The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events) (13 page)

"savor," you probably know, here means "read slowly, as each sentence in their parents'

handwriting was like a gift from beyond the grave"— but as the poison of the Medusoid Mycelium advanced further and further, the siblings had to skim, scanning each page for the words "horseradish" or "wasabi." As you know if you've ever skimmed a book, you end up getting a strange view of the story, with just glimpses here and there of what is going on, and some authors insert confusing sentences in the middle of a book just to confuse anyone who might be skimming. Three very short men were carrying a large, flat piece of wood, painted to look like a living room. As the Baudelaire orphans searched for the secret they hoped they would find, they caught glimpses of other secrets their parents had kept, and as Violet, Klaus, and Sunny spotted the names of people the Baudelaire parents had known, things they had whispered to these people, the codes hidden in the whispers, and many other intriguing details, the children hoped they would have the opportunity to reread
A Series of Unfortunate
Events
on a less frantic occasion. On that afternoon, however, they read faster and faster, looking desperately for the one secret that might save them as the hour began to pass and the Medusoid Mycelium grew faster and faster inside them, as if the deadly fungus also did not have time to savor its treacherous path. As they read more and more, it grew harder and harder for the Baudelaires to breathe, and when Klaus finally spotted one of the words he had been looking for, he thought for a moment it was just a vision brought on by all the stalks and caps growing inside him.

"Horseradish!" he said, his voice rough and wheezy. "Look: 'Ishmael's fearmongering has stopped work on the passageway, even though we have a plethora of horseradish in case of any emergency.'"

Violet started to speak, but then choked on the fungus and coughed for a long while.

"What does 'fearmongering' mean?" she said finally.

"'Plethora'?" Sunny's voice was little more than a mushroom-choked whisper.

"'Fearmongering' means 'making people afraid,'" said Klaus, whose vocabulary was unaffected by the poison, "and 'plethora' means 'more than enough.'" He gave a large, shuddering wheeze, and continued to read. "'We're attempting a botanical hybrid through the tuberous canopy, which should bring safety to fruition despite its dangers to our associates in utero. Of course, in case we are banished, Beatrice is hiding a small amount in a vess—'"

The middle Baudelaire interrupted himself with a cough that was so violent he dropped the book to the floor. His sisters held him tightly as his body shook against the poison and one pale hand pointed at the ceiling. "'Tuberous canopy,'" he wheezed finally. "Our father means the roots above our heads. A botanical hybrid is a plant made from the combination of two other plants." He shuddered, and his eyes, behind his glasses, filled with tears. "I don't know what he's talking about," he said finally.

Violet looked at the roots over their heads, where the periscope disappeared into the network of the tree. To her horror she found that her vision was becoming blurry, as if the fungus was growing over her eyes. "It sounds like they put the horseradish into the roots of the plant, in order to make everyone safe," she said. "That's what 'bringing safety to fruition'

would be, the way a tree brings its crop to fruition."

"Apples!" cried Sunny in a strangled voice. "Bitter apples!"

"Of course!" Klaus said. "The tree is a hybrid, and its apples are bitter because they contain horseradish!"

"If we eat an apple," Violet said, "the fungus will be diluted."

"Gentreefive," Sunny agreed in a croak, and lowered herself off her siblings' laps, wheezing desperately as she tried to get to the gap in the roots. Klaus tried to follow her, but when he stood up the poison made him so dizzy that he had to sit back down and clasp his throbbing head. Violet coughed painfully, and gripped her brother's arm.

"Come on," she said, in a frantic wheeze.

Klaus shook his head. "I'm not sure we can make it," he said.

Sunny reached toward the gap in the roots and then curled to the floor in pain. "Kikbucit?"

she asked, her voice weak and faint.

"We can't die here," Violet said, her voice so feeble her siblings could scarcely hear her.

"Our parents saved our lives in this very room, many years ago, without even knowing it."

"Maybe not," Klaus said. "Maybe this is the end of our story."

"Tumurchap," Sunny said, but before anyone could ask what she meant, the children heard another sound, faint and strange, in the secret space beneath the apple tree their parents had hybridized with horseradish long ago. The sound was sibilant, a word which might appear to have something to do with siblings, but actually refers to a sort of whistle or hiss, such as a steam engine might make as it comes to a stop, or an audience might make after sitting through one of Al Funcoot's plays. The Baudelaires were so desperate and frightened that for a moment they thought it might be the sound of Medusoid Mycelium, celebrating its poisonous triumph over the three children, or perhaps just the sound of their hopes evaporating. But the sibilance was not the sound of evaporating hope or celebrating fungus, and thank goodness it was not the sound of a steam engine or a disgruntled theatrical audience, as the Baudelaires were not strong enough to confront such things. The hissing sound came from one of the few inhabitants of the island whose story contained not one but two shipwrecks, and perhaps because of its own sad history, this inhabitant was sympathetic to the sad history of the Baudelaires, although it is difficult to say how much sympathy can be felt by an animal, no matter how friendly. I do not have the courage to do much research on this matter, and my only herpetological comrade's story ended quite some time ago, so what this reptile was thinking as it slid toward the children is a detail of the Baudelaires' history that may never be revealed. But even with this missing detail, it is quite clear what happened.

The snake slithered through the gap in the roots of the tree, and whatever the serpent was thinking, it was quite clear from the sibilant sound that came hissing through the reptile's clenched teeth that the Incredibly Deadly Viper was offering the Baudelaire orphans an apple.

If is a well-known but curious fact that the first bite of an apple always tastes the best, which is why the heroine of a book much more suitable to read than this one spends an entire afternoon eating the first bite of a bushel of apples. But even this anarchic little girl—the word "anarchic" here means "apple-loving"—never tasted a bite as wonderful as the Baudelaire orphans' first bite of the apple from the tree their parents had hybridized with horseradish. The apple was not as bitter as the Baudelaire orphans would have guessed, and the horseradish gave the juice of the apple a slight, sharp edge, like the air on a winter morning. But of course, the biggest appeal of the apple offered by the Incredibly Deadly Viper was its immediate effect on the deadly fungus growing inside them. From the moment the Baudelaire teeth bit down on the apple—first Violet's, and then Klaus's, and then Sunny's— the stalks and caps of the Medusoid Mycelium began to shrink, and within moments all traces of the dreaded mushroom had withered away, and the children could breathe clearly and easily. Hugging one another in relief, the Baudelaires found themselves laughing, which is a common reaction among people who have narrowly escaped death, and the snake seemed to be laughing, too, although perhaps it was just appreciating the youngest Baudelaire scratching behind its tiny, hooded ears.

"We should each have another apple," Violet said, standing up, "to make sure we've consumed enough horseradish."

"And we should collect enough apples for all of the islanders," Klaus said. "They must be just as desperate as we were."

"Stockpot," Sunny said, and walked to the rack of pots on the ceiling, where the snake helped her take down an enormous metal pot that could hold a great number of apples and in fact had been used to make an enormous vat of applesauce a number of years previously.

"You two start picking apples," Violet said, walking to the periscope. "I want to check on Kit Snicket. The flooding of the coastal shelf must have begun by now, and she must be terrified."

"I hope she avoided the Medusoid Mycelium," Klaus said. "I hate to think of what that would do to her child."

"Phearst," Sunny said, which meant something like, "We should rescue her promptly."

"The islanders are in worse shape than Kit," Klaus said. "We should go to Ishmael’s tent first, and then go rescue Kit."

Violet peered through the periscope and frowned. "We shouldn't go to Ishmael's tent," she said. "We need to fill that stockpot with apples and get to the coastal shelf as quickly as we can."

"What do you mean?" Klaus said.

"They're leaving," Violet said, and I'm sorry to say it was true. Through the periscope, the eldest Baudelaire could see the shape of the outrigger and the figures of its poisoned passengers, who were pushing it along the coastal shelf toward the library raft where Kit Snicket still lay. The three children each peered through the periscope, and then looked at one another. They knew they should be hurrying, but for a moment none of the Baudelaires could move, as if they were unwilling to travel any farther in their sad history, or see one more part of their story come to an end.

If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans—and I certainly hope you have not—then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repair people in between. But it cannot be said that
The End
contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than
The Bad Beginning
contained its beginning.

The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that left the Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always
in medias res
— a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative"—and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so
The End
is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of
The End
is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of
The End,
as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of
The End
contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at
The End
before the end of
The End
arrives, and to stop reading
The End
before you read the end, as the stories that end in
The End
that began in
The Bad Beginning
are beginning to end now.

The Baudelaires hurriedly filled their stock-pot with apples and ran to the coastal shelf, hurrying over the brae as quickly as they could. It was past lunchtime, and the waters of the sea were already flooding the shelf, so the water was much deeper than it had been since the children's arrival. Violet and Klaus had to hold the stockpot high in the air, and Sunny and the Incredibly Deadly Viper climbed up on the elder Baudelaires' shoulders to ride along with the bitter apples. The children could see Kit Snicket on the horizon, still lying on the library raft as the waters rose to soak the first few layers of books, and alongside the strange cube was the outrigger. As they drew closer, they saw that the islanders had stopped pushing the boat and were climbing aboard, pausing from time to time to cough, while at the head of the outrigger was the figure of Ishmael, seated in his clay chair, gazing at his poisoned colonists and watching the children approach.

"Stop!" Violet cried, when they were close enough to be heard. "We've discovered a way to dilute the poison!"

"Baudelaires!" came the faint cry of Kit high atop the library raft. "Thank goodness you're here! I think I'm going into labor!"

As I'm sure you know, "labor" is the term for the process by which a woman gives birth, and it is a Herculean task, a phrase which here means "something you would rather not do on a library raft floating on a flooding coastal shelf." Sunny could see, from her stockpot perch, Kit holding her belly and giving the youngest Baudelaire a painful grimace.

"We'll help you," Violet promised, "but we need to get these apples to the islanders."

"They won't take them!" Kit said. "I tried to tell them how the poison could be diluted, but they insist on leaving!"

"No one's forcing them," said Ishmael calmly. "I merely suggested that the island was no longer a safe place, and that we should set sail for another one."

"You and the Baudelaires are the ones who got us into this mess," came the drowsy voice of Mr. Pitcairn, thick with fungus and coconut cordial, "but Ishmael is going to get us out."

"This island used to be a safe place," said Professor Fletcher, "far from the treachery of the world. But since you've arrived it's become dangerous and complicated."

"That's not our fault," Klaus said, walking closer and closer to the outrigger as the water continued to rise. "You can't live far from the treachery of the world, because eventually the treachery will wash up on your shores."

"Exactly," said Alonso, who yawned. "You washed up and spoiled the island forever."

"So we're leaving it to you," said Ariel, who coughed violently. "You can have this dangerous place. We're going to sail to safety."

"Safe here!" Sunny cried, holding up an apple.

"You've poisoned us enough," said Erewhon, and the islanders wheezed in agreement "We don't want to hear any more of your treacherous ideas."

"But you were ready to mutiny," Violet said. "You didn't want to take Ishmael's suggestions."

"That was before the Medusoid Mycelium arrived," Finn said hoarsely. "He's been here the longest, so he knows how to keep us safe. At his suggestion, we all drank quite a bit of cordial while he figured out the root of the trouble." She paused to catch her breath as the sinister fungus continued to grow. "And the root of the trouble, Baudelaires, is you."

By now the children had reached the outrigger, and they looked up at Ishmael, who raised his eyebrows and stared back at the frantic Baudelaires. "Why are you doing this?" Klaus asked the facilitator. "You know we're not the root of the problem."

"
In medias res
!" Sunny cried.

"Sunny's right," Violet said. "The Medusoid Mycelium was around before we were born, and our parents prepared for its arrival by adding horseradish to the roots of the apple tree."

"If they don't eat these bitter apples," Klaus pleaded, "they'll come to a bitter end. Tell the islanders the whole story, Ishmael, so they can save themselves."

"The whole story?" Ishmael said, and leaned down from his chair so he could talk to the Baudelaires without the others hearing. "If I told the islanders the whole story, I wouldn't be keeping them safe from the world's terrible secrets. They almost learned the whole story this morning, and began to mutiny over breakfast. If they knew all these island's secrets there'd be a schism in no time at all."

"Better a schism than a death," Violet said.

Ishmael shook his head, and fingered the wild strands of his woolly beard. "No one is going to die," he said. "This outrigger can take us to a beach near Lousy Lane, where we can travel to a horseradish factory."

"You don't have time for such a long voyage," Klaus said.

"I think we do," Ishmael said. "Even without a compass, I think I can get us to a safe place."

"You need a
moral
compass," Violet said. "The spores of the Medusoid Mycelium can kill within the hour. The entire colony could be poisoned, and even if you make it to shore, the fungus could spread to anyone you meet. You're not keeping anyone safe. You're endangering the whole world, just to keep a few of your secrets. That's not parenting! That's horrid and wrong!"

"I guess it depends on how you look at it," Ishmael said. "Good-bye, Baudelaires." He sat up straight and called out to the wheezing islanders. "I suggest you start rowing," he said, and the colonists reached their arms into the water and began to paddle the outrigger away from the children. The Baudelaires hung on to the side of the boat, and called to the islander who had first found them on the coastal shelf.

"Friday!" Sunny cried. "Take apple!"

"Don't succumb to peer pressure," Violet begged.

Friday turned to face the children, and the siblings could see she was terribly frightened.

Klaus quickly grabbed an apple from the stock-pot, and the young girl leaned out of the boat to touch his hand.

"I'm sorry to leave you behind, Baudelaires," she said, "but I must go with my family. I’ve already lost my father, and I couldn't stand to lose anyone else."

"But your father—" Klaus started to say, but Mrs. Caliban gave him a terrible look and pulled her daughter away from the edge of the outrigger.

"Don't rock the boat," she said. "Come here and drink your cordial."

"Your mother is right, Friday," Ishmael said firmly. "You should respect your parent's wishes. It's more than the Baudelaires ever did."

"We are respecting our parents' wishes," Violet said, hoisting the apples as high as she could. "They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them."

Ishmael put his hand on the stockpot of apples. "What do your parents know," he asked,

"about surviving?" and with one firm, cruel gesture the old orphan pushed against the stockpot, and the outrigger moved out of the children's grasp. Violet and Klaus tried to take another step closer to the islanders, but the water had risen too far, and the Baudelaire feet slipped off the surface of the coastal shelf, and the siblings found themselves swimming. The stockpot tipped, and Sunny gave a small shriek and climbed down to Violet's shoulders as several apples from the pot dropped into the water with a splash. At the sound of the splash, the Baudelaires remembered the apple core that Ishmael had dropped, and realized why the facilitator was so calm in the face of the deadly fungus, and why his voice was the only one of the islanders' that wasn't clogged with stalks and caps.