Page 18 of The White Octopus Hotel
Eve glanced up. “Excuse me?”
“The animation technology. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Eve looked back at her sketchpad and the octopus drifting around the paper, exploring the edges of the page with its tentacles.
“You can see it?” she whispered.
“Er…yeah? How is it moving around the—?”
“It’s a prototype,” Eve said, quickly closing the book. “Not available in the shops yet.”
She gathered up her things and left the boy frowning after her.
“How was it?” Suzy asked when she got home. Eve was a little out of breath and Suzy looked at her more closely. “Is everything okay?”
Eve nodded but couldn’t summon the words to say anything. Her mind was on fire with the knowledge that the octopus drawings really were moving, alive.
“I’d love to see your art one day,” Suzy said.
Eve tried to imagine Suzy’s reaction, but she couldn’t picture it at all. Suzy was so normal. So balanced. It didn’t seem like there would be space in her life for impossible tentacles and staring eyes that looked deep into your soul. For a moment, she was tempted to show her the sketchbook anyway, just to see what would happen and to share the extraordinary wonder of it. But this was a secret that couldn’t be unshared, and she was too afraid of what Suzy and her dad’s reactions might be. It wasn’t possible for a drawing to come to life, and an impossible thing was bound to make them nervous. What if they looked at her with unease and fear? What if they insisted she stop drawing and give up the octopuses? Eve already knew that she couldn’t.
“I’m…I’m not sure you’d like them very much,” Eve said. “They’re not really for show. They’re just, you know, for me.”
They’re my friends.
Eve didn’t know how or why her octopuses moved, but the mystery of them made them yet more precious to her. And with each one she drew, she felt them becoming more alive and felt herself getting a little better until, at last, she was well enough to come off her medication and go back to university. Still broken, still always broken and tainted, but stitched back together again for the time being. Her mum had been right about lifelines, after all. The octopuses had been Eve’s.
Chapter 11
Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 2016
The tentacle gave her arm one final squeeze before disappearing back into the book, leaving an inky residue on her sleeve that Eve could feel but not really see. This was why she always wore black. It was a difficult thing trying to explain to someone why you were covered in octopus ink. Besides which, removing the stains was a nightmare. But this proved that it wasEve’soctopus—impossibly existing here in this hotel up in the mountains.
The book on the reception desk wasn’t a sketchbook. It was too big and heavy and looked more like a guest book. Perhaps it was an old one from the thirties, containing the names of the guests who had checked in for the final party. Eve liked the idea, this link with the last guests—but when she opened the cover, she found that the book only contained the names of the urban explorers and ghost hunters who’d come since the hotel closed. There were brief messages too, singing the praises of the abandoned building—how creepy it was, how eerie, how fascinating. Some contained cautions about unstable floors or empty lift shafts. Others offered warnings about hauntings and ghosts.
Eve looked up again at the deserted lobby. She wasn’t in the least afraid of the hotel. Whatever ghosts it might contain could notpossibly compare with her own. In addition, she’d always been drawn to things that were dark and eerie. There was beauty in the shadows, if you knew where to look. The world could be an upside-down sort of place where rabbits were monsters and octopuses were dear friends. So Eve closed the book on the warnings and turned her attention to the reception desk. There was nothing much to find when she rummaged. The drawers and key holes were all empty, save for a few scurrying beetles and wood lice. She could feel the weight of the key to Room 27 in her pocket and decided it was time to move on. She retraced her steps and went through a doorway to the left of the main entrance.
The long room before her was lined with windows that would have looked out on spectacular lake views if they hadn’t all been boarded up. It was so cold that her breath smoked. It was dark, too—and as she strained her eyes through the gloom, Eve was startled to realize there were lumpy shapes upon the floor. Then her vision adjusted, and she saw that they were only piles of broken wood, perhaps from tables and chairs that had once filled the space. She could imagine this spot being the perfect place to enjoy coffee and tea while looking out at the lake.
She began to make her way to the end of the room, scrambling over piles of wood as she went, doing her best to avoid splinters and exposed nails, glad of her sturdy shoes. But the next door was locked. Either that or it had warped in the cold and damp and was jammed. Eve was unable to open it, even when she pushed with her shoulder.
She went back the way she’d come, hoping she wouldn’t encounter too many other dead ends. There was another door leading away from the lobby behind the piano. It opened onto a corridor that took her to various rooms, all in the same sorry state as the lobby. Some were so damaged and littered that it was impossible to discern their original function, although there were glimpses of the elegant salons they had once been.
The ceilings were cracked and water damaged and some were crumbling in an alarming way that made it clear the building really wasn’t at all safe. In places, however, Eve could see that the ceilings had once been painted. Ancient, tarnished mirrors still hung upon the walls, too heavy and awkward for scavengers to remove, and the same went for the chandeliers—although many of those had fallen down, broken shards of crystal and tangles of wire crunching underfoot.
There were long corridors, the wallpaper peeling away and the air filled with the scent of mould and damp. There was graffiti everywhere and Eve felt a creeping sense of disappointment. She’d hoped for more of a time warp, more of a sense of what these rooms had once been used for, perhaps even to stumble across a few interesting remnants of the past—such as a sheet of writing paper—or the abandoned possessions of previous guests. She’d hoped for ghostly fingers tracing down her back. But of course, all the belongings had long since gone.
When Eve found her way to an impressive pair of art deco doors, she stopped to admire them, pleased to discover a gem at last. Like everything else in the building, the stained-glass panels were dusty and dirty, but they were shining too, illuminated by a source of light on the other side. Eve saw scales and shells in shimmering greens and pearly pinks.
She reached for the handle, praying that the doors wouldn’t be locked or jammed, but they swung open easily at her touch and she blinked at the sudden flood of light washing in. The room before her was gigantic, with dozens and dozens of windows, many of which were broken, letting in the fresh mountain air outside—a welcome relief after the claustrophobia of the decaying corridors. The space was easily big enough to contain a couple of hundred people, but right now it was completely empty—except for the ibex.
The large mountain goat had a muscular body and anextraordinary pair of massive horns, ridged and curved backwards. It turned its head towards Eve and looked at her with calm amber eyes. For long moments, they just stared at each other. It was so unexpected coming across a wild animal inside a ballroom, yet the ibex looked far more like it belonged here than the Coke bottles and food wrappers. After a few beats, the ibex huffed out a breath that smoked in the frozen air and then turned to pick its way over the floor towards the open French doors. The next moment it had scampered out onto the veranda and was gone.
It was a relief to see it leave. The White Octopus Hotel was not a good place for wildlife. The floor was littered with pieces of wood and broken glass. Eve found herself wondering whether the glass could possibly be the remnants of the champagne coupes from that party, just before the hotel closed for good in 1935.
Graffiti marked the walls and mirrors as well as the stage set up at the end of the vast room. There was a grubby-looking sleeping bag rolled up in the corner that had clearly been there for years. Despite its condition, the room’s old elegance shone through in the painted ceiling and the glint of mirrors and the fantastic surviving chandelier.
Most of the light fixtures had tumbled down and broken over the decades, joining the detritus on the floor, but there was one that remained. It was tiered crystal, studded with paste jewels designed to resemble barnacles, with three tiny Murano glass octopuses clinging to the arms by looped tentacles. Above it, the ceiling was painted to resemble a dark night sky, inky blue and covered in thousands of silver stars. Eve stared up, feeling a new flash of recognition. Surely she had seen that chandelier somewhere before, somewhere fairly recently—just the other day, in fact.
