Chapter 11
The tentacle gave her arm one final squeeze before disappearing back into the book, leaving an inky residue on her sleeve that Eve could feel but not really see.
This was why she always wore black. It was a difficult thing trying to explain to someone why you were covered in octopus ink.
Besides which, removing the stains was a nightmare.
But this proved that it was Eve’s octopus—impossibly existing here in this hotel up in the mountains.
The book on the reception desk wasn’t a sketchbook.
It was too big and heavy and looked more like a guest book.
Perhaps it was an old one from the thirties, containing the names of the guests who had checked in for the final party.
Eve liked the idea, this link with the last guests—but when she opened the cover, she found that the book only contained the names of the urban explorers and ghost hunters who’d come since the hotel closed.
There were brief messages too, singing the praises of the abandoned building—how creepy it was, how eerie, how fascinating.
Some contained cautions about unstable floors or empty lift shafts.
Others offered warnings about hauntings and ghosts.
The long room before her was lined with windows that would have looked out on spectacular lake views if they hadn’t all been boarded up.
It was so cold that her breath smoked. It was dark, too—and as she strained her eyes through the gloom, Eve was startled to realize there were lumpy shapes upon the floor.
Then her vision adjusted, and she saw that they were only piles of broken wood, perhaps from tables and chairs that had once filled the space.
She could imagine this spot being the perfect place to enjoy coffee and tea while looking out at the lake.
She began to make her way to the end of the room, scrambling over piles of wood as she went, doing her best to avoid splinters and exposed nails, glad of her sturdy shoes.
But the next door was locked. Either that or it had warped in the cold and damp and was jammed.
Eve was unable to open it, even when she pushed with her shoulder.
She went back the way she’d come, hoping she wouldn’t encounter too many other dead ends.
There was another door leading away from the lobby behind the piano.
It opened onto a corridor that took her to various rooms, all in the same sorry state as the lobby.
Some were so damaged and littered that it was impossible to discern their original function, although there were glimpses of the elegant salons they had once been.
The ceilings were cracked and water damaged and some were crumbling in an alarming way that made it clear the building really wasn’t at all safe.
In places, however, Eve could see that the ceilings had once been painted.
Ancient, tarnished mirrors still hung upon the walls, too heavy and awkward for scavengers to remove, and the same went for the chandeliers—although many of those had fallen down, broken shards of crystal and tangles of wire crunching underfoot.
There were long corridors, the wallpaper peeling away and the air filled with the scent of mould and damp.
There was graffiti everywhere and Eve felt a creeping sense of disappointment.
She’d hoped for more of a time warp, more of a sense of what these rooms had once been used for, perhaps even to stumble across a few interesting remnants of the past—such as a sheet of writing paper—or the abandoned possessions of previous guests.
She’d hoped for ghostly fingers tracing down her back.
But of course, all the belongings had long since gone.
When Eve found her way to an impressive pair of art deco doors, she stopped to admire them, pleased to discover a gem at last. Like everything else in the building, the stained-glass panels were dusty and dirty, but they were shining too, illuminated by a source of light on the other side.
Eve saw scales and shells in shimmering greens and pearly pinks.
She reached for the handle, praying that the doors wouldn’t be locked or jammed, but they swung open easily at her touch and she blinked at the sudden flood of light washing in.
The room before her was gigantic, with dozens and dozens of windows, many of which were broken, letting in the fresh mountain air outside—a welcome relief after the claustrophobia of the decaying corridors.
The space was easily big enough to contain a couple of hundred people, but right now it was completely empty—except for the ibex.
The large mountain goat had a muscular body and an extraordinary pair of massive horns, ridged and curved backwards.
It turned its head towards Eve and looked at her with calm amber eyes.
For long moments, they just stared at each other.
It was so unexpected coming across a wild animal inside a ballroom, yet the ibex looked far more like it belonged here than the Coke bottles and food wrappers.
After a few beats, the ibex huffed out a breath that smoked in the frozen air and then turned to pick its way over the floor towards the open French doors.
The next moment it had scampered out onto the veranda and was gone.
It was a relief to see it leave. The White Octopus Hotel was not a good place for wildlife.
The floor was littered with pieces of wood and broken glass.
Eve found herself wondering whether the glass could possibly be the remnants of the champagne coupes from that party, just before the hotel closed for good in 1935.
Graffiti marked the walls and mirrors as well as the stage set up at the end of the vast room.
There was a grubby-looking sleeping bag rolled up in the corner that had clearly been there for years.
Despite its condition, the room’s old elegance shone through in the painted ceiling and the glint of mirrors and the fantastic surviving chandelier.
Most of the light fixtures had tumbled down and broken over the decades, joining the detritus on the floor, but there was one that remained.
It was tiered crystal, studded with paste jewels designed to resemble barnacles, with three tiny Murano glass octopuses clinging to the arms by looped tentacles.
Above it, the ceiling was painted to resemble a dark night sky, inky blue and covered in thousands of silver stars.
Eve stared up, feeling a new flash of recognition.
Surely she had seen that chandelier somewhere before, somewhere fairly recently—just the other day, in fact.
Then all of a sudden she remembered. She’d seen this chandelier in a photo—the last known photo of Max Everly before his disappearance.
It showed him in a ballroom at a party, full of champagne and women in silk dresses.
Everly wore a black tuxedo and stood in the centre of the room, gazing at some unseen person beyond the photographer.
Eve had often wondered who that individual, just out of frame, might have been.
A colleague, perhaps, a friend, maybe, but she’d always thought the expression on Everly’s face indicated a more intimate relationship.
Surely, he was looking across the room at a lover.
Eve had been so taken with the photo that she’d sketched it a few times, trying to get Max’s expression just right.
And now she knew that the original had been taken in this very room, beneath this same chandelier.
That meant that Max Everly had been to the White Octopus Hotel.
It seemed an incredible coincidence that a man bearing that same name had come to see Eve in London, yet it couldn’t be the same person.
Not unless time travel really was possible…
She reached into her pocket for the key to Room 27, letting it rest cool and heavy in her palm.
It was time to find out whether she had just spent a lot of time and effort on a hoax.
She knew from the guest book in reception that the lift was long since dead and she wouldn’t have dared risk such an ancient contraption anyway, so she’d have to locate the stairs to the upper floors.
She left the ballroom and went back into the damp shadows of the hotel to retrace her steps to the lobby.
From there she climbed the staircase to the upper level.
As she set off, she crossed her fingers that the floor wouldn’t suddenly collapse beneath her feet.
It seemed solid enough, although the boards creaked, and the darkness was so complete that she had to use her torch to light her way.
It seemed that most of the first floor had once been used as public spaces, but when she reached the second floor she found the first lot of guest rooms. They were all bare except for the bed frames and the rotting remnants of mattresses.
Here, as elsewhere, graffiti covered the walls, and it was difficult to visualise the rooms as they once had been.
The brass numbers remained, screwed to the doors, and it didn’t take long to reach the room at the end of the corridor—Room 7.
The lift shaft was here too. There were no doors to block it off and Eve couldn’t resist creeping to the edge to peer down into the depths, hoping to catch a glimpse of the golden birdcage structure she’d seen in the lobby.
But, two floors up, it was too dark to see anything much, and being that close to the drop made her skin prickle.
She stepped back and went to the stairs.
On the third floor the rooms were slightly smaller and so there were more of them. Eve frowned at the last one—Room 17. Hadn’t her mother told her that there was no such room? Perhaps she’d been lying about exploring the rest of the hotel. But why lie about such a thing?
Finally, she ascended the stairs to the fourth floor, which ended with Room 26. But when she reached the fifth floor, she saw that the first room in the corridor was Room 28. Just as Victor’s colleague had said, there was no Room 27; it seemed as if it had been lost between the floors.