Page 43 of The White Octopus Hotel
“What’s that?” small Eve asked.
“We wish for the wrong thing sometimes,” Anna replied. “And an unwishing fountain is where we can…take it back.”
“How strange,” Jane said.
“Do you think so?” Anna looked at the water and the marble tentacles sprawling up the basins. “I’ve always thought that an unwish is perhaps the only thing more precious than a wish.” She looked back to Jane. “The receptionist tells me you’re checking out now, Mrs. Shaw?”
“That’s right.”
“I hope you enjoyed your stay at the White Octopus.”
“It was wonderful, thank you.” Jane smiled. “I only wish I could remember it. Once we’re home, I mean.”
Anna nodded. She stepped forwards, and Eve assumed she wasgoing to shake Jane’s hand, but she threw her arms around the other woman instead, hugging her tightly over her bump. Eve saw the startled expression on Jane’s face as she patted Anna on the back. She saw how tightly Anna held on to her before letting her go. Why was she looking at Jane like that? Like she didn’t want her to ever leave?
“Have a safe journey,” she said, before walking out of the room.
Still looking confused, Jane turned back to small Eve, wrapping her arms around her and holding her close for a moment before kissing her on the head. “Come on, then. Time to go home.”
“Would the little one like to help me wind the clock before you go?”
For the first time, Eve realised there was another person in the lobby, just out of her sight. When she stepped further into the room, she saw a wiry man in his midthirties, tinkering with the grandfather clock. The name badge on his jacket readTristan:Nikolas Roth’s second son. He smiled gently at Jane and Eve. “My children used to love helping with this old clock. Nan still does.”
“All right,” Jane agreed. “Thank you. But then we really have to go, Eve.”
I should go too,Eve thought, yet she knew that she wouldn’t. Not until her mother was out of sight. These were her last moments of seeing her this way and she wasn’t about to give them up. Her younger self skipped eagerly over to the clock and Tristan guided her hands to one of the chains inside.
“Just think how long this clock has been here,” he said. “Ticking and tocking its way through all the years. That’s it, pull the chain just like that, all the way to the top. Do you hear it? Tick—”
Tock.
The last few minutes unravelled back on themselves and Eve was suddenly in her original place in the doorway watching her younger self, who was no longer winding the clock but sat next to the fountain instead. And then Max, who was no longer playing the piano,was stopping beside her, pulling pennies and a sugar octopus from his hat. Then there was Anna hugging Jane like she would never let her go. It all played out exactly as it had before, five minutes of rewound time.
Tick.
It felt to Eve as if she was an observer inside her own head. She saw things from a slightly different perspective than she had the first time but didn’t seem to be able to do anything different. The same moments were simply replaying themselves again.
Tock.
There were Jane and Eve tossing coins into the fountain as Max played the piano.
Tick.
And there was Tristan.
“Would the little one like to help me wind the clock…?”
Tock.
And then there they all were, back to the moment they had left before, when small Eve had just wound the clock. Only time didn’t slip backwards again, but continued forwards instead. In the corner of the room, Max’s fingers fumbled into a discordant chord, and he abruptly stopped playing. Silence descended.
“It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?” Tristan said. “It only happens once a week, when the clock is wound. A funny glitch of its mechanisms, I suppose, that makes time rewind for five minutes.”
“Incredible,” Jane breathed, looking stunned.
“That’s some trick,” Max said from the piano.
“It’s no trick, Mr. Everly,” Tristan replied. “Everything you see at the White Octopus Hotel is real.”
