The Hostile Hospital

thirteen and go up the chute, and I'll get out another way. We'll meet up in the unfinished wing.'

'No!' Sunny cried.

'Sunny's right,' Klaus said. 'This is what happened with the Quagmires, remember? When we left them behind, they were snatched away.'

'The Quagmires are safe now,' Violet reminded him. 'Don't worry, I'll invent a solution.'

The eldest Baudelaire gave her siblings a small smile, and reached into her pocket so she could tie up her hair and put the levers and gears of her inventing mind into motion. But there was no ribbon in her pocket. As her trembling fingers explored her empty pocket, she remembered she had used her ribbon to fool Hal with a fake loop of keys. Violet felt a quiver in her stomach as she remembered, but she had no time to feel bad about the trick she had played. With sudden horror, she heard a creak right behind her, and she jumped out of the way just in time to avoid the crash. A file cabinet labeled 'Linguistics to Lions' fell against the wall, blocking the mouth of the chute.

'Violet!' Sunny cried. She and her brother tried to push the cabinet aside, but the strength of a thirteen- year-old boy and his baby sister were no match against a metal case holding files on everything from the history of language to a large carnivorous feline found in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India.

'I'm O.K.,' Violet called back.

'Not for long you're not!' Esmé snarled, from a few aisles over.

Klaus and Sunny sat in the dark chute and heard their sister's faint voice as she called to them. 'Leave me here!' she insisted. 'I'll meet you back in our filthy, cold, inappropriate home.'

The two younger Baudelaires huddled together at the entrance of the chute, but it is useless for me to describe to you how desperate and terrified they felt. There is no reason to describe how horrible it was to hear Violet's frantic footsteps across the Library of Records, or the odd, tottering ones of Esmé as she pursued the eldest Baudelaire in her stiletto heels, creaking and crashing file cabinets with every stabbing step. It is unnecessary to describe the cramped and difficult journey Klaus and Sunny made up the chute, which was slanted so steeply that it felt to the two orphans like they were crawling up a large mountain covered in ice instead of a fairly short chute used for depositing information. It is ineffectual to describe how the two children felt when they finally reached the end of the chute, which was another hole, carved into the outside wall of Heimlich Hospital, and found that Hal was right when he said it was to be a particularly cold evening. And it is absolutely futile--a word which here means 'useless, unnecessary, and ineffectual, because there is no reason for it'--to describe how they felt as they sat in the half-finished section of the hospital, with dropcloths wrapped around them to keep them warm and flashlights lit around them to keep them company, and waited for Violet to show up, because Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were not thinking of these things.

The two younger Baudelaires sat together, clutching page thirteen of the Baudelaire file, as the night grew later and later, but they were not thinking about the noises they heard coming from the Library of Records, or about the journey up the chute or even about the icy breeze as it blew through the plastic sheets and chilled the Baudelaire bones. Klaus and Sunny were thinking about what Violet had said, when she saw the piece of paper they were clutching now. 'I never thought I'd live to see the day,' Violet had said, and her two siblings knew that the phrase was just another way of saying 'I'm very surprised' or 'I'm extremely flabbergasted' or 'This blows my mind beyond belief.' But now, as the two Baudelaires waited more and more anxiously for their sister, Klaus and Sunny began to fear that the phrase Violet used was more appropriate than she ever would have guessed. As the first pale rays of the morning sun began to shine on the unfinished half of the hospital, the Baudelares grew more and more frightened that their sister would not live to see the day.

Chapter Eight

Heimlich Hospital is gone now, and will probably never be rebuilt. If you want to visit it, you have to convince a farmer to let you borrow his mule, for nobody in the surrounding area is willing to go within twelve miles of its wreckage, and once you arrive you can hardly blame them. The few scraps of the building that have survived are covered with a thick and prickly type of ivy called kudzu, which makes it difficult to see what the hospital looked like when the Baudelaires first arrived in the V.F.D. van. The confusing maps have been gnawed off the walls of the sagging staircases, so it is very hard to imagine how troublesome it was to find one's way through all of the areas of the building. And the intercom system has long since crumbled away, with only a handful of square speakers left sitting among the ashen rubble, so it is impossible to imagine just how unnerving it was when Klaus and Sunny heard the latest announcement from Mattathias.

'Attention!' Mattathias announced. There were no intercom speakers installed in the unfinished half of the hospital, so the two younger Baudelaires had to listen very hard to hear the scratchy voice of their enemy coming from one of the outdoor speakers. 'Attention! Attention! This is Mattathias, the Head of Human Resources. I am canceling the remainder of the hospital inspections. We have found what we were looking for.' There was a pause as Mattathias moved away from the microphone, and as Klaus and Sunny listened very hard, they could hear the faint, faint noise of triumphant, high-pitched laughter coming from the Head of Human Resources.

'Excuse me,' he continued, when his giggling fit was over. 'To continue, please be aware that two of the three Baudelaire murderers-- Klaus and Sun--I mean, Klyde and Susie Baudelaire--have been spotted in the hospital. If you see any children whom you recognize from The Daily Punctilio, please capture them and notify the police.' Mattathias stopped talking and began to giggle again, until the children heard the voice of Esmé Squalor whispering, 'Darling, you forgot to turn off the intercom.' Then there was a click, and everything was silent.

'They caught her,' Klaus said. Now that the sun had risen, it wasn't very cold in the half-finished section of the hospital, but the middle Baudelaire shivered nonetheless. 'That's what Mattathias meant when he said that they had found what they were looking for.'

'Danger,' Sunny said grimly.

'She certainly is,' Klaus said. 'We have to rescue Violet before it's too late.'

'Virm,' Sunny said, which meant 'But we don't know where she is.'

'She must be somewhere in the hospital,' Klaus said, 'otherwise Mattathias wouldn't still be here. He and Esmé are probably hoping to capture us, too.'

'Ranee,' Sunny said.

'And the file,' Klaus agreed, taking page thirteen out of his pocket, where he had been storing it for safekeeping along with the scraps of the Quagmire notebooks. 'Come on, Sunny. We've got to find our sister and get her out of there.'

'Lindersto,' Sunny said. She meant 'That'll be tough. We'll have to wander around the hospital looking for her, while other people will be wandering around the hospital, looking for us.'

'I know,' Klaus said glumly. 'If anyone recognizes us from The Daily Punctilio, we'll be in jail before we can help Violet.'

'Disguise?' Sunny said.

'I don't know how,' Klaus said, looking around the half-finished room. 'All we have here is some flashlights and a few dropcloths. I suppose if we wrapped the dropcloths around us and put the flashlights on top of our heads, we could try to disguise ourselves as piles of construction materials.'

'Gidoost,' Sunny said, which meant 'But piles of construction materials don't wander around hospitals.'

'Then we'll have to walk into the hospital without disguises,' Klaus said. 'We'll just have to be extra careful.'

Sunny nodded emphatically, a word which here means 'as if she thought being extra careful was a very good plan,' and Klaus nodded emphatically back. But as they left the half-finished wing of the hospital, the two children felt less and less emphatic about what they were doing. Ever since that terrible day at the beach when Mr. Poe brought them news of the fire, all three Baudelaires had been extra careful all of the time. They had been extra careful when they lived with Count Olaf, and Sunny had still ended up dangling from a cage outside Olaf's tower room. They had been extra careful when they'd worked at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, and Klaus had still ended up hypnotized by Dr. Orwell. And now the Baudelaires had been as careful as they could possibly be, but the hospital had turned out to be as hostile an environment as anywhere the three children had ever lived. But just as Klaus and