'Don't worry,' Klaus said to his sisters. 'I don't think we'll stay here very long. The fortune-telling tent is closed today because Count Olaf and Madame Lulu are running that important errand.' The middle Baudelaire did not need to add that it would be a good time to sneak into the tent and find out if Lulu's crystal ball really held the answers they were seeking.
'Why do you care if Lulu's tent is closed?' Colette asked. 'You're a freak, not a fortuneteller.'
'And why don't you want to stay here?' Kevin asked. 'Caligari Carnival hasn't been very popular lately, but there's nowhere else for a freak to go.'
'Of course there is,' Violet said. 'Lots of people are ambidextrous, Kevin. There are ambidextrous florists, and ambidextrous air-traffic controllers, and all sorts of things.'
'You really think so?' Kevin asked.
'Of course I do,' Violet said. 'And it's the same with contortionists and hunchbacks. All of us could find some other type of job where people didn't think we were freakish at all.'
'I'm not sure that's true,' Hugo called over from the stove. 'I think that a two-headed person is going to be considered pretty freakish no matter where they go.'
'And it's probably the same with an ambidextrous person,' Kevin said with a sigh.
'Let's try to forget our troubles and play dominoes,' Hugo said, bringing over a tray with six steaming mugs of hot chocolate. 'I thought both of your heads might want to drink separately,' he explained with a smile, 'particularly because this hot chocolate is a little bit unusual. Chabo the Wolf Baby added a little bit of cinnamon.'
'Chabo added it?' Klaus asked with surprise, as Sunny growled modestly.
'Yes,' Hugo said. 'At first I thought it was some freaky wolf recipe, but it's actually quite tasty.'
'That was a clever idea, Chabo,' Klaus said, and gave his sister a squinty smile. It seemed only a little while ago that the youngest Baudelaire couldn't walk, and was small enough to fit inside a birdcage, and now she was developing her own interests, and was big enough to seem half wolf.
'You should be very proud of yourself,' Hugo agreed. 'If you weren't a freak, Chabo, you could grow up to be an excellent chef.'
'She could be a chef anyway,' Violet said. 'Elliot, would you mind if we stepped outside to enjoy our hot chocolate?'
'That's a good idea,' Klaus said quickly. 'I've always considered hot chocolate to be an outdoor beverage, and I'd like to take a peek in the gift caravan.'
'Grr,' Sunny growled, but her siblings knew she meant 'I'll come with you,' and she crawled over to where Violet and Klaus were awkwardly rising from their chair.
'Don't be too long,' Colette said. 'We're not supposed to wander around the carnival.'
'We'll just drink our hot chocolate and come right back,' Klaus promised.
'I hope you don't get in trouble,' Kevin said. 'I hate to think of the tagliatelle grande hitting both of your heads.'
The Baudelaires were just about to point out that a blow from the tagliatelle grande probably wouldn't hurt one bit, when they heard a noise which was far more fearsome than a large noodle waving in the air. Even from inside the caravan, the children could hear a loud, creaky noise they recognized from their long trip into the hinterlands.
'That sounds like that gentleman friend of Madame Lulu's,' Hugo said. 'That's the sound of his car.'
'There's another sound, too,' Colette said. 'Listen.'
The children listened and heard that the contortionist had spoken the truth. Accompanying the roar of the engine was another roar, one that sounded deeper and angrier than any automobile. The Baudelaires knew that you cannot judge something by its sound any more than you can judge a person by the way they look, but this roar was so loud and fierce that the youngsters could not imagine that it brought good news.
Here I must interrupt the story I am writing, and tell you another story in order to make an important point. This second story is fictional, a word which here means 'somebody made it up one day,' as opposed to the story of the Baudelaire orphans, which somebody merely wrote down, usually at night. It is called 'The Story of Queen Debbie and Her Boyfriend, Tony,' and it goes something like this:
The Story of Queen Debbie and her boyfriend, Tony. Once upon a time, there lived a fictional queen named Queen Debbie, who ruled over the land where this story takes place, which is made up. This fictional land had lollipop trees growing everywhere, and singing mice that did all of the chores, and there were fierce and fictional lions who guarded the palace against fictional enemies. Queen Debbie had a boyfriend named Tony, who lived in the neighboring fictional kingdom. Because they lived so far away, Debbie and Tony couldn't see each other that often, but occasionally they would go out to dinner and a movie, or do other fictional things together.
Tony's birthday arrived, and Queen Debbie had some royal business and couldn't travel to see him, but she sent him a nice card and a myna bird in a shiny cage. The proper thing to do if you receive a present, of course, is to write a thank-you note, but Tony was not a particularly proper person, and Called Debbie to complain.
'Debbie, this is Tony,' Tony said. 'I got the birthday present you sent me, and I don't like it at all.'
'I'm sorry to hear that,' Queen Debbie said, plucking a lollipop off a nearby tree. 'I picked out the myna bird especially for you. What sort of present would you prefer?'
'I think you should give me a bunch of valuable diamonds,' said Tony, who was as greedy as he was fictional 'Diamonds?' Queen Debbie said. 'But myna birds can cheer you up when you are sad. You can teach them to sit on your hand, and sometimes they even talk.'
'I want diamonds,' Tony said.
'But diamonds are so valuable,' Queen Debbie said. 'If I send you diamonds in the mail, they'll probably get stolen on their way to you, and then you won't have any birthday present at all.'
'I want diamonds,' whined Tony, who was really becoming quite tiresome.
'I know what I'll do,' Queen Debbie said with a faint smile. 'I'll feed my diamonds to the royal lions, and then send the lions to your kingdom. No one would dare attack a bunch of fierce lions, so the diamonds are sure to arrive safely.'
'Hurry up,' Tony said. 'It's supposed to be my special day.'
It was easy for Queen Debbie to hurry up, because the singing mice who lived in her palace did all of the necessary chores, so it only took a few minutes for her to feed a bunch of diamonds to her lions, wrapping the jewels in tuna fish first so the lions would agree to eat them. Then she instructed the lions to travel to the neighboring kingdom to deliver the present.
Tony waited impatiently outside his house for the rest of the day, eating all of the ice cream and cake and teasing his myna bird, and finally, at just about sunset, he saw the lions approaching on the horizon and ran over to collect his present.
'Give me those diamonds, you stupid lions!' Tony cried, and there is no need to tell you the rest of this story, which has the rather obvious moral 'Never look a gift lion in the mouth.' The point is that there are times where the arrival of a bunch of lions is good news, particularly in a fictional story where the lions are not real and so probably will not hurt you. There are some cases, as in the case of Queen Debbie and her boyfriend, Tony, where the arrival of lions means that the story is about to get much better.
But I am sad to say that the case of the Baudelaire orphans is not one of those times. The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the sinister mystery that surrounds them, and in this real world the arrival of lions means that the story is about to get much worse, and if you do not have a stomach for such a story–any more than lions have a stomach for diamonds not coated in tuna fish–it would be best if you turned around right now and ran the other way, as the Baudelaires wished they could as they exited the caravan and saw what Count Olaf had brought with him when he returned from his errand.
Count Olaf drove his black automobile between the rows of caravans, nearly running over several visitors to the carnival, stopped right at the tent for the House of Freaks, and turned off the engine, which ended the creaky roar the children had recognized. But the other, angrier roar continued as Olaf got out of the car, followed by Madame Lulu, and pointed with a flourish to a trailer that was attached to the rear of the automobile. The trailer was really more of a metal cage on wheels, and through the bars of the cage the Baudelaires could see what the
