Free A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket Page B

this minute." "If we go right this minute," Klaus said, "we'll have do it very quietly. The Squalors are not going to let three children poke around an elevator shaft." "It's worth the risk, if it helps us figure out Gunther's plan," Violet said. I'm sorry to say that it turned out not to be worth the risk at all, but of course the Baudelaires had no way of knowing that, so they merely nodded in agreement and tiptoed toward the penthouse's exit, peeking into each room before they went through to see if the Squalors were anywhere to be found. But Jerome and Esme were apparently spending the evening in some room in another part of the apartment, because the Baudelaires didn't see hide or hair of them--the expression "hide or hair of them" here means "even a glimpse of the city's sixth most important financial advisor, or her husband"--on their way to the front door. They hoped the door would not squeak as they pushed it open, but apparently silent hinges were in, because the Baudelaires made no noise at all as they left the apartment and tiptoed over to the two pairs of sliding elevator doors. "How do we know which elevator is which?" Violet whispered. "The pairs of doors look exactly alike." "I hadn't thought of that," Klaus replied. "If one of them is really a secret passageway, there must be some way to tell." Sunny tugged on the legs of her siblings' pants, which was a good way to get their attention without making any noise, and when Violet and Klaus looked down to see what their sister wanted, she answered them just as silently. Without speaking, she reached out one of her tiny fingers and pointed to the buttons that were next to each set of sliding doors. Next to one pair of doors, there was a single button, with an arrow printed on it pointing down. But next to the second pair of doors, there were two buttons: one with a Down arrow, and one with an Up arrow. The three children looked at the buttons and considered. "Why would you need an Up button," Violet whispered, "if you were already on the top floor?" and without waiting for an answer to her question, she reached out and pressed it. With a quiet, slithery sound, the sliding doors opened, and the children leaned carefully into the doorway, and gasped at what they saw. "Lakry," Sunny said, which meant something like "There are no ropes." "Not only are there no ropes," Violet said. "There's no endlessly looped belt, push-button console, or electromagnetic braking system. I don't even see an enclosed platform." "I knew it," Klaus said, in hushed excitement. "I knew the elevator was ersatz!" "Ersatz" is a word that describes a situation in which one thing is pretending to be another, the way the secret passageway the Baudelaires were looking at had been pretending to be an elevator, but the word might as well have meant "the most terrifying place the Baudelaires had ever seen." As the children stood in the doorway and peered into the elevator shaft, it was as if they were standing on the edge of an enormous cliff, looking down at the dizzying depths below them. But what made these depths terrifying, as well as dizzying, was that they were so very dark. The shaft was more like a pit than a passageway, leading straight down into a blackness the likes of which the youngsters had never seen. It was darker than any night had ever been, even on nights when there was no moon. It was darker than Dark Avenue had been on the day of their arrival. It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea. The Baudelaire orphans had never dreamed that anything could be this dark, even in their scariest nightmares, and as they stood at the edge of this pit of unimaginable blackness, they felt as if the elevator shaft would simply swallow them up and they would never see a speck of light again. "We have to go down there," Violet said, scarcely believing the words she was saying. "I'm not sure I have the