Chapter 48
When they reached the sunbathing lawn, the fire was already several metres high.
A can of petrol lay to one side and Eve realised that Anna must have doused the trunks with it.
They blazed fiercely, spitting out red sparks and billows of smoke that made eyes sting and throats burn.
There was quite a crowd of guests there, exclaiming loudly and angrily as they tried to work out whose possessions were being incinerated.
Anna ignored them all. She stood worryingly close to the flames, with her arms folded across her chest, staring into the fire.
There were tears in her eyes, but anger radiated from her as strongly as the heat from the flames.
She had no coat, and her dress was impossibly scarlet against the fresh snow that had fallen in the night.
“It’s all right,” a man said. Everyone turned to see Tristan hurrying across the grounds towards them, a coat in his hands. “Please don’t be alarmed. These are not guests’ trunks. They’re Roth suitcases, taken from storage.”
“But what’s inside them?” one of the guests asked. “Why is she burning them?”
Anna glanced up through the flames and her eyes met Eve’s, just as one of the trunks buckled and a pile of paintings and music boxes spilled out.
It was impossible to tell what the paintings had once been since the canvases were aflame and the scent of burning paint filled the air.
The music boxes had all been beautiful once but were already falling into charred pieces.
And there it was, alight on the ground—the mirrored piano with the white octopus on top of it, the music box that played the most beautiful music in the world.
Eve groaned and stepped towards it but there was nothing she could do, nothing anyone could do now. It was already gone.
“She’s mad,” one of the guests said. “Those objects must be priceless.”
“Please go back inside,” Tristan urged. “As you know, we lost our parents quite recently and this is…It’s a private affair.”
One by one, the guests returned to the hotel in a grumbling and disgruntled group.
Tristan had gone up to Anna, draped the coat over her shoulders, and put his arm around her, whispering something in her ear.
Eve could feel the other woman’s eyes burning into her and she knew in her bones that this was Bella, and that her sister was furious with her for what she’d done and that she was simply never, ever going to let her go.
There would always be balloons, and apples, and rabbits following her wherever she went, and gates shrieking on their hinges inside her head, and all that Eve would ever have to hold on to would be the inky tentacles of her octopus.
She took a step closer to Anna, meeting the other woman’s eyes through the flames. “None of this is real, is it?”
Anna met her gaze and her lips formed into a tight, straight line. “You should never have put all this on me. It’s unfair. It’s an unfair burden.”
“Anna!” Tristan said in a warning tone. “Don’t.”
“I don’t even know how you’re here!” Eve cried. “You died! You died twenty-four years ago!”
“No!” Anna shook her head vigorously. “No, I didn’t. You did!”
“What?”
“You’re the one who’s dead.”
Anna started to cry, then—noisy, messy sobs that caused big, fat tears to spill from her eyes and track mascara in dark lines down her face.
And Eve felt a strange shiver run through her—that feeling people described as someone walking over their grave.
She felt suddenly that Anna was right and that she was already dead, that she had died some time ago, that perhaps she had never really been here at all.
She remembered someone once telling her that when the phrase first started to be used, it was common to hear it in the form of “a rabbit walked over my grave.”
Don’t forget to close the gate….
Tristan put his arms around Anna, and she pressed her face into his chest. “Please return to the hotel,” he said quietly. “My sister and I need a moment to ourselves.”
“Come on,” Max said, already walking away. “Let’s go.”
Eve was desperate to put some distance between herself and Anna, so she followed Max to the lobby.
Their clothes and hair smelled of smoke and she felt a deep, dreadful pang of loss at the image of that music box crumpling into ash in the flames.
It was such a senseless, perverse thing to have done.
And what had all of this even been for? Was there even a scavenger hunt or was it all just an elaborate punishment? A different way to make Eve suffer?
“Show me the octopus again,” Max said.
“What octopus?” Eve replied. Her eyes went to the one sprawled in the lower bowl of the fountain, and for a moment she saw it as it soon would be—covered in algae, chipped and broken, and forgotten and alone.
“That sculpture with the hook on its head. I must have brought it to you in 2016 for a reason, and I still think it’s got to be the last octopus.”
Eve wished once more that she could give the whole thing up, but there was a rabbit sitting on top of the grand piano, watching her, and she knew that she couldn’t, no matter how painful it was.
They returned to Eve’s room, and she gave Max the octopus but didn’t pay much attention when he started talking about it again.
Her thoughts were too full of Anna and the things she’d said.
The idea went through her mind that perhaps the entire point of the White Octopus Hotel was that it was a place for Bella and herself to change places.
Eve would enter the hotel through one door and Bella would walk out through another.
Eve, after all, had had her turn at life.
Perhaps now it was Bella’s turn to get that same chance—the one Eve had snatched from her all those years ago.
“Well, are you coming?” Max was saying.
Eve shook her head. “You go. There’s something else I want to do.”
Max disappeared with the sculpture and when Eve went downstairs alone, she wasn’t hunting for octopuses this time; she was hunting for ghosts.
She walked straight to the Smoking Room.
It was still quite early, and she’d thought the room might be empty and that the telephone might ring just for her.
And maybe this time she’d pick it up and hear whatever it was Bella had to say.
Just take it all—the recriminations, the hatred, the blame.
But the room was already occupied by another person.
Nan sat cross-legged in the seat built into the telephone table.
The Bakelite receiver was pressed to her ear.
Just as before, the phone wasn’t plugged into the wall, but Nan was talking to someone on the other end of the line.