Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? Page 12

  “I have something to say,” Hangfire announced. Nobody ever heard it. I had something to say, too. I did not face the crowd, but instead faced the broken window of the train, and pointed at it, too, to make it as obvious as possible.

  “What’s that behind you?” is what I said. It is a very old trick, perhaps the oldest one in the world. Like the old myths and superstitions, it almost always works. Hangfire turned his head, just for a second, and in that second I moved forward and snatched the statue from him. I moved quickly and strongly, and it made Hangfire stumble back against the table. The table made him stumble back against the bench. The bench made him stumble back against his own foot. His own foot made him fall to the floor, and the fall removed his mask and revealed his blinking, startled face. I didn’t look at him. My eyes were on the Bombinating Beast, which shivered like a dark chill in my hands. Everyone else looked, though. Ellington looked hardest of all and gasped the loudest, over the gasps of everyone else and the unearthly sounds outside the broken window.

  I looked back at the Mitchums. “Will you uphold the law?” I asked. “Will you arrest the criminals who are plaguing this town?”

  Harvey and Mimi looked from Hangfire to their son and then back at me. I waited but I didn’t hope. They looked at me and quietly, barely, as I expected, shook their heads. At that moment I moved outside the boundaries of the law, just as The Thistle of the Valley had, and entered a wild, lawless place. I held the Bombinating Beast in my hands. It was why this night was different from all other nights.

  I looked at the statue. It glared back at me like a wild creature, and I took a wild guess and brought it closer. I’d read the old myths in the library, in a book Dashiell Qwerty had given me. You could tame the Bombinating Beast by imitating its fearsome buzz. There was even a story of a wizard ordering the beast to do terrible things on his behalf, as long as it was kept fed.

  I held the statue to my mouth, and then I simply breathed and kept still. The statue began to make a wheezy, buzzing sound, as my breath passed through the paper patch and was expelled through the slits and holes carved into its body. I played it like a clarinet, as had been suggested to me. It was not a loud sound, but even so I felt it go through the landscape like a scream. The sound did not fly out of the window and back toward town, across the ocean floor and up the rocky cliffs that had once overlooked the water. The sound did not clamber over the wall of the Wade Academy and stop short at the edge of the fire pond. It traveled in some other way, some way that science has not yet discovered. It moved the way an idea moves from a book to your mind, or the way strangers move together into friendship. It moved the way someone’s very green eyes can move you to do something very wrong. It was wrong, very wrong, the wrong sound on the wrong night, and it reached the wrong place and the wrong ears, and the eyes it opened were wild and lawless.

  The Bombinating Beast moved black and cold to the surface, and we froze and listened to it echo across the land and the sea, before Stain’d-by-the-Sea had occupied both. The sound moved deep underground, shivering and shimmering like something hidden, and then rattling and clattering, louder than the train. The Bombinating Beast lumbered out of the fire pond and over any wall foolish enough to try and contain it. It rushed unbound and unsupervised across the dark countryside the town had ruined. We could hear its tail lash out of the water and shake droplets into the sky. We could hear its claws across the ground, like sparks from a fire, and the rustle of its shiny, scaly skin against the helpless rocks, slithering past everything and making everything shudder. It galloped and swam, it leapt and it bounded. It moved like spilled ink across paper or dread across the heart. The Bombinating Beast moved like a heavy shadow, or an angry fist. It was enormous and slippery, desperate and hungry. It was coming closer. You could hear it over the train, buzzing toward us, ravenous and furious. The wind hurried from it with a sound of ripping paper, and the seaweed shrank back in the window as the vanished sea sensed its approach. Each leap of the beast was deep and thunderous, quicker and quicker like a terrified heartbeat. We cowered at the sound, all of us, and “cowered” means we closed our eyes and shook and clung to whatever we could with trembling hands.

  I could not get scared later. I was scared right then.

  The Bombinating Beast gave one great roar, deafening and reckless, and then it was upon us. There was a tremendous clang as it hit the train, and The Thistle of the Valley tumbled off the tracks and fell into the crackling seaweed of the Clusterous Forest. The room spun on its axis, all the way around, and all of us clattered against the walls and the floor. The compartment grew icy, and there was a great scuffling noise from the roof of the train, a rough slither like something dragged across the skin of the world. Then the beast appeared in the broken window.

  The statue had not done the animal justice. Its teeth were sharper, and there were many more of them, clacking and gnashing at the air. Its mouth was soaked with slime and smelled of something buried long ago. Its eyes were fiery bright, fluttering with several sets of scaled eyelids moving like the blades of some infernal machine. Its skin shone with darkness, and seemed to be as wet as blood but as dry as the grave. And it was louder, louder than anything in nature, or inked into the paper of a book. We could only see its terrible scaly face, and one horrible clenched claw at the bottom of the window as it reached past the last broken shards of the glass toward us. Its forked tongue moved like a searching eel. It wanted something. It was hungry.

  Only one person was brave enough to face the beast directly. He was a naturalist, after all. He was a scientist and a villain, curious and treacherous, and he stood and took one step toward it as it heaved and growled. He was not smiling, and he was not frowning. He looked content, as if something at last was his, as peaceful as he did in Ellington’s photograph of him.

  He was Hangfire, and Hangfire was Armstrong Feint.

  “Father!” Ellington screamed, and the beast buzzed voraciously and the whole train shook. Ellington’s father turned to face us and he pointed with one finger toward me. He was shouting something, but I could not hear what it was. There is often confusion regarding the last words of prominent individuals, a phrase which here means “heroes or villains.” He stood in front of the mouth of the beast and shouted something, but even with three librarians present it was not recorded, and those words have vanished. What I did has not vanished, even if I wish it were so. I stood up and did something Hangfire had done all over town.

  I gave him a push in the right direction.

  The villain fell away from his daughter and into the mouth of the Bombinating Beast. He was gone in no time at all. The teeth moved together, and there was the sound of a quick collapse, like something made of folded paper falling apart. A long, quick bulge appeared in the creature’s throat, and then the forked tongue ran itself all over its teeth. Its unnatural eyes, dark and wet and blinking every which way, slid from me to the statue in my hands and back again. I didn’t trust my voice. I just pointed, out the window, away from Stain’d-by-the-Sea and toward the depths of the Clusterous Forest. The beast buzzed again, and the whole train shook, like even the metal and the wood were quaking in fear, and then in one cold swoop it was gone. The seaweed rustled behind it and its noises faded in leaps and bounds. The buzzing stopped. It was quiet. Ellington was on the floor staring at me, her eyes frantic with grief and anger. She had words for me, but she couldn’t say them. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t look at her. Around me everyone lay trembling and shivering on the ground. I let us tremble and shiver. For a moment there was nothing else to be done.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I heard noises around me, but I saw nothing. I had closed my eyes without knowing it, the way you can sometimes squint your way out of a nightmare and find yourself safe in the morning at last. What a strange and terrible dream you’ve been having, I told myself desperately. I knew it was nonsense.

  I blinked my way back into the frightened compartment. The statue was still in my h
ands, but everything else was on the ugly carpet, thrown there when the train had been driven off its tracks. My associates were scattered around the ruined room, and in a far corner was a heap of Mitchums beginning to disentangle themselves. Moxie was the first to sit up, reaching out an arm still scarred from an earlier case of ours, and retrieving her hat and her typewriter case. She blinked too, but she didn’t look at me.

  “What’s the news, Moxie?” I said quietly, but she just shook her head and turned away. Her expression was grim, and her eyes looked dark and haunted, like the dead windows of so many buildings in town. I looked from her to the others, and everywhere it was the same. Friend or enemy, associate or stranger, they all shrank from me as I stepped out of the compartment into the corridor and disembarked from the train.

  The Thistle of the Valley had been just at the edge of the Clusterous Forest, and the beast had knocked us back toward the empty landscape. You could see the train spread out like a dead serpent. Some of the cargo cars were overturned, and a few splashes of ink had spilled onto the ground in dark stains. I stepped through a few quivering tendrils and found myself on the empty, drained seafloor. The night still hung in the sky, but by the feeble light of the crescent moon I could see I wasn’t the only person there. Other passengers were making their way off the train to stand in the eerie silence. Some looked hurt and some only looked scared. Some passengers were limping, and other passengers were helping them. Some people stood alone and some in little worried groups, some wearing masks and some who had discarded theirs. There were a few people who were very old, and a few infants held by their mothers and fathers. A few people looked slightly familiar, as if I had passed them sometime on the streets of Stain’d-by-the-Sea, but I didn’t truly recognize anyone until I saw the Haines family stumble their way out of the seaweed, reunited and huddling together. Lizzie Haines, smiling faintly over her false beard, had one arm around Kellar and one arm around her mother, and behind the family came the nervous figure of Sally Murphy. I did not see the Mitchums, but Gifford and Ghede stumbled forward, still in their conductors’ uniforms, guiding the three librarians, who stood in a cluster murmuring to one another. Lastly came my associates, those who had helped in my work and kept me company during my days in Stain’d-by-the-Sea: the chemist and the cook, the sculptor and the journalist, everyone but the one who had occupied my thoughts the most.

  I didn’t see Ellington Feint anywhere at all.

  Over the eerie and dazed quiet I heard the sound of a familiar car engine, and a battered yellow taxi rattled into view. The Bellerophon brothers’ taxicab looked like it’d had a very hard time following The Thistle of the Valley, and when Pip rolled the window down, he looked as tired and battered as his automobile.

  “This doesn’t look good, does it?” Pip asked me, before anyone said hello. “Is anyone seriously hurt?”

  I told him it sure didn’t and I hoped not.

  Squeak climbed up to face me. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you all right, Snicket?”

  “Just the opposite,” I said.

  Pip frowned. “What was it, Snicket? What was that dark thing we saw?”

  “It was something terrible,” Squeak said. “We only got a quick look, but I had to remind my brother of what you said about getting scared later.”

  “You should probably stop listening to me,” I said, but the people around us didn’t appear to agree. They were stepping closer, circling around me as I stood by the taxicab talking.

  “You know what happened?” asked a masked woman holding a badly dented suitcase. “You know what that was?”

  There was a murmur in the gathering crowd, and even the people I knew stepped toward me. “What’s the story?” asked a man who was holding a handkerchief up to the cut on his face. A few drops of blood stained the handkerchief, and he grimaced a little, but not enough that he didn’t look curious. Everyone did, and everyone waited, looking at me.

  An instructor of mine once said that if you were nervous about speaking in front of a group of people, you should imagine them naked. He was standing in front of a large class when he said this, and we were not pleased to think that he was imagining us without our clothes on. I did not imagine the denizens of Stain’d-by-the-Sea without their clothes on, but as I stood in the empty landscape and cleared my throat, I did imagine them swimming, or trying to swim, right where we were standing.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” I said. “Long ago, this entire area was covered in water.”

  People frowned at one another, and there were a few mutters here and there. “Look here, young man,” Sally Murphy said. “I don’t think we have to begin quite that far back.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “I thought this story began when I arrived in town. I was wrong. It begins when Stain’d-by-the-Sea was a busy town, with bustling streets, a thriving ink industry, a well-regarded newspaper, and beautiful views of the sea.”

  “The town doesn’t look like that anymore,” Walleye said. “What happened?”

  Cleo stepped forward, but wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Plenty of things happened,” she said. “It became harder to find octopi, so Ink Inc.’s ink became weaker and fainter. It made the articles in the newspaper seem less certain, and people who read it became uncertain themselves.”

  “They were upset that things weren’t going as well in the town,” said Moxie, who wouldn’t look at me either.

  Jake nodded. “There was a war, and people argued whether Colonel Colophon was a hero, or just a violent man. Stores closed. Adults moved out of town and left their children behind. The police force shrank, and the library was almost forgotten.”

  “That’s a rotten shame,” Pocket muttered.

  “There is nothing worse,” Walleye agreed.

  “Stain’d-by-the-Sea became a place of loneliness and discontent,” I said, “so people took drastic action. They decided to drain the sea so the machines and the railways could find enough octopi to rescue the ink industry. It was a brave and unusual plan, and for a while it must have looked like it worked. But they were wrong. Draining the sea made things worse. It destroyed far more creatures than it uncovered, and it flooded the surrounding regions. Now there was more loneliness and discontent than ever.”

  “It’s an old story,” Eratosthenes said, stroking the ends of his beard. “I’ve heard versions of it before.”

  “But something began to feed on that loneliness and discontent,” I said. “Something thrived on it, the way the seaweed of the Clusterous Forest thrives, even with the sea gone. A naturalist was distressed over what had been done to the sea and its creatures, and took inspiration from the wild and lawless ways of the untamed world, and from the old myths and superstitions that were around before Stain’d-by-the-Sea even existed. He gathered whatever associates he could find into an ad hoc organization.”

  “The Inhumane Society,” Lizzie Haines said, so quietly that she probably didn’t know she’d said it.

  I nodded. “They banded together, and they got to work.”

  “They took an old tradition about ringing a gong and wearing masks,” Moxie said, “and soon had people cowering and disguising themselves whenever they needed to skulk around.”

  “They started fires,” Kellar said.

  “They set explosions, and they performed sinister experiments,” Cleo said.

  “They stole,” Jake said, “and they kidnapped.”

  “They gathered associates and captured schoolchildren. By the time I got into town, these people had been operating for quite some time. It took me a while to see that each mystery I encountered was part of a larger, treacherous plot. It’s a fragmentary plot, a phrase which here means—”

  “We know what it means,” Walleye said. “It means that the treachery was scattered around, to various people.”

  “There’s books with fragmentary plots too,” Pocket said.

  “Some say that the whole world is a fragmentary plot,” Eratosthenes said.

/>   “I haven’t seen the whole world,” I said, “but I’ve seen Stain’d-by-the-Sea. The treachery of the Inhumane Society was controlled by one man. As a brilliant scientist, he could have saved the town, but instead he fed on the loneliness and discontent of the fading town, and pushed people in the direction he thought was right. Sometimes he did it with laudanum, and sometimes he did it with hostages.”

  “Like Lizzie,” Kellar said, and put a hand on his sister’s shoulder. Sharon Haines looked at her children and then at the ground.

  “Sometimes the people were willing to be wicked,” I continued, “and sometimes they needed to be frightened into it. So the villain spread a frightening rumor, that a mythological creature was returning to Stain’d-by-the-Sea, a wild, lawless thing that could destroy the town once and for all.”

  “The Bombinating Beast,” said a man in the crowd.

  “You saw it for yourself,” I said. “It’s been around for a very long time, and so naturally there are wild and fantastic stories. But it’s just an animal, trying to get what it wants, and to make its way through a difficult world. The underwater plants that hid the creature found a way to survive when the sea was drained away, but the Bombinating Beast needed a new home. Hangfire provided that home. He harvested the eggs in whatever damp places he could find. When they hatched, he kept the creatures in fishbowls and then in bigger and bigger bodies of water.”

  “That’s why we were finding more and more of this,” Cleo said, holding up the folded cup and pointing to its crinkly steam.

  Jake gave her a grim nod. “It might look like bark,” he said, “but it’s shed skin.”

  “The beast was molting,” Cleo said with a shudder, “shedding its skin, and growing.”