Page 85 of The White Octopus Hotel
“It’s where the octopus goes.”
“You should put it back,” the little girl said. “Then it will look like the old one I saw in the photo again.”
“Yes,” Eve replied. She could feel the walls closing in on her once more. She was going to win the scavenger hunt after all. “I should.”
The girl put the key in the lock and turned it anticlockwise.
“You can’t take the key,” Eve said. “It belongs to the hotel.”
Her younger self gave her a withering look. “It belongs to me. But I know I can’t take it this time. Nan already told me.”
When she opened the door, it led back to her own bedroom at home. Eve couldn’t look at it and turned away. It was a place she never, ever wanted to go back to, not for one second. And yet here she was sending a four-year-old to face what she could not.
“Bye,” the girl whispered.
“Goodbye, Eve,” Max replied. “And good luck.”
Then the door closed behind her and she was gone. Eve reached down to pick up the octopus, feeling the cold weight of it in her hand—a burden she could never set down. Then she took the key to Room 7 and slid it into her pocket. Reunited again, after all these years.
Max caught her gaze. “You were unfair to her. You must realise that, deep down. You must.”
“She’s responsible.”
“I never said she wasn’t.”
“I can’t forgive her for what she did.” Eve’s breath shuddered through her body. “Not ever.”
“No.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose you will. To the lobby, then.”
They went downstairs and Eve heard Tristan’s words ring inside her head in a curious double echo. The words she had heard him speak when she was both three and twenty-eight years old.
But, Mr. Everly, we don’t really have the faintest notion of what time actually is.
Tick.
The truth is that time will always be as much of a mystery to us as death itself.
Tock.
When she and Max walked over to the grandfather clock, Eve saw that it had three chains. Two of these had weights attached to them, taking the form of traditional cylinders. The chain in the middle was missing its weight entirely, but there was a hook at the end for it to hang from.
Eve reached into the clock and put the octopus in its rightful place.
Chapter 52
A bright flash exploded for the final time, and Eve saw the sparkle of pennies landing inside the fountain, felt a burst of childish delight at a sugar rabbit, and then there was the echoingclip-clopof the trench horse wandering the steam baths, and the air was filled with the most beautiful music in the world, played by a band of tin mice. For a moment the lobby wavered back and forth between splendour and decay, and she couldn’t work out whether the Max before her was twenty, or thirty-six, or eighty as his voice rang inside her head.
Come back to the hotel.
Are you real?
My music is for you. It’s all for you, every note and bar….
“The clock needs winding,” a man said.
Eve looked up, blinking away the last of those firework flashes. She saw that Tristan had entered the lobby, with his brother and sister behind him.
“Congratulations,” Anna said. “You won. I believe it’s the last sheet of writing paper you wish to claim?”
