“Uncle Monty?” Klaus asked shyly. “I just have one question.”

“What is that?” Uncle Monty said.

“What’s in that cage with the cloth on top of it?”

Uncle Monty looked at the cage, and then at the children. His face lit up with a smile of pure joy. “That, my dears, is a new snake which I brought over from my last journey.

Gustav and myself are the only people to have seen it. Next month I will present it to the Herpetological Society as a new discov-ery, but in the meantime I will allow you to look at it. Gather ’round.”

The Baudelaire orphans followed Uncle Monty to the cloth-covered cage, and with a flourish—the word “flourish” here means “a sweeping gesture, often used to show off”—he swooped the cloth off the cage. Inside was a large black snake, as dark as a coal mine and as thick as a sewer pipe, looking right at the orphans with shiny green eyes.

With the cloth off its cage, the snake began to uncoil itself and slither around its home.

“Because I discovered it,” Uncle Monty said, “I got to name it.”

“What is it called?” Violet asked.

“The Incredibly Deadly Viper,” Uncle Monty replied, and at that moment something happened which I’m sure will interest you. With one flick of its tail, the snake unlatched the door of its cage and slithered out onto the table, and before Uncle Monty or any of the Baudelaire orphans could say anything, it opened its mouth and bit Sunny right on the chin.

THREE

I am very, very sorry to leave you hanging like that, but as I was writing the tale of the Baudelaire orphans, I happened to look at the clock and realized I was running late for a formal dinner party given by a friend of mine, Madame diLustro. Madame diLustro is a good friend, an excellent detective, and a fine cook, but she flies into a rage if you arrive even five minutes later than her invitation states, so you understand that I had to dash off. You must have thought, at the end of the previous chapter, that Sunny was dead and that this was the terrible thing that happened to the Baudelaires at Uncle Monty's house, but I promise you Sunny survives this particular episode. It is Uncle Monty, unfortunately, who will be dead, but not yet.