“Man,” said Tally.

“Yep,” I said.

I rowed faster.

13

IT ONLY TOOK AN HOUR or so to find Baudelaire Quatro’s Place. We saw the top of it looming over the trees and made a beeline straight there. Well, as much of a beeline as a fella can make in a swamp.

When we first saw it I thought my brain had gone buggy. I don’t know what I expected, but it sure wasn’t this. The trees gave way to an open space about a quarter of a mile wide, where the water was deeper and there wasn’t a sandbar in sight. Set deep back in this kind of swamp lagoon, Baudelaire Quatro’s Place was a giant wooden building, about eighty feet tall, shaped perfect like a bald human head. I mean that. There were ears on it and everything, even a slightly bent nose, like it had somehow gotten broken in a fight. The eyes were two windows of blue stained glass that seemed lit from inside, and there were double doors right where the mouth would be, and a gaping mouth it was. The head was laid out on a sort of bobbing boardwalk or pier around it, like it had been cut off and was sitting on a plate. It was a floating island of a head that looked like it could rise with the floodwaters and land on soft mud just fine during a drought. It seemed built to survive everything, like the world could end altogether and no one there would hardly notice.

“I heard legends about this place,” said Tally, “but I never really believed it was real.”

“No kidding,” I said.

I didn’t know how the thing floated—if it was magic, or just designed all smart by some wacky boat genius—but there it stood, a huge buoy bobbing a little out in the water. A fleet of small boats were tied to a kind of low-lying pier portion, all drifting and bumping into each other a little. Slim canoes and patched-looking dinghies banged into rich folks’ yachts, swamp-useless but drifting awful pretty out there. It was clear Baudelaire Quatro’s was for folks of all types—provided they could play Parsnit, of course.

“Shoot, Buddy, I don’t know about this,” said Tally.

The storm was still a little ways off yet, growling and rumbling, warning us that it was headed this way.

“I think maybe we got to try it,” I said. “It’s the last Parsnit house that doesn’t belong to Boss Authority, right? We’ll be safe there. Besides, there’s a witch for every Parsnit duel. Somebody’s bound to be able to help you out.”

Tally sighed. “Well, let’s get if we’re getting.”

I rowed us over to the head, where the entrance was, and Tally roped us to the deck. We climbed a little ladder to a sort of boardwalk. Two big wooden doors stood shut tight, right where the wide-open mouth was, and nobody sat watch. That was odd, it sure was, but what could me or Tally do about it?