"That seems fair," said Sherman.
"I agree," Professor Fletcher said.
"Me too," Omeros said, who had picked up the harpoon gun.
Ishmael frowned, but as more and more islanders expressed their agreement, he succumbed topeer pressure and gave the orphans a small smile. "I suppose they can stay," he said, "if they don't rock the boat any further." He sighed, and then suddenly frowned down at a puddle. During the conversation, the Incredibly Deadly Viper had decided to take a brief swim, and was now staring up at the facilitator from a pool of seawater.
"What is that?" Mr. Pitcairn asked, with a frightened gasp.
"It's a friendly snake we found," Friday said.
"Who told you it was friendly?" demanded Ferdinand.
Friday shared a quick dismayed look with the Baudelaires. After all that had happened, they knew there was no hope of convincing Ishmael that keeping the snake was a good idea. "Nobody told me," Friday said quietly. "It just seems friendly."
"It looks incredibly deadly," Erewhon said with a frown. "I say we dump it in the arboretum."
"We don't want a snake slithering around the arboretum," Ishmael said, stroking his beard quickly. "It might hurt the sheep. I won't force you, but I think we should abandon it here with Count Olaf. Come along now, it's almost lunchtime. Baudelaires, please push that cube of books to the arboretum, and—"
"Our friend shouldn't be moved," Violet interrupted, with a gesture to Kit's unconscious figure. "We need to help her."
"I didn't realize there was a castaway up there," Mr. Pitcairn said, peering at the bare foot that was still hanging over the side of the cube. "Look, she has the same tattoo as the villain!"
"She's my girlfriend," said Olaf from the bird cage. "You should either punish us both or set us both free."
"She's not your girlfriend!" Klaus cried. "She's our friend, and she's in trouble!"
"It seems that from the moment you joined us, the island is threatened with secrecy and treachery," Ishmael said, with a weary sigh. "We've never had to punish anyone here before you arrived, and now there's another suspicious person lurking around the island."
" Dreyfuss?" Sunny said, which meant "What precisely are you accusing us of?" but the facilitator kept talking as if she had not said a word.
"I won't force you," Ishmael said, "but if you want to be a part of the safe place we've constructed, I think you should abandon this Kit Snicket person, too, even though I've never heard of her."
"We won't abandon her," Violet said. "She needs our help."
"As I said, I won't force you," Ishmael said, with one last tug on his beard. "Good-bye, Baudelaires. You can stay here on the coastal shelf with your friend and your books, if those things are so important to you."
"But what will happen to them?" asked Willa. "Decision Day is approaching, and the coastal shelf will flood with water."
"That's their problem," Ishmael said, and gave the islanders an imperious—the word "imperious," as you probably know, means "mighty and a bit snobbish" — shrug. As his shoulders raised, a small object rolled out of the sleeve of his robe and landed with a small plop! In a puddle, narrowly missing the bird cage where Olaf was prisoner. The Baudelaires could not identify the object, but whatever it was, it was enough to make Ishmael hurriedly clap his hands to distract anyone who might be wondering about it.
"Let's go!" he cried, and the sheep began to drag him back toward his tent. A few islanders gave the Baudelaires apologetic looks, as if they disagreed with Ishmael's suggestions but did not dare to resist the peer pressure of their fellow colonists. Professor Fletcher and Omeros, who had secrets of their own, looked particularly regretful, and Friday looked as if she might cry. She even started to say something to the Baudelaires, but Mrs. Caliban stepped forward and put her arm firmly around the girl's shoulders, and she merely gave the siblings a sad wave and walked away with her mother. The Baudelaires were too stunned for a moment to say anything. Contrary to expectations, Count Olaf had not fooled the inhabitants of this place so far from the world, and had instead been captured and punished. But still the Baudelaires were not safe, and certainly not happy to find themselves abandoned on the coastal shelf like so much detritus.
"This isn't fair," Klaus said finally, but he said it so quietly that the departing islanders probably did not hear. Only his sisters heard him, and the snake the Baudelaires thought they would never see again, and of course Count Olaf, who was huddled in the large, ornate bird cage like an imprisoned beast, and who was the only person to answer him.
"Life isn't fair," he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.
Chapter Seven
The predicament of the Baudelaire orphans as they sat abandoned on the coastal shelf, with Kit Snicket unconscious at the top of the cube of books above them, Count Olaf locked in a cage alongside them, and the Incredibly Deadly Viper curled at their feet, is an excellent opportunity to use the phrase "under a cloud." The three children were certainly under a cloud that afternoon, and not just because one lone mass of condensed water vapor, which Klaus was able to identify as being of the cumulus variety, was hanging over them in the sky like another castaway from the previous night's storm. The expression "under a cloud" refers to people who are out of favor in a particular community, the way most classrooms have at least one child who is quite unpopular, or most secret organizations have at least one rhetorical analyst who is under suspicion. The island's only community had certainly placed Violet, Klaus, and Sunny under a cloud, and even in the blazing afternoon sun the children felt the chill of the colony's suspicion and disapproval.
"I can't believe it," Violet said. "I can't believe we've been abandoned."
"We thought we could cast away everything that happened to us before we arrived here," Klaus said, "but this place is no safer than anywhere else we've been."
"But what to do?" Sunny asked.
Violet looked around the coastal shelf. "I suppose we can catch fish and harvest seaweed to eat," she said. "Our meals won't be much different from those on the island."
"If fire," Sunny said thoughtfully, "then salt bake carp."
"We can't live here," Klaus pointed out. "Decision Day is approaching, and the coastal shelf will be underwater. We either have to live on the island, or figure out a way to get back to where we came from."
"We'll never survive a journey at sea without a boat," Violet said, wishing she had her ribbon back so she could tie up her hair.
"Kit did," Sunny pointed out.
"The library must have served as a sort of raft," Klaus said, running his hand along the books, "but she couldn't have come far on a boat of paper."
"I hope she met up with the Quagmires," Violet said.
"I hope she'll wake up and tell us what happened," Klaus said.
"Do you think she's seriously hurt?" Violet asked.
"There's no way to tell without a complete medical examination," Klaus said, "but except for her ankle, she looks all right. She's probably just exhausted from the storm."
"Worried," Sunny said sadly, wishing there was a dry, warm blanket on the coastal shelf that the Baudelaires might have used to cover their unconscious friend.
"We can't just worry about Kit," Klaus said. "We need to worry about ourselves."
"We have to think of a plan," Violet said wearily, and all three Baudelaires sighed. Even the Incredibly Deadly Viper seemed to sigh, and laid its head sympathetically on Sunny's foot. The Baudelaires stood on the coastal shelf and thought of all their previous predicaments, and all the plans they'd thought up to make themselves safe, only to end up in the midst of another unfortunate event. The cloud they were under seemed to get bigger and darker, and the children might have sat there for quite some time had not the silence been broken by the voice of the man who was locked in a bird cage.