The Slippery Slope

dress. 'Well-read!' she repeated in a particularly nasty tone of voice. 'Being well-read won't help you in this world. Many years ago, I was supposed to waste my entire summer reading Anna Karenina, but I knew that silly book would never help me, so I threw it into the fireplace.' She reached down and picked up a few more pieces of wood, which she tossed aside with a snicker. 'Look at your precious headquarters, volunteers! It's as ruined as my book. And look at me! I'm beautiful, fashionable, and I smoke cigarettes!' She laughed again, and pointed at the children with a scornful finger. 'If you didn't spend all your time with your heads stuck in books, you'd have that precious baby back.'

'We're going to get her back,' Violet said firmly.

'Really?' Esmй said mockingly. 'And how do you propose to do that?'

'I'm going to talk to Count Olaf,' Violet said, 'and he's going to give her back to me.'

Esmй threw back her head and started to laugh, but not with as much enthusiasm as before. 'What do you mean?' she said.

'Just what I said,' Violet said.

'Hmmm,' Esmй said suspiciously. 'Let me think for a moment.' The evil girlfriend began to pace back and forth on the frozen pond, her enormous dress crackling with every step.

Klaus leaned in to whisper to his sister. 'What are you doing?' he asked. 'Do you honestly think that we can get Sunny back from Count Olaf with a simple conversation?'

'I don't know,' Violet whispered back, 'but it's better than luring someone into a trap.'

'It was wrong to dig that pit,' Quigley agreed, 'but I'm not sure that walking straight into Olaf's clutches is the right thing to do, either.'

'It'll take a while to reach Mount Fraught again,' Violet said. 'We'll think of something during the climb.'

'I hope so,' Klaus said, 'but if we can't think of something — '

Klaus did not get a chance to say what might happen if they couldn't think of something because Esmй clapped her hands together to get the children's attention.

'If you really want to talk to my boyfriend,' she said, 'I suppose I can take you to where he is. If you weren't so stupid, you'd know that he's very nearby.'

'We know where he is, Esmй,' Klaus said. 'He's at the top of the waterfall, at the source of the Stricken Stream.'

'Then I suppose you know how we can get there,' Esmй said, and looked a little foolish. 'The toboggan doesn't go uphill, so I actually have no idea how we can reach the peak.'

'She will invent a way,' Quigley said, pointing at Violet.

Violet smiled at her friend, grateful for his support, and closed her eyes underneath her mask. Once more, she was thinking of something she had heard sung to her, when she was a very little girl. She had already thought of the way that the three children could take Esmй with them when they ascended the hill, but thinking of their journey made her think of a song she had not thought of for many years. Perhaps when you were very young, someone sang this song to you, perhaps to lull you to sleep, or to entertain you on a long car trip, or in order to teach you a secret code. The song is called 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider,' and it is one of the saddest songs ever composed. It tells the story of a small spider who is trying to climb up a water spout, but every time its climb is half over, there is a great burst of water, either due to rain or somebody turning the spout on, and at the end of the song, the spider has decided to try one more time, and will likely be washed away once again.

Violet Baudelaire could not help feeling like this poor spider as she ascended the waterfall for the last time, with Quigley and Klaus beside her and Esmй Squalor on her toboggan behind them. After attaching the last two forks to Klaus's shoes, she had told her companions to tie the leather straps of the toboggan around their waists, so they could drag the villainous girlfriend behind them as they climbed. It was exhausting to approach the peak of Mount Fraught in this manner, particularly after staying up all night digging a pit, and it seemed like they might get washed back down by the dripping water of the Stricken Stream, like the spider Violet had heard about when she was a little girl. The ice on the slope was weakening, after two fork-assisted climbs, a toboggan ride, and the increasing temperatures of False Spring, and with each step of Violet's invention, the ice would shift slightly. It was clear that the slippery slope was almost as exhausted as they were, and soon the ice would vanish completely. 'Mush!' Esmй called from the toboggan. She was using an expression that arctic explorers shouted to their sled dogs, and it certainly did not make the journey any easier.

'I wish she'd stop saying that,' Violet murmured from behind her mask. She tapped the candelabra on the ice ahead of her, and a small piece detached from the waterfall and fell to the ruins of headquarters. She watched it disappear below her and sighed. She would never see the V.F.D. headquarters in all its glory. None of the Baudelaires would. Violet would never know how it felt to cook in the kitchen and gaze at the two tributaries of the Stricken Stream, while chatting with the other volunteers. Klaus would never know how it felt to relax in the library and learn all of the secrets of

V.F.D. in the comfort of one of the library's chairs, with his feet up on one of the matching V.F.D. footstools. Sunny would never operate the projector in the movie room, or practice the art of the fake mustache in the disguise center, or sit in the parlor at tea time and eat the almond cookies made from my grandmother's recipe. Violet would never study chemical composition in one of the six laboratories, and Klaus would never use the balance beams at the gymnasium, and Sunny would never stand behind the counter at the ice cream shop and prepare butterscotch sundaes for the swimming coaches when it was her turn. And none of the Baudelaires would ever meet some of the organization's most beloved volunteers, including the mechanical instructor C. M. Kornbluth, and Dr. Isaac Anwhistle, whom everyone called Ike, and the brave volunteer who tossed the sugar bowl out the kitchen window so it would not be destroyed in the blaze, and watched it float away on one of the tributaries of the Stricken Stream. The Baudelaires would never do any of these things, any more than I will ever see my beloved Beatrice again, or retrieve my pickle from the refrigerator in which I left it, and return it to its rightful place in an important coded sandwich. Violet, of course, was not aware of everything she would never do, but as she gazed down at the vast, ashen remains of the headquarters, she felt as if her whole journey in the Mortmain Mountains had been as useless as the journey of a tiny arachnid in a song she had never liked to hear.

'Mush!' Esmй cried again, with a cruel chuckle.

'Please stop saying that, Esmй,' Violet called down impatiently. 'That mush nonsense is slowing our climb.'

'A slow climb might be to our advantage,' Klaus murmured to his sister. 'The longer it takes us to reach the summit, the longer we have to think up what we're going to say to Count Olaf.'

'We could tell him that he's surrounded,' Quigley said, 'and that there are volunteers everywhere ready to arrest him if he doesn't let Sunny go free.'

Violet shook her mask. 'He won't believe that,' she said, sticking a fork-assisted shoe into the waterfall. 'He can see everything and everyone from Mount Fraught. He'll know we're the only volunteers in the area.'

'There must be something we can do,' Klaus said. 'We didn't make this journey into the mountains for nothing.'

'Of course not,' Quigley said. 'We found each other, and we solved some of the mysteries that were haunting us.'

'Will that be enough,' Violet asked, 'to defeat all those villains on the peak?'

Violet's question was a difficult one, and neither Klaus nor Quigley had the answer, and so rather than hazard a guess — a phrase which here means 'continue to expend their energy by discussing the matter' — they decided to hazard their climb, a phrase which here means 'continue their difficult journey in silence, until they arrived at last at the source of the Stricken Stream.' Hoisting themselves up onto the flat peak, they sat on the edge and pulled the leather straps as hard as they could. It was such a difficult task to drag Esmй Squalor and the toboggan over the edge of the slope and onto Mount Fraught that the children did not notice who was nearby until they heard a familiar scratchy voice right behind them.

'Who goes there?' Count Olaf demanded.

Breathless from the climb, the three children turned around to see the villain standing with his two sinister cohorts near his long, black automobile, glaring suspiciously at the masked volunteers.

'We thought you'd get here by taking the path,' said the man with a beard but no hair, 'not by climbing up the waterfall.'