The Slippery Slope

each twisting off in a different direction past the ruins of the headquarters, and curving around the Mortmain Mountains until they disappeared from view.' Violet and Klaus gazed sadly at the icy swirls of black and gray they had noticed when they were walking alongside the Stricken Stream. 'It was ashes' Klaus said quietly. 'Ashes from the fire fell into the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, and the stream carried them down the river.'

Violet found that it was easier to discuss a small, specific matter than think about her immense disappointment. 'But the pool is frozen solid,' she said. 'The stream couldn't have carried the ashes anywhere.'

'It wouldn't have been frozen when it happened,' Klaus replied. 'The heat from the fire would have thawed the pool.'

'It must have been awful to see,' the sweatered scout said. Violet and Klaus stood with him, imagining the inferno, a word which here means 'enormous fire that destroyed a secret headquarters high in the mountains.' They could almost hear the shattering of glass as the windows fell away, and the crackle of the fire as it consumed everything it could. They could almost smell the thick smoke as it floated upward and blackened the sky, and they could almost see the books in the library, falling from the burning shelves and tumbling into ashes The only thing they could not picture was who might have been at the headquarters when the fire began, running out into the freezing cold to avoid the flames.

'Do you think,' Violet said, 'any of the volunteers. .'

'There's no sign that anyone was here,' the scout said quickly.

'But how can we know for sure?' Klaus asked. 'There could be a survivor someplace right now.'

'Hello?' Violet called, looking around her at the rubble. 'Hello?' She found that her eyes were filling with tears, as she called out for the people she knew in her heart were nowhere nearby. The eldest Baudelaire felt as if she had been calling for these people since that terrible day on the beach, and that if she called them enough they might appear before her. She thought of all the times she had called them, back when she lived with her siblings in the Baudelaire mansion.

Sometimes she called them when she wanted them to see something she had invented. Sometimes she called them when she wanted them to know she had arrived home. And sometimes she called them just because she wanted to know where they were. Sometimes Violet just wanted to see them, and feel that she was safe as long as they were around. 'Mother!' Violet Baudelaire called. 'Father!'

There was no answer.

'Mom!' Klaus called. 'Dad!'

The Baudelaires heard nothing but the rush of all four of the valley's drafts, and a long creak as the Vernacularly Fastened Door blew shut. They saw that the door had been made to look just like the side of the mountain, so that they could scarcely see where they had come from, or the way to get back. Now they were truly alone.

'I know we were all hoping to find people at the headquarters,' the sweatered scout said gently, 'but I don't think anyone is here. I think we're all by ourselves.'

'That's impossible!' Klaus cried, and Violet could hear that he was crying. He reached through his layers of clothing until he found his pocket, and pulled out page thirteen from the Snicket file, which he had been carrying with him since the Baudelaires had found it at Heimlich Hospital. The page had a photograph of their parents, standing with Jacques Snicket and another man the Baudelaires had been unable to identify, and above the photograph was a sentence Klaus had memorized from reading it so many times. ''Because of the evidence discussed on page nine,'' he recited tearfully, ''experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown.'' He walked up to the scout and shook the page in his face. 'We thought the survivor would be here,' he said.

'I think the survivor is here,' the scout said quietly, and removed his mask to reveal his face at last. 'I'm Quigley Quagmire,' he said, 'I survived the fire that destroyed my home, and I was hoping to find my brother and sister.'

Chapter Eight

If is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous. If someone asks you how you are, for example, you might automatically say 'Fine, thank you,' when in fact you have just failed an examination or been trampled by an ox. A friend might tell you, 'I've looked everywhere in the world for my keys,' when you know that they have actually only looked in a few places in the immediate area. Once I said to a woman I loved very much, 'I'm sure that this trouble will end soon, and you and I will spend the rest of our lives together in happiness and bliss,' when I actually suspected that things were about to get much worse. And so it was with the two elder Baudelaires, when they stood face-to-face with Quigley Quagmire and found themselves to be saying things they knew were absurd.

'You're dead,' Violet said, and took off her mask to make sure she was seeing things clearly. But there was no mistaking Quigley, even though the Baudelaires had never seen him before. He looked so much like Duncan and Isadora that he could only be the third Quagmire triplet.

'You perished in a fire along with your parents,' Klaus said, but as he took off his mask he knew this wasn't so. Quigley was even giving the two Baudelaires a small smile that looked exactly like his siblings'.

'No,' Quigley said. 'I survived, and I've been looking for my siblings ever since.'

'But how did you survive?' Violet asked. 'Duncan and Isadora said that the house burned to the ground.'

'It did,' Quigley said sadly. He looked out at the frozen waterfall and sighed deeply. 'I suppose I should start at the beginning. I was in my family's library, studying a map of the Finite Forest, when I heard a shattering of glass, and people shouting. My mother ran into the room and said there was a fire. We tried to go out the front door but the main hall was filled with smoke, so she took me back into the library and lifted a corner of the rug. There was a secret door underneath. She told me to wait down below while she fetched my siblings, and she left me there in the dark. I remember hearing the house falling to pieces above me, and the sound of frantic footsteps, and my siblings screaming.' Quigley put his mask down on the ground and looked at the two Baudelaires. 'But she never came back,' he said. 'Nobody came back, and when I tried to open the door, something had fallen on top of it and it wouldn't budge.'

'How did you get out?' Klaus asked.

'I walked,' Quigley said. 'When it became clear that no one was going to rescue me, I felt around in the dark and realized I was in a sort of passageway. There was nowhere else to go so I started walking. I've never been so frightened in my life, walking alone in some dark passageway my parents had kept secret. I couldn't imagine where it would lead.'

The two Baudelaires looked at one another. They were thinking about the secret passageway they had discovered underneath their home, which they had discovered when they were under the care of Esmй Squalor and her husband. 'And where did it lead?' Violet said.

'To the house of a herpetologist,' Quigley said. 'At the end of the passageway was a secret door that opened into an enormous room, made entirely of glass. The room was filled with empty cages, but it was clear that the room had once housed an enormous collection of reptiles.'

'We've been there!' Klaus cried in amazement. 'That's Uncle Monty's house! He was our guardian until Count Olaf arrived, disguised as — '

'As a lab assistant,' Quigley finished. 'I know. His suitcase was still there.'

'There was a secret passageway under our house, too,' Violet said, 'but we didn't discover it until we lived with Esmй Squalor.'

'There are secrets everywhere,' Quigley said. 'I think everyone's parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them.'

'But why would our parents, and yours, have tunnels underneath their homes leading to a fancy apartment building and a herpetologist's home?' Klaus said. 'It doesn't make any sense.'

Quigley sighed, and put his backpack on the ashen ground, next to his mask. 'There's a lot that doesn't make