The Hostile Hospital Read online

  The Baudelaire orphans had been so shocked by what they had found that they had forgotten about the person breaking into the Library of Records, and now they looked up to see a tall skinny figure walking down the B aisle STOP. It was a person they had seen recently, and one they had hoped never to see again. There are many different ways of describing this person, including "Count Olaf's girlfriend," "the Baudelaire children's former guardian," "the city's sixth most important financial advisor," "a former resident of 667 Dark Avenue," and several phrases that are far too nasty to be placed in a book. But the name she preferred was the one that came snarling out of her lipsticked mouth.

  "I am Esmé Gigi Geniveve Squalor," said Esmé Gigi Geniveve Squalor, as if the Baudelaires would ever forget her, no matter how hard they tried. She stopped walking and stood in front of the Baudelaires, who saw immediately why her footsteps had been so odd and tottering. For as long as the children had known her, Esmé Squalor had been a slave to fashion, a phrase which here means "dressed in incredibly expensive, and often incredibly absurd, outfits." This evening she was wearing a long coat made from the fur of a number of animals that had been killed in particularly unpleasant ways, and she was carrying a handbag shaped like an eye, just like the tattoo her boyfriend had on his left ankle. She wore a hat with a small veil that hung in front of her face, as if she had blown her nose with a black lacy handkerchief, and then forgotten to remove it, and on her feet she had a pair of shoes with stiletto heels. A stiletto is a small, slender knife resembling a dagger, such as might be carried by a carnival performer or a murderer, and the word "stiletto" has been used to describe a woman's shoe with a very long and narrow heel. In this case, however, the phrase "shoes with stiletto heels" actually refers to a pair of shoes made with a small, slender knife where each heel should be. The stilettos were pointing straight down, so that Esmé viciously stabbed the floor of the Library of Records with each step, and occasionally the stilettos stuck, so the wicked woman had to pause and yank them out of the floor, which explained why her footsteps were so odd and tottering. These shoes happened to be the absolute latest fashion, but the Baudelaires had more important things to do than leaf through magazines describing what was in and what was out, so they could only stare at Esmé's shoes and wonder why she was wearing footwear that was so violent and impractical.

  "This is a pleasant surprise," Esmé said. "Olaf asked me to break in here and destroy the Baudelaire file, but now we can destroy the Baudelaires as well."

  The children looked at each other in shock. "You and Olaf know about the file?" Violet asked.

  Esmé laughed in a particularly nasty way, and, from behind her veil, smiled a particularly nasty smile. "Of course we know about it," she snarled. "That's why I'm here--to destroy all thirteen pages." She took one odd, tottering step toward the Baudelaires. "That's why we destroyed Jacques Snicket." She took another stabbing step down the aisle. "And that's why we're going to destroy you." She looked down at her shoe and shook her foot wildly to get the blade out of the library floor. "Heimlich Hospital is about to have three new patients," she said, "but I'm afraid it'll be too late for any doctor to save their lives."

  Klaus stood up, and followed his sisters as they began to step away from the slave to fashion who was moving slowly toward them. "Who survived the fire?" he asked Esmé, holding up the page from the file. "Is one of our parents alive?"

  Esmé frowned, and teetered on her stiletto heels as she tried to snatch the page away. "Did you read the file?'" she demanded in a terrible voice. " What does the file say?"

  "You'll never find out!" Violet cried, and turned to her siblings. "Run!"

  The Baudelaires ran, straight down the aisle past the rest of the B files, rounding the corner past the cabinet that read "Byron to Byzantine" and around to the section of the library where all of the C files were stored.

  "We're running the wrong way," Klaus said.

  "Egress," Sunny agreed, which meant something along the lines of, "Klaus is right--the exit is the other way."

  "So is Esmé," Violet replied. "Somehow, we'll have to go around her."

  "I'm coming for you!" Esmé cried, her voice coming over the top of the file cabinets. "You'll never escape, orphans!"

  The Baudelaires paused at the cabinet reading "Conch to Condy's Fluid," which are a fancy seashell and a complex chemical compound, and listened as Esmé's heels clattered in pursuit.

  "We're lucky she's wearing those ridiculous shoes," Klaus said. "We can run much faster than she can."

  "As long as she doesn't think of taking them off," Violet said. "She's almost as clever as she is greedy."

  "Shh!" Sunny said, and the Baudelaires listened as Esmé's footsteps abruptly stopped. The children huddled together as they heard Olaf's girlfriend mutter to herself for a moment, and then the three youngsters began to hear a terrifying sequence of sounds. There was a long, screechy creak, and then a booming crash, and then another long, screechy creak, and another booming crash, and the pair of sounds continued, getting louder and louder. The youngsters looked at one another in puzzlement, and then, just in the nick of time, the oldest Baudelaire figured out what the sound was.

  "She's knocking over the file cabinets!" Violet cried, pointing over the top of Confetti to Consecration. "They're toppling over like dominos!"

  Klaus and Sunny looked where their sister was pointing and saw that she was right. Esmé had pushed over one file cabinet, which had pushed over another, which had pushed over another, and now the heavy metal cabinets were crashing toward the children like a wave crashing on the shore. Violet grabbed her siblings and pulled them out of the path of a falling file cabinet. With a creak and a crash, the cabinet fell to the floor, right where they had been standing. The three children breathed a sigh of relief, having just narrowly avoided being crushed beneath files on congruent triangles, coniferous trees, conjugated verbs, and two hundred other topics.

  "I'm going to flatten you!" Esmé called, starting on another line of cabinets. "Olaf and I are going to have a romantic breakfast of Baudelaire pancakes!"

  "Run!" Sunny cried, but her siblings needed no urging. The three children hurried down the rest of the C aisle, as the cabinets creaked and crashed all around them.

  "Where can we go?" Violet cried.

  "To the D aisle!" Klaus answered, but changed his mind as he saw another row of cabinets begin to topple. "No! The E aisle!"

  "B?" Violet asked, finding it difficult to hear over the sounds of the cabinets.

  "E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape? Before long, the children found themselves as far from the anteroom door as they possibly could be. As the cabinets crashed around them, and Esmé cackled wildly and stabbed the floor in pursuit, the three youngsters found themselves in the area of the Library of Records where information was deposited. As the room creaked and crashed around them, the siblings looked first at the basket of papers, then at the bowl of paper clips, then the mouth of the chute, and finally at one another.

  "Violet," Klaus said hesitantly, "do you think you can invent something out of paper clips and a basket that could help us get out of here?"

  "I don't have to," Violet said. "That chute will serve as an exit."

  "But you won't fit in there," Klaus said. "I'm not even sure I will."

  "You're never going to get out of this room alive, you imbeciles!" Esmé cried, using a horrible word in her horrible voice.

  "We'll have to try," Violet said. "Sunny, go first."

  "Prapil," Sunny said doubtfully, but she went first, crawling easily into the chute and staring out through the darkness at her siblings.

  "Now you, Klaus," Violet said, and Klaus, removing his glasses so they wouldn't break, followed his sister. It was a tight fit, and it took some manuevering, but eventually the middle Baudelaire worke
d his way through the mouth of the chute.

  "This won't work," Klaus said to Violet, peering around him. "It'll be tough to crawl up through the chute, the way it's slanted. Besides, there's no way you'll fit."

  "Then I'll find another way," Violet said. Her voice was calm, but Klaus and Sunny could see, through the hole in the wall, that her eyes were wide with fear.

  "That's out of the question," Klaus said. "We'll climb back out, and the three of us will escape together."

  "We can't risk it," Violet said. "Esmé won't catch all of us, not if we split up. You two take page thirteen and go up the chute, and I'll get out another way. We'll meet up in the unfinished wing."

  "No!" Sunny cried.

  "Sunny's right," Klaus said. "This is what happened with the Quagmires, remember? When we left them behind, they were snatched away."

  "The Quagmires are safe now," Violet reminded him. "Don't worry, I'll invent a solution."

  The eldest Baudelaire gave her siblings a small smile, and reached into her pocket so she could tie up her hair and put the levers and gears of her inventing mind into motion. But there was no ribbon in her pocket. As her trembling fingers explored her empty pocket, she remembered she had used her ribbon to fool Hal with a fake loop of keys. Violet felt a quiver in her stomach as she remembered, but she had no time to feel bad about the trick she had played. With sudden horror, she heard a creak right behind her, and she jumped out of the way just in time to avoid the crash. A file cabinet labeled "Linguistics to Lions" fell against the wall, blocking the mouth of the chute.

  "Violet!" Sunny cried. She and her brother tried to push the cabinet aside, but the strength of a thirteen-year-old boy and his baby sister were no match against a metal case holding files on everything from the history of language to a large carnivorous feline found in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India.

  "I'm O.K.," Violet called back.

  "Not for long you're not!" Esmé snarled, from a few aisles over.

  Klaus and Sunny sat in the dark chute and heard their sister's faint voice as she called to them. "Leave me here!" she insisted. "I'll meet you back in our filthy, cold, inappropriate home."

  The two younger Baudelaires huddled together at the entrance of the chute, but it is useless for me to describe to you how desperate and terrified they felt. There is no reason to describe how horrible it was to hear Violet's frantic footsteps across the Library of Records, or the odd, tottering ones of Esmé as she pursued the eldest Baudelaire in her stiletto heels, creaking and crashing file cabinets with every stabbing step. It is unnecessary to describe the cramped and difficult journey Klaus and Sunny made up the chute, which was slanted so steeply that it felt to the two orphans like they were crawling up a large mountain covered in ice instead of a fairly short chute used for depositing information. It is ineffectual to describe how the two children felt when they finally reached the end of the chute, which was another hole, carved into the outside wall of Heimlich Hospital, and found that Hal was right when he said it was to be a particularly cold evening. And it is absolutely futile--a word which here means "useless, unnecessary, and ineffectual, because there is no reason for it"--to describe how they felt as they sat in the half-finished section of the hospital, with dropcloths wrapped around them to keep them warm and flashlights lit around them to keep them company, and waited for Violet to show up, because Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were not thinking of these things.

  The two younger Baudelaires sat together, clutching page thirteen of the Baudelaire file, as the night grew later and later, but they were not thinking about the noises they heard coming from the Library of Records, or about the journey up the chute or even about the icy breeze as it blew through the plastic sheets and chilled the Baudelaire bones. Klaus and Sunny were thinking about what Violet had said, when she saw the piece of paper they were clutching now. "I never thought I'd live to see the day," Violet had said, and her two siblings knew that the phrase was just another way of saying "I'm very surprised" or "I'm extremely flabbergasted" or "This blows my mind beyond belief." But now, as the two Baudelaires waited more and more anxiously for their sister, Klaus and Sunny began to fear that the phrase Violet used was more appropriate than she ever would have guessed. As the first pale rays of the morning sun began to shine on the unfinished half of the hospital, the Baudelares grew more and more frightened that their sister would not live to see the day.

  Chapter Eight

  Heimlich Hospital is gone now, and will probably never be rebuilt. If you want to visit it, you have to convince a farmer to let you borrow his mule, for nobody in the surrounding area is willing to go within twelve miles of its wreckage, and once you arrive you can hardly blame them. The few scraps of the building that have survived are covered with a thick and prickly type of ivy called kudzu, which makes it difficult to see what the hospital looked like when the Baudelaires first arrived in the V.F.D. van. The confusing maps have been gnawed off the walls of the sagging staircases, so it is very hard to imagine how troublesome it was to find one's way through all of the areas of the building. And the intercom system has long since crumbled away, with only a handful of square speakers left sitting among the ashen rubble, so it is impossible to imagine just how unnerving it was when Klaus and Sunny heard the latest announcement from Mattathias.

  "Attention!" Mattathias announced. There were no intercom speakers installed in the unfinished half of the hospital, so the two younger Baudelaires had to listen very hard to hear the scratchy voice of their enemy coming from one of the outdoor speakers. "Attention! Attention! This is Mattathias, the Head of Human Resources. I am canceling the remainder of the hospital inspections. We have found what we were looking for." There was a pause as Mattathias moved away from the microphone, and as Klaus and Sunny listened very hard, they could hear the faint, faint noise of triumphant, high-pitched laughter coming from the Head of Human Resources.

  "Excuse me," he continued, when his giggling fit was over. "To continue, please be aware that two of the three Baudelaire murderers-- Klaus and Sun--I mean, Klyde and Susie Baudelaire--have been spotted in the hospital. If you see any children whom you recognize from The Daily Punctilio, please capture them and notify the police." Mattathias stopped talking and began to giggle again, until the children heard the voice of Esmé Squalor whispering, "Darling, you forgot to turn off the intercom." Then there was a click, and everything was silent.

  "They caught her," Klaus said. Now that the sun had risen, it wasn't very cold in the half-finished section of the hospital, but the middle Baudelaire shivered nonetheless. "That's what Mattathias meant when he said that they had found what they were looking for."

  "Danger," Sunny said grimly.

  "She certainly is," Klaus said. "We have to rescue Violet before it's too late."

  "Virm," Sunny said, which meant "But we don't know where she is."

  "She must be somewhere in the hospital," Klaus said, "otherwise Mattathias wouldn't still be here. He and Esmé are probably hoping to capture us, too."

  "Ranee," Sunny said.

  "And the file," Klaus agreed, taking page thirteen out of his pocket, where he had been storing it for safekeeping along with the scraps of the Quagmire notebooks. "Come on, Sunny. We've got to find our sister and get her out of there."

  "Lindersto," Sunny said. She meant "That'll be tough. We'll have to wander around the hospital looking for her, while other people will be wandering around the hospital, looking for us."

  "I know," Klaus said glumly. "If anyone recognizes us from The Daily Punctilio, we'll be in jail before we can help Violet."

  "Disguise?" Sunny said.

  "I don't know how," Klaus said, looking around the half-finished room. "All we have here is some flashlights and a few dropcloths. I suppose if we wrapped the dropcloths around us and put the flashlights on top of our heads, we could try to disguise ourselves as piles of construction materials."

  "Gidoost," Sunny said, which meant "But piles of construction materials don't wander ar
ound hospitals."

  "Then we'll have to walk into the hospital without disguises," Klaus said. "We'll just have to be extra careful."

  Sunny nodded emphatically, a word which here means "as if she thought being extra careful was a very good plan," and Klaus nodded emphatically back. But as they left the half-finished wing of the hospital, the two children felt less and less emphatic about what they were doing. Ever since that terrible day at the beach when Mr. Poe brought them news of the fire, all three Baudelaires had been extra careful all of the time. They had been extra careful when they lived with Count Olaf, and Sunny had still ended up dangling from a cage outside Olaf's tower room. They had been extra careful when they'd worked at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, and Klaus had still ended up hypnotized by Dr. Orwell. And now the Baudelaires had been as careful as they could possibly be, but the hospital had turned out to be as hostile an environment as anywhere the three children had ever lived. But just as Klaus and Sunny entered the finished half of Heimlich Hospital, their feet moving less and less emphatically and their hearts beating faster and faster, they heard something that soothed their savage breasts:

  "We are Volunteers Fighting Disease, And we're cheerful all day long. If someone said that we were sad, That person would be wrong."

  There, coming around the corner, were the Volunteers Fighting Disease, walking down the hall singing their cheerful song and carrying enormous bunches of heart-shaped balloons. Klaus and Sunny looked at one another, and ran to catch up with the group. What better place to hide than among people who believed that no news was good news, and so didn't read the newspaper?

  "We visit people who are sick, And try to make them smile, Even if their noses bleed, Or if they cough up bile."

  To the children's relief, the volunteers paid no attention as Klaus and Sunny infiltrated the group, a phrase which here means "sneaked into the middle of a singing crowd." An especially cheerful singer seemed to be the only one who noticed, and she immediately handed a balloon to each newcomer. Klaus and Sunny held the balloons in front of their faces, so that anybody passing by would see two volunteers with shiny, helium-filled hearts, instead of two accused criminals hiding in V.F.D.