The Way I See It

Prologue (dedicated to S)

I sat quietly on Briny Beach, enjoying the cool breeze and the feel of the sand beneath me. Almost nobody was on the shore; only three children — a girl of about my age skipping rocks, a boy a little younger exploring rockpools, and a baby, who seemed to be biting something that looked like a wrench. I was reading Anna Karenina, a novel about a Russian woman who is abused by her husband, and threw herself under a train. Something I was a part of required me to know its central theme by heart.

I read, quietly smiling to myself, feeling a strange but sweet kind of calm. I heard someone approaching the children on the beach. The baby had been saying, "Gack!" repeatedly, which meant, "Look at that mysterious figure emerging from the fog!" Sure enough, I could see the silhouette of a tall creature making its way towards to children, out of the mist. I put down my book and watched.

"It only seems scary because of all the mist," the boy reassured who I assumed was his older sister. I was thinking the same thing — but nevertheless, I picked up Anna Karenina and clenched it in my hand, throwing reflexes at the ready. I wished that I was my older sister Nadia, who with her perfectionist streak and precise nature could hit a target any time she tried.

The tall figure came closer, and closer, and closer, until it was no longer surrounded by fog. I sighed audibly. It was only Arthur; Arthur Poe. He was a banker, and my dear friend Jacquelyn was his receptionist. She'd learnt much valuable information from clients, and that helps with our occupation. I'd been invited to a dinner party or two with Arthur — and he wasn't scary at all, only somewhat useless.

Arthur walked briskly towards the children, calling, "Baudelaires! Baudelaires!" Hold on. Baudelaires? I thought. These children are Baudelaires? They must be Beatrice's children, the ones she's told me so much about! Beatrice was my cousin Kit's best friend, and a mother figure to me since my own parents died in a house fire. But now I was meeting her children? I studied them.

The girl my age — Violet, I suppose — had long brown hair tied back in a ribbon. Kit does that, when she's trying to invent something. I wondered if Violet was an inventor too, with her brain filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, like Kit's.

Next I studied the boy. I tried to remember what Beatrice had said his name was — Klaus, I think? Klaus had been examining spiny crabs in the rockpools, something my sister Nadia used to do when she was a child. His glasses made him look rather intelligent; and if he was Beatrice's son, surely he was!

The baby was harder to interpret. She was very small, around the size of a boot, and she had four massive teeth — but it didn't look weird on her, just amazingly cute. I couldn't really remember what Bertrand (who would have been the father) looked like, having only seen him a few times at certain gatherings when Beatrice was with him, but the baby — Sunny was her name, I think — looked a little like how I pictured him in my mind's eye.

I had been staring at the three Baudelaires for so long that I hadn't properly been listening to what Arthur was telling them, but one sentence floated my way on the wind. "It's your parents, they... they have perished in a terrible fire."

Excuse me? "They perished," he continued, "in a fire that destroyed the entire house. I'm very sorry to tell you this, my dears." Oh dear. I tried my hardest not to picture the beautiful Baudelaire mansion going up in flames, so instead — not necessarily any better — I saw my own home, twelve years ago, burning to the ground.

I was supposed to run, my sister Olivia had told me later. Of course I hadn't known that; I'd been only two and thought we were playing chase. Only when my father opened the hatch under the living room rug and handed me to Via, telling us he'd just get our mother out of the library then come under with us, did I realise that it had not been a game.

Needless to say, he never came back.

"Perished means killed." Arthur explained, and I was whipped back to the present. "We know what perished means!" said Klaus quietly. That's when it hit me. If their parents had perished in a terrible fire that destroyed the entire home, and they were Beatrice and Bertrand's children...

Then Beatrice was dead.