'To keep the lions in,' Olaf replied, 'so they only eat whichever freak jumps down there. Let's dig it over by the roller coaster.'
'Good idea, boss,' the bald man said.
'There are shovels in tool caravan,' Lulu said. 'I will show you, please.'
'I'm not going to dig a pit,' Esmй announced as the others walked away. 'I might break a nail. Besides, I need to talk to Count Olaf–
'Oh, all right,' Count Olaf said. 'Let's go in the guest caravan where we won't be disturbed.'
Olaf and Esmй walked off in one direction, and Madame Lulu led the henchmen in the other, leaving the three children alone with their coworkers.
'Well, we'd better go inside,' Colette said. 'Maybe we can think of a way not to get eaten.'
'Oh, let's not think about those fearsome creatures,' Hugo said with a shudder. 'Let's play another game of dominoes instead.'
'Chabo, my other head, and I will be along in a moment,' Violet said. 'We want to finish our hot chocolate.'
'You might as well enjoy it,' Kevin said glumly, following Hugo and Colette back into the freaks' caravan. 'It might turn out to be the last hot chocolate you ever drink.'
Kevin shut the door with both hands, and the Baudelaires stepped farther away from the caravan so they could talk without being overheard.
'Adding cinnamon to hot chocolate is a terrific idea, Sunny,' Violet said, 'but I'm having trouble enjoying it.'
'Ificat,' Sunny said, which meant 'Me too.'
'Count Olaf's latest scheme leaves a bad taste in my mouth,' Klaus said, 'and I don't think cinnamon will help.'
'We have to get into that fortune-telling tent,' Violet said, 'and this may be our only chance.'
'Do you think it's really true?' Klaus asked. 'Do you think Madame Lulu really saw something in her crystal ball?'
'I don't know,' Violet said, 'but I do know from my studies of electricity that lightning can't appear inside a tent. Something mysterious is going on, and we need to find out what it is.'
'Chow!' Sunny said, which meant 'Before we're thrown to the lions!'
'But do you think it's real?' Klaus asked.
'I don't know,' Violet said testily, a word which here means 'in her regular voice, forgetting her disguise because she was becoming very frustrated and upset.' 'I don't know if Madame Lulu is a fortune-teller. I don't know how Count Olaf always knows where we are. I don't know where the Snicket file is, or why someone else had Olaf's tattoo, or what V.F.D. stands for, or why there's a secret passageway that leads to our house, or–'
'If our parents are alive?' Klaus interrupted. 'Do you know if one of our parents is really alive?'
The middle Baudelaire's voice quivered, and his sisters turned to look at him–a feat that was difficult for Violet, who was still sharing his shirt–and saw that he was crying. Violet leaned so that her head was against his while Sunny put her mug down and crawled closer to hug his knees, and the three Baudelaires stood quietly together for a few moments.
Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it. When I am able, I go out walking on Briny Beach very early in the morning, which is the best time to find materials important to the Baudelaire case, and the ocean is so peaceful that I feel peaceful, too, as if I am no longer grieving for the woman I love and will never see again. But then, when I am cold and duck into a teashop where the owner is expecting me, I have only to reach for the sugar bowl before my grief returns, and I find myself crying so loudly that other customers ask me if I could possibly lower my sobs. With the Baudelaire orphans, it was as if their grief were a very heavy object that they each took turns carrying so that they would not all be crying at once, but sometimes the object was too heavy for one of them to move without weeping, so Violet and Sunny stood next to Klaus, reminding him that this was something they could all carry together until at last they found a safe place to lay it down.
'I'm sorry I was testy, Klaus,' Violet said. 'There's just so much we don't know that it's hard to think about all at once.'
'Chithvee,' Sunny said, which meant 'But I can't help thinking about our parents.'
'Me neither,' Violet admitted. 'I keep wondering if one of them survived the fire.'
'But if they did,' Klaus said, 'why would they be hiding in a faraway place? Why aren't they trying to find us?'
'Maybe they are,' Violet said quietly. 'Maybe they're searching for us everywhere they can think of, but they can't find us, because we've been hiding and disguising ourselves for so long.'
'But why doesn't our mother or father contact Mr. Poe?' Klaus said.
'We've tried to contact him,' Violet pointed out, 'but he doesn't answer our telegrams, and we can't seem to reach him by phone. If one of our parents has survived the fire, maybe they're having the same wretched luck.'
'Galfuskin,' Sunny pointed out. By 'Galfuskin' she meant something like, 'This is all guesswork–let's go to the fortune-telling tent and see if we can find out anything for sure, and we'd better do it soon before the others get back.'
'You're right, Sunny,' Violet said, and put her mug down next to Sunny's. Klaus put down his mug, and all three Baudelaires took disguised steps away from their hot chocolate. Violet and Klaus walked awkwardly in their shared pants, leaning against one another with every step, and Sunny followed alongside, still crawling so that she would look half wolf if anyone watched them as they made their way through the carnival toward the fortune-telling tent. But no one was watching the Baudelaire orphans. The visitors to the carnival had gone home to tell their friends about the lion show happening the next day. The children's coworkers were in the freaks' caravan bemoaning their fate, a word which here means 'playing dominoes, rather than trying to think of a way out of their predicament.' Madame Lulu and Olaf's assistants were digging the pit, over by the roller coaster still covered in ivy. Count Olaf and Esmй Squalor were bickering in the guest caravan, which was located at the far end of the carnival where I had stayed with my brother so many years ago, and the rest of Madame Lulu's employees were closing down the carnival and hoping that someday they might work in a less miserable place. So nobody was watching as the children approached the tent next to Lulu's caravan, and stopped for a minute at the flap that led inside. The fortune-telling tent no longer stands at Caligari Carnival, or anywhere else for that matter. Anyone wandering through the blackened and desolate hinterlands would scarcely be able to tell that there had been any tents at all. But even if everything looked exactly the same as when the Baudelaire orphans stayed there, it is unlikely that a traveler would understand what the tent's decoration meant, as nowadays there are so few living experts on such subjects, and the experts who are alive are all in terrible circumstances, or, in my case, on their way to terrible circumstances in the hopes of making them less terrible. But the Baudelaire orphans– who, as you will recall, had only arrived at the carnival the night before, and so had never seen the fortune-telling tent in daylight until this very moment–could see how the tent was decorated, which is why they stopped to stare at it. At first glance, the painting on the fortune-telling tent seemed to depict an eye, like the decoration on Madame Lulu's caravan and the tattoo on Count Olaf's ankle. The three children had seen similar eyes wherever they went, from a building in the shape of an eye when they were working in a lumbermill, to an eye on Esmй Squalor's purse when they were hiding in a hospital, to a huge swarm of eyes that surrounded them in their most frightening nightmares, and although the siblings never understood quite what these eyes meant, they were so weary of gazing at them that they would never pause to look at one again. But there are many things in life that become different if you take a long look at them, and as the children paused in front of the fortune-telling tent, the painting seemed to change before their very eyes, until it did not seem like a painting at all, but an insignia.
An insignia is sort of a mark that usually stands for an organization or a business, and the mark can be of any sort whatsoever. Sometimes an insignia can be a simple shape, such as a wavy line to indicate an organization concerned with rivers or oceans, or a square to indicate an organization concerned with geometry or sugar cubes. Sometimes an insignia can be a small picture of something, such as a torch, to indicate an organization that is flammable, or the three-eyed girl outside the House of Freaks, indicating that people who were unusual in some way were on display inside. And sometimes an insignia can be part of the name of the organization, such as the first few letters, or its initials. The Baudelaires, of course, were not involved in any sort of business, aside from
