Poison for Breakfast Read online

  Poison

  for

  Breakfast

  LEMONY SNICKET

  ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARGAUX KENT

  In memory of the shoemaker.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Notes

  Poison for Breakfast

  CHAPTER ONE

  This morning I had poison for breakfast.

  This book is about bewilderment, a word which here means “the feeling of being bewildered,” and “bewildered” is a word which here means “you don’t have any idea what is happening,” and “you” is a word which doesn’t just mean you. It means everyone. You have no idea what is happening, and nobody you know has any idea what is happening, and of course there are all the people you don’t know, which is most of the people in the world, and they don’t know what is happening either, and of course I don’t know what is happening or I wouldn’t have eaten poison for breakfast.

  Everything that happens in this book is true, by which I mean that it all really happened, the poison and the poems, the deadly cactus and the hypnotic musician, the chicken and the egg and the fatal finale, a phrase which here means there is death at the end of the story. But the story begins at breakfast, which I fixed myself, as I enjoy doing. It won’t be necessary for you to remember what I had for breakfast, because I will keep mentioning it, but it was

  Tea

  with honey,

  a piece of toast

  with cheese,

  one sliced pear,

  and an egg perfectly prepared,

  and all of it, as I have mentioned, I fixed myself and ate all up while reading whatever I pleased.

  I’ve been fixing my own breakfast for many years, beginning one summer when I was quite small, and I was with my family in a house we were borrowing. The house was on the shore of a lake which was quite large and quite cold, and a small flock of geese would gather on the sand, having loud conversations and making a mess. “The geese will go away,” the owner of the house told us, “as long as you don’t feed them,” but the geese never went away, not all summer. In the morning, I would wake up and go by myself to the kitchen. The early sun would shine on the lake, the ripples so shiny and sharp that they looked like knives.

  I read something once that describes the sea as “all a case of knives” and I have never forgotten it. It is a description I admire very much, because it is so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, and yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend and a new acquaintance at the same time, and the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure and a mysterious stranger all at once.

  Although I had not yet read “all a case of knives” when I was living next to the lake, I would sit and watch all the sharp and shiny bits of water outside the window as I waited for the toaster to do its work. At the time, all I liked for breakfast was a glass of juice and a single piece of toast with jam on it, so I would pour my own juice and put two pieces of bread into the toaster. When they were ready, I would spread jam on one of the pieces, and go out to the lake and feed the geese the other one. They loved the toast and they stayed all summer and no one ever knew why. I kept feeding them for two reasons: A, because I liked feeding them, and it didn’t seem fair to force the geese to look elsewhere for breakfast just because they were loud and had no bathroom of their own, and B, because I liked having a secret, and actually, as I write these two reasons, A and B, it seems to me that B is the more important one, and so B is actually A, the secret I liked having.

  Sneaking out in the morning was such an interesting secret that I soon began to sneak out at night, which was even more interesting. The geese were gone by the time it was dark, and there was only the rustle of the water as I walked, the lake displaying its knives in the moonlight. Everything was quiet and noisy at the same time, and calm and spooky too. I was not yet writing books, not really, but I liked to stand in the darkness and think and write things down. Sometimes I wrote them down on paper and sometimes I just wrote them down in my mind.

  I liked these times so much that I kept sneaking out at night when the summer was over and I was living in a house in a city. It is probably not necessary for me to describe the feeling of hurrying down a street at night, because you probably know how delicious it is already. It is, of course, also a little frightening, but feeling a little frightened is nothing compared to the dark blue sky and the one-eyed moon and the speedy chill of the night air through your pajamas. It is true that something terrible might happen to you walking around by yourself at night, which is why I always ran instead of walking, although this probably did not decrease my chances of something terrible happening. Something terrible can happen to you anytime—at breakfast, for instance.

  As I ran I had an additional thrill, because at the time I liked very much a poem called “The Highwayman,” in which the mysterious hero

  came riding—

  Riding—riding—

  just like that, with dashes between the words, making the poem more urgent and more fun to read. I would race around my neighborhood,

  racing—

  Racing—racing—

  feeling as mysterious and heroic as the Highwayman, who incidentally ends up dead.

  There’s another line in the poem which rattled in my head as I ran: “The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” A galleon is a type of old ship, but I didn’t know that then, and because the word “galleon” looks like the word “gallon,” I thought it was some sort of bottle, tossed on the sea with a message inside. I liked the idea that the moon had a message in it and that some night, if I kept racing around, I might be the person to receive it.

  When I try to picture myself running around, I cannot see the neighborhood the way it really was, only the world of the Highwayman and a moon in the sky like a ghostly bottle. It is one of the mysteries of the world that you can change the landscape with your mind, that everything around you will move and shift just from the way you are imagining them. If your mind is on a book, for example, you may see the world of the book around you, even if you are not reading at the time. It is one of the many thrilling tricks of literature, but recently a shoemaker of my acquaintance reminded me that it can happen anytime, in any circumstances whatsoever. In fact, she spent some time when she was young walking a terrible landscape, without a book in sight, imagining only wonderful things. She, like the Highwayman, is dead now.

  When I snuck out to do my nighttime running, I left through the back door of my house which led to a dark alley. One often hears the expression, “I wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley,” said about someone who looks or acts suspicious, but of course there is nobody whom you’d really want to meet in a dark alley. The alley I found myself in was like most alleys, full of shadows with eerie shapes and shifting sounds. I could have met my best friend in the world in this alley and they would have seemed like a menacing stranger. I felt like a stranger myself in this alley alone, a child believed to be in bed, but I would pause for a moment, before hurrying out to the sidewalk, to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind.

  When I was very young, someone told me the story of a kidnapping which had interested me very much. The kidnappers had grabbed a little girl from her bedroom and dragged her out into an alley wher
e their car was waiting. The parents heard the noise of the car and hurried out to the alley, where the little girl’s pillow-case was found. “Can you imagine,” said the woman telling me the story, who was the sort of person who got gleefully excited when telling horrifying stories, “how frantic you would feel to find your child’s pillow-case in a dark alley?” I could imagine this, so I always stopped to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything in the alley that would make anyone frantic if they found it. I also sometimes kept watch by my bedroom window at night, looking for a kidnappers’ car or any other sign of something terrible that might happen. A murderer, I thought, a werewolf. I do not know how to describe the way I felt when I was thinking about these things. I almost had to hold my breath, because it was wonderful and terrible at the very same time. Two hooded figures, a long snake, a pair of masked twins or a demon with a cloak. I would stand there, watching and thinking, for a long time, and though I never saw so much as a single witch, I continued to keep watch.

  As you may have gathered, this is a different sort of book than others you might have read. It is different from other books I have written. There is a story to be found here—a true story about my eating poison for breakfast—but it is also a book of philosophy, a word which here means thinking about things and trying to figure them out. It is also a book about how I write the books I seem to have written, and some other things, like a long song and a movie I saw many years ago, which I happen to think are important. I’ve already told you that the book is about bewilderment, and about death, which has happened twice already so far, the Highwayman and the shoemaker of my acquaintance, and that it will end, as I’ve said, with a fatal finale.

  All books of philosophy end up mentioning death, which is one of the reasons that many people do not like reading books of philosophy, just as many people do not like to leave their beds at night to sneak out of the house. I mentioned this book to another author I will not identify, and she said, “Oh, Mr. Snicket, who would want to read such a thing?” I know exactly what she means. If you enter a library looking for a particularly quiet place to read, head straight for the philosophy section. Because no one likes to read philosophy, no one will be there, and you will be undisturbed to read, to write or just to think and keep watch, as I do and have always done. It is part of being a writer—a very important part, even more important, perhaps, than writing things down. But it can be very difficult to describe.

  When I was very young, for instance, after breakfast I would be told, “Please go brush your teeth and put your shoes on,” and I would leave the room and then, at first very dimly and then much too loudly, I would hear my own name called, and would return to the breakfast room, my teeth unbrushed and my shoes off. “Mr. Snicket,” I would be asked—I prefer it when people call me “Mr. Snicket,” so that, eventually, if we become friends, I can say, “Oh, we’ve known each other for so long now, you don’t have to call me ‘Mr. Snicket,’”—“Mr. Snicket, what have you been doing?” and I would be unable to say.

  At the breakfast table, back then, was a wooden chair that could be taken apart and put together in different ways. When you were a baby, it could be a high chair; when you were a small child, it could be adjusted to be a more suitable place to sit, and then again when you were an adult, and I always thought that perhaps it could be adjusted one more time when you died, to become a coffin—a “wooden overcoat,” as I once heard it called—so you would only need one chair for your entire life. I’m fairly certain that when I am in my own wooden overcoat, I still won’t be able to tell you exactly what I was doing when I had been told to brush my teeth and put on my shoes. I was not reading because I had no book in front of me. I was not writing because I did not have a pen or pencil in my hand. I was thinking. I was keeping watch. To try and explain it is bewildering, like having a startling message suddenly come to me, washing ashore in a bottle or perhaps slipped under my door, as it was this morning as I was finishing my breakfast and thinking of other things. It was just a scrap of paper, lying near the tiny sliver of nothing between the door and the floor. By the time I picked it up and read it, I could think of nothing else, for two reasons: A, because it was frightening, and B, because it was bewildering, and actually, as I write these two reasons, it seems B is the more important one, and so B is actually A, because it was bewildering. You can already guess what it said, as you read it at the very beginning of this book.

  You had poison for breakfast.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For a few moments I stared at the scrap of paper in my hands and tried to get my thoughts in order. I even tried to number them, in case it helped.

  1.Egad!

  2.There’s no use thinking egad, Snicket. Remain calm.

  No, wait, that should be your third thought.

  3.Remain calm.

  4.That’s better.

  5.Now, then, look at the message again.

  6.You had poison for breakfast.

  7.Egad!

  8.Stop it.

  9.Right.

  10.Take a deep breath. It often helps to take a deep breath, or better yet, several deep breaths.

  11.

  12.That was just one breath. Take some more. Everybody knows how to breathe, but sometimes you have to stop and teach yourself once more how to do it.

  13.You had poison for breakfast.

  14.Stop! Take some deep breaths.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.All right, then. Now, do you think the note is some sort of joke? If you do, then relax. If you don’t, skip down to 35.

  19.Yes, a joke. It must be.

  20.But what if it isn’t a joke?

  21.It certainly doesn’t look like a joke.

  22.A man is sitting on a train with a baby, who is very ugly.

  23.In fact, the baby is so ugly that a nearby passenger says, “What a hideous baby.”

  24.“I’ve never been so insulted in my whole life,” the man says, and hurries to the train conductor to complain.

  25.“I’m so sorry, sir,” the train conductor says, when the man tells her he was insulted so terribly. “I apologize on behalf of the railway company.”

  26.“Please allow me to move you to the first-class cabin, where you can enjoy a free glass of champagne,”

  27.“and I will try to find some cheese for your pet rat.”

  28.That’s an example of a joke.

  29.It tells a little story and has a funny twist.

  30.You had poison for breakfast does no such thing.

  31.Of course, there’s also the type of joke that is just a question with a funny answer.

  32.Where does the king keep his armies?

  33.Yes, that’s a good one.

  34.But You had poison for breakfast doesn’t do that either.

  35.All right, it’s not a joke.

  36.And if it’s not a joke, then it’s an emergency.

  At the word emergency, I looked once more at the scrap of paper and agreed with myself. The words written there certainly felt like an emergency. Still, I didn’t think contacting any emergency personnel—someone at a police station, for instance, or a hospital—was the thing to do. If someone had poisoned me, then I was murdered, and if someone hadn’t, I wasn’t, so contacting the police would be like calling the fire department and saying that either my house had burned completely to ashes or that it was still standing and I was just sitting around on the porch, and if I called anyone at the hospital they would surely ask what kind of poison it was and how much I had taken and how long ago I had taken it and would I please hurry over to be undressed and asked more questions and my only answers would be I don’t know, and I don’t know, and no, thank you.

  I turned back and looked at my breakfast, although it wasn’t really breakfast anymore. I’d finished every scrap of

  Tea

  with honey,

  a piece of toast

  with cheese,

  one sliced pear,

  and an egg perfectly prepar
ed,

  and all that was left was a damp cup and a plate with a few crumbs sitting next to the book I was reading. I always like to have a book with me at breakfast, although sometimes I do not read much of it. Some breakfasts I do not even open the book, but it sits beside me like a quiet companion while my thoughts wander all over the morning. I may be thinking of the day ahead of me, or the night I have left behind, or perhaps of things far from my own circumstances, until, in the blink of an eye or a sip of tea, my mind returns to the breakfast table, sometimes with a delicious new idea or a solution to some bewildering problem.

  This is philosophy, more or less—the use of one’s own thoughts to figure something out—and it occurred to me that philosophy might be the best way to solve the problem of my own poisoning. Not many people think of calling on a philosopher in an emergency, yet the most exciting and most useful things in the world have been born simply by someone thinking about them. Maybe it would work today, I thought. Maybe philosophy could save me.

  At that very instant, for example, I was thinking about something: a story I’d read about some other people who had been bewildered at breakfast. The story is about a family called the Emersons, who lived in America, where their eldest daughter Sally was in love with a young man whom her parents didn’t like. They much preferred a man named Stephen Jones, whose name stuck in my head from the moment I read it, because it made the man sound very dull. Sally apparently agreed, and made arrangements to sneak off and marry the man she liked better. But that very morning, the Emerson family was visited by an eccentric old woman who lived nearby. “Eccentric” is a word which here means “so unusual that people in the village thought the woman might be a witch,” and she knocked on the door and asked for some breakfast. The family explained that they were very busy, but said that the old woman could come in and help herself.