"What a wonderful morning!" Count Olaf crowed. "Just think, by the end of the day I'll have more new members of my troupe than ever before!"
"And we'll need them," Esm agreed "We're all going to have to work together for the greater good burning down the last safe place!"
"Just the idea of the Hotel Denouement in flames makes me so excited, I'm going to open a bottle of wine!" Count Olaf announced, and Sunny covered her mouth with her hands so the villains would not hear her gasp. The Hotel Denouement, she realized, must be the last safe place for volunteers to gather, and Olaf was so excited that he had uttered the name inadvertently, a word which here means "where the youngest Baudelaire could hear it."
"The idea of all those eagles filling the sky makes me so excited, I'm going to smoke one of those in green cigarettes!" Esm announced, and then frowned. "Except I don't have one. Drat."
"Beg your pardon, your Esmship," said one of the white-faced women, "but I see some of that green smoke down at the bottom of the waterfall."
"Really?" Esm asked eagerly, and looked in the direction Olaf's employee was pointing. Sunny looked, too, and saw a familiar plume of green smoke at the very bottom of the slope, getting bigger and bigger as the sun continued to rise. The youngest Baudelaire wondered why her siblings were signaling her, and what they were trying to say.
"That's strange," Olaf said. "You'd think there'd be nothing left of the headquarters to burn."
"Look how much smoke there is," Esm said greedily. "There must be a whole pack of cigarettes down there. This day is getting even better!"
Count Olaf smiled, and then looked away from the waterfall and noticed Sunny for the first time. "I'll have the baby go down and get them for you," Count Olaf said.
"Yessir!" Sunny said eagerly.
"The baby would probably steal all the cigarettes for herself," Esm said, glaring at the young girl. "I'll go."
"But climbing down there will take hours " Olaf said. "Don't you want to be here for the recruitment scheme? I just love springing traps on people."
"Me, too," Esm agreed, "but don't worry, Olaf. I'll be back in moments. I'm not going to climb. I'll take one of the toboggans and sled down the waterfall before anyone else even notices I'm gone."
"Drat!" Sunny couldn't help saying. She meant something along the lines of, "That is exactly what I was planning on doing," but once again no one understood.
"Shut up, toothy," Esm said, "and get out of my way." She flounced past the youngest Baudelaire, and Sunny realized that there was something sewn to the bottom of the dress that made it make a crackling noise as she walked, so that the wicked girlfriend sounded as much like a fire as she looked like one. Blowing a kiss to Count Olaf, she grabbed the toboggan belonging to the sinister villains.
"I'll be right back, darling," Esm said. "Tell that baby to take a nap so she won't see what we're up to."
"Esm's right," Olaf said, giving Sunny a cruel smile. "Get in the casserole dish. You're such an ugly, helpless creature, I can scarcely stand to look at you."
"You said it, handsome," Esm said, and chuckled meanly as she sat at the top of the waterfall. The two white-faced women scurried to help, and gave the toboggan a big push as Sunny did as she was told, and disappeared from Olaf's sight.
As you may imagine, the sight of a grown woman in an enormous flame-imitating dress tobogganing down from the source of the Stricken Stream to the two tributaries and the half-frozen pool at the bottom of the waterfall is not the sort of thing to pass unnoticed, even from far away. Violet was the first to see the colorful blur heading quickly down the slope, and she lowered Colette's hand mirror, which she had used once again to catch the rays of the rising sun and reflect them onto the Verdant Flammable Devices, which she had put in a pile in front of the pit. Wrinkling her nose from the bitter smell of the smoke, she turned to Klaus and Quigley, who were putting one last piece of weakened wood across the pit, so their trap would be hidden from view.
"Look," Violet said, and pointed to the descending shape.
"Do you think it's Esm?" Klaus asked.
Violet squinted up at the tobogganing figure. "I think so," she said. "Nobody but Esm Squalor would wear an outfit like that."
"We'd better hide behind the archway," Quigley said, "before she spots us."
The two Baudelaires nodded in agreement, and walked carefully to the library entrance, making sure to step around the hole they had dug.
"I'm happy that we can't see the pit anymore," Klaus said. "Looking into that blackness reminded me of that terrible passageway at 667 Dark Avenue."
"First Esm trapped your siblings there," Violet said to Quigley, "and then she trapped us."
"And now we're fighting fire with fire, and trapping her," Quigley said uncomfortably.
"It's best not to think about it," Violet said, although she had not stopped thinking about the trap since the first handful of ashes and earth. "Soon we'll have Sunny back, and that's what's important."
"Maybe this is important, too," Klaus said, and pointed up at the archway. "I never noticed it until now."
Violet and Quigley looked up to see what he was referring to, and saw four tiny words etched over their heads, right underneath the large letters spelling "V.F.D. Library."
"'The world is quiet here,'" Quigley read. "What do you think it means?"
"It looks like a motto," Klaus said. "At Prufrock Preparatory School, they had a motto carved near the entrance, so everyone would remember it when they entered the academy."
Violet shook her head. "That's not what I'm thinking of," she said. "I'm remembering something about that phrase, but just barely."
"The world certainly feels quiet around here," Klaus said. "We haven't heard a single snow gnat since we arrived."
"The smell of smoke scares them away, remember?" Quigley asked.
"Of course," Klaus said, and peered around the archway to check on Esm's progress. The colorful blur was about halfway down the waterfall, heading straight for the trap they had built. "There's been so much smoke here at headquarters, the gnats might never come back."
"Without snow gnats," Quigley said, "the salmon of the Stricken Stream will go hungry. They feed on snow gnats." He reached into his pocket and opened his commonplace book.
"And without salmon," he said, "the Mortmain Mountain eagles will go hungry. The destruction of V.F.D, headquarters has caused even more damage than I thought."
Klaus nodded in agreement. "When we were walking along the Stricken Stream," he said, "the fish were coughing from all the ashes in the water. Remember, Violet?"
He turned to his sister, but Violet was only half listening. She was still gazing at the words on the archway, and trying to remember where she heard them before. "I can just hear those words," she said. "The world is quiet here. " She closed her eyes. "I think it was a very long time ago, before you were born, Klaus."
"Maybe someone said them to you," Quigley said.
Violet tried to remember as far back as she could, but everything seemed as misty as it did in the mountains. She could see the face of her mother, and her father standing behind her, wearing a suit as black as the ashes of V.F.D. headquarters. Their mouths were open, but Violet could not remember what they were saying. No matter how hard she tried, the memory was as silent as the grave. "Nobody said them to me," she said finally. "Someone sang them. I think my parents sang the words 'the world is quiet here' a long time ago, but I don't know why." She opened her eyes and faced her brother and her friend. "I think we might be doing the wrong thing," she said.
"But we agreed," Quigley said, "to fight fire with fire."
Violet nodded, and stuck her hands in her pocket, bumping up against the bread knife again. She thought of the darkness of the pit, and the scream Esm would make as she fell into it. "I know we agreed," Violet said, "but if V.F.D. really stands for Volunteer Fire Department, then they're an organization that stops fire. If everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke."