Ishmael did not offer the Baudelaire orphans any tea, and when he flicked a switch on the wall, and lit up the secret space underneath the apple tree with electric lights, the children could see that he was neither smiling nor frowning, but exhibiting a strange combination of the two, as if he were as nervous about the Baudelaires as they were about him. "I knew you'd come here," he said finally, after a long silence. "It's in your blood. I've never known a Baudelaire who didn't rock the boat."

The Baudelaires felt all of their questions bump into each other in their heads, like frantic sailors deserting a sinking ship. "What is this place?" Violet asked. "How did you know our parents?"

"Why have you lied to us about so many things?" Klaus demanded. "Why are you keeping so many secrets?"

"Who are you?" Sunny asked.

Ishmael took another step closer to the Baudelaires and gazed down at Sunny, who gazed back at the facilitator, and then stared down at the clay still packed around his feet. "Did you know I used to be a schoolteacher?" he asked. "This was many years ago, in the city. There were always a few children in my chemistry classes who had the same gleam in their eyes that you Baudelaires have. Those students always turned in the most interesting assignments." He sighed, and sat down on one of the reading chairs in the center of the room. "They also always gave me the most trouble. I remember one child in particular, who had scraggly dark hair and just one eyebrow."

"Count Olaf," Violet said.

Ishmael frowned, and blinked at the eldest Baudelaire. "No," he said. "This was a little girl. She had one eyebrow and, thanks to an accident in her grandfather's laboratory, only one ear. She was an orphan, and she lived with her siblings in a house owned by a terrible woman, a violent drunkard who was famous for having killed a man in her youth with nothing but her bare hands and a very ripe cantaloupe. The cantaloupe was grown on a farm that is no longer in operation, the Lucky Smells Melon Farm, which was owned by—"

"Sir," Klaus said.

Ishmael frowned again. "No," he said. "The farm was owned by two brothers, one of whom was later murdered in a small village, where three innocent children were accused of the crime."

"Jacques," Sunny said.

"No," Ishmael said with another frown. "There was some argument about his name, actually, as he appeared to use several names depending on what he was wearing. In any case, the student in my class began to be very suspicious about the tea her guardian would pour for her when she got home from school. Rather than drink it, she would dump it into a house-plant that had been used to decorate a well-known stylish restaurant with a fish theme."

"Cafe Salmonella," Violet said.

"No," Ishmael said, and frowned once more."The Bistro Smelt. Of course, my student realized she couldn't keep feeding tea to the house-plant, particularly after it withered away and the houseplant's owner was whisked off to Peru aboard a mysterious ship."

"The Prospero" Klaus said.

Ishmael offered the youngsters yet another frown. "Yes," he said, "although at the time the ship was called the Pericles. But my student didn't know that. She only wanted to avoid being poisoned, and I had an idea that an antidote might be hidden—"

"Yaw," Sunny interrupted, and her siblings nodded in agreement. By "yaw," the youngest Baudelaire meant "Ishmael's story is tangential," a word which here means "answering questions other than the ones the Baudelaires had asked."

"We want to know what's going on here on the island, at this very moment," Violet said, "not what happened in a classroom many years ago."

"But what is happening now and what happened then are part of the same story," Ishmael said. "If I don't tell you how I came to prefer tea that's as bitter as wormwood, then you won't know how I came to have a very important conversation with a waiter in a lakeside town. And if I don't tell you about that conversation, then you won't know how I ended up on a certain bathyscaphe, or how I ended up shipwrecked here, or how I came to meet your parents, or anything else contained in this book." He took the heavy volume from Klaus's hands and ran his fingers along the spine, where the long, somewhat wordy title was printed in gold block letters. "People have been writing stories in this book since the first castaways washed up on the island, and all the stories are connected in one way or another. If you ask one question, it will lead you to another, and another, and another. It's like peeling an onion."

"But you can't read every story, and answer every question," Klaus said, "even if you'd like to."

Ishmael smiled and tugged at his beard. "That's just what your parents told me," he said. "When I arrived here they'd been on the island a few months, but they'd become the colony's facilitators, and had suggested some new customs. Your father had suggested that a few castaway construction workers install the periscope in the tree, to search for storms, and your mother had suggested that a shipwrecked plumber devise a water filtration system, so the colony could have fresh water, right from the kitchen sink. Your parents had begun a library from all the documents that were here, and were adding hundreds of stories to the commonplace book. Gourmet meals were served, and your parents had convinced some of the other castaways to expand this underground space." He gestured to the long bookshelf, which disappeared into the darkness. "They wanted to dig a passageway that would lead to a marine research center and rhetorical advice service some miles away." The Baudelaires exchanged amazed looks. Captain Widdershins had described such a place, and in fact the children had spent some desperate hours in its ruined basement. "You mean if we walk along the bookcase," Klaus said, "we'll reach Anwhistle Aquatics?"

Ishmael shook his head. "The passageway was never finished," he said, "and it's a good thing, too. The research center was destroyed in a fire, which might have spread through the passageway and reached the island. And it turned out that a very deadly fungus was contained in that place. I shudder to think what might happen if the Medusoid Mycelium ever reached these shores."

The Baudelaires looked at one another again, but said nothing, preferring to keep one of their secrets even as Ishmael told them some of his own. The story of the Baudelaire children may have connected with Ishmael's story of the spores contained in the diving helmet Count Olaf was hiding under his gown in the bird cage in which he was a prisoner, but the siblings saw no reason to volunteer this information.

"Some islanders thought the passage was a wonderful idea," Ishmael continued. "Your parents wanted to carry all of the documents that had washed up here to Anwhistle Aquatics, where they might be sent to a sub-sub-librarian who had a secret library. Others wanted to keep the island safe, far from the treachery of the world. By the time I arrived, some islanders wanted to mutiny, and abandon your parents on the coastal shelf." The facilitator heaved a great sigh, and closed the heavy book in his lap. "I walked into the middle of this story," he said, "just as you walked into the middle of mine. Some of the islanders had found weapons in the detritus, and the situation might have become violent if I hadn't convinced the colony to simply abandon your parents. We allowed them to pack a few books into a fishing boat your father had built, and in the morning they left with a few of their comrades as the coastal shelf flooded. They left behind everything they'd created here, from the periscope I use to predict the weather to the commonplace book where I continue their research."

"You drove our parents away?" Violet asked in amazement.

"They were very sad to go," Ishmael said. "Your mother was pregnant with you, Violet, and after all of their years with V.F.D. your parents weren't sure they wanted their children exposed to the world's treachery. But they didn't understand that if the passageway had been completed, you would have been exposed to the world's treachery in any case. Sooner or later, everyone's story has an unfortunate event or two—a schism or a death, a fire or a mutiny, the loss of a home or the destruction of a tea set. The only solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life."