"Ishmael said he'd never heard of Kit Snicket," Violet said, "but here he writes that she's a figure from the shadowy past."
"Six six seven," Sunny said, and Klaus nodded. Handing the flashlight to his older sister, he quickly turned the pages of the book, flipping back in history until he reached the page Ishmael had mentioned.
"'Inky has learned to lasso sheep,'" Klaus read, '"and last night's storm washed up a postcard from Kit Snicket, addressed to Olivia Caliban. Kit, of course, is the sister of. '"
The middle Baudelaire's voice trailed off, and his sisters stared at him curiously. "What's wrong, Klaus?" Violet asked. "That entry doesn't seem particularly mysterious."
"It's not the entry," Klaus said, so quietly that Violet and Sunny could scarcely hear him. "It's the handwriting."
" Familia?" Sunny asked, and all three Baudelaires stepped as close as they could to one another. In silence, the children gathered around the beam of the flashlight, as if it were a warm campfire on a freezing night, and gazed down at the pages of the oddly titled book. Even the Incredibly Deadly Viper crawled up to perch on Sunny's shoulders, as if it were as curious as the Baudelaire orphans to know who had written those words so long ago.
"Yes, Baudelaires," said a voice from the far end of the room. "That's your mother's handwriting."
ChapterTen
Ishmael stepped out of the darkness, running a hand along the shelves of the bookcase, and walked slowly toward the Baudelaire orphans. In the dim glow of the flashlight, the children could not tell if the facilitator was smiling or frowning through his wild, woolly beard, and Violet was reminded of something she'd almost entirely forgotten. A long time ago, before Sunny was born, Violet and Klaus had begun an argument at breakfast over whose turn it was to take out the garbage. It was a silly matter, but one of those occasions when the people arguing are having too much fun to stop, and all day, the two siblings had wandered around the house, doing their assigned chores and scarcely speaking to each other. Finally, after a long, silent meal, during which their parents tried to get them to reconcile— a word which here means "admit that it didn't matter in the slightest whose turn it was, and that the only important thing was to get the garbage out of the kitchen before the smell spread to the entire mansion" — Violet and Klaus were sent up to bed without dessert or even five minutes of reading. Suddenly, just as she was dropping off to sleep, Violet had an idea for an invention that meant no one would ever have to take out the garbage, and she turned on a light and began to sketch out her idea on a pad of paper. She became so interested in her invention that she did not listen for footsteps in the hallway outside, and so when her mother opened the door, she did not have time to turn out the light and pretend to be asleep. Violet stared at her mother, and her mother stared back, and in the dim light the eldest Baudelaire could not see if her mother was smiling or frowning—if she was angry at Violet for staying up past her bedtime, or if she didn't mind after all. But then finally, Violet saw that her mother was carrying a cup of hot tea. "Here you go, dear," she said gently. "I know how star anise tea helps you think." Violet took the steaming cup from her mother, and in that instant she suddenly realized that it had been her turn to take out the garbage after all.
Ishmael did not offer the Baudelaire orphans any tea, and when he flicked a switch on the wall, and lit up the secret space underneath the apple tree with electric lights, the children could see that he was neither smiling nor frowning, but exhibiting a strange combination of the two, as if he were as nervous about the Baudelaires as they were about him. "I knew you'd come here," he said finally, after a long silence. "It's in your blood. I've never known a Baudelaire who didn't rock the boat."
The Baudelaires felt all of their questions bump into each other in their heads, like frantic sailors deserting a sinking ship. "What is this place?" Violet asked. "How did you know our parents?"
"Why have you lied to us about so many things?" Klaus demanded. "Why are you keeping so many secrets?"
"Who are you?" Sunny asked.
Ishmael took another step closer to the Baudelaires and gazed down at Sunny, who gazed back at the facilitator, and then stared down at the clay still packed around his feet. "Did you know I used to be a schoolteacher?" he asked. "This was many years ago, in the city. There were always a few children in my chemistry classes who had the same gleam in their eyes that you Baudelaires have. Those students always turned in the most interesting assignments." He sighed, and sat down on one of the reading chairs in the center of the room. "They also always gave me the most trouble. I remember one child in particular, who had scraggly dark hair and just one eyebrow."
"Count Olaf," Violet said.
Ishmael frowned, and blinked at the eldest Baudelaire. "No," he said. "This was a little girl. She had one eyebrow and, thanks to an accident in her grandfather's laboratory, only one ear. She was an orphan, and she lived with her siblings in a house owned by a terrible woman, a violent drunkard who was famous for having killed a man in her youth with nothing but her bare hands and a very ripe cantaloupe. The cantaloupe was grown on a farm that is no longer in operation, the Lucky Smells Melon Farm, which was owned by—"
"Sir," Klaus said.
Ishmael frowned again. "No," he said. "The farm was owned by two brothers, one of whom was later murdered in a small village, where three innocent children were accused of the crime."
"Jacques," Sunny said.
"No," Ishmael said with another frown. "There was some argument about his name, actually, as he appeared to use several names depending on what he was wearing. In any case, the student in my class began to be very suspicious about the tea her guardian would pour for her when she got home from school. Rather than drink it, she would dump it into a house-plant that had been used to decorate a well-known stylish restaurant with a fish theme."
"Cafe Salmonella," Violet said.
"No," Ishmael said, and frowned once more."The Bistro Smelt. Of course, my student realized she couldn't keep feeding tea to the house-plant, particularly after it withered away and the houseplant's owner was whisked off to Peru aboard a mysterious ship."
"The Prospero" Klaus said.
Ishmael offered the youngsters yet another frown. "Yes," he said, "although at the time the ship was called the Pericles. But my student didn't know that. She only wanted to avoid being poisoned, and I had an idea that an antidote might be hidden—"
"Yaw," Sunny interrupted, and her siblings nodded in agreement. By "yaw," the youngest Baudelaire meant "Ishmael's story is tangential," a word which here means "answering questions other than the ones the Baudelaires had asked."
"We want to know what's going on here on the island, at this very moment," Violet said, "not what happened in a classroom many years ago."
"But what is happening now and what happened then are part of the same story," Ishmael said. "If I don't tell you how I came to prefer tea that's as bitter as wormwood, then you won't know how I came to have a very important conversation with a waiter in a lakeside town. And if I don't tell you about that conversation, then you won't know how I ended up on a certain bathyscaphe, or how I ended up shipwrecked here, or how I came to meet your parents, or anything else contained in this book." He took the heavy volume from Klaus's hands and ran his fingers along the spine, where the long, somewhat wordy title was printed in gold block letters. "People have been writing stories in this book since the first castaways washed up on the island, and all the stories are connected in one way or another. If you ask one question, it will lead you to another, and another, and another. It's like peeling an onion."