'That's a pretty good idea,' Violet replied. 'We could sleep in the unfinished half of the hospital. Nobody will go there at night.'
'Sleep all by ourselves, in a half-finished room?' Klaus asked. 'It'll be cold and dark.'
'It can't be much worse than the Orphans Shack at Prufrock Prep,' Violet said.
'Danya,' Sunny said, which meant 'Or the bedroom at Count Olaf's house.'
Klaus shuddered, remembering how terrible it was when Count Olaf had been their guardian. 'You're right,' he said, stopping at a door which read 'Library of Records.' 'The unfinished wing of the hospital can't be that bad.'
The Baudelaires knocked on the door, which opened almost immediately to reveal one of the oldest men they had ever met, wearing one of the tiniest pairs of glasses they had ever seen. Each lens was scarcely bigger than a green pea, and the man had to squint in order to look at them.
'My eyesight isn't what it used to be,' he said, 'but you appear to be children. And you're very familiar children, too. I'm certain I've seen your faces somewhere before.'
The Baudelaires looked at one another in panic, not knowing whether to dash out of the room or to try to convince the man he was mistaken.
'We're new volunteers,' Violet said. 'I don't think we've ever met before.'
'Babs assigned us to work in the Library of Records,' Klaus said.
'Well, you've come to the right place,' the old man said with a wrinkled smile. 'My name is Hal, and I've worked here in the Library of Records for more years than I'd like to count. I'm afraid my eyesight isn't what it used to be, so I asked Babs if some volunteers could help me.'
'Wolick,' Sunny said.
'My sister says we're very happy to be of assistance,' Violet said, 'and we are.'
'Well, I'm glad to hear that,' Hal said. 'Because there's a lot of work to be done. Come on in and I'll explain what you have to do.'
The Baudelaires walked through the door and found themselves in a small room with nothing much in it but a small table that held a bowl of fresh fruit. 'This is the library?' Klaus said 'Oh no,' the man said. 'This is just an antechamber, a small room I'm using to store my fruit. If you get hungry during the day, you may help yourself to something out of that bowl Also, this is where the intercom is, so we'll have to report here whenever Babs makes an announcement.' He led them across the room to a small door and took a loop of string out of the pocket of his coat. On the loop of string were hundreds of keys, which made tiny clanging noises as they jostled one another. Hal quickly found the right key to unlock the door. 'This,' he said with a small smile, 'is the Library of Records.'
Hal ushered the children inside a dim room with very low ceilings--so low that Hal's gray hair almost brushed against the top. But although the room was not very tall, it was enormous. The Library of Records stretched out so far in front of the Baudelaires that they could scarcely see the opposite wall, or, as the children looked from side to side, the right and left walls. All they could see were big metal file cabinets, with neatly labeled drawers describing the files contained inside. The file cabinets were placed in row after row, as far as the eye could see. The rows were placed very close together, so that the siblings had to walk behind Hal in single file as he gave them the tour of the room.
'I've organized everything myself,' he explained. 'The Library of Records contains information not only from Heimlich Hospital, but from all over the area. There's information about everything from poetry to pills, from picture frames to pyramids, and from pudding to psychology--and that's just in the P aisle, which we're walking down right now.'
'What an amazing place,' Klaus said. 'Just think of everything we can learn from reading all these files.'
'No, no, no,' Hal said, shaking his head sternly. 'We're supposed to file this information, not read it. I don't want to see you touching any of these files except when you're working with them. That's why I keep all these file cabinets locked up tight. Now, let me show you exactly where you'll be working.'
Hal led them to the far wall and pointed out a small rectangular hole, just wide enough for Sunny or maybe Klaus to crawl through. Beside the hole was a basket with a large stack of paper in it, and a bowl filled with paper clips. 'Authorities deposit information into the information chute, which begins outside the hospital and ends right here,' he explained, 'and I need two people to help me file these deposits in the right place. Here's what you do. First, you remove the paper clips and put them in this bowl. Then you glance at the information and figure out where it goes. Remember, try to read as little as possible.' He paused, unclipped a small stack of paper, and squinted at the top page. 'For instance,' he continued 'You only have to read a few words to see that these paragraphs are about the weather last week at Damocles Dock, which is on the shore of some lake someplace. So you would ask me to unlock cabinets in aisle D, for Damocles, or W, for weather, or even P, for paragraphs. It's your choice.'
'But won't it be difficult for people to find that information again?' Klaus asked. 'They won't know whether to look under D, W, or P.'
'Then they'll have to look under all three letters,' Hal said. 'Sometimes the information you need is not in the most obvious place. Remember, paperwork is the most important thing we do at this hospital, so your job is very important. Do you think you can file these papers correctly? I'd like you to start right away.'
'I think we can,' Violet said. 'But what will the third volunteer do?'
Hal looked embarrassed and held up the loop of string with all the keys on it. 'I lost some of the keys to the file cabinets,' he admitted, know why you three seem so familiar.' Hal continued to lead Sunny down another aisle of file cabinets to show her where her teeth could be handy, so his voice floated over to the two older Baudelaires as if he were speaking on an intercom. 'I didn't read it, of course, but there was some information about you in the file about the Snicket fires.'
Chapter Five
“I just don't understand it,' said Klaus, which was not something he said very often.
Violet nodded in agreement, and then said something she didn't say very frequently either. 'It's a puzzle I'm not sure we can solve.'
'Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity,' Sunny said, which was something she had said only once before. It meant something along the lines of 'I must admit I don't have the faintest idea of what is going on,' and the first time the youngest Baudelaire had said it, she had just been brought home from the hospital where she was born, and was looking at her siblings as they leaned over her crib to greet her. This time, she was sitting in the unfinished wing of the hospital where she worked, and was looking at her siblings as they tried to guess what Hal had meant when he had mentioned 'the Snicket fires.' If I had been with the children, I would have been able to tell them a long and terrible story about men and women who joined a noble organization only to find their lives wrecked by a greedy man and a lazy newspaper, but the siblings were alone, and all they had of the story were a few pages from the Quagmire notebooks. It was night, and after working all day in the Library of Records, the Baudelaire orphans had made themselves as comfortable as they could in the half-finished section of Heimlich Hospital, but I'm sorry to say the phrase 'as comfortable as they could' here means 'not very comfortable at all.' Violet had found a few flashlights designed to be used by builders working in dark corners, but when she arranged them to light up their surroundings, the light only made clear just how filthy their surroundings really were. Klaus had found some dropcloths, designed to be used by painters who did not want to drip paint on the floor, but when he wrapped them around himself and his sisters, the warmth only made clear just how freezing it was when the evening wind blew through the sheets of plastic that were nailed to the wooden boards. And Sunny had used her teeth to chop up some of the fruit in Hal's bowl, to make a sort of fruit salad for dinner, but each handful of chopped fruit only made clear just how inappropriate it was to be living in such a bare and lonely place. But even though it was clear to the children how filthy, freezing, and inappropriate their new living quarters were, nothing else seemed clear at all.
'We wanted to use the Library of Records to learn more about Jacques Snicket,' Violet said, 'but we might end up learning more about ourselves. What in the world do you think is written about us in that file Hal mentioned?'
'I don't know,' Klaus replied, 'and I don't think Hal knows, either. He said he doesn't read any of the
