Page 19 of The White Octopus Hotel
Then all of a sudden she remembered. She’d seen this chandelier in a photo—the last known photo of Max Everly before his disappearance. It showed him in a ballroom at a party, full of champagne and women in silk dresses. Everly wore a black tuxedo and stood inthe centre of the room, gazing at some unseen person beyond the photographer.
Eve had often wondered who that individual, just out of frame, might have been. A colleague, perhaps, a friend, maybe, but she’d always thought the expression on Everly’s face indicated a more intimate relationship. Surely, he was looking across the room at a lover. Eve had been so taken with the photo that she’d sketched it a few times, trying to get Max’s expression just right. And now she knew that the original had been taken in this very room, beneath this same chandelier.
That meant that Max Everly had been to the White Octopus Hotel. It seemed an incredible coincidence that a man bearing that same name had come to see Eve in London, yet it couldn’t be the same person. Not unless time travel really was possible…She reached into her pocket for the key to Room 27, letting it rest cool and heavy in her palm. It was time to find out whether she had just spent a lot of time and effort on a hoax. She knew from the guest book in reception that the lift was long since dead and she wouldn’t have dared risk such an ancient contraption anyway, so she’d have to locate the stairs to the upper floors.
She left the ballroom and went back into the damp shadows of the hotel to retrace her steps to the lobby. From there she climbed the staircase to the upper level. As she set off, she crossed her fingers that the floor wouldn’t suddenly collapse beneath her feet. It seemed solid enough, although the boards creaked, and the darkness was so complete that she had to use her torch to light her way. It seemed that most of the first floor had once been used as public spaces, but when she reached the second floor she found the first lot of guest rooms. They were all bare except for the bed frames and the rotting remnants of mattresses. Here, as elsewhere, graffiti covered the walls, and it was difficult to visualise the rooms as they once had been.
The brass numbers remained, screwed to the doors, and it didn’ttake long to reach the room at the end of the corridor—Room 7. The lift shaft was here too. There were no doors to block it off and Eve couldn’t resist creeping to the edge to peer down into the depths, hoping to catch a glimpse of the golden birdcage structure she’d seen in the lobby. But, two floors up, it was too dark to see anything much, and being that close to the drop made her skin prickle. She stepped back and went to the stairs.
On the third floor the rooms were slightly smaller and so there were more of them. Eve frowned at the last one—Room 17. Hadn’t her mother told her that there was no such room? Perhaps she’d been lying about exploring the rest of the hotel. But why lie about such a thing?
Finally, she ascended the stairs to the fourth floor, which ended with Room 26. But when she reached the fifth floor, she saw that the first room in the corridor was Room 28. Just as Victor’s colleague had said, there was no Room 27; it seemed as if it had been lost between the floors.
Chapter 12
Eve took the key from her pocket, looking down at the 2 and the 7, tangled up in loops of tentacles. She had heard of hotels that didn’t have a thirteenth floor or a thirteenth room, but she’d never come across the number 27 being unlucky for anyone other than her or her family. Why would the hotel not have such a room? It didn’t make any sense.
Eve closed the door of Room 28 and then inserted the key into the lock to see if it worked. Perhaps the rooms had just been renumbered…. But the key didn’t fit the lock. When she went back down to Room 26 and tried the key there, it didn’t fit either. Over the next couple of hours, she systematically visited every guest room she could find. The key to Room 27 didn’t fit any of them, nor was there any sign of surviving writing paper.
Her clothes soon became grimy with the decades of dust and it was past one o’clock by the time she returned to the ground floor. Eve was hungry and tired and disheartened, but still she pressed on, focusing on the rooms she hadn’t yet seen. At one point she found herself in the wild, abandoned gardens at the back, which led to a grand building that had once been a suite of steam baths. There was nothing of any value out there, so Eve returned to the hotel. Itwas difficult to keep track of where she had and hadn’t been, but she got the sense that she had walked through most of the rooms by now.
The corridors stretched on endlessly and all looked alike. A short while later she found herself in a bar on the first floor, which had its original sign still fixed upon the door:The Palm Bar and Martini Room.She didn’t think there’d be any new rooms to explore after this one. As with the ballroom, there were lingering echoes of art deco in the bevelled mirrors, the glass too tarnished and dirty to make out a reflection—especially as the room was so dark. In fact, Eve realised it was one of the few rooms she’d come across that didn’t have any windows at all. It seemed an odd place to put a bar when it could have been looking out at the lake. The gloom meant she had to switch on her phone’s torch in order to see, and as she swept its beam into the corners, she felt like a diver exploring a shipwreck.
It had once been a very beautiful space. In places where the graffiti wasn’t too bad, you could still see the original silver-leaf-lacquered wall panels, and there was art on the ceiling too—elegant murals depicting various cocktails. It was possible to make out the names of some of them, spelled out in curling golden letters: the Sidecar, the Aviation, the Last Word.
There had once been velvet chairs and banquettes, but these had long since become homes for mice. Tables had collapsed and lay in broken pieces on the floor, along with shattered glass that Eve guessed must have come from bottles and crystal coupes. The shelves behind the bar were all empty, covered in a thick coating of dust. An antique smoker’s cabinet lay in sad broken bits on its side. Any humidors or cigars that had been stored inside were long since gone.
Eve wished she knew more about this type of piece, but it was impossible for her to date it with any accuracy. It might only have had the appearance of an antique or it could genuinely have beenextremely old. She reached down to brush her fingers over the golden handles. Might Nikolas Roth’s own hands have touched them? Or Max Everly’s? The thought made goosebumps prickle over her skin once more and for a moment she could almost feel the ghosts of the two men right there in the room with her—the artist and the musician, lounging in the wingback chairs, smoking their cigars, listening to the crackle of jazz on a gramophone….
Her ears strained for the spectral echo of saxophones, the faintest trace of cigar smoke, mentally reaching for the past, but there was nothing here except dirt, decay…and the rabbit. There it was—white and fluffy, with a splodge of black over one eye, gazing up at her with such a sweet, harmless, innocent little face.
Why doesBELLAget a new dress when it’sMYparty?
Eve shuddered and then her resolve crumpled, and she did the thing she knew she must never, ever do. She spoke to the rabbit.
“How much longer?” she demanded.
How much longer am I to be punished?The rabbit wouldn’t answer; it never did. It couldn’t speak because it was, after all, only a rabbit. And what kind of answer was Eve expecting anyway? How longwasa suitable punishment for killing your sister? The rabbit stared at Eve and Eve stared at the rabbit and they both knew the answer. Forever. She would be punished forever for what she had done.
There was a smothered giggle from out in the corridor, and a fragrant burst of crisp, fresh apples, and thethud-thud-thudof little steps disappearing in a rapid patter. Eve felt the knot of fury that was always there tighten a notch further as she darted out the door, the rabbit hopping along in her wake. It was hard to see much in the windowless space, but the scent of apples remained. She raised her phone’s torch and ran down the corridor. Bella was there, just out of sight, she knew it. Come to inflict more torment.
Without a second thought, Eve plunged into the twisting maze of corridors after the echo—or ghost, or whatever it was—of hersister. In no time, she’d reached the back of the hotel, and the sudden flood of sunlight made her wince. A row of gallery windows stretched the length of the room, offering views of the mountain vista beyond. A tiled checkerboard floor in black and white was visible beneath the dust, but the room itself was empty, its original purpose lost. Eve didn’t think she’d been here before, though, so clearly there was a part of the hotel she had missed.
She was out of breath, but the rabbit hopped rapidly ahead to the end of the room, where it stopped beside a doorway. An apple rolled through, mostly green with a faint blush of pink, a single leaf still attached to the stem.
Eve sucked in her breath. How annoying—no, infuriating—the apples and leaves had been that final summer. Eve would be in the garden, trying to play with her sandpit or run about with her ball—the pink glittery one she’d adored—and Bella would be forever walking up to her with a leaf or an apple that she’d found on the lawn, thrusting it out in a chubby hand.
I don’t want it, Bella. I’m playing with my sandpit,Eve would say.
But the apples and leaves kept coming and coming, until there was a giant pile of them next to Eve. And if she didn’t stop what she was doing and take the apple from Bella, then sometimes her sister would throw it at her instead and it would bounce off her head and it would hurt.
She doesn’t understand,their mum would say.She’s only trying to give you a present because you’re her big sister and she loves you.
Guilt and grief and rage were powerful feelings on their own, but mixed together they set one another off like warring siblings. Eve had grown better at controlling these three over the years, but you couldn’t be in control of all of them all of the time; you just couldn’t. Nobody could. She glared at the apple, and her wholebody trembled, and her voice now came out as a roar. “I! DON’T! WANT! IT!”
Any other rabbit would have fled at the first sign of shouting, but this was no ordinary rabbit and it only gazed at her, unperturbed, as if it had seen far worse, thought far worse, lived far worse. Eve thought of the breathing exercises she had learned—tried to employ them now, to get the rage back under control. Of course, there was no controlling it—not really. The best you could hope for was to manage it, to trick it into going back to sleep, to try to pretend it wasn’t there.
Righteous anger would have been bad enough, but at least it would have been easier to live with. Unmerited anger, though, was the worst feeling of all. Eve knew she had no right to be angry—at herself, yes, obviously, but not at the rabbit, not at Bella, not at her mother, not at the gate, not at the world. Eve was to blame. Everyone involved knew this. She hadn’t meant for anything bad to happen to Bella. Most of the time she was almost completely certain of this crucial fact, that there had been no intent whatsoever—but even now, after all those years, there were days when she was so intensely and viciously angry with Bella that she could barely see or think or breathe. She was angry at her for going out through the gate, angry at her for dying, angry at her for the unfillable hole she’d left behind.
