Page 62 of The White Octopus Hotel
They returned to the lobby, which was hushed and quiet. The liftwas no longer in operation and the lift attendant had gone for the evening.
“It’s locked,” Max said, pointing out the padlock.
Eve looked across the room at the reception desk with its wall of cubbyholes. But when she examined them, they only contained keys for the guest bedrooms. She turned her attention to the desk instead, quickly rummaging through the drawers, but there was nothing there either. She was just wondering whether it might be possible to use the letter opener to break the lock on the lift when there was a metallic clanging sound behind her, as if an object had suddenly fallen from a height. She turned around in time to see a white tentacle disappearing back into the wall. A single key shone upon the floor. Like the others, this one had a White Octopus fob, but instead of containing a room number it was stamped with a word:Lift.
“How many octopuses are hiding in the walls, do you imagine?” Max asked, frowning at the marble.
“I think it’s just one,” Eve replied.
It washeroctopus. And she didn’t know how it had found its way here, but she was certain it was trying to help. She slipped the key into the lock, and it turned with a thunk. When they stepped into the cage of the lift, Eve looked at the numbers on the brass plaque and smiled.
“There,” she said, pointing.
A singleB-for-“basement” button that hadn’t been there before. And another octopus to tick off the list too, because there was a small, dark silhouette of the creature wound around the letter. Now there was only one more still to find. Along with the two clocks.
“Are you sure about this?” Max asked as they both stared at the button. “If the Roths are happy to have a mirror that strangles people out in the open, then how bad would an object have to be in order to be banned?”
“I’m sure.”
Eve pressed the button, which immediately lit up. And then the lift began to descend. She had no idea what she really expected to find down there. She’d never been in a basement before but had the vague image of a place filled with various disused and unwanted items. There would be dust and darkness, perhaps the scent of damp and decay. Rather like the hotel she’d left behind in 2016.
“We should have brought a lamp,” Max muttered.
But then the basement came into view, and it wasn’t dark like they’d been expecting. The lift clanked to a halt, Eve slid back the grille, and they stepped out. A neon sign on the wall cast a green glow over the room and spelled outThe Luggage Room Bar.The walls were panelled with gleaming wood and fixed with lamps. Rows of steamer trunks were lined up upon the checkerboard tiled floor and stacked on racks. One end of the room was taken up with a small bar and a row of bar stools. The shelf behind it was filled with bottles of gin, dry vermouth, and absinthe, while the shelf above contained a neat line of identical crystal coupes. An attractive black-and-gold drinks menu was propped up against the bar, but Eve saw that it only contained one cocktail:
The Obituary. To toast unwanted baggage.
She walked over to a large wooden steamer trunk covered in stickers depicting far-off locations. When she flipped over the label tied to the trunk, she was startled by the sight of her own name printed there.
“Look.” Max indicated the suitcase next to it. “This one has your name on it too. And so does this one here. In fact…areallof these trunks yours?”
Eve shook her head. “But I didn’t bring anything like this with me.”
She reached for the nearest one, unfastened the clasps, and threw back the lid. An abundance of paper exploded from within, each covered in drawings she recognised from her sketchbooks back home. When they opened the other trunks, they found more and more paper in those too.
“These can’t be here,” Eve said. “They’re back in my apartment.”
Max picked up a sketch and frowned at it. “Why are these all hidden away?” He looked irritated. “No one creates art to put it in a box. Isn’t the point to send it out in search of those people who might hear it, or see it, and feel something worth feeling?”
Eve shrugged. They were her drawings. It was up to her what she did with them.
“Huh,” Max grunted.
“What?”
“Nothing. I didn’t have you pegged for a coward, that’s all.”
Eve gave him an icy look. “My octopuses come alive sometimes,” she reminded him. “They splatter ink around too. That would be a difficult thing to explain to an art gallery.”
“So what? If you wanted to find a way to display your art, you would.”
“Why would I ever display it?” Eve snapped. “People wouldn’t like my octopuses. They’d be horrified.”
Frightened, even. Sickened…
“In my experience,” Max replied, “it’s better to allow people to make up their own minds.”
Eve could feel herself bristling. He made it sound so easy, and she was glad when a tentacle suddenly flailed out from one of the pages, followed by another and another. As always, they were huge and white and thick with muscle, a real-life monster. But to her intense annoyance, Max didn’t flinch, not even when one of the tentacles wrapped itself around him briefly, trailing over his chest andaround his shoulders in a way that was almost…intimate. He flashed a smile at her. “Extraordinary. Anyone with any sense at all would think so. And damn the rest of them.”
