Chapter 50
The ballroom was bright with candles and glittering lights and jazz. All around them, people were dancing, and laughing, and sipping champagne from crystal coupes. Astonishingly beautiful sugar creatures graced silver platters, along with rows and rows of white chocolate octopuses.
As soon as they entered the room, Anna appeared beside them, wearing a silk dress in champagne gold, trimmed with ivory pearls.
“Welcome to the party,” she said. “I’m afraid I owe you an apology for earlier. Tristan pointed out to me that you never told me what the paintings looked like. The ones you saw in the basement?”
As soon as Eve started to describe them, Anna relaxed.
“Those weren’t Nikolas Roth’s work,” she said.
“Those were paintings done by our guests. My parents used to encourage people to make art when they stayed here. They found that it could help—especially those people who found it difficult to put their suffering into words.”
Eve thought of the dark, disturbed paintings she’d seen, and they made more sense now that she knew they were various people’s attempts to capture their own suffering. She knew from experience that there was a relief in being able to do so.
“But why would it matter if we saw your father’s paintings anyway?” she asked. “And why did you burn the music boxes? And pretend we’d never met before?”
“Excuse me, there’s someone trying to get my attention—” Anna began to walk away, but Eve reached out to grip her arm.
“If you think we’re going to change places at the end of all this, then you owe me some answers.”
Anna frowned. “Change places?”
Eve took a step closer. “I know,” she said. “I know what you want. You’re hoping that when the night ends, you’ll walk out of this hotel and I won’t. Don’t try to deny it.”
Anna met her gaze. “I don’t hope that’s going to happen,” she said simply, almost kindly. “I know.”
“Smile for the camera!”
There was the bright flash and pop of a camera going off and Eve felt that flood of déjà vu once more.
“I’ll answer your questions,” Anna replied. “I promise you that. But sometimes, you know, answers just lead to more questions. Sometimes the questions never end. Please be so good as to wait until the party is over. It’s my last one as hostess, after all.”
It was only after she’d walked away that Eve recalled that Anna wasn’t supposed to know that this was the last party or her last night as hostess. Not unless the reason the hotel finally closed was because of something Anna herself was going to do and had perhaps been planning all along….
“Drink?” Max said.
They went to the champagne bar. Eve accepted a sparkling coupe from the barman and the glass was cold, so cold, through her lace glove, the bubbles as small and bright and beautiful as diamonds.
“Did you ever find out what it was all for?” a man beside them asked.
“What’s that?” Max asked.
“You know. All of this.” The man gave a wave to encompass the room. “The hotel. The performance. Why did Anna hire us? Was it a practice run for something?”
“Anna hired you?” Eve said. “To do what?”
“To play the part of hotel guests, obviously. And to try to win her scavenger hunt. If even half of the stories we were told to circulate amongst ourselves are true, then there’s an object or two I would love to get my hands on.
” The man’s voice was suddenly wistful, but when he saw their puzzled expressions, he looked abruptly unsure.
“But aren’t you actors too? I thought all of us were. ”
Eve and Max both shook their heads.
“Oh dear. I suppose I shouldn’t have said anything. I just thought, given that it’s the last night, you might know where we’re headed next….”
He trailed off awkwardly, then rapidly made his excuses and left.
Eve thought back to the gentlemen she had offended with her very presence on her first night in the Palm Bar. Had that been a genuine reaction or just a performance? She supposed she would never know. Though—actors or not—they were still just men of their time.
Nan appeared then, holding a crumpled leaf. “She said to give this to you.”
Eve didn’t need to ask who. She took it from Nan and for a flash of a moment she was back home in the garden with Bella holding a leaf out to her in chubby fingers.
Time works differently in the mountains….
“You always try to pretend you can’t see the rabbit,” Nan went on conversationally. “Why don’t you ever follow it instead?”
I did follow it, she thought. It took me to Room Seven.
She leaned down to the little girl and said, “Who’s the guest in Room Seven, Nan? Is it Bella?”
Nan let out a squeal of laughter. “No, silly!”
She scampered off, still giggling. Eve’s eyes went to the many mirrors that lined the ballroom. It suddenly looked as if there was another girl beside Nan—a much younger child wearing a blue-and-white party dress with a large appliquéd bunny on the front.
From the other side of the room came the ting-ting-ting of someone tapping a fork against a crystal glass and Anna Roth was standing on the stage at the front, waiting for the room to fall silent as everyone turned towards her.
“Thank you all for coming to our party tonight,” she began.
Somewhere close by, a camera flashed.
Don’t forget to close the gate….
And Eve was back there, on the path outside her house.
She was four years old, wearing her beloved purple dress and looking at her balloons.
When she reached out for the gate, the metal was cold beneath her fingers, and she noticed that the blue paint was smart and neat, no longer rusting off in flakes.
She closed it with a clang. And found herself once again in the ballroom of the White Octopus Hotel.
“I apologise for ending the festivities early, but as you can see, the weather would make it impossible to continue.”
The guests all began to exclaim and point up towards the ceiling and the spectacular night sky painted there.
Snow was falling from the inky-blue paint in soft white flurries that landed in people’s champagne coupes, settled on silk dresses, and extinguished the candles one by one.
The glass chandeliers above remained lit but could only half illuminate the vast space.
The White Octopus will close its doors for good on the day snow falls from the ceiling and other lives are glimpsed within the mirrors….
“You there.” Max signalled the barman. “Two more champagnes before we’re all thrown out in the snow.”
Eve couldn’t tear her eyes from the mirror.
She could see it, that other life. There was a party going on within the glass—the one from all those years ago, the party that had never happened.
Except it was happening. Eve saw her four-year-old self running around the summer garden with her friends, while her mum and aunt and various other adults looked on, smiling, laughing, eating cake, being normal.
And Bella was there, alive and happy, toddling around in those uncertain, wobbly steps until she was standing right up against the mirror, looking out at Eve.
The little girl raised her hand in a wave and Eve left Max at the champagne bar to walk over to her.
She crouched down close to the glass, but it was impossible to hear anything of the party on the other side.
Yet she could so very almost hear it, and smell it, and touch it, and taste it.
Her heart raced as she met Bella’s gaze, but this wasn’t the bitter ghost of her imaginings.
The little girl beamed out of the mirror, her whole face lit up with pleasure at the sight of her sister.
She scooped up a leaf from the ground and pressed it against the glass.
Eve put her hand up to the cold surface, her fingertips resting against Bella’s.
She couldn’t feel the warmth of her sister’s skin, but the leaf was passing through the mirror.
Eve looked down and saw it resting in her hand, completely covered in a reflective coat, mirror-dipped and cold.
She looked back up at Bella and there was so much that she wanted to say, but the little girl was already giving a final wave and running back to the party.
Then ice crackled along the surface, and the mirrors froze in their frames, turning opaque and hiding the other world from their view.
“The sleighs have been loaded with your luggage and are waiting outside to take you across the lake,” Anna went on from the stage. “Arrangements have been made with another hotel there, who have rooms available to take you all in for the night.”
“What about the scavenger hunt?” someone called. “Who won?”
Anna lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “No one managed to find all the octopuses. Perhaps some prizes aren’t meant to be won. I hope you have enjoyed your stay.”
Eve stood up and stared at the silver leaf in her hand, the exact double of the one Anna Roth wore on a chain around her throat.
The guests began to make their way out of the French doors, which had been opened to reveal a fleet of sleighs waiting for them outside.
But out of the corner of her eye, Eve saw the rabbit as it hopped from the room in the other direction, heading back into the hotel.
Why don’t you ever follow it instead?
“One last toast to old friends before we have to go?” Max had joined her, two coupes of champagne in his hands. Then he blinked. “Where did you get that leaf?” he asked.
“There’s someone still here, I think,” Eve said, slipping the leaf into her pocket. “The guest in Room Seven.”
“You know, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on anymore,” Max said. He set the champagne on a nearby table before following her out the door and into the corridor.
When they got to the lobby, it was deserted.
There was no one to prevent Eve from examining the guest book on the front desk.
She didn’t even need to riffle through the pages.
The last entry contained the check-in details for Room 7.
According to the book, the guest had checked in just two hours ago.
And there was the name printed in the final column: Eve Shaw.
“But you’re in Room Twenty-seven,” Max said, peering over her shoulder.
“It’s a different me,” Eve replied.
Her mind raced. It must be a future version of herself, since she didn’t remember ever being inside Room 7. She wondered how much older she would be and how she had managed to find her way back to the hotel….
“I need to talk to her.”
When they reached the first floor and stood before the door to Room 7, Eve raised her fist, but she didn’t hammer the door this time. Instead, she knocked gently.
“Please,” she said quietly. “I know you’re in there. Please let me in.”
There was a brief silence. Then they heard the key turn in the lock and the door swung open.