Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?. Lemony Snicket
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last car approaching, and then I saw it pass, locked tight so the prisoners couldn’t escape, although it felt like they were escaping anyway, out of my sight and out of my reach. The last of the train left Stain’d Station like sand through my fingers, and I just stood there watching, helpless and useless. The mystery is leaving, Snicket. Your investigation is escaping, and now you’re all alone.
The station took a while to settle down, and I stood for a moment with my hands in my pockets, one clenching a paper train and the other clenching nothing. I didn’t want to give up, so I tried to guess what to do next. I guessed and then I kept guessing and then I couldn’t guess and then I gave up. Trudging out of the station, however, turned out to be the right guess after all, because a solution was stopped just at the curb, honking its horn and calling my name.
“Is that you, Snicket?”
I smiled. “Is that you, Pip and Squeak?”
The boy at the wheel smiled, and his brother crawled up from his position at the brake pedal so they could both hand me cards through the taxi’s open window. The cards told me what I already knew. Bouvard and Pecuchet Bellerophon, better known as Pip and Squeak, provided discreet transportation, a phrase which meant they drove the only taxi left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea whenever their father was sick or couldn’t do it for some other reason, which was almost all the time and always. They weren’t quite tall enough to drive by themselves, but with Pip steering and Squeak on the pedals, they’d gotten me out of a few tight spots after getting me into them more or less on time.
I hurried into the back of the cab. “I need you two on a tail job.”
“Neat,” Squeak said, in the voice that gave him his nickname. “Since we started driving this taxi, I’ve been waiting for someone to say ‘follow that car.’ ”
“It’s not a car I want you to follow,” I said. “It’s a train.”
“Follow a train?” Pip repeated with a laugh. “That’s hardly a tail job. It runs on tracks, doesn’t it? Why do we need to follow a train when we already know where it goes?”
“I need you to take me to where it goes before it gets there,” I said.
“So instead of ‘follow that car’ it’s ‘precede that train’?” Squeak asked, sliding down to his pedal spot. He sounded a little disappointed.
“I need to get onto The Thistle of the Valley,” I said, “but I couldn’t manage it here.”
Pip frowned. “But there’s nowhere else you can get on board. They canceled all the old stops in town.”
“That’s why I need you to take me to Partial Foods,” I said. “The back entrance, off the alley, where the train tracks are.”
“Didn’t you hear us, Snicket?” Pip asked. “The Thistle of the Valley doesn’t stop there or anyplace else.”
“I heard you.”
Pip put the car in gear. “I hope you’re not going to do anything foolish.”
“I hope you’re not hoping too hard,” I said. Squeak hit the gas and we pulled away from Stain’d Station and took a shortcut toward our destination. I heard the train whistle blow again, and thought of Theodora’s phony snores. Breathe and keep still, I told myself, thinking of the foolish thing in my immediate future.
“It’s been a busy night,” Squeak said, as we rounded the corner.
“I was supposed to be in bed early,” I said.
Pip grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “That’s always the way, isn’t it? The most interesting things happen when we’re supposed to be in bed. What were you doing at Stain’d Station, anyway?”
“Official business,” I said.
“I guess we should keep all our actions quiet,” Squeak said. “That way Hangfire won’t catch on.”
“We hope,” Pip said.
“We hope,” I agreed, but I didn’t feel agreeable. I wondered what the Bellerophons were up to. And Ornette, I thought. And Theodora, and Sally Murphy and her strange porter. And my sister, and a thousand other people I might not see again. Not after what I was about to do. I looked out at the night, and the taxi turned left and swung into the shadow of Ink Inc., the pen-shaped tower making the dark even darker just where we were.
“Snicket,” Squeak said, braking and breaking the silence, “how about you give us a tip like you do?”
I had a system with the Bellerophon brothers, recommending books in exchange for their services. It’s a system I wish were used more widely in the world. “Have you read a book called The Turn of the Screw ?” I asked.
Pip pointed his thumb at the hood of the taxi. “We get enough hardware in our ordinary lives,” he said.
“It’s not about hardware,” I told him. “It’s about a babysitter and some ghosts. It’s difficult but it’s spooky, and speaking of which, stop here, will you?”
The Bellerophons stopped their taxi, and I peered out at the loading dock of Partial Foods. It was empty and eerie, with a crumbling cement ramp and the back door of the grocery store, locked now and probably forever. I could see a discarded apple core, sad and mushy in a clump of weeds, and the torn wrapper of a long-gone candy bar, balled up and forgotten near the train tracks.
“You never told us the whole story of what happened here, with all those stolen honeydew melons,” Pip reminded me, referring to recent events chronicled in a report that is not recommended for the general public.
“True,” I admitted.
“The train won’t stop here,” Squeak said to me. “It’ll just race on by.”
“I know it,” I replied.
Pip turned around to look at me. “Do we have to ask again about doing something foolish?”
“No,” I said. “You definitely don’t have to ask.”
“Maybe that’s the wrong question,” Squeak said, looking at the strange, bare place where he and his brother had taken me. “Maybe the right question is, do you really want to be here?”
I thought of all the places I wanted to be, not as difficult and not as spooky. I stepped out of the car and deeper into a mystery of which I couldn’t make head nor tail, and I answered the question the best I could.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to be here,” and I thanked them for taking me there and sent them on their way.
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