The End

"Apples!" cried Su

"Of course!" Klaus said. "The tree is a hybrid, and its apples are bitter because they contain horseradish!"

"If we eat an apple," Violet said, "the fungus will be diluted."

" Gentreefive," Su

"Come on," she said, in a frantic wheeze.

Klaus shook his head. "I'm not sure we can make it," he said.

Su

"We can't die here," Violet said, her voice so feeble her siblings could scarcely hear her. "Our parents saved our lives in this very room, many years ago, without even knowing it."

"Maybe not," Klaus said. "Maybe this is the end of our story."

" Tumurchap," Su

Chapter Thirteen

If is a well-known but curious fact that the first bite of an apple always tastes the best, which is why the heroine of a book much more suitable to read than this one spends an entire afternoon eating the first bite of a bushel of apples. But even this anarchic little girl—the word «anarchic» here means «apple-loving» — never tasted a bite as wonderful as the Baudelaire orphans' first bite of the apple from the tree their parents had hybridized with horseradish. The apple was not as bitter as the Baudelaire orphans would have guessed, and the horseradish gave the juice of the apple a slight, sharp edge, like the air on a winter morning. But of course, the biggest appeal of the apple offered by the Incredibly Deadly Viper was its immediate effect on the deadly fungus growing inside them. From the moment the Baudelaire teeth bit down on the apple—first Violet's, and then Klaus's, and then Su

"We should each have another apple," Violet said, standing up, "to make sure we've consumed enough horseradish."

"And we should collect enough apples for all of the islanders," Klaus said. "They must be just as desperate as we were."

"Stockpot," Su

"You two start picking apples," Violet said, walking to the periscope. "I want to check on Kit Snicket. The flooding of the coastal shelf must have begun by now, and she must be terrified."

"I hope she avoided the Medusoid Mycelium," Klaus said. "I hate to think of what that would do to her child."

" Phearst," Su

"The islanders are in worse shape than Kit," Klaus said. "We should go to Ishmael’s tent first, and then go rescue Kit."

Violet peered through the periscope and frowned. "We shouldn't go to Ishmael's tent," she said. "We need to fill that stockpot with apples and get to the coastal shelf as quickly as we can."

"What do you mean?" Klaus said.

"They're leaving," Violet said, and I'm sorry to say it was true. Through the periscope, the eldest Baudelaire could see the shape of the outrigger and the figures of its poisoned passengers, who were pushing it along the coastal shelf toward the library raft where Kit Snicket still lay. The three children each peered through the periscope, and then looked at one another. They knew they should be hurrying, but for a moment none of the Baudelaires could move, as if they were unwilling to travel any farther in their sad history, or see one more part of their story come to an end.

If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans—and I certainly hope you have not—then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repair people in between. But it ca