The Bad Beginning Read Online Free PDF Page A

reach. Count Olaf looked down at Klaus and smiled a terrible, toothy grin, raising the wailing Sunny up even higher in the air. He seemed about to drop her to the floor when there was a large burst of laughter in the next room.
         “Olaf! Where's Olaf?” voices called out Count Olaf paused, still holding the wailing Sunny up in the air, as members of his theater troupe walked into the kitchen. Soon they were crowding the room—an assortment of strange-looking characters of all shapes and sizes. There was a bald man with a very long nose, dressed in a long black robe. There were two women who had bright white powder all over their faces, making them look like ghosts. Behind the women was a man with very long and skinny arms, at the end of which were two hooks instead of hands. There was a person who was extremely fat, and who looked like neither a man nor a woman. And behind this person, standing in the doorway, were an assortment of people the children could not see but who promised tobe just as frightening.
         “Here you are, Olaf,” said one of the white faced women. “What in the world are you doing?”
         “I'm just disciplining these orphans,” Count Olaf said. “I asked them to make dinner, and all they have made is some disgusting sauce.”
         “You can't go easy on children,” the man with the hook-hands said. “They must be taught to obey their elders.”
         The tall, bald man peered at the youngsters. “Are these,” he said to Count Olaf, “those wealthy children you were telling me about?”
         “Yes,” Count Olaf said. “They are so awful I can scarcely stand to touch them.” With that, he lowered Sunny, who was still wailing, to the floor. Violet and Klaus breathed a sigh of relief that he had not dropped her from that great height.
         “I don't blame you,” said someone in the doorway.
         Count Olaf rubbed his hands together as if he had been holding something revolting instead of an infant. “Well, enough talk,” he said. “I suppose we will eat their dinner, even though it is all wrong. Everyone, follow me to the dining room and I will pour us some wine. Perhaps by the time these brats serve us, we will be too drunk to care if it is roast beef or not.”
         “Hurrah!” cried several members of the troupe, and they marched through the kitchen, following Count Olaf into the dining room.
         Nobody paid a bit of attention to the children, except for the bald man, who stopped and stared Violet in the eye.
         “You're a pretty one,” he said, taking her face in his rough hands. “If I were you I would try not to anger Count Olaf, or he might wreck that pretty little face of yours.” Violet shuddered, and the bald man gave a high-pitched giggle and left the room.
         The Baudelaire children, alone in the kitchen, found themselves breathing heavily, as if they had just run a long distance. Sunny continued to wail, and Klaus found that his eyes were wet with tears as well. Only Violet didn't cry, but merely trembled with fear and revulsion, a word which here means “an unpleasant mixture of horror and disgust.” For several moments none of them could speak.
         “This is terrible, terrible,” Klaus said finally. “Violet, what can we do?”
         “I don't know,” she said “I'm afraid.”
         “Me too,” Klaus said.
        
     “Hux!” Sunny said, as she stopped crying.
         “Let's have some dinner!” someone shouted from the dining room, and the theater troupe began pounding on the table in strict rhythm, which is an exceedingly rude thing to do.
         “We'd better serve the puttanesca,” Klaus said, “or who knows what Count Olaf will do to us.”
         Violet thought of what the bald man had said, about wrecking her face, and nodded. The two of them looked at the pot of bubbling sauce, which had seemed so cozy while they were making it and now looked like