Who Could That Be at This Hour?. Lemony Snicket

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the hurried, slender shape of a long train, balancing high above the bumpy valley where we were driving. The train tracks were on a long, high bridge, which curved out from the shore to reach an island that was now just a mountain of stones rising out of the drained valley. Theodora turned the roadster toward the island, and as we approached I could see a group of buildings—faded brick buildings enclosed by a faded brick wall. A school, perhaps, or the estate of a dull family. The buildings had once been elegant, but many of the windows were shattered and gone, and there were no signs of life. I was surprised to hear, just as the roadster passed directly under the bridge, the low, loud clanging of a bell, from a high brick tower that looked abandoned and sad on a pile of rocks.

      Theodora cleared her throat. “There should be two masks behind you.”

      “Masks?” I said.

      “Don’t repeat what I say, Snicket. You are an apprentice, not a mynah bird. There are two masks on the backseat. We need them.”

      I reached back and found the items in question but had to stare at them for a moment before I found the courage to pick them up. The two masks, one for an adult and one for a child, were fashioned from a shiny silver metal, with a tangle of rubber tubes and filters on the back. On the front were narrow slits for the eyes and a small ripple underneath for the nose. There was nothing where a mouth might be, so the faces of the masks looked at me silently and spookily, as if they thought this whole journey was a bad idea.

      “I absolutely agree,” I told them.

      Theodora frowned. “That bell means we should don these masks. ‘Don’ is a word which here means ‘put on our heads.’ The pressure at this depth will make it difficult to breathe otherwise.”

      “Pressure?”

      “Water pressure, Snicket. It’s everywhere around us. Masked or not, you must use your head.”

      My head told me it didn’t understand how there could be water pressure everywhere around us. There wasn’t any water. I wondered where all the water had gone when they’d drained this part of the sea, and I should have wondered. But I told myself it was the wrong question and asked something else instead. “Why did they do this? Why did they drain the sea of its water?”

      S. Theodora Markson took one mask from my hands and slipped it onto her helmeted head. “To save the town,” she replied in a muffled voice. “Put your mask on, Snicket.”

      I did as Theodora said. The mask was dark inside and smelled faintly like a cave or a closet that had not been opened in some time. A few tubes huddled in front of my mouth, like worms in front of a fish. I blinked behind the slits at Theodora, who blinked back.

      “Is the mask working?” she asked me.

      “How can I tell?”

      “If you can breathe, then it’s working.”

      I did not say that I had been breathing previously. Something more interesting had attracted my attention. Out the window of the roadster I saw a line of big barrels, round and old, squatting uncovered next to some odd, enormous machines. The machines looked like huge hypodermic needles, as if a doctor were planning on giving several shots to a giant. Here and there were people—men or women, it was impossible to tell in their masks—checking on the needles to make sure they were working properly. They were. With a swinging of hinges and a turning of gears, the needles plunged deep into holes in the shell-covered ground and then rose up again, full of a black liquid. The needles deposited the liquid, with a quiet black splash, into the barrels and then plunged back into the holes, over and over again while I watched through the slits in my mask.

      “Oil,” I guessed.

      “Ink,” Theodora corrected. “The town is called Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Of course, it is no longer by the sea, as they’ve drained it away. But the town still manufactures ink that was once famous for making the darkest, most permanent stains.”

      “And the ink is in those holes?”

      “Those holes are long, narrow caves,” Theodora said, “like wells. And in the caves are octopi. That’s where the ink comes from.”

      I thought of a friend of mine who had also just graduated, a girl who knew about all sorts of underwater life. “I thought octopi make ink only when they are frightened.”

      “I imagine an octopus would find those machines very frightening indeed,” Theodora said, and she turned the roadster onto a narrow path in the shells that twisted upward, climbing a steep and craggy mountain. At its peak, I could see a faint, pulsing light through the afternoon gray. It took me a minute to realize that it was a lighthouse, which stood on a cliff that overlooked what had been waves and water and was now just a vast, eerie landscape. As the roadster sputtered up the hill, I looked out the windows on Theodora’s side and saw that opposite the inkwells was another strange sight.

      “The Clusterous Forest,” Theodora said, before I could even ask. “When they drained the sea, everyone thought all of the seaweed would shrivel up and die. But my information says that for some mysterious reason, the seaweed learned to grow on dry land, and now for miles and miles there is an enormous forest of seaweed. Never go in there, Snicket. It is a wild and lawless place, not fit for man or beast.”

      She did not have to tell me not to go into the Clusterous Forest. It was frightening enough just to look at it. It was less like a forest and more like an endless mass of shrubbery, with the shiny leaves of the seaweed twisting this way and that, as if the plants were still under churning water. Even with the windows shut, I could smell the forest, a brackish scent of fish and soil, and I could hear the rustling of thousands of strands of seaweed that had somehow survived the draining of the sea.

      The bell rang again as the roadster finally reached the top of the hill, signaling the all-clear. We removed our masks, and Theodora steered the car onto an actual paved road that wound past the blinking lighthouse and down a hill lined with trees. We passed a small white cottage and then came to a stop at the driveway of a mansion so large it looked like several mansions had crashed together. Parts of it looked like a castle, with several tall towers stretching high into the cloudy air, and parts of it looked like a tent, with heavy gray cloth stretched over an ornate garden crawling with fountains and statues, and parts of it looked more like a museum, with a severe front door and a long, long stretch of window. The view from the window must have been very pretty once, with the waves crashing below the cliffs. It wasn’t pretty anymore. I looked down and saw the top of the Clusterous Forest, moving in slow ripples like spooky laundry hung out to dry, and the distant sight of the needles spilling ink into the waiting barrels.

      Theodora braked and got out of the car, stretched, and took off her gloves and her leather helmet. I finally had a good look at her long, thick hair, which was almost as strange a sight as everything I had seen on the way. I needed a haircut, but S. Theodora Markson made me look bald. Her hair stretched out every which way from her head in long, curly rows, like a waterfall made from tangled yarn. It was very hard to listen to her while it was in front of me.

      “Listen to me, Snicket,” my chaperone said. “You are on probation. Your penchant for asking too many questions and for general rudeness makes me reluctant to keep you. ‘Penchant’ is a word which here means habit.”

      “I know what penchant means,” I said.

      “That is exactly what I’m talking about,” Theodora said sternly, and quickly ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame it. It was impossible to tame, like leeches. “Our first СКАЧАТЬ