A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room Read Free Page B

as Sunny's little eyes closed and her face grew quiet. Then, moving as suddenly as the snake, Sunny smiled brightly, opened her mouth, and bit the Incredibly Deadly Viper right on its tiny, scaled nose. The snake let go of her chin, and Violet and Klaus could see that it had left barely a mark. The two older Baudelaire siblings looked at Uncle Monty, and Uncle Monty looked back at them and laughed. His loud laughter bounced off the glass walls of the Reptile Room. "Uncle Monty, what can we do?" Klaus said in despair. "Oh, I'm sorry, my dears," Uncle Monty said, wiping his eyes with his hands. "You must be very frightened. But the Incredibly Deadly Viper is one of the least dangerous and most friendly creatures in the animal kingdom. Sunny has nothing to worry about, and neither do you." Klaus looked at his baby sister, who was still in his arms, as she playfully gave the Incredibly Deadly Viper a big hug around its thick body, and he realized Uncle Monty must be telling the truth. "But then why is it called the Incredibly Deadly Viper?" Uncle Monty laughed again. "It's a misnomer," he said, using a word which here means "a very wrong name." "Because I discovered it, I got to name it, remember? Don't tell anyone about the Incredibly Deadly Viper, because I'm going to present it to the Herpetological Society and give them a good scare before explaining that the snake is completely harmless! Lord knows they've teased me many times, because of my name. 'Hello hello, Montgomery Montgomery,' they say. 'How are you how are you, Montgomery Montgomery?' But at this year's conference I'm going to get back at them with this prank." Uncle Monty drew himself up to his full height and began talking in a silly, scientific voice. "'Colleagues,' I'll say, 'I would like to introduce to you a new species, the Incredibly Deadly Viper, which I found in the southwest forest of-my God! It's escaped!' And then, when all my fellow herpetologists have jumped up on chairs and tables and are shrieking in fear, I'll tell them that the snake wouldn't hurt a fly! Won't that be hysterical?" Violet and Klaus looked at each other, and then began laughing, half in relief that their sister was unharmed, and half with amusement, because they thought Uncle Monty's prank was a good one. Klaus put Sunny down on the floor, and the Incredibly Deadly Viper followed, wriggling its tail affectionately around Sunny, the way you might put your arm around someone of whom you were fond. "Are there any snakes in this room that are dangerous?" Violet asked. "Of course," Uncle Monty said. "You can't study snakes for forty years without encountering some dangerous ones. I have a whole cabinet of venom samples from every poisonous snake known to people, so I can study the ways in which these dangerous snakes work. There is a snake in this room whose venom is so deadly that your heart would stop before you even knew he'd bitten you. There is a snake who can open her mouth so wide she could swallow all of us, together, in one gulp. There is a pair of snakes who have learned to drive a car so recklessly that they would run you over in the street and never stop to apologize. But all of these snakes are in cages with much sturdier locks, and all of them can be handled safely when one has studied them enough. I promise that if you take time to learn the facts, no harm will come to you here in the Reptile Room." There is a type of situation, which occurs all too often and which is occurring at this point in the story of the Baudelaire orphans, called "dramatic irony." Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite,