"Watch this," she said, and flicked the first switch. Immediately, the gears began to spin, and the long strip of rubber began to move, and the wheel of mirrors became a whirring circle.
"But what does it do?" Klaus said.
"Listen," Violet said, and the children could hear a low, buzzing hum coming from the machine. "That's the hum Count Olaf was talking about. He thought it was coming from the crystal ball, but it was coming from this invention."
"I thought a magical hum sounded fishy," Klaus said.
"Legror?" Sunny asked, which meant "But what about the lightning?"
"You see how that larger mirror is angled?" Violet said. "It's pointed so that it reflects any light that comes out of the small hole in the tent."
"But there isn't any light coming from it," Klaus said.
"Not now," Violet said, "because the hole is facing east, and it's late in the afternoon. But in the morning, when Madame Lulu does her fortune-telling, the sun is rising, and the light of the sunrise would shine right on that mirror. And that mirror would reflect it onto the other mirrors, put into motion by the torquated belt"
"Wait," Klaus said. "I don't understand."
"That's O.K.," Violet said. "Count Olaf doesn't understand either. When he walks into the tent in the morning, Madame Lulu turns this invention on and the room is filled with flickering lights. Remember when I used the refraction of light to make a signaling device at Lake Lachrymose? It's the same thing, but Lulu tells him that it's magical lightning."
"But wouldn't Olaf look up and see that it wasn't magical lightning?"
"Not if the lights were off," Violet said, flicking the other switch, and above them the stars went out. The cloth of the tent was so thick that no light from outside shone in, and the Baudelaires found themselves in utter darkness. It reminded the children of when they were climbing down the elevator shaft of 667 Dark Avenue, except that had been silent, and here they were surrounded by the sound of the machine's hum.
"Eerie," Sunny said.
"It is spooky," Klaus agreed. "No wonder Olaf thought it was a magical hum."
"Imagine how it would feel if the room were flickering with lightning," Violet said.
"That's the sort of trickery that makes people believe in fortune-telling."
"So Madame Lulu is a fake," Klaus said.
Violet flicked both switches again, and the lights went on as the invention went off. "She's a fake, all right," Violet said. "I bet that crystal ball is just plain glass. She tricks Count Olaf into thinking she's a fortune-teller, so he'll buy her things like lions and new turbans."
"Chesro?" Sunny asked, and looked up at her siblings. By "Chesro?" Sunny meant something along the lines of, "But if she's a fake, how did she know that one of our parents was alive?" but her siblings were almost afraid to answer her.
"She didn't, Sunny," Violet said quietly. "Madame Lulu's information is as fake as her magic lightning."
Sunny made a small, quiet sound that her siblings could scarcely hear behind her beard, and hugged Violet and Klaus's legs while her little body shivered with sadness. Suddenly, it was Sunny's turn to bear the burden of Baudelaire grief, but she did not bear it for long, because Klaus thought of something that made the Baudelaires collect themselves.
"Wait a minute," Klaus said. "Madame Lulu may be a fake, but her information might be real. After all, she always told Count Olaf where we were staying, and she was right about that."
"That's true," Violet said. "I forgot about that."
"After all," Klaus said, reaching with difficulty into his pocket. "We first thought that one of our parents might be alive after we read this." He unfolded a piece of paper that his sisters recognized as the thirteenth page of the Snicket file. There was a photograph, stapled to the page, which showed the Baudelaire parents, standing next to one man the Baudelaires had met briefly at the Village of Fowl Devotees, and one man the children did not recognize, and below the photograph was a sentence Klaus had read so many times that he did not need his glasses to read it again. "'Because of the evidence discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown,'" he recited. "Maybe Madame Lulu knows about this."
"But how?" Violet asked.
"Well, let's see," Klaus said. "Count Olaf said that after the appearance of magical lightning, Madame Lulu told him to close his eyes so she could concentrate."
"There!" Sunny said, pointing to the table with the crystal ball.
"No, Sunny," Violet said. "The crystal ball couldn't tell her. It's not magical, remember?"
"There!" Sunny insisted, and walked over to the table. Violet and Klaus followed her, walking awkwardly, and saw what she was pointing at. Sticking out from under the tablecloth was a tiny speck of white. Kneeling down in their shared pants, the older Baudelaires could see it was the very edge of a piece of paper.
"Good thing you're closer to the ground than we are, Sunny," said Klaus. "We never would have noticed that."
"But what is it?" Violet asked, sliding it out from under the tablecloth.
Klaus reached into his pocket again, removed his glasses, and put them on. "Now I feel less like a freak and more like myself," he said with a smile, and began to read out loud. '"My Dear Duchess, Your masked ball sounds like a fantastic evening, and I look forward to . . .'" His voice trailed off, and he scanned the rest of the page. "It's just a note about some party," he said.
"What's it doing underneath a tablecloth?" Violet asked.
"It doesn't seem important to me," Klaus said, "but I guess it was important enough to Lulu that she hid it.
"Let's see what else she's hiding," Violet said, and lifted the end of the tablecloth. All three Baudelaires gasped.
It may seem strange to read that there was a library underneath Madame Lulu's table, but as the Baudelaire orphans knew, there are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers. The children had encountered a private library at the home of Justice Strauss, who they missed very much, and a scientific library at the home of Uncle Monty, who they would never see again. They had seen an academic library at Prufrock Preparatory School, and a library at Lucky Smells Lumbermill that was understocked, a word which here means "empty except for three books." There are public libraries and medical libraries, secret libraries and forbidden libraries, libraries of records and libraries of auction catalogs, and there are archival libraries, which is a fancy term for a collection of files and documents rather than books. Archival libraries are usually found at universities, museums, or other quiet placessuch as underneath a tablewhere people can go and examine whatever papers they like, in order to find the information they need. The Baudelaire orphans gazed at the enormous piles of papers that were stuffed underneath the table, and realized that Madame Lulu had an archival library that just might contain the information they were looking for.
"Look at all this," Violet said. "There are newspaper articles, magazines, letters, files, photographsall sorts of documents. Madame Lulu tells people to close their eyes and concentrate, and then she looks through all this material and finds the answers."
"And they can't hear her shuffling paper," Klaus said, "over the hum of the lightning device."
"It's like taking a test," Violet said, "with all the answers hidden in your school desk."
"Cheat!" Sunny said.
"It is cheating," Klaus said, "but maybe her cheating can help us. Look, here's an article from The Daily Punctilio."