Chapter 49
“Yes,” Nan said cheerfully. “Yes, I’ll tell her. Bye!”
She reached over to hang up the receiver with a solid clunk.
Eve cleared her throat, realising her mouth had gone dry. “Who were you talking to?” she asked.
Nan looked around. “Oh, hello! I was taking a message for you. Adults can’t understand child ghosts. Only other children can.”
Eve’s eyes went to the phone. It was still and silent, but it seemed to Eve that it gave off a dangerous sort of something—a warning, like a bomb yet to explode.
She wondered briefly whether she could tell Nan she didn’t want to hear the message, but wasn’t that why she’d come to the Smoking Room?
To hear from Bella? Not Annabella Roth the woman, but the little girl who’d been her sister.
“She said she’s tired and wants to go now.”
Eve took a deep breath. There was no way of knowing whether Nan had actually spoken to Bella, or whether she was simply playing make-believe. A gate creaked loudly inside her head and she saw a rabbit hopping about on the other side of the mirror.
“Why are you upset?” Nan asked. “Is it because of Aunt Anna? Because she put it in the fire?”
“She burned the music boxes and paintings,” Eve replied. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes, and she burned the special one,” Nan said. “The music box that plays the most beautiful music in the world. It’s broken now.”
“Yes.”
“Daddy says Aunt Anna is very stressed,” Nan said. “Because she worries about the hotel, because she loves it so much, and we’re not supposed to bother her.” She paused. “The music isn’t gone, though.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” Nan beckoned Eve closer. “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered.
“I think so,” Eve whispered back.
“Aunt Anna doesn’t know about this,” Nan said. “But my mouse band can do it.”
“Do…what?”
“They can play it. The most beautiful song in the world.”
Eve recalled the tuneless whirs and clicks from the last time the girl had put on a mouse concert and felt her burst of hope fading away. The mice musicians couldn’t play the most beautiful music in the world. They couldn’t play any music at all.
“I’ll show you,” Nan said.
She reached for Eve’s hand, making her flinch.
The last child’s hand she’d held had been Bella’s.
She had a sudden strong flash of memory of her sister reaching for her whenever their mother took them to the forest. It was something she’d forgotten for many years, but Bella always wanted to hold Eve’s hand as they walked towards the duck pond.
And when they got there, Bella would try to eat the bread they’d brought for the ducks, and Eve would say, “No, Bella, you’re supposed to give it to the ducks. Look.”
She’d toss in some crumbs, watching them land on the murky surface of the pond. And then Bella threw her bread in too, because she always wanted to do what Eve did.
“That’s right!” Eve exclaimed.
And Bella beamed, and then she giggled, and Eve felt a rush of warmth and love for her sister, and a burst of pleasure at the fact that she was the one who’d made her laugh.
There had been moments like that, when Bella wasn’t being a pain, or getting in her way, or crying, or making a fuss, or throwing food on the floor.
There had been times when Eve had been glad to see her, when she’d liked her, when she’d taken care of her and they’d enjoyed each other’s company.
It was hard to remember those moments sometimes now, but they had been there.
Eve swallowed hard as she followed Nan down the corridor of the hotel.
The child was so completely trusting, not realising that she was holding hands with a killer, as she skipped straight to the Billiards Room.
Eve had been inside it before, on that first day of the scavenger hunt.
The room had one clock—an old, German-made billiards timing clock—and two octopuses, in the form of the twin lights suspended above the table.
They were switched on now, illuminating the smooth green felt below.
The room was empty at this time of day, but there was a small whiskey bar in the corner, along with two high-backed armchairs.
The walls were lined with bookshelves and glossy wooden panels and there was, to Eve’s relief, not a painting in sight.
“This way,” Nan said, humming to herself as she dropped Eve’s hand and went over to a shelf. Upon it sat the Merrymakers clockwork mouse band Nan had shown her before—the four tin mice assembled around their piano.
“It looks like the mice are all wearing masks,” Eve said. “I hadn’t noticed that before.”
Nan glanced up at her. “Everyone wears masks,” she said matter-of-factly. She held the box up to Eve. “Well, aren’t you going to press the lever?”
Eve did so and the four mice sprang enthusiastically to life once again, bashing at their instruments in their clockwork frenzy, but it wasn’t just whirs and clicks this time, it was music.
The same extraordinary, life-changing music Eve had heard on a day that was both yesterday and seventeen years ago in the frigidarium.
She closed her eyes and heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves on mosaic tiles, felt sweat run down her bare skin as Max whispered her name in her ear, and the snow fell outside, and red apples shone in the dark.
Someone tugged at her hand, and she looked down to see Nan, pointing up towards the ceiling.
“Look,” she whispered. “A fairy.”
Eve squinted towards the lights. There was something up there—some bright, fluttering thing, dancing and dashing about in a wordlessly joyous way.
It was difficult to tell what it was exactly; it almost looked like a piece of broken mirror, if glass could frolic in the air.
Certainly if any music could draw out fairies, it was this song.
But eventually it finished, and the tin mice were all still once more. The shiny, bright whatever-it-was fluttered down towards the bookshelves, landing briefly on a small model of a globe before twinkling into nothing.
“They like the music too,” Nan said. “But when it finishes, they always go back to the mountains. Dad says you can’t keep fairies in the hotel. You have to let them leave when they want to.”
Eve walked over to the bookshelf, still looking at the globe.
It was a small model of the world she’d noticed before, but now that she looked closer, she noticed there was a seam running down the middle of it.
When she pressed her fingertips into the groove, it split into two halves, like an Easter egg.
One half of the globe held a small clock—the last one on the scavenger hunt list. The other half had space for a single photo—of two little girls in a garden.
One was about three years old, and the other was an infant.
They weren’t looking at the photographer, but at each other, both laughing helplessly at some long-forgotten joke.
“Nan,” Eve said, turning around with the clock. “Do you know who these two girls are?”
The child looked at the photo, then shook her head. “Is one of them me?”
“No. This is me.” She pointed at the older girl. “And that’s my sister. Bella.”
Nan peered closer. “How did they get it in colour? Normally pictures are black and white.”
“Nan.” Eve crouched down to the child’s level. “Do you know what’s really going on at this hotel? Do you know what the scavenger hunt is all about?”
“Yep.” She nodded.
“Will you please tell me?”
“I’m not allowed,” Nan said at once. “It’s a secret.
” She leaned a little closer to Eve. “Aunt Anna thinks I can’t keep a secret.
That’s why I’m not supposed to talk to you.
But my granny said I’m really, really good at them.
That’s why she told me about the mice and the beautiful song.
And I know you’re going to win the prize.
” She sprang forwards and planted a kiss on Eve’s cheek.
“I’m glad you saw the fairy. I need to go help Aunt Mila in the Sugar Room now. ”
Before Eve could think of stopping her, she’d snatched the mouse band from the shelf and skipped out the door.
Eve looked back at the globe. How could a photograph of herself and Bella possibly have found its way to the White Octopus Hotel in 1935?
Just then, a couple of guests walked into the Billiards Room with their scavenger hunt cards, so Eve slipped out into the corridor.
When she found Max, he’d had no more luck with the octopus statue than she had.
“Maybe it didn’t originally come from the hotel at all,” he said.
“I can’t find a place anywhere for it to go.
Perhaps there’s some other room like the Sugar Room that only appears at a certain time, under particular conditions.
Maybe there’s some password or secret entrance that we’ll never have any hope of discovering. ”
Nevertheless, they searched together for the rest of the day, poking into every corner of the hotel they could think of.
When the rabbit appeared, Eve tried to ignore it at first, like always.
Max couldn’t see it, so she knew it was part of her own haunting and not the real flesh-and-blood creature that belonged to Anna Roth.
But then the rabbit did something it had never done before.
It bit her. Sharp little nips of her ankles that stung more than she expected.
Eve had never deliberately touched the rabbit, but this time she grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and was very tempted—oh, so tempted—to throttle the damn thing.
But then she saw a bedroom door reflected in the rabbit’s eyes, and it wasn’t right because they were standing outside Room 11, but the number the rabbit was reflecting back to her was a 7.
She heard Bella’s footsteps as she pitter-pattered her way down the corridor, but when she turned around there was nothing there.
“What are you doing?” Max asked, staring at her.
She dropped the rabbit and watched as it hopped away down the corridor towards the stairs.
“I think we need to go downstairs.”
She and Max followed the rabbit down to the floor below, where it stopped before Room 7. The next moment, it rose up on its back legs and began scrabbling and scratching at the door.
“It’s trying to get into Room Seven,” Eve said. “The rabbit.”
She walked over and knocked. No one answered or spoke, but when she looked at the gap beneath the door, she saw that telltale flicker of light and shadow that told her someone was there, just out of sight on the other side.
She balled her hand into a fist and hammered it against the wood. “Who’s in there?”
There was no reply, and the shadows didn’t move this time.
It was almost as if Eve had imagined it.
Yet she knew that she hadn’t. There was someone in the room.
Another time-travelling guest. She could feel them breathing.
She could feel them staring at her through the wood.
When she looked down again, the rabbit had gone.
From downstairs, the sound of jazz started to filter through to them.
“It sounds like the party has started,” Max said.
He touched her arm gently and Eve thought of that day seventeen years ago in the steam baths.
She would have given almost anything to have him touch her like that again, or at least to hold on to the memory of those moments when she checked out.
It seemed so cruel to have to forget them entirely.
“We tried,” Max said. “Perhaps, after all, it’s a game that can’t be won. ”
“Perhaps.” But Eve was tired of the game—tired of the mysteries, and the clocks, even tired of the octopuses.
In the pit of her stomach, though, she felt a treacherous flicker of relief at the idea that she wouldn’t be able to complete the scavenger hunt, that she would not have to ask for a prize that would kill the man she loved.
“You told me something happens at the party,” Max went on. “Something that makes the hotel close its doors. Perhaps the last octopus is there?”
Eve nodded. She would have to go to the party, of course, would have to see it through to the end.
They returned to their rooms to get changed.
Tonight, the wardrobe in Eve’s bedroom produced a beautiful floor-length gown that shimmered with thousands of hand-woven beads forming geometric art deco patterns in rose gold and black.
A long crystal necklace in the shape of a snake accompanied it, along with a beaded clutch and elbow-length lace gloves.
Eve scooped up the octopus sculpture to tuck into the bag, then went down to meet Max outside the ballroom.
He wore a black tuxedo, and she felt a flash of déjà vu when she looked at him.
“Do you think we might have done this already?” she asked. “Been to this party and worn these same clothes? Danced to the same songs?”
“Time doesn’t work properly in this place,” Max said, “so anything is possible.”
Maybe, after all, they would never escape the maze.
Perhaps they were destined to just go around and around the hotel in a loop that didn’t end.
And there was something comforting about the thought—of hiding here forever, of being with Max forever, never going forwards or backwards, of not having to make an impossible choice.
They could hear music and laughter and the pop of champagne corks from beyond the glass art deco doors.
Max offered Eve his arm and she took it, feeling the warmth of his body through his sleeve and wishing that she could hold on for just a short while longer.
They stepped into the party together.