The Grim Grotto

'Only a few letters at the very bottom,' she said. ' 'CC: J.S.' What does that mean?'

' 'CC' means that Quigley sent a copy of this message to someone else,' Klaus said, 'and 'J.S.' are the initials of the person.'

'Those mysterious initials again,' Violet said. 'It can't be Jacques Snicket, because he's dead. But who else could it be?'

'We can't worry about that now,' Klaus said. 'We have to figure out what words have been substituted in these poems.'

'How can we do that?' Violet asked.

'I don't know,' Klaus said. 'Why would Quigley think we would have memorized these poems?'

'He wouldn't think that,' Violet said. 'He knows us. But the telegram was addressed to the Queequeg. He knew that someone on board could decode the poetry.'

'But who?' Klaus asked. 'Not Fiona – she's a mycologist. An optimist like Phil isn't likely to be familiar with T. S. Eliot. And it's hard to imagine Captain Widdershins having a serious interest in poetry.'

'Not anymore,' Violet said thoughtfully. 'But Fiona's brother said he and the captain used to study poetry together.'

'That's true,' Klaus said. 'He said they used to read to one another in the Main Hall.' He walked over to the sideboard and opened the cabinet, peering at the books Fiona kept inside. 'But there's no poetry here – just Fiona's mycological library.'

'Captain Widdershins wouldn't keep poetry books out front like that,' Violet said. 'He would have kept them secret.'

'Just like he kept the secret of what happened to Fiona's brother,' Klaus said.

'He thought there were secrets too terrible for young people to know,' Violet said, 'but now we need to know them.'

Klaus was silent for a moment, and then turned to his sister. 'There's something I never told you,' he said. 'Remember when our parents were so angry over the spoiled atlas?'

'We talked about that in the grotto,' Violet said. 'The rain spoiled it when we left the library window open.'

'I don't think that's the only reason they were mad,' Klaus said. 'I took that atlas down from the top shelf – one I could only reach by putting the stepladder on top of the chair. They didn't think I could reach that shelf.'

'Why would that make them angry?' Violet asked.

Klaus looked down. 'That's where they kept books they didn't want us to find,' he said. 'I was interested in the atlas, but when I removed it from the shelf there was a whole row of other books.'

'What kind of books?' Violet asked.

'I didn't get a good look at them,' Klaus said. 'There were a few books about war, and I think a few romances. I was too interested in the atlas to investigate any further, but I remember thinking it was strange that our parents had hidden those books. That's why they were so angry, I think – when they saw the atlas on the window seat, they knew I'd discovered their secret.'

'Did you ever look at them again?' Violet said.

'I didn't have a chance,' Klaus said. 'They moved them to another hiding place, and I never saw them again.'

'Maybe our parents were going to tell us what was in those books when we were older,' Violet said.

'Maybe,' Klaus agreed. 'But we'll never know. We lost them in the fire.' The elder Baudelaires sat quietly for a moment, looking at the cabinet in the sideboard, and then, without a word, the two siblings stepped onto the wooden table so they could open the highest cabinet. Inside was a small stack of books on such dull topics as child rearing, proper and improper diets, and the water cycle, but when the children pushed these books aside they saw what they had been looking for.

'Elizabeth Bishop,' Violet said, 'Charles Simic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Franz Wright, Daphne Gottlieb – there's all sorts of poetry here.'

'Why don't you read T.S. Eliot,' Klaus suggested, handing her a thick, dusty volume, 'and I'll tackle Lewis Carroll. If we read quickly we should be able to find the real poems and decode the message.'

'I found something else,' Violet said, handing her brother a crumpled square of paper. 'Look.' Klaus looked at what his sister had given him. It was a photograph, blurred and faded with four people, grouped together like a family. In the center of the photograph was a large man with a long mustache that was curved at the end like a pair of parentheses – Captain Widdershins, of course, although he looked much younger and a great deal happier than the children had ever seen him. He was laughing, and his arm was around someone the two Baudelaires recognized as the hook-handed man, although he was not hook-handed in the photograph – both of his hands were perfectly intact, one resting on the captain's shoulder, and the other pointing at whoever was taking the picture – and he was young enough to still be called a teenager, instead of a man. On the other side of the captain was a woman who was laughing as hard as the captain, and in her arms was a young infant with a tiny set of triangular glasses.

'That must be Fiona's mother,' Klaus said, pointing at the laughing woman.

'Look,' Violet said, pointing to the wall behind the family. 'This was taken on board the Queequeg. That's the edge of the plaque with the captain's personal philosophy – 'He who hesitates is lost.' '

'The whole family is lost, almost,' Klaus said quietly. 'Fiona's mother is dead. Her brother joined Count Olaf's troupe. And who knows where her stepfather is?' He put down the photograph, opened his commonplace book, and flipped to the beginning, where he had pasted another photograph taken long ago.

This photograph also had four people in it, although one of the people was facing away from the camera, so it was impossible to tell who it was. The second person was Jacques Snicket, who of course was long dead. And the other two people were the Baudelaire parents. Klaus had kept this photograph ever since the children found it at Heimlich Hospital, and had looked at it every day, gazing into his parents' faces and reading the one sentence, over and over, that had been typed below it. 'Because of the evidence discussed on page nine,' the sentence read, 'experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown.'

For quite some time, the Baudelaires had thought this meant one of their parents was alive after all, but now they were almost certain it meant no such thing. Violet and Klaus looked from one photograph to the other, imagining a time when no one in the pictures was lost, and everyone was happy.

Klaus sighed, and looked at his sister. 'Maybe we shouldn't be hesitating here,' Klaus said. 'Maybe we should be rescuing our captain, instead of reading books of poetry and looking at old photographs. I don't want to lose Fiona.'

'Fiona's safe with her brother,' Violet said, 'and I'm sure she'll join us when she can. We need to decode this message, or we might lose everything. In this case, he or she who doesn't hesitate is lost.'

'What if we decode the message before Fiona arrives?' Klaus asked. 'Do we wait for her to join us?'

'We wouldn't have to,' Violet said. 'The three of us could properly operate this submarine by ourselves. All we'd need to do is repair the porthole, and we could probably steer the Queequeg out of the Carmelita.'

'We can't abandon her here,' Klaus said. 'She wouldn't abandon us.'

'Are you sure?' violet asked.

Klaus sighed, and looked at the photograph again. 'No,' he said. 'Let's get to work.'

Violet nodded in agreement, and the two Baudelaires shelved the discussion – a phrase which here means 'temporarily stopped their conversation' and unshelved the poetry books in order to get to work on decoding Quigley's Verse Fluctuation Declarations. It had been some time since the Baudelaires had been able to read in a comfortable place, and the children were pleased to find themselves silently flipping pages, searching for certain words, and even taking a few notes. Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message hidden within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage. With each poem the children felt more and more powerful – or, as they might have said in their food code, more and more wasabi – and by the time the two volunteers were interrupted they felt as if the tables just might be continuing to turn.

'Snack!' announced a cheerful voice below them, and Violet and Klaus were pleased to see their sister