Violet Baudelaire could not help feeling like this poor spider as she ascended the waterfall for the last time, with Quigley and Klaus beside her and Esm Squalor on her toboggan behind them. After attaching the last two forks to Klaus's shoes, she had told her companions to tie the leather straps of the toboggan around their waists, so they could drag the villainous girlfriend behind them as they climbed. It was exhausting to approach the peak of Mount Fraught in this manner, particularly after staying up all night digging a pit, and it seemed like they might get washed back down by the dripping water of the Stricken Stream, like the spider Violet had heard about when she was a little girl. The ice on the slope was weakening, after two fork-assisted climbs, a toboggan ride, and the increasing temperatures of False Spring, and with each step of Violet's invention, the ice would shift slightly. It was clear that the slippery slope was almost as exhausted as they were, and soon the ice would vanish completely. "Mush!" Esm called from the toboggan. She was using an expression that arctic explorers shouted to their sled dogs, and it certainly did not make the journey any easier.
"I wish she'd stop saying that," Violet murmured from behind her mask. She tapped the candelabra on the ice ahead of her, and a small piece detached from the waterfall and fell to the ruins of headquarters. She watched it disappear below her and sighed. She would never see the V.F.D. headquarters in all its glory. None of the Baudelaires would. Violet would never know how it felt to cook in the kitchen and gaze at the two tributaries of the Stricken Stream, while chatting with the other volunteers. Klaus would never know how it felt to relax in the library and learn all of the secrets of
V.F.D. in the comfort of one of the library's chairs, with his feet up on one of the matching V.F.D. footstools. Sunny would never operate the projector in the movie room, or practice the art of the fake mustache in the disguise center, or sit in the parlor at tea time and eat the almond cookies made from my grandmother's recipe. Violet would never study chemical composition in one of the six laboratories, and Klaus would never use the balance beams at the gymnasium, and Sunny would never stand behind the counter at the ice cream shop and prepare butterscotch sundaes for the swimming coaches when it was her turn. And none of the Baudelaires would ever meet some of the organization's most beloved volunteers, including the mechanical instructor C. M. Kornbluth, and Dr. Isaac Anwhistle, whom everyone called Ike, and the brave volunteer who tossed the sugar bowl out the kitchen window so it would not be destroyed in the blaze, and watched it float away on one of the tributaries of the Stricken Stream. The Baudelaires would never do any of these things, any more than I will ever see my beloved Beatrice again, or retrieve my pickle from the refrigerator in which I left it, and return it to its rightful place in an important coded sandwich. Violet, of course, was not aware of everything she would never do, but as she gazed down at the vast, ashen remains of the headquarters, she felt as if her whole journey in the Mortmain Mountains had been as useless as the journey of a tiny arachnid in a song she had never liked to hear.
"Mush!" Esm cried again, with a cruel chuckle.
"Please stop saying that, Esm," Violet called down impatiently. "That mush nonsense is slowing our climb."
"A slow climb might be to our advantage," Klaus murmured to his sister. "The longer it takes us to reach the summit, the longer we have to think up what we're going to say to Count Olaf."
"We could tell him that he's surrounded," Quigley said, "and that there are volunteers everywhere ready to arrest him if he doesn't let Sunny go free."
Violet shook her mask. "He won't believe that," she said, sticking a fork-assisted shoe into the waterfall. "He can see everything and everyone from Mount Fraught. He'll know we're the only volunteers in the area."
"There must be something we can do," Klaus said. "We didn't make this journey into the mountains for nothing."
"Of course not," Quigley said. "We found each other, and we solved some of the mysteries that were haunting us."
"Will that be enough," Violet asked, "to defeat all those villains on the peak?"
Violet's question was a difficult one, and neither Klaus nor Quigley had the answer, and so rather than hazard a guess a phrase which here means "continue to expend their energy by discussing the matter" they decided to hazard their climb, a phrase which here means "continue their difficult journey in silence, until they arrived at last at the source of the Stricken Stream." Hoisting themselves up onto the flat peak, they sat on the edge and pulled the leather straps as hard as they could. It was such a difficult task to drag Esm Squalor and the toboggan over the edge of the slope and onto Mount Fraught that the children did not notice who was nearby until they heard a familiar scratchy voice right behind them.
"Who goes there?" Count Olaf demanded.
Breathless from the climb, the three children turned around to see the villain standing with his two sinister cohorts near his long, black automobile, glaring suspiciously at the masked volunteers.
"We thought you'd get here by taking the path," said the man with a beard but no hair, "not by climbing up the waterfall."
"No, no, no," Esm said quickly. "These aren't the people we're expecting. These are some volunteers I found at headquarters."
"Volunteers?" said the woman with hair but no beard, but her voice did not sound as deep as it usually did. The villains gave the children the same confused frown they had seen from Esm, as if they were unsure whether to be scared or scornful, and the hook-handed man, the two white-faced women, and the three former carnival employees gathered around to see what had made their villainous boss fall silent. Although they were exhausted, the two Baudelaires hurriedly untied the straps of the toboggan from their waists and stood with Quigley to face their enemies. The orphans were very scared, of course, but they found that with their faces concealed they could speak their minds, a phrase which here means "confront Count Olaf and his companions as if they weren't one bit frightened."
"We built a trap to capture your girlfriend, Olaf," Violet said, "but we didn't want to become a monster like you."
"They're idiotic liars!" Esm cried. "I found them hogging the cigarettes, so I captured them myself and made them drag me up the waterfall like sled dogs."
The middle Baudelaire ignored the wicked girlfriend's nonsense. "We're here for Sunny Baudelaire," Klaus said, "and we're not leaving without her."
Count Olaf frowned, and peered at them with his shiny, shiny eyes as if he were trying to see through their masks. "And what makes you so certain," he said, "that I'll give you my prisoner just because you say so?"
Violet thought furiously, looking around at her surroundings for anything that might give her an idea of what to do. Count Olaf clearly believed that the three masked people in front of him were members of V.F.D., and she felt that if she could just find the right words to say, she could defeat him without becoming as villainous as her enemies. But she could not find the words, and neither could her brother nor her friend, who stood beside her in silence. The winds of the Mortmain Mountains blew against them, and Violet stuck her hands in her pockets, bumping one finger against the long bread knife. She began to think that perhaps trapping Esm had been the right thing to do after all. Count Olaf's frown began to fade, and his mouth started to curl upward in a triumphant smile, but just as he opened his mouth to speak, Violet saw two things that gave her hope once more. The first was the sight of two notebooks, one a deep shade of purple and the other dark blue, sticking out of the pockets of her companions commonplace books, where Klaus and Quigley had written down all of the information they had found in the ruined library of V.F.D. headquarters. And the other was a collection of dishes spread out on the flat rock that Olaf's troupe had been using for a table. Sunny had been forced to wash these dishes, using handfuls of melted snow, and she had laid them out to dry in the sunshine of False Spring. Violet could see a stack of plates, each emblazoned with the familiar image of an eye, as well as a row of teacups and a small pitcher for cream. But there was something missing from the tea set, and it made Violet smile behind her mask as she turned to face Count Olaf again.