A Series of Unfortunate Events #6: The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket; Brett Helquist

Author:Lemony Snicket; Brett Helquist
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Penthouses, Children: Grades 4-6, Fiction, Violet (Fictitious character), Siblings, Sunny (Fictitious character), Brothers and sisters, Family - Orphans & Foster Homes, Klaus (Fictitious character), Ages 9-12 Fiction, Juvenile Fiction, Humorous Stories, Orphans, Orphans & Foster Homes, American, English, Action & Adventure - General, Humorous stories, Family, Action & Adventure, Elevators, Family - Siblings, Children's Books, General, Baudelaire
ISBN: 9780064408646
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2001-02-08T17:44:41.943000+00:00

I'm dreaming,“ Duncan Quagmire said. His voice was a hoarse whisper of utter shock. ”I must be dreaming."

“But how can you be dreaming,” Isadora asked him, “if I'm having the same dream?”

“I once read about a journalist,” Duncan whispered, “who was reporting on a war and was imprisoned by the enemy for three years. Each morning, she looked out her cell window and thought she saw her grandparents coming to rescue her. But they weren't really there. It was a hallucination.”

“I remember reading about a poet,” Isadora said, “who would see six lovely maidens in his kitchen on Tuesday nights, but his kitchen was really empty. It was a phantasm.”

“No,” Violet said, and reached her hand between the bars of the cage. The Quagmire triplets shrank back into the cage's far corner, as if Violet were a poisonous spider instead of a long-lost friend. “It's not a hallucination. It's me, Violet Baudelaire.”

“And it's really Klaus,” Klaus said. “I'm not a phantasm.”

“Sunny!” Sunny said.

The Baudelaire orphans blinked in the darkness, straining their eyes to see as much as possible. Now that they were no longer dangling from the end of a rope, they were able to get a good look at their gloomy surroundings. Their long climb ended in a tiny, filthy room with nothing in it but the rusty cage that the extension cord had clinked against, but the Baudelaires saw that the passageway continued with a long hallway, just as shadowy as the elevator shaft, that twisted and turned away into the dark. The children also got a good look at the Quagmires, and that view was no less gloomy. They were dressed in tattered rags, and their faces were so smeared with dirt that the Baudelaires might not have recognized them, if the two triplets had not been holding the notebooks they took with them wherever they went. But it was not just the dirt on their faces, or the clothes on their bodies, that made the Quagmires look so different. It was the look in their eyes. The Quagmire triplets looked exhausted, and they looked hungry, and they looked very, very frightened. But most of all, Isadora and Duncan looked haunted. The word “haunted,” I'm sure you know, usually applies to a house, graveyard, or supermarket that has ghosts living in it, but the word can also be used to describe people who have seen and heard such horrible things that they feel as if ghosts are living inside them, haunting their brains and hearts with misery and despair. The Quagmires looked this way, and it broke the Baudelaire hearts to see their friends look so desperately sad.

“Is it really you?” Duncan said, squinting at the Baudelaires from the far end of the cage. “Can it really, really be you?”

“Oh, yes,” Violet said, and found that her eyes were filling with tears.

“It's really the Baudelaires,” Isadora said, stretching her hand out to meet Violet's. “We're not dreaming, Duncan . They're really here.”

Klaus and Sunny reached into the cage as well, and Duncan left his corner to reach the Baudelaires as best he could from behind bars.

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