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Chapter One
There are two reasons why a writer
would end a sentence with the word
ìstopî written entirely in
capital letters stop. The first is if the
writer were writing a telegram, which is a
coded message sent through an electrical
wire stop. In a telegram, the word
ìstopî in all capital letters
is the code for the end of a sentence
stop. But there is another reason why a
writer would end a sentence with
ìstopî written entirely in
capital letters, and that is to warn
readers that the book they are reading is
so utterly wretched that if they have
begun reading it, the best thing to do
would be to stop stop. This particular
book, for instance, describes an
especially unhappy time in the dreadful
lives of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny
Baudelaire, and if you have any sense at
all you will shut this book immediately,
drag it up a tall mountain, and throw it
off the very top stop. There is no earthly
reason why you should read even one more
word about the misfortune, treachery, and
woe that are in store for the three
Baudelaire children, any more than you
should run into the street and throw
yourself under the wheels of a bus stop.
This ìstopî -- ended sentence
is your very last chance to pretend the
ìstopî warning is a stop
sign, and to stop the flood of despair
that awaits you in this book, the
heart-stopping horror that begins in the
very next sentence, by obeying the
ìstopî and stopping stop.
The Baudelaire orphans stopped. It was
early in the morning, and the three
children had been walking for hours across
the flat and unfamiliar landscape. They
were thirsty, lost, and exhausted, which
are three good reasons to end a long walk,
but they were also frightened, desperate,
and not far from people who wanted to hurt
them, which are three good reasons to
continue. The siblings had abandoned all
conversation hours ago, saving every last
bit of their energy to put one foot in
front of the other, but now they knew they
had to stop, if only for a moment, and
talk about what to do next.
The children were standing in front of
the Last Chance General Store -- the only
building they had encountered since they
began their long and frantic nighttime
walk. The outside of the store was covered
with faded posters advertising what was
sold, and by the eerie light of the
half-moon, the Baudelaires could see that
fresh limes, plastic knives, canned meat,
white envelopes, mango-flavored candy, red
wine, leather wallets, fashion magazines,
goldfish bowls, sleeping bags, roasted
figs, cardboard boxes, controversial
vitamins, and many other things were
available inside the store. Nowhere on the
building, however, was there a poster
advertising help, which is really what the
Baudelaires needed.
ìI think we should go
inside,î said Violet, taking a
ribbon out of her pocket to tie up her
hair. Violet, the eldest Baudelaire, was
probably the finest fourteen-year-old
inventor in the world, and she always tied
her hair up in a ribbon when she had to
solve a problem, and right now she was
trying to invent a solution for the
biggest problem she and her siblings had
ever faced. ìPerhaps there's
somebody in there who can help us in some
way.î
ìBut perhaps there's somebody in
there who has seen our pictures in the
newspaper,î said Klaus, the middle
Baudelaire, who had recently spent his
thirteenth birthday in a filthy jail cell.
Klaus had a real knack for remembering
nearly every word of nearly all of the
thousands of books he had read, and he
frowned as he remembered something untrue
he had recently read about himself in the
newspaper. ìIf they read The Daily
Punctilio,î he continued,
ìperhaps they believe all those
terrible things about us. Then they won't
help us at all.î
ìAgery!î Sunny said. Sunny
was a baby, and as with most babies,
different parts of her were growing at
different rates. She had only four teeth,
for example, but each of them was as sharp
as that of an adult lion, and although she
had recently learned to walk, Sunny was
still getting the hang of speaking in a
way that all adults could understand. Her
siblings, however, knew at once that she
meant ìWell, we can't keep on
walking forever,î and the two older
Baudelaires nodded in agreement.
ìSunny's right,î Violet
said. ìIt's called the Last Chance
General Store. That sounds like it's the
only building for miles and miles. It
might be our only opportunity to get some
help.î
ìAnd look,î Klaus said,
pointing to a poster taped in a high
corner of the building. ìWe can
send a telegram inside. Maybe we can get
some help that way.î
ìWho would we send a telegram
to?î Violet asked, and once again
the Baudelaires had to stop and think. If
you are like most people, you have an
assortment of friends and family you can
call upon in times of trouble. For
instance, if you woke up in the middle of
the night and saw a masked woman trying to
crawl through your bedroom window, you
might call your mother or father to help
you push her back out. If you found
yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of
a strange city, you might ask the police
to give you a ride home. And if you were
an author locked in an Italian restaurant
that was slowly filling up with water, you
might call upon your acquaintances in the
locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to
come and rescue you. But the Baudelaire
children's trouble had begun with the news
that their parents had been killed in a
terrible fire, so they could not call upon
their mother or father...
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