The Grim Grotto

'He's a friend of ours,' Klaus said. 'Do you know him?'

'Only by reputation,' Fiona said, using a phrase which here means 'I don't know him personally but I've heard of the work he does.'

'The volunteers lost track of him a long time ago, along with Hector and the other Quagmire triplets.'

'The Quagmires haven't been as lucky as we have,' Violet said, tying her hair up in a ribbon to help her focus on repairing the telegram device. 'I'm hoping you'll spot him with the periscope.'

'It's worth a try,' Fiona said, as Phil walked through the kitchen doors, wearing an apron over his uniform.

'Sunny?' he asked. 'I heard you were going to help me in the kitchen. We're a bit low on supplies, I'm afraid. Using the Queequeg nets I managed to catch a few cod, and we have half a sack of potatoes, but not much else. Do you have any ideas about what to make for dinner?'

'Chowda?' Sunny asked.

'It's worth a try,' Phil said, and for the next few hours, all three Baudelaires tried to see if their tasks were worth a try.

Violet wheeled herself underneath several pipes to get a good look at the telegram device, and frowned as she twisted wires and tightened a few screws with a screwdriver she found lying around. Klaus sat at the table and looked over the tidal charts, using a pencil to trace possible paths the sugar bowl might have taken as the water cycle sent it tumbling down the Stricken Stream. And Sunny worked with Phil, standing on a large soup pot so she could reach the counter of the small, grimy kitchen, boiling potatoes and picking tiny bones out of the cod. And as the afternoon turned to evening, and the waters of the Stricken Stream grew even darker in the porthole, the Main Hall of the Queequeg was quiet as all the volunteers worked on the tasks at hand. But even when Captain Widdershins climbed down from the ladder, retrieved a small bell from a pocket of his uniform, and filled the room with the echoes of its loud, metallic ring, the Baudelaires could not be certain if all their efforts had been worth a try at all.

'Attention!' the captain said. 'Aye! I want the entire crew of the Queequeg to report on their progress! Gather 'round the table and tell me what's going on!' Violet wheeled herself out from under the telegram device, and joined her brother and Fiona at the table, while Sunny and Phil emerged from the kitchen.

'I'll report first!' the captain said. 'Aye! Because I'm the captain! Not because I'm showing off! Aye! I try not to show off very much! Aye! Because it's rude! Aye! I've managed to steer us further down the Stricken Stream without humping into anything else! Aye! Which is much harder than it sounds! Aye! We've reached the sea! Aye! Now it should be easier not to run into anything! Aye! Violet, what about you?'

'Well, I thoroughly examined the telegram device,' Violet said. 'I made a few minor repairs, but I found nothing that would interfere with receiving a telegram.'

'You're saying that the device isn't broken, aye?' the captain demanded.

'Aye,' Violet said, growing more comfortable with the captain's speech. 'I think there must be a problem at the other end.'

'Procto?' Sunny asked, which meant 'The other end?'

'A telegram requires two devices,' Violet said. 'One to send the message and the other to receive it. I think you haven't been receiving Volunteer Factual Dispatches because whoever sends the messages is having a problem with their machine.'

'But all sorts of volunteers send us messages,' Fiona said. 'Aye!' the captain said. 'We've received dispatches from more than twenty-five agents!' 'Then many machines must be damaged,' Violet replied. 'Sabotage,' Klaus said. 'It does sound like the damage has been done on purpose,' Violet agreed. 'Remember when we sent a telegram to Mr. Poe, from the Last Chance General Store?'

'Silencio,' Sunny said, which meant 'We never heard a reply.'

'They're closing in,' the captain said darkly. 'Our enemies are preventing us from communicating.'

'I don't see how Count Olaf would have time to destroy all those machines,' Klaus said. 'Many telegrams travel through telephone lines,' Fiona said. 'It wouldn't be difficult.'

'Besides, Olaf isn't the only enemy,' Violet said, thinking of two other villains the Baudelaires had encountered on Mount Fraught.

'Aye!' the captain said. 'That's for certain. There is evil out there you cannot even imagine. Klaus, have you made any progress on the tidal charts?'

Klaus spread out a chart on the table so everyone could see. The chart was really more of a map, showing the Stricken Stream winding through the mountains before reaching the sea, with tiny arrows and notations describing the way the water was moving. The arrows and notes were in several different colors of ink, as if the chart had been passed from researcher to researcher, each adding notes as he or she discovered more information about the area. 'It's more complicated than I thought,' the middle Baudelaire said, 'and much more dull. These charts note every single detail concerning the water cycle.'

'Dull?' the captain roared. 'Aye? We're in the middle of a desperate mission and all you can think of is your own entertainment? Aye? Do you want us to hesitate? Stop our activities and put on a puppet show just so you won't find this submarine dull?'

'You misunderstood me,' Klaus said quickly. 'All I meant was that it's easier to research something that's interesting.'

'You sound like Fiona,' the captain said. 'When I want her to research the life of Herman Melville, she works slowly, but she's quick as a whip when the subject is mushrooms.'

'Mushrooms?' Klaus asked. 'Are you a mycologist?'

Fiona smiled, and her eyes grew wide behind her triangular glasses. 'I never thought I'd meet someone who knew that word,' she said. 'Besides me. Yes, I'm a mycologist. I've been interested in fungi all my life. If we have time, I'll show you my mycological library.'

'Time?' Captain Widdershins repeated. 'We don't have time for fungus books! Aye! We don't have time for you two to do all that flirting, either!'

'We're not flirting!' Fiona said. 'We're having a conversation.'

'It looked like flirting to me,' the captain said. 'Aye!'

'Why don't you tell us about your research,' Violet said to Klaus, knowing that her brother would rather talk about the tidal charts than his personal life.

Klaus gave her a grateful smile and pointed to a point on the chart. 'If my calculations are correct,' he said, 'the sugar bowl would have been carried down the sane tributary we went down in the toboggan. The prevailing currents of the stream lead all the way down here, where the sea begins.'

'So it was carried out to sea,' Violet said.

'I think so,' Klaus said. 'And we can see here that the tides would move it away from Sontag Shore in a northeasterly direction.'

'Sink?' Sunny asked, which meant something like, 'Wouldn't the sugar bowl just drift to the ocean floor?'

'It's too small,' Klaus said. 'Oceans are in constant motion, and an object that falls into the sea could end up miles away. It appears that the tides and currents in this part of the ocean would take the sugar bowl past the Gulag Archipelago here, and then head down toward the Mediocre Barrier Reef before turning at this point here, which is marked 'A.A.' Do you know what that is, Captain? It looks like some sort of floating structure.'

The captain sighed, and raised one finger to fiddle with the curl of his mustache. 'Aye,' he said sadly. 'Anwhistle Aquatics. It's a marine research center and a rhetorical advice service – or it was. It burned down.'

'Anwhistle?' Violet asked. 'That was Aunt Josephine's last name.'

'Aye,' the captain said. 'Anwhistle Aquatics was founded by Gregor Anwhistle, the famous ichnologist and Josephine's brother-in-law. But all that's ancient history. Where did the sugar bowl go next?'

The Baudelaires would have preferred to learn more, but knew better than to argue with the captain, and Klaus pointed to a small oval on the chart to continue his report. 'This is the part that confuses me,' he said. 'You see this oval, right next to Anwhistle Aquatics? It's marked but there's no other explanation.'

Captain Widdershins said, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully. 'I've never seen an oval like that on a chart like this.'