting frightened later, when one is out of danger. Sometimes I imagine I will be frightened for the rest of my life because of all of the fear I put aside during my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I led Moxie inside the house. The screaming seemed to come from everyplace, echoing in the long, empty hallway. I thought I remembered a carpet on the floor when I had first entered the Sallis mansion, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. The floor was bare now.

“The mansion is too big,” I said. “We’re going to have to split up.”

“You want me to find whoever’s screaming by myself?” Moxie asked.

“Get scared later,” I told her, and hurried down the hallway and up a wide flight of stairs. There were rings on the floor under the banister,
where potted plants had once been placed. Now they were gone. Everything seemed gone. There was a single lightbulb hanging from a wire in the ceiling above the staircase. Surely the Sallis family had enough money for a chandelier.

The screaming seemed louder at the top of the stairs, which led to another hallway with no carpets or furniture, simply rows of doors on either side. The first door revealed a room with nothing in it. So did the second. The third was a closet, and then a bathroom, and then three more rooms, but nowhere was there a person or even a scrap of furniture. The furnishings in the Sallis library, I remembered, had seemed wrong for the room. The room had been arranged hastily, using whatever furniture could be found, so Theodora and I would think the house was not deserted.

The door to the last room at the end of the hallway was difficult to open, because I had to take a moment to remind myself to be frightened
later, perhaps when I was a grown man. It was a waste of time. The only thing in this room was a mattress, placed flat on the ground, with several blankets and pillows in a messy pile. I kicked through them. Nothing, Snicket. But why do you still hear the screaming? It took me a moment to notice that the screams were coming from a small grate in the ceiling, probably for heating the house. It was why the screams seemed to be everywhere, because every room in the house had such a grate. The grates all connected to the heater. There was another sound, too, through the grate. At first it sounded like the rustling of the Clusterous Forest. Most people keep their heaters in the basement.

I ran downstairs, through a living room empty of everything except an enormous, smooth window overlooking the strange view, and across a kitchen with no refrigerator, no stove, and no pots or pans hanging from a bare rack. Moxie had figured out the same thing I had, and was pushing hard against a small white door. I hurried to help her. The door struggled to open, as if someone were on the other side, pushing back, but Moxie and I managed. There was no one on the other side, just a large rock, about the size of a good dictionary, that someone had wedged up against the door that led to the basement steps. We stood on the top step and looked down at something that would frighten us later.

The Sallis basement was enormous, about the size of a huge swimming pool or even a small lake, and right then, also like a huge swimming pool or a small lake, it was a body of water. The room was about half full of brown, churning water, slapping against the walls of the basement and slowly climbing the steps toward us as the water continued to rise. For a moment it appeared that the head of Mrs. Murphy Sallis was floating in the middle of the basement, blindfolded and screaming. But then I realized she must have been tied to something, with the
water rising above her and just inches away from reaching her mouth. She was about to drown. Moxie put her typewriter next to the door and started to walk down the stairs.

“No,” I said loudly over the rushing of the water, and grabbed her shoulder.

“We have to help her,” Moxie said, her brow furrowing under her hat.

“Not like that,” I said, trying to think quickly. On the far wall of the basement, I could see the top edge of a window, otherwise covered in water. I leaned down to pick up one end of the large stone. “Help me,” I said. “Everyone knows how to throw a rock through a window.”

We picked up the rock and heaved it at the window. It is more fun to throw rocks when you don’t have to care about where they will land, but the window was large enough and the rock was large enough that it wasn’t too hard to hit one with the other. The window broke with a muted shatter, and water immediately began to rush
out of the basement, as if we’d pulled the plug. Mrs. Sallis kept screaming, even when the water was low enough that we could walk down the stairs and untie her. The knots were difficult, but Moxie was good with them—better than I was, if I want to write the truth.

I left Moxie to her rope work and walked over to the source of the water, which was still gushing from a far corner. It was gushing from a large vat, wide enough for a grown-up to fit into, not that anybody would want to. It was fashioned out of gray bricks, with a large rusty lever alongside it. The lever moved easily, and the water stopped immediately. An underground spring, I realized, must have run under the Sallis mansion. It was a basement well, worked by a simple but clever pump. Well, well, well, I thought. No wonder the science reporters did research here.