A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Penultimate Peril Read Free

where it goes off accidentally and kills someone in an incident eerily similar to one that happens in chapter nine of this very book, and all the while they are trying to figure out if any of these troubles are the result of destiny. They wonder and wonder at all the perils in their lives, and when the final curtain is brought down even the audience cannot be sure what all these unfortunate events may mean. The Baudelaire orphans did not know what perils lay ahead of them, as they followed Kit Snicket down the lawn, but they wondered, just as I wondered, on that fateful evening long ago, as I hurried out of the opera house before a certain woman could spot me, if it was the force of destiny that was guiding their story, or something even more mysterious, even more dangerous, and even more unfortunate.
    Chapter Two
    If you were to hold this book up to a mirror, you would see at once how confusing it is to read kcab detcelfer era eht nehw sdrow dna srettel .uoy ot In fact, the entire world looks confusing in a mirror, almost as if rehto elohw a si ereht yltcaxe ,ecafrus revlis ynihs eht dnoyeb dlrow ,ni evil ew dlrow eht sa emas eht except backward. Life is perplexing enough without thinking about other worlds staring back at you from the mirror, which is why people who spend a great deal of time looking in the mirror tend to have trouble thinking about anything except hcum os retfa revocsid yeht sterces gnilbis nwonknu ylsnoiverp a sa hcus ,noicelfer yrev taht ta meht gihctaw ydaerla saw ohw .tnemom The Baudelaire orphans, of course, had not spent very much time looking in mirrors recently, as they'd been quite preoccupied, a word which here means "in desperate and mysterious circumstances brought about by Count Olaf." But even if they had spent every waking moment staring at their own reflections, they would not have been prepared for the perplexing sight waiting for them at the end of the sloping lawn. When Violet, Klaus, and Sunny at last caught up with Kit Snicket, it felt as if they had stepped into the world on the opposite side of the mirror without even knowing it. Impossible as it seemed, the lawn deposited the children at the roof of a building, but a building that lay flat on the ground instead of rising up toward the sky. The Baudelaires' shoes were inches from the roof's glittering shingles, where a large sign read hotel denouement. Below the sign, farther from the orphans, was a row of windows with the number 9 emblazoned on each of their shutters. The row was very long, stretching out to the left and right of the Baudelaires, so far that they couldn't see the end of it. Below this row of windows was another with the number 8 emblazoned on the shutters, and then another row with 7, and so on and so on, the numbers getting farther and farther away from the Baudelaires, all the way down to 0. Protruding from one of the 0 windows was a strange funnel, which was spewing a thick, white fog toward the siblings, covering a set of stairs leading to a large, curved archway one story above, marked ENTRANCE. The building was constructed from strange, shimmering bricks, and here and there on the building were large, strange flowers and patches of dark green moss, which all lay out on the ground in front of the children. After a moment, one of the shutters opened, and in an instant the Baudelaires realized why the Hotel Denouement seemed so perplexing. They had not been staring at the building at all, but at its reflection in an enormous pond. The actual hotel stood at the far end of the pond, and was reflected onto the pond's surface. Normally, of course, it is easy to tell a building from its reflection in a body of water, but whoever had designed the Hotel Denouement had added several features to confuse passersby. For one thing, the building did not stand up straight, but tilted toward the ground at a precise angle, so that the pond only reflected the hotel, and none of the surrounding landscape and sky. Also, all of