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.
You know who else is in the city standing trial, I told myself, but thinking about my sister didn’t make it any easier to get to sleep. Kit had been caught on a caper when I was supposed to be there helping her. I felt very bad about this, and kept writing her letters in my head. The preamble was always “Dear Kit,” but then I had trouble. Sometimes I promised her I would get her out, but that was a promise I couldn’t necessarily keep. Sometimes I told her that soon she would be free, but I didn’t know if that was true. So I told her I was thinking of her, but that felt very meager, so I kept crumpling up these imaginary letters and throwing them into a very handsome imaginary trash can.
And then there’s the one, I thought, who has stolen more sleep from you than all the rest. Ellington Feint, like me, was somewhat new in town, having come to rescue her father from Hangfire’s clutches. She’d told me that she would do “anything and everything” to rescue him, and “anything and everything” turned out to be a phrase which meant “a number of terrible crimes.” Her crimes had caught up with her, and now she was locked in Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s tiny jail. The train is coming for her too, I told myself. Soon she will be transported through the outskirts of town and down into the valley that was once the floor of the ocean. She will ride past the Clusterous Forest, a vast, lawless landscape of seaweed that has managed to survive without water, and you might never see her again.
So many people to think about, Snicket, and still you are all alone.
The whistle blew again, louder this time, or perhaps it just seemed louder because Theodora’s odd snoring had stopped. It had stopped because it wasn’t snoring. She’d been pretending to be asleep. I closed my eyes and held still so I could find out why.
“Snicket?” she whispered in the dark room. “Lemony Snicket?”
I didn’t make a sound. When pretending to be asleep, you should never fake snoring in front of people who may have heard your actual snores. You should simply breathe and keep still. There are a great number of circumstances in which this strategy is helpful.
“Snicket?”
I kept still and kept breathing.
“Snicket, I know you’re awake.”
I didn’t fall for that old trick. I listened to Theodora sigh, and then, with a great creaking, she got out of bed and pattered to the bathroom. There was a click and a small stripe of light fell across my face. I let it. Theodora rustled around in the bathroom and then the light went out and she walked across the Far East Suite with her feet sounding different than they had. She’d put on her boots, I realized. She was going out in the middle of the night, just when the train was coming to a stop.
I heard the doorknob rattle and quit. She was giving me one last look. Perhaps I should have opened my eyes, or simply said, suddenly in the dark, “Good luck.” It would have been fun to startle her like that. But I just let her walk out and shut the door.
I decided to count to ten to make sure she was really gone. When I reached fourteen, she opened the door again to check on me. Then she walked out again and knocked the door shut again and I counted again and then one more time and then I stood up and turned the light on and moved quickly. I was at a disadvantage because I was in my pajamas, and it took me a few moments to hurry into clothing. I put on a long-sleeved shirt with a stiff collar that was clean enough, and my best shoes and a jacket that matched some good thick pants with a very strong belt. I mention the belt for a reason. I walked quickly to the door and opened it and looked down the hallway to make sure she wasn’t waiting for me, but S. Theodora Markson had never been that clever.
I looked back at the room. The star-shaped fixture shone down on everything. The girl with the dog with the bandaged paw gave me her usual frown, as if she were bored and hoped I’d give her a magazine. Had I known I was leaving the Far East Suite behind forever, I might have taken a longer look. But instead I just glanced at it. The room looked like a room. I killed the lights.
In the lobby were two familiar figures, but neither of them was my chaperone. One was the statue that was always there in the middle of the room, depicting a woman with no clothes or arms, and the other was Prosper Lost, the hotel’s proprietor, who stood by the desk giving me his usual smile. It was a smile that meant he would do anything to help you, anything at all, as long as it wasn’t too much trouble.
“Good evening, Mr Snicket.”
“Good evening,” I told him back. “How’s your daughter, Lost?”
“If you hadn’t decided to go to bed early, you would have seen her,” Prosper told me. “She stopped by to visit me, and left something for you as well.”
“Is that so?” I said. Ornette Lost was one of my associates, and for reasons I didn’t quite understand, she lived with her uncles, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only remaining firefighters, instead of with her father.
“That is so,” her father said now, and reached into his desk to retrieve a small object made of folded paper. I picked it up just as the whistle blew again.
It was a train.
“Ornette’s always been good at fashioning extraordinary things out of ordinary materials,” Lost said. “I suppose it runs in the family. Her mother had a great interest in sculpture.”
“Did she?” I said, although I was not really listening. When someone leaves a folded paper train for you, you take a moment to wonder why.
“She did indeed,” Lost said. “Alice had an enormous collection of statues and a great number of her own sculptures as well. They were displayed in the Far West Wing of this very hotel. My wife hoped the glyptotheca would attract tourists, but things didn’t go as planned.”
“They
