Chapter 11 1957
After they share their dreams, Calliope and Flitter fall asleep.
Aria doesn’t. What Calliope said about her parents being forgotten—as if there’s another death waiting that’s worse than what they’ve already suffered—haunts her.
Miss Devine Rey is the only person in California who knew Aria’s parents too—Aria’s dad was her brother.
If Aria frames a conversation with her aunt just right—perhaps over breakfast tomorrow—then maybe she’ll get the chance she craves: to bring her parents back to life for just an hour or two.
She decides to go back to her aunt’s suite.
Isaiah isn’t waiting by the elevators, so she has to close the metal grille herself.
She thinks she gets out on the right floor, but the corridors are so dimly lit it’s hard to tell.
The carpet looks redder here, like the snakes are bleeding.
There’s something with too many arms lurking in the shadows.
She backs away, can’t find the elevator, must have taken a wrong turn; thinks she’s finally found her aunt’s room, but when she opens the door, there’s no aunt inside.
There’s a ghost.
White face, white hand hanging as limply as the silk sheets over the bed. A tube in its mouth and another in its nose. A man wearing a doctor’s coat is pulling back the plunger of a syringe connected to the tube as if he’s extracting the ghost’s soul.
Aria whirls around, knows she has to get out before the man takes her soul too.
She charges into the corridor where a wall opens up and a woman in a housemaid’s uniform steps out.
Aria plunges into the opening, finds a stairwell that’s so dark she wants to escape.
She pushes open a different door only to discover that the ghost is heading straight for her.
In the second before she faints, Aria realizes it’s just a sheet hiding a woman as if she’s a dirty little secret.
Aria rouses, fear crawling over her scalp like lice.
Even though the sheeted woman appears to be gone, she prays for the Marmont to swallow her up, prays so hard she doesn’t see Bob Ashenhurst coming up behind her, carrying a sleeping woman in his arms as if he’s Prince Charming doing a bit of maiden-saving at midnight.
Bob doesn’t see Aria either, not until he trips over her and drops the woman on the ground. The woman blinks awake.
Aria looks from her to Bob, expects him to ask both the woman and Aria if they’re okay. But as the woman comes to properly and she sees Bob, she scrambles away. The look in her eyes—it’s like she thinks he’s a wolf about to eat her.
She lunges over to Aria, grabs her wrist and Aria is almost certain that she says, in a tiny desperate voice, “Help.”
Somehow, Aria leaves her body. She can see herself sitting in the hallway, mouth stretched open, a scream coming out of her louder than any sound she’s ever made, so loud that people open their doors and peer out.
Her scream stops abruptly when a man wearing an expressionless face and a black suit materializes in front of her.
“Miss Jones,” he says. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Mr. Mason, the hotel manager. I’ll be sure to have a word to your aunt about your sleepwalking. You should go back to your room immediately.”
Aria blinks. “I wasn’t…” Wasn’t sleepwalking, she wants to say. But when she looks around, there’s nobody in the corridor except her and Mr. Mason. Where did Bob go? Where did the woman go? Is Aria even awake?
She does what characters in books do—pinches herself, and it hurts. She isn’t dreaming, not now. Maybe she did sleepwalk. There’s no other rational explanation.
When she blinks a second time, the man from the ghost-woman’s room is standing in front of her. At least he’s real. But was the ghost real?
Of course not. Maybe nothing else was real either.
Aria feels so silly now at four in the morning, standing in a hotel corridor having conjured up ghosts and roused so many people. She remembers her aunt saying to her, You will be discreet at all times and she knows she’s just been anything but discreet.
Before the sick feeling in her stomach can return, the man says to her, “I’m Doctor Foster.
Mr. Mason sent me,” and his tone is so much like a warm blanket that every muscle Aria didn’t know she’d been holding cramped tight since that awful night in New York releases just a little.
“I’ll take you back to your aunt’s room,” he says.
He slips into one of those secret doors in the wall that, moments ago, Aria had wished would open. Now it does, letting her in. It’s all so easy and calm and not scary at all. She must have sleepwalked and dreamed everything.
The doctor takes out a key and lets them into Room 53.
Inside, Miss Devine Rey is sitting in a chair, weeping. When she sees Aria, she swipes her arm across the table and a glass and a bottle break apart on the floor, glittering like her aunt’s tears.
“By god,” her aunt roars, “has no one told you not to sneak around at night? There might be no consequences out there”—she waves her arm toward the hallways and another bottle shatters—“but there are more consequences than you could possibly bear in here.” She bangs her palms against her head, terrifying, incomprehensible, monstrous.
Fainting, screaming—Aria has done both tonight. Now she stares mutely while the doctor walks over to Miss Devine Rey and holds her tight, like he is safety and she can drop right into him. Her aunt quiets, her eyes close and she looks far from terrifying—she looks almost as if she’s dead.
“Can I go back to Flitter and Calliope’s room?” Aria whispers to the doctor.
“That’s a good idea. I’ll walk you down.”
Back in the secret stairway, Doctor Foster says to her, “Would it help if I told you that you saw a woman in a wheelchair earlier, not a ghost? She’s in the hospital now and will be fine by morning.”
No ghost. But Doctor Foster’s words mean she did see at least one woman. How can that have been real, but not Bob and the woman he was carrying? Maybe it’s just more of that magic Calliope showed her. Maybe everything in Hollywood is an illusion.
And Doctor Foster is the most sensible person she’s met so far. His words are soothing, so she fixes on them.
“I’ll give your aunt a prescription of things you need. Bus fare so you can get out of here from time to time. Some paper and a pen,” he muses. “Then you can give all the things you want to forget to a journal instead of carrying them around with you.”
Get out of here. Get out of here. Those words remind Aria of the promise she’d made to herself.
And an eerie but practical voice whispers from the cracks in the plaster—pockets full of tissues and candy, both in used condition, will not feed or clothe or house her.
If she’s to leave, she has to have money.
But what can a beastly not-quite-fourteen-year-old do to earn enough to survive in this world?
Aria’s soon fast asleep. But the night isn’t over, not for the chateau. It has work to do.
It makes sure Doctor Foster remembers that on Marian Monti’s desk is a stack of white paper. It’s monogrammed with her name, but that’s no matter.
The Marmont shakes its right arm so the lock to her room unclasps, letting the doctor inside where he can gather up the paper and leave it in Aria’s bedroom.
The Marmont knows that only when you write things down does anyone believe they really happened.
Otherwise, all you have for evidence is your word and your memory—and when you’re a girl, they say your word is a lie and your memory a tall story.
In Aria’s story, the Marmont knows, she’ll either get the world she gives in to or the world she fights for.
The Marmont can’t see how it will end, just the two paths ahead and the moments that will turn Aria toward one or the other.
But if she writes everything down, then maybe at the most critical moment, this record of her history will help her to choose the right path.
Meddling done, the Marmont settles itself into its yellowing foundation stones for the night like an elegant drunk. Or a mischievous drunk perhaps—because it depends on which you think is the right path for Aria Jones.