Page 21 of The White Octopus Hotel
When she opened her eyes, the rabbit and the apple had vanished. Eve unclenched her fists, straightened her shoulders, and set off towards the doorway the apple had rolled from, forcing herself to look inside. To her relief, there was no flash of black curls, no blue gingham, no bunny, and no apples. Instead, she saw the ruins of a library. The double-height room had an upper floor with its own balcony and bookshelves. Large windows were caked with dirt but faced a majestic view of the mountains beyond. A jumble of furniture lay in bits and pieces, and the broken windows had clearly admitted birds because there were piles of pigeon droppings everywhere, and even a couple of swan feathers.
The majority of the books had gone, but loose pages lay about the place like confetti, displaying random lines from long-lost volumes of poetry and prose. Here and there, a clump of pages had come out together and Eve flicked through a few of these, trying to identify the types of books they’d come from. It was encouraging to see paper of any kind that had survived for all this time. It surely meant that a sheet of writing paper might be around too.
Best of all, there were a couple of desks set beside one of the windows, so large and solid that they were all still in one piece. Evehurried over, but the drawers were empty. Nothing remained of the papers that might once have been inside. There was nowhere left to search. When she glanced at her watch, she saw that it was a quarter to three. Friede would already be on her way, but Eve couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the hotel. Not yet.
She closed the last drawer and stepped back. Her heel landed on one of the sheaves of pages and she reached down to pick it up. She saw from the first lines that the pages had come from a book about art history. And as she flicked through it, something fell out—a black-and-white photograph. When she looked at it, the shock of adrenaline made her physically jump and let go of the photo. It fell facedown on the floor and she stared at it, her heart racing and her body tingling with the same raw energy that came from narrowly missing a collision with another driver.
Slowly, she shook her head. She was mistaken in what she thought she’d seen. She must be. She reached down to pick up the photo and turned it over. The image was faded and marked with brown spots but clearly showed the lobby of the White Octopus Hotel as it was before it closed. Water ran from the scalloped basins, a guest spoke to the receptionist behind the main desk in the background, and off to the right a uniformed bellhop wheeled a luggage trolley piled high with steamer trunks covered in travel stickers.
And the subject of the photo, a woman in her late twenties, stood beside the fountain, her chin-length black hair styled into elegant finger waves. She wore an extraordinary dark lace gown, silken and backless, that draped itself around her body and swept over the floor in a small train. The woman stood side-on to the fountain, her hands resting on the edge of the largest basin, looking into the water. There was nothing so very extraordinary about any of this, aside from the fact that it was an interesting glimpse into the hotel’s past.
The mind-bending part was that the woman beside the fountain was Eve.
When she peered closer, she could even make out the very tip of a dark tentacle on her exposed lower back. Her hair was styled differently, and her clothes were from a bygone era, but there could be no doubt that the woman in the photograph was her. Which left only two explanations. Either someone had photoshopped this picture and tucked it away in the library for some unknown purpose, or…Or Eve really had been here at the hotel in the thirties.
She slipped the photo into her pocket and brought out the key to Room 27 again. She had to be missing something. There must be such a room somewhere. She turned on her heel and went back through the maze of the hotel and up to the guest rooms. She walked down the fourth-floor corridor, counting them off—rooms eighteen to twenty-six, all present and accounted for. Then she went to the floor above and stood once again before the door to Room 28. This room was wrong; she was sure of it. This was the room thatoughtto be Room 27. She took her phone from her pocket and switched on the torch, shining it straight at the door, examining it up and down without any clear idea what she was looking for.
Even if the room had once had a different number, it didn’t change the fact that she’d already tried, and the key didn’t fit the lock. She pushed open the door and stepped into the room. Like all the others, it was a hollow graffitied shell, the only hint of its former glory lying in the magnificent lake and mountain view beyond the dirty windows. Otherwise, there was only a bare bed frame, a cold ash-filled fireplace, and a collection of wood lice that scuttled busily over the grimy floorboards. Eve could see Friede’s boat more than halfway across the lake. She guessed it would be at the hotel within five minutes.
But she made no move to leave and go downstairs. She couldn’t.She was rooted to the spot, breathing the room in. How strange to think that wealthy guests had stayed here from the turn of the century and beyond. For a moment, she could sense them beside her—the women rolling up their silk stockings, applying coats of scarlet lipstick, fastening diamond earrings in readiness for a glittering party downstairs….
Eve pushed the door closed, and that was when she saw that it had a brass plaque on the inside as well as the outside. And here, at last, was the number she had been searching for: 27. She stared at it—one door, two numbers. When she glanced back out the window, Friede’s boat was almost at the pier.
She looked back to the door and her hand shook slightly as she slid the key to Room 27 into the lock. And this time, the key went in smoothly. She turned it and heard the faintestclickas the lock slid into place. And then there was that flash inside her head once more, but this time it wasn’t the pop of a camera flash but the blinding light of a shooting star. She cried out and stumbled back.
Her head felt as if it would break apart, and her skin prickled and fizzed. She thought she must be having some sort of fit. She wondered if she might be dying. Was this what having a brain aneurysm felt like? Nausea flooded her and her hands reached out for something, anything, to grab on to, but the world had disappeared and she was falling through the gap in the universe where it used to be. She fell and fell and fell until at last she landed. There was a thump, and a groan, and a loud, long silence. Eve tried to open her eyes, but she wasn’t sure that she even stillhadeyes. She couldn’t mentally locate them, couldn’t remember how to blink.
I’m dead,Eve thought.I died.
Time to face Bella, at last….
But then slowly, surely, the silence dissolved, bit by bit, until a baffling array of sounds filtered through, like music on a radio station that had been blasting out static but had finally been correctly tuned. There was the distant murmur of voices, the tread offootsteps, the opening and closing of doors, the crackle of flames, the tick of a clock. And muffled jazz music filtering through from outside. Eve remembered how to open her eyes, but it took a great effort and she had to peel them back as if they’d been glued shut. The blinding light had gone but had left behind intense aftershocks of brightness that came and went in her vision. She tried to lift her hand to rub away the gum and grit but once again felt that same disconcerting lack of coordination and only managed to scratch her face.
She dropped her hand and concentrated on what she could see instead, trying to focus through the flashes. Golden-brown wooden floorboards stretched ahead of her. There was a wardrobe opposite, standing against a wall covered in green-and-white striped wallpaper. It seemed like she stared at these for some time, trying to make sense of where she was and what had happened. Eventually, the flashing in her vision lessened until it faded away altogether, and she noticed the details she’d missed. The floorboards glowed in a single shaft of sunlight. The wardrobe had small brass octopuses for handles. The green stripe in the wallpaper contained a seaweed motif.
She struggled up into a sitting position, relieved to find she was more in control of her limbs. When she turned her head, she saw that there was a fire flickering and popping in the grate, giving off scents of wood smoke and pine. She had no idea how long she’d been lying there. She felt shaky and untethered somehow, as if she weren’t really here and might float away at any moment. If not death, then perhaps it was a dream? She reached into her pocket for her fumsup but of course it was gone, frozen at the bottom of the lake. There was a knocking sound that felt like it was coming from within her own head. She winced and rubbed her temples.
There was a bed right beside her with a white iron bedpost and she used this to drag herself up to sit on the bedspread. A monogrammed pair of pyjamas in ivory silk were neatly folded upon thepillow and a matching pair of slippers were placed on the floor. A small vanity table with an oval mirror took up most of the space on the other side of the room, and a painting of fish adorned the opposite wall. The space was small but attractive and comfortable, and the thought filtered into Eve’s brain that she was in a hotel room. For long moments she couldn’t think why she should be in a hotel rather than back home in her flat or at work in the auction house. The knocking inside her head made it hard to think, but then the memories bobbed to the surface, one by one. Switzerland. The lake. The White Octopus Hotel. Room 27.
Her breath shuddered in a gasp and then finally she realised that the knocking sound wasn’t coming from within her head, but from someone on the other side of the door. There was no brass number plate there anymore, and the room itself was unrecognisable. No graffiti, no dust, no broken glass. The smell of damp was gone, replaced with beeswax furniture polish and fresh pine. There was a green-and-white vase on the vanity table filled with cuttings of Nordmann fir and red chrysanthemums. The knock came again, a politetap-tap-tap.
Eve wasn’t sure she could stand up, let alone walk to the door. “Hello?” she called. Her throat was dry, her voice a raspy croak.
“Room service!” a man’s voice replied, young and cheerful.
Chapter 15
“Come in,” Eve said.
There was the click of a key turning in the lock. The door swung open, and a young man stepped inside. He was dressed in a bellhop uniform—dark trousers and a pale green jacket with black braid. There was a small white octopus badge pinned to the lapel. A round, brimless cap sat on his head, black with a single green stripe. The bellhop was young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with pale blond hair, blue eyes, and an open, friendly face. A pristine pair of white gloves adorned his hands, and in them he carried a small silver tray set with a lace mat and what looked like a green cocktail in a tall, fluted glass.
“Good afternoon, madam,” he said, walking into the room and setting the tray down on the vanity table. Beside the cocktail was a silver saucer of sugar octopuses, their tentacles curled in elegant loops. “My name’s Alfie. I hope you had a pleasant journey.”
Eve looked up at him. “I’m Eve. Is this—” She broke off when a muffled giggle, quickly smothered, floated through the open door. She glanced that way sharply. “Who’s out there?”
Alfie’s smile stretched a little wider. “Why would there be anyone hiding out in the corridor? Please let me be the first to welcomeyou to the White Octopus Hotel. We are all so happy to have you. Ah, you dropped your key. Allow me.”
He bent and plucked a key from the floor. She saw that her bag lay by the side of the bed too. Alfie held out the key to Room 27 and Eve stared at it. Could it have actuallyworked? Was she gazing into the face of a boy who had lived and died many years ago? Her head spun with the complete impossibility of such a thing and yet—and yet, and yet, she knew that it was happening. She could feel it deep down in her bones. Her octopus tattoo drifted up her leg, making the skin there burn. Her fingers shook so badly that when she reached to take the key from the young man, she fumbled it and the key slipped through her fingers to the floor again.
