The Bad Beginning (2 page)

     Mr. Poe opened his mouth to speak, but had to cough a few times before he began. “Yes you do. I'm dropping you off on my way to the bank, so we need to leave as soon as possible. Please get out of bed and get dressed,” he said briskly. The word “briskly” here means “quickly, so as to get the Baudelaire children to leave the house.”

     The Baudelaire children left the house. Mr. Poe's automobile rumbled along the cobblestone streets of the city toward the neighborhood where Count Olaf lived. They passed horse-drawn carriages and motorcycles along Doldrum Drive
. They passed the Fickle Fountain, an elaborately carved monument that occasionally spat our water in which young children played. They passed an enormous pile of dirt where the Royal
Gardens
once stood. Before too long, Mr. Poe drove his car down a narrow alley lined with houses made of pale brick and stopped halfway down the block.

     “Here we are,” Mr. Poe said, in a voice undoubtedly meant to be cheerful.
“Your new home.”

     The Baudelaire children looked out and saw the prettiest house on the block. The bricks had been cleaned very well, and through the wide and open windows one could see an assortment of well-groomed plants. Standing in the doorway, with her hand on the shiny brass doorknob, was an older woman, smartly dressed, who was smiling at the children. In one hand she carried a flowerpot.

     “Hello there!” she called out. “You must be the children Count Olaf is adopting.”

     Violet opened the door of the automobile and got out to shake the woman's hand. It felt firm and warm, and for the first time in a long while Violet felt as if her life and the lives of her siblings might turn out well after all. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are. I am Violet Baudelaire, and this is my brother Klaus and my sister Sunny. And this is Mr. Poe, who has been arranging things for us since the death of our parents.”

     “Yes, I heard about the accident,” the woman said, as everyone said how do you do. “I am Justice Strauss.”

     “That's an unusual first name,” Klaus remarked.

     “It is my title,” she explained, “not my first name. I serve as a judge on the High Court.”

     “How fascinating,” Violet said. “And are you married to Count Olaf?”

     “Goodness me no,” Justice Strauss said. “I don't actually know him that well. He is my next-door neighbor.”

     The children looked from the well-scrubbed house of Justice Strauss to the dilapidated one next door. The bricks were stained with soar and grime. There were only two small windows, which were closed with the shades drawn even though it was a nice day. Rising above the windows was a tall and dirty tower that tilted slightly to the left. The front door needed to be repainted, and carved in the middle of it was an image of an eye. The entire building sagged to the side, like a crooked tooth.

     “Oh!” said Sunny, and everyone knew what she meant. She meant, “What a terrible place! I don't want to live there at all!”

     “Well, it was nice to meet you,” Violet said to Justice Strauss.

     “Yes,” said Justice Strauss, gesturing to her flowerpot. “Perhaps one day you could come over and help me with my gardening.”

     “That would be very pleasant,” Violet said, very sadly. It would, of course, be very pleasant to help Justice Strauss with her gardening, but Violet could not help thinking that it would be far more pleasant to live in Justice Strauss's house, instead of Count Olaf's. What kind of a man, Violet wondered, would carve an image of an eye into his front door?

     Mr. Poe tipped his hat to Justice Strauss, who smiled at the children and disappeared into her lovely house. Klaus stepped forward and knocked on Count Olaf's door, his knuckles rapping right in the middle of the carved eye. There was a pause, and then the door creaked open and the children saw Count Olaf for the first time.

     “Hello hello
hello,” Count Olaf said in a wheezy whisper. He was very tall and very thin, dressed in a gray suit that had many dark stains on it. His face was unshaven, and rather than two eyebrows, like most human beings have, he had just one long one. His eyes were very, very shiny, which made him look both hungry and angry. “Hello, my children. Please step into your new home, and wipe your feet outside so no mud gets indoors.”

     As they stepped into the house, Mr. Poe behind them, the Baudelaire orphans realized what a ridiculous thing Count Olaf had just said. The room in which they found themselves was the dirtiest they had ever seen, and a little bit of mud from outdoors wouldn't have made a bit of difference. Even by the dim light of the one bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, the three children could see that everything in this room was filthy, from the stuffed head of a lion which was nailed to the wall to the bowl of apple cores which sat on a small wooden table.

     Klaus willed himself not to cry as he looked around.

     “This room looks like it needs a little work,” Mr. Poe said, peering around in the gloom.

     “I realize that my humble home isn't as fancy as the Baudelaire mansion,” Count Olaf said, “but perhaps with a bit of your money we could fix it up a little nicer.”

     Mr. Poe's eyes widened in surprise, and his coughs echoed in the dark room before he spoke. “The Baudelaire fortune,” he said sternly, “will not be used for such matters. In fact, it will not be used at all, until Violet is of age.”

     Count Olaf turned to Mr. Poe with a glint in his eye like an angry dog. For a moment Violet thought he was going to strike Mr. Poe across the face. But then he swallowed— the children could see his Adam's apple bob in his skinny throat—and shrugged his patchy shoulders.

     “All right then,” he said. “It's the same to me. Thank you very much, Mr. Poe, for bringing them here. Children, I will now show you to your room.”

     “Good-bye, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny,” Me. Poe said, stepping back through the frontdoor. “I hope you will be very happy here. I will continue to see you occasionally, and you can always contact me at the bank if you have any questions.”

     “But we don't even know where the bank is,” Klaus said.

     “I have a map of the city,” Count Olaf said. “Good-bye, Mr. Poe.”

     He leaned forward to shut the door, and the Baudelaire orphans were too overcome with despair to get a last glimpse of Mr. Poe. They now wished they could all stay at the Poe household, even though it smelled. Rather than looking at the door, then, the orphans looked down, and saw that although Count Olaf was wearing shoes, he wasn't wearing any socks. They could see, in the space of pale skin between his tattered trouser cuff and his black shoe, that Count Olaf had an image of an eye tattooed on his ankle, matching the eye on his front door. They wondered how many other eyes were in Count Olaf's house, and whether, for the rest of their lives, they would always feel as though Count Olaf were watching them even when he wasn't nearby.

C H A P T E R

Three

I
don't
know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong. You can look at a painting for the first time, for example, and not like it at all, but after looking at it a little longer you may find it very pleasing. The first time you try Gorgonzola cheese you may find it too strong, but when you are older you may want to eat nothing but Gorgonzola cheese. Klaus, when Sunny was born, did not like her at all, but by the time she was six weeks old the two of them were thick as thieves. Your initial opinion on just about anything may change over time.

     I wish I could tell you that the Baudelaires first impressions of Count Olaf and his house were incorrect, as first impressions so often are. But these impressions—that Count Olaf was a horrible person, and his house a depressing pigsty—were absolutely correct. During the first few days after
the orphans' arrival at Count Olaf's, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny attempted to make themselves feel at home, but it was really no use. Even though Count Olaf's house was quite large, the three children were placed together in one filthy bedroom that had only one small bed in it. Violet and Klaus took turns sleeping in it, so that every other night one of them was in the bed and the other was sleeping on the hard wooden floor, and the bed's mattress was so lumpy it was difficult to say who was more uncomfortable. To make a bed for Sunny, Violet removed the dusty curtains from the curtain rod that hung over the bedroom's one window and bunched them together to form a sort of cushion, just big enough for her sister. However, without curtains over the cracked glass, the sun streamed through the window every morning, so the children woke up early and sore each day. Instead of a closet, there was a large cardboard box that had once held a refrigerator and would now hold the three children's clothes, all piled in a heap. Instead of toys, books, or other things to amuse the youngsters, Count Olaf had provided a small pile of rocks. And the only decoration on the peeling walls was a large and ugly painting of an eye, matching the one on Count Olaf's ankle and all over the house.

     But the children knew, as I'm sure you know, that the worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind. Count Olaf
wasneither
interesting nor kind; he was demanding, short-tempered, and bad-smelling. The only good thing to be said for Count Olaf is that he wasn't around very often. When the children woke up and chose their clothing out of the refrigerator box, they would walk into the kitchen and find a list of instructions left for them by Count Olaf, who would often not appear until nighttime. Most of the day he spent out of the house, or up in the high tower, where the children were forbidden to go. The instructions he left for them were usually difficult chores, such as repainting the back porch or repairing the windows, and instead of a signature Count Olaf would draw an eye at the bottom of the note.

     One morning his note read, “My theater troupe will be coming for dinner before tonight's performance. Have dinner ready for all ten of them by the time they arrive at seven o'clock. Buy the food, prepare it, ser the table, serve dinner, clean up afterwards, and stay out of our way.” Below that there was the usual eye, and underneath the note was a small sum of money for the groceries.

     Violet and Klaus read the note as they ate their breakfast, which was a gray and lumpy oatmeal Count Olaf left for them each morning in a large pot on the stove. Then they looked at each other in dismay.

     “None of us knows how to cook,” Klaus said.

     “That's true,” Violet said. “I knew how to repair those windows, and how to clean the chimney, because those sorts of things interest me. But I don't know how to cook anything except toast.”

     “And sometimes you burn the toast,” Klaus said, and they smiled. They were both remembering a time when the two of them got up early to make a special breakfast for their parents. Violet had burned the toast, and their parents, smelling smoke, had run downstairs to see what the matter was. When they saw Violet and Klaus, looking forlornly at pieces of pitch-black toast, they laughed and laughed, and then made pancakes for the whole family.

     “I wish they were here,” Violet said. She did not have to explain she was talking about their parents. “They would never let us stay in this dreadful place.”

     “If they were here,” Klaus said, his voice rising as he got more and more upset, “we would not be with Count Olaf in the first place. I hate it here, Violet! I hate this house! I hate our room! I hate having to do all these chores, and I hate Count Olaf!”

     “I hate it too,” Violet said, and Klaus looked at his older sister with relief.

Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation. “I hate everything about our lives right now, Klaus,” she said, “but we have to keep our chin up.” This was an expression the children's father had used, and it meant “try to stay cheerful.”

     “You're right,” Klaus said. “But it is very difficult to keep one's chin up when Count Olaf keeps shoving it down.”

    
“Jook!” Sunny shrieked, banging on the table with her oatmeal spoon. Violet and Klaus were jerked out of their conversation and looked once again at Count Olaf's note.

     “Perhaps we could find a cookbook, and read about how to cook,” Klaus said. “It shouldn't be that difficult to make a simple meal.”

     Violet and Klaus spent several minutes opening and shutting Count Olaf's kitchen cupboards, but there weren't any cookbooks to be found.

     “I can't say I'm surprised,” Violet said. “We haven't found any books in this house at all.”

  
  “I know,” Klaus said miserably. “I miss reading very much. We must go out and look for a library sometime soon.”

     “But not today,” Violet said. “Today we have to cook for ten people.”

     At that moment there was a knock on the front door. Violet and Klaus looked at one another nervously.

     “Who in the world would want to visit Count Olaf?” Violet wondered out loud.

     “Maybe somebody wants to visit us,” Klaus said, without much hope. In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphans' friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression which here means “they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them very lonely.” You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

     Violet, Klaus, and Sunny walked slowly to the front door and peered through the peephole, which was in the shape of an eye. They were delighted to see Justice Strauss peering back at them, and opened the door.

     “Justice Strauss!” Violet cried. “How lovely to see you.” She was about to add, “Do come in,” but then she realized that Justice Strauss would probably not want to venture into the dim and dirty room.

     “Please forgive me for not stopping by sooner,” Justice Strauss said, as the Baudelaires stood awkwardly in the doorway. “I wanted to see how you children were settling in, but I had a very difficult case in the High Court and it was taking up much of my time.”