Page 48 of The White Octopus Hotel
“The tentacles…” he began.
“There isn’t a name for whatever I am,” Eve said.
“You’re bleeding—”
“It’ll be all right.”
She pulled a scarf from her pocket and used it to stop the bleeding. They were sat up now with their backs against the wall, and for the first time, Max noticed that the inky sky above was filled with an impossible number of impossibly bright stars. Part of him wished she had just let him go. It would have been easy to take one last step into the night, whereas the road ahead, back to normal life, was long and hard and his soul ached at the thought of attempting it.
“I don’t think I will ever be happy again,” he whispered, hardly realising that he was speaking out loud.
“Someone once told me that striving for happiness is a burden,” Eve said. “And that you should look for moments of contentedness in a life of quiet sadness instead.”
“Good advice,” Max muttered.
“It was terrible advice,” Eve replied. “Listen, quiet sadness is no good. It’s not enough. You should not aim for that. You should never aim for that. You should pursue a life of the fiercest happiness instead. With everything you’ve got.”
“I’m afraid of being happy,” he said. “Aren’t you? Isn’t anyone with any sense? Why do you care anyway? What’s one more broken serviceman to you?”
Eve was silent for a moment, then she said, “You are not broken. Don’t say that. And don’t think it.” She stood up. “Come on. Come back to bed.”
His head was such a tangled mess that for a wild moment he thought she meantherbed. And for an even wilder moment, it felt normal, and right, and like something she had said to him dozens—no, hundreds—of times before. Like they were a couple and had been for decades. He could almost feel pale, ghostly tentacles winding their way into all the dark corners of his soul, all those parts that were broken and bruised, and he wondered if Evecould be a witch, if that could be the explanation, if it was the only one that made any sense. He realised suddenly that he was the one now wearing the coat, that she must have slipped it around his shoulders at some point and that she was shivering in the night.
And he also realised, as he followed her from the roof, that he had not thanked her for saving his life. He wondered if he should do so now. He wanted to give back the coat, but she was walking so quickly that he almost struggled to keep up. Soon they were back inside, in one of the bathrooms, and he was scrubbing the ink from his skin while Eve went to fetch him some spare clothes. She seemed to be gone a curiously long while, and he was shivering again with the cold by the time she passed a clean set of hospital blues through the door. When he finally got back to his bed, he wanted only to close his eyes and not think about anything at all.
Chapter 31
Eve—The White Octopus Hotel, 1935
Eve was still puzzling over the rather strange way her afternoon tea with Mrs. Roth had ended as she pressed the button for the lift. The golden birdcage glided down through the floors to collect her and when she stepped inside, she saw that Alfie was operating the lift today.
“Afternoon, miss,” he said with a grin. He looked so friendly and normal that it was hard to reconcile the strange image of him standing silently at the windows of the restaurant, a short while ago, with that grave expression on his face. “Floor five?”
“No, floor six, please,” Eve said as the grille slid closed behind her.
Alfie raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? Nothing up there but staff quarters.”
“I’d like to go to floor six,” Eve repeated.
She wondered whether Alfie might refuse. Perhaps he’d say that the sixth floor was off-limits to guests. But instead, he just gave a good-natured shrug and pressed the button for the top floor. The lift clanked into life and the view of the lobby shrank as the lift ascended. For a moment, she could still see Max talking to Tristan in front of the grandfather clock. Then the clock, the fountain, andthe rest of the lobby dropped away as they rose through the floors. Before long, the lift stopped at the top of the hotel and the door slid back, revealing a long corridor, much like the ones Eve had seen below, with a row of identical doors stretching down its length, all with shining brass numbers fastened to them. There was no sign of any tentacles.
“Just press the button if you need me,” Alfie said.
The grille slid back, and Eve watched as the lift descended into the hotel, leaving her alone on the sixth floor. It was oddly still and quiet up here compared to the hustle and bustle of the guest floors below. There was no murmur of voices, no doors opening and closing, no tread of feet upon the marble tiles. The silence reminded Eve of the hotel as it had been when she explored its deserted shell.
There were no paintings or clocks upon the walls, and no octopuses in sight. The doors were all closed, and Eve didn’t try to gain entry. If they were staff quarters, then they were private and unlikely to contain any of the objects she was looking for. Her mind was a tangle of confused thoughts as she pictured her younger mother and self downstairs—the intensely strange feeling of being both glad and sad at the same time. Glad to see her mother again, but sad at how far away she was now and the knowledge of how quickly their lives were going to unravel. She pushed the sadness away. Held on to the anger instead. She could still hear thetickandtockof the grandfather clock inside her head and felt a sudden strong urge to punch the wall. What use was rewinding time by five minutes? What possible fucking use was that to anybody here? Why couldn’t the clock have been there in her house on her fourth birthday? Five minutes of rewound time was all it would have taken that day. Five minutes was all it would have taken to change everything, but she needed far more than that now.
I don’t think I’m very good at it…. Being a mother….
Jane’s words rang in her head and Eve clenched her fists. She was no good at being a daughter. And even worse at being a sister. Justnot really very good at being a human being in general. A gate creaked loudly inside her head, and she did it this time, she punched the wall, and her fist went right through the wallpaper and the plaster, and a huge white tentacle burst through the hole and wrapped itself all the way up her arm, squeezing tight, and she was wearing a white shirtdress instead of the black polo-neck, so the ink left stains that gleamed darkly as she breathed hard and breathed hard and breathed hard. And, as always, she was grateful to the tentacle, grateful to the octopus that was holding her here and keeping her grounded. But today the tentacle did more than that. Today, the tentacle dragged her right up to the wall.
Like on the lower floors, the wallpaper was green and white stripes with a seaweed motif. Eve found herself pressed against it, and the wall was solid until it wasn’t. It began to waver, like water, and the tentacle tightened its grip and pulled her all the way through, to whatever waited on the other side.
Chapter 32
This was, Eve supposed, the moment when she ought to feel afraid. She had never been pulled through a wall before, and this was hardly the type of thing that happened to normal people. She was not particularly startled by the tentacle itself. After all, it was an old friend, but it normally only held her for a moment or two—just long enough to let her know she wasn’t entirely alone. Then it would vanish back into the sketchbook. Now it disappeared through the floor with a flick of its black tip, leaving Eve to assess her surroundings.
On the other side of the wall was no dusty cavity, but another corridor—a mirror of the one she had just left. Except this one was decorated, entirely, in ink. Black ink that glistened beneath her shoes and shimmered on the walls around her. And here, at last, were paintings. Not the vapid, saccharine Bouguereau she’d spotted downstairs. There were no rosy cheeks or sweet smiles here. No, these were dark and despairing. These were paintings worth looking at.
