"So they had you place a lock on the laundry room door," Violet said, "so that nobody could get to the sugar bowl."
"But did Frank have Sunny activate the lock," Klaus asked, "or Ernest? If it was Frank, then the sugar bowl is locked away from any villains who want to get their hands on it. But if it was Ernest, then the sugar bowl is locked away from any volunteers who ought to get their hands on it."
"J. S.," Sunny said.
"J. S. is the key to the entire mystery," Violet agreed. "Esme Squalor thinks J. S. is spoiling the party. Sir thinks J. S. is hosting the party. Hal thinks J. S. might be here to help. Kit thinks J. S. might be an enemy. And we still don't even know if J. S. is a man or a woman!"
"Like blind men," Sunny said, "with elephant."
"We have to find J. S.," Klaus agreed, "but how? Trying to locate one guest in an enormous hotel is like finding one book in a library."
"A library without a catalog," Violet said quietly, and the three Baudelaires exchanged sad glances by the light of the frog-shaped lamp. The children had uncovered countless secrets in libraries under the most desperate of circumstances. They had decoded a message in a library while a hurricane raged outside, and had found important information while a sinister person chased them around a library in wicked shoes. They had discovered crucial facts in a library that held only three books, and obtained a vital map in a library that was only a pile of papers hidden underneath a table. The Baudelaires had even found the answers they were looking for in a library that had burned down, leaving only a few scraps of paper and a motto etched on an iron archway. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny stood for a moment at the concierge desk and thought of all the libraries they had seen, and wondered if any of the secrets they had uncovered would help them find what they were looking for in the perplexing library of the Hotel Denouement.
"The world is quiet here," Sunny said, reciting the motto her siblings had found, and as her words echoed in the lobby, they heard a noise above them, a quiet shuffling from the enormous dome, scarcely audible over the sound of the croaking frogs. The shuffling grew louder, but the Baudelaires could not see anything in the blackness over their heads, which was as dark as a crow flying through a pitch black night. Finally, Violet lifted the frog-shaped lamp as far as its cord would allow, and all three children removed their sunglasses. Faintly, they could see a shadowy shape lowering itself from the machinery of the clock using what looked like a thick rope. It was an eerie sight, like a spider lowering itself to the center of a web, but the Baudelaires could not help but admire the skill with which it was done. With only a slight shuffle, the shape drew closer and closer, until at last the children could see it was a man, tall and skinny, with his legs and arms sticking out at odd angles, as if he were made of drinking straws instead of flesh and bone. The man was climbing down a rope he was unraveling at the same time, which is an activity I do not recommend unless you've had the proper training, and unfortunately the best trainer has been forced to go into hiding ever since a certain mountain headquarters was destroyed by arson, and he now earns his living doing spider imitations in a traveling show. Finally, the man was quite close to the ground, and with an elegant flourish he let go of the rope and landed silently on the floor. Then he strode toward the Baudelaires, pausing only to brush a speck of dust off the word MANAGER which was printed in fancy script over one of the pockets of his coat.
"Good evening, Baudelaires," the man said. "Forgive me for not revealing myself earlier, but I had to be sure that you were who I thought you were. It must have been very confusing to wander around this hotel without a catalog to help you."
"So there is a catalog?" Klaus asked.
"Of course there's a catalog," the man said. "You don't think I'd organize this entire building according to the Dewey Decimal System and then neglect to add a catalog, do you?"
"But where is the catalog?" Violet asked.
The man smiled. "Come outside," he said, "and I'll show you."
"Trap," Sunny murmured to her siblings, who nodded in agreement. "We're not following you," Violet said, "until we know that you're someone we can trust."
The man smiled. "I don't blame you for being suspicious," he said. "When I used to meet your father, Baudelaires, we would recite the work of an American humorist poet of the nineteenth century, so we could recognize one another in our disguises." He stopped in the middle of the lobby, and with a gesture from one of his odd, skinny arms, he began to recite a poem:
"So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!"
The words of the American humorist poets of the nineteenth century are often confusing, as they are liable to use such terms as "oft," which is a nineteenth-century abbreviation for "often"; "disputants," which refers to people who are arguing; "ween," which means "think"; and "rail on," which means to bicker for hours on end, the way you might do with a family member who is particularly bossy. Such poets might use the word "prate," which means "chatter," and they might spend an entire stanza discussing "theologic wars," a term which refers to arguing over what different people believe, the way you might also do with a family member who is particularly bossy. Even the Baudelaires, who'd had the works of American humorist poets of the nineteenth century recited to them many times over their childhood, had trouble understanding everything in the stanza, which simply made the point that all of the blind men in the poem were arguing pointlessly. But Violet, Klaus, and Sunny did not need to know exactly what the stanza meant. They only needed to know who wrote it.
"John Godfrey Saxe," said Sunny with a smile.
"Very good," the man said, and he walked across the shiny, silent floor of the lobby, pulling the rope down from the ceiling and tucking it into his belt.
"And who are you?" Violet called.
"Can't you guess?" the man asked, pausing at the large, curved entrance. The Baudelaires hurried to catch up with him as he turned to exit the hotel.
"Frank?" Klaus said.
"No," the man said, and began to walk down the stairs. The Baudelaires took a step outside, where the croaking of the frogs in the pond was considerably louder, although the children could not see the pond through the cloud of steam coming from the funnel. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny looked at one another cautiously, and then began to follow.
"Ernest?" Sunny asked.
The man smiled, and kept walking down the stairs, disappearing into the steam. "No," he said, and the Baudelaire orphans stepped out of the hotel and disappeared along with him.
CHAPTER
The word "denouement" is not only the name of a hotel or the family who manages it, particularly nowadays, when the hotel and all its secrets have almost been forgotten, and the surviving members of the family have changed their names and are working in smaller, less glamorous inns. "Denouement" comes from the French, who use the word to describe the act of untying a knot, and it refers to the unraveling of a confusing or mysterious story, such as the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, or anyone else you know whose life is filled with unanswered questions. The denouement is the moment when all of the knots of a story are untied, and all the threads are unraveled, and everything is laid out clearly for the world to see. But the denouement should not be confused with the end of a story. The denouement of "Snow White," for instance, occurs at the moment when Ms. White wakes up from her enchanted sleep, and decides to leave the dwarves behind and marry the handsome prince, and the mysterious old woman who gave her an apple has been exposed as the treacherous queen, but the end of "Snow White" occurs many years later, when a horseback riding accident plunges Ms. White into a fever from which she never recovers. The denouement of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" occurs at the moment when the bears return home to find Goldilocks napping on their private property, and either chase her away from the premises, or eat her, depending on which version you have in your library, but the end of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" occurs when a troop of young scouts neglect to extinguish their campfire and even the efforts of a volunteer fire department cannot save most of the wildlife from certain death. There are some stories in which the denouement and the end occur simultaneously, such as La Forzadel Destino, in which the characters recognize and destroy one another over the course of a single song, but usually the denouement of a story is not the last event in the heroes' lives, or the last trouble that befalls them. It is often the second-to-last event, or the penultimate peril. As the Baudelaire orphans followed the mysterious man out of the hotel and through the cloud of steam to the edge of the reflective pond, the denouement of their story was fast approaching, but the end of their story still waited for them, like a secret still covered in fog, or a distant island in the midst of a troubled sea, whose waves raged against the shores of a city and the walls of a perplexing hotel.