Read Online The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket - Free Book Online

be found. “Sunny!” he yelled, looking around the room. Violet dropped the dress she was holding and began to help him search. They looked in every corner, under the bed, and even inside the cardboard box. But Sunny was gone.
         “Where can she be?” Violet asked worriedly. “She's not the type to run off.”
         “Where can she be indeed?” said a voice behind them, and the two children turned around. Count Olaf was standing in the doorway, watching Violet and Klaus as they searched the room. His eyes were shining brighter than they ever had, and he was still smiling like he'd just uttered a joke.
     
    C H A P T E R
    Nine
     
        “
    
     Yes,
    
    ”
    Count Olaf continued, “it certainly is strange to find a child missing. And one so small, and helpless.”
        
     “Where's Sunny?” Violet cried. “What have you done with her?”
         Count Olaf continued to speak as if he had not heard Violet. “But then again, one sees strange things every day. In fact, if you two orphans follow me out to the backyard, I think we will all see something rather unusual.”
         The Baudelaire children didn't say anything, but followed Count Olaf through the house and out the back door. Violet looked around the small, scraggly yard, in which she had not been since she and Klaus had been forced to chop wood. The pile of logs they had made was still lying there untouched, as if Count Olaf had merely made them chop logs for his own amusement, rather than for any purpose. Violet shivered, still in her nightgown, but as she gazed here and there she saw nothing unusual.
         “You're not looking in the right place,” Count Olaf said. “For children who read so much, you two are remarkably unintelligent.”
         Violet looked over in the direction of Count Olaf, but could not meet his eyes. The eyes on his face, that is. She was staring at his feet, and could see the tattooed eye that had been watching the Baudelaire orphans since their troubles had begun. Then her eyes traveled up Count Olaf's lean, shabbily dressed body, and she saw that he was pointing up with one scrawny hand. She followed his gesture and found herself looking at the forbidden tower. It was made of dirty stone, with only one lone window, and just barely visible in the window was what looked like a birdcage.
         “Oh no,” Klaus said in a small, scared voice, and Violet looked again. It was a birdcage, dangling from the tower window like a flag in the wind, but inside the birdcage she could see a small and frightened Sunny. When Violet looked closely, she could see there was a large piece of tape across her sister's mouth, and ropes around her body. She was utterly trapped.
         “Let her go!” Violet said to Count Olaf. “She has done nothing to you! She is an infant!”
         “Well, now,” Count Olaf said, sitting on a stump. “If you really want me to let her go, I will. But surely even a stupid brat like you might realize that if I let her go—or, more accurately, if I ask my comrade to let her go—poor little Sunny might not survive the fall down to the ground. That's a thirty-foot tower, which is a very long way for a very little person to fall, even when she's inside a cage. But if you insist—”
         “No!”
    
    Klaus cried. “Don't”
         Violet looked into Count Olaf's eyes, and then at the small parcel that was her sister, hanging from the top of the tower and moving slowly in the breeze. She pictured Sunny toppling from the tower and onto the ground, pictured her sister's last thoughts being ones of sheer terror. “Please,” she said to Olaf, feeling tears in her eyes. “She's just a baby. We'll do anything, anything. Just don't harm her.”
        
     “Anything?”
    
    
    Count Olaf asked, his eyebrow rising. He leaned in toward Violet and gazed into her eyes. “Anything? Would you, for instance, consider marrying me during tomorrow night's