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 topeer 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 stock-pot, 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.
"We have to go after them," Violet said. "We may be their only chance!"
"We can't go after them," Klaus said, still holding the apple. "We have to help Kit."
"Split up," Sunny said, staring after the departing outrigger.
Klaus shook his head. "All of us need to stay if we're going to help Kit give birth." He gazed at the islanders and listened to the wheezing and coughing coming from the boat fashioned from wild grasses and the limbs of trees. "They made their decision," he said finally.
" Kontiki," Sunny said. She meant something along the lines of, "There's no way they'll survive the journey," but the youngest Baudelaire was wrong. There was a way. There was a way to bring the islanders a single apple that they could share, each taking a bite of the precious bitter fruit that might tide them over—the phrase "tide them over," as you probably know, means "help deal with a difficult situation" — until they reached someplace or someone who could help them, just as the three Baudelaires shared an apple in the secret space where their parents had enabled them to survive one of the most deadly unfortunate events ever to wash up on the island's shores. Whoever brought the apple to the islanders, of course, would need to swim very stealthily to the outrigger, and it would help if they were quite small and slender, so they might escape the watchful eye of the outrigger's facilitator. The Baudelaires would not notice the disappearance of the Incredibly Deadly Viper for quite some time, as they would be focused on helping Kit, and so they could never say for sure what happened to the snake, and my research into the reptile's story is incomplete, so I do not know what other chapters occurred in its history, as Ink, as some prefer to call the snake, slithered from one place to the next, sometimes taking shelter from the treachery of the world and sometimes committing treacherous acts of its own—a history not unlike that of the Baudelaire orphans, which some have called little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. Unless you have investigated the islanders' case yourself, there is no way of knowing what happened to them as they sailed away from the colony that had been their home. But there was a way they could have survived their journey, a way that may seem fantastic, but is no less fantastic than three children helping a woman give birth. The Baudelaires hurried to the library raft, and lifted Sunny and the stockpot to the top of the raft where Kit lay, so the youngest Baudelaire could hold the wheezing woman's gloved hand and the bitter apples could dilute the poison inside her as Violet and Klaus pushed the raft back toward shore. "Have an apple," Sunny offered, but Kit shook her head.
"I can't," she said.
"But you've been poisoned," Violet said. "You must have caught a spore or two from the islanders as they floated by."
"The apples will harm the baby," Kit said. "There's something in the hybrid that's bad for people who haven't been born yet. That's why your mother never tasted one of her own bitter apples. She was pregnant with you, Violet." One of Kit's gloved hands drifted down over the top of the raft and patted the hair of the eldest Baudelaire. "I hope I'm half as good a mother as yours was, Violet," she said.
"You will be," Klaus said.
"I don't know," Kit said. "I was supposed to help you children on that day when you finally reached Briny Beach. I wanted nothing more than to take you away in my taxi to someplace safe. Instead, I threw you into a world of treachery at the Hotel Denouement. And I wanted nothing more than to reunite you with your friends the Quagmires. Instead, I left them behind." She uttered a wheezy sigh, and fell silent.
Violet continued to guide the raft toward the island, and noticed for the first time that her hands were pushing against the spine of a book whose title she recognized from the library Aunt Josephine kept underneath her bed— Ivan Lachrymose— Lake Explorer—while her brother was pushing against Mushroom Minutiae, a book that had been part of Fiona's mycological library. "What happened?" she asked, trying to imagine what strange events would have brought these books to these shores.