Chapter 12
Her clothes soon became grimy with the decades of dust and it was past one o’clock by the time she returned to the ground floor.
Eve was hungry and tired and disheartened, but still she pressed on, focusing on the rooms she hadn’t yet seen.
At one point she found herself in the wild, abandoned gardens at the back, which led to a grand building that had once been a suite of steam baths.
There was nothing of any value out there, so Eve returned to the hotel.
It was difficult to keep track of where she had and hadn’t been, but she got the sense that she had walked through most of the rooms by now.
The corridors stretched on endlessly and all looked alike.
A short while later she found herself in a bar on the first floor, which had its original sign still fixed upon the door: The Palm Bar and Martini Room.
She didn’t think there’d be any new rooms to explore after this one.
As with the ballroom, there were lingering echoes of art deco in the bevelled mirrors, the glass too tarnished and dirty to make out a reflection—especially as the room was so dark.
In fact, Eve realised it was one of the few rooms she’d come across that didn’t have any windows at all.
It seemed an odd place to put a bar when it could have been looking out at the lake.
The gloom meant she had to switch on her phone’s torch in order to see, and as she swept its beam into the corners, she felt like a diver exploring a shipwreck.
It had once been a very beautiful space.
In places where the graffiti wasn’t too bad, you could still see the original silver-leaf-lacquered wall panels, and there was art on the ceiling too—elegant murals depicting various cocktails.
It was possible to make out the names of some of them, spelled out in curling golden letters: the Sidecar, the Aviation, the Last Word.
There had once been velvet chairs and banquettes, but these had long since become homes for mice.
Tables had collapsed and lay in broken pieces on the floor, along with shattered glass that Eve guessed must have come from bottles and crystal coupes.
The shelves behind the bar were all empty, covered in a thick coating of dust. An antique smoker’s cabinet lay in sad broken bits on its side.
Any humidors or cigars that had been stored inside were long since gone.
Eve wished she knew more about this type of piece, but it was impossible for her to date it with any accuracy.
It might only have had the appearance of an antique or it could genuinely have been extremely old.
She reached down to brush her fingers over the golden handles.
Might Nikolas Roth’s own hands have touched them?
Or Max Everly’s? The thought made goosebumps prickle over her skin once more and for a moment she could almost feel the ghosts of the two men right there in the room with her—the artist and the musician, lounging in the wingback chairs, smoking their cigars, listening to the crackle of jazz on a gramophone… .
Her ears strained for the spectral echo of saxophones, the faintest trace of cigar smoke, mentally reaching for the past, but there was nothing here except dirt, decay…
and the rabbit. There it was—white and fluffy, with a splodge of black over one eye, gazing up at her with such a sweet, harmless, innocent little face.
Why does BELLA get a new dress when it’s MY party?
Eve shuddered and then her resolve crumpled, and she did the thing she knew she must never, ever do. She spoke to the rabbit.
“How much longer?” she demanded.
How much longer am I to be punished? The rabbit wouldn’t answer; it never did.
It couldn’t speak because it was, after all, only a rabbit.
And what kind of answer was Eve expecting anyway?
How long was a suitable punishment for killing your sister?
The rabbit stared at Eve and Eve stared at the rabbit and they both knew the answer.
Forever. She would be punished forever for what she had done.
There was a smothered giggle from out in the corridor, and a fragrant burst of crisp, fresh apples, and the thud-thud-thud of little steps disappearing in a rapid patter.
Eve felt the knot of fury that was always there tighten a notch further as she darted out the door, the rabbit hopping along in her wake.
It was hard to see much in the windowless space, but the scent of apples remained.
She raised her phone’s torch and ran down the corridor.
Bella was there, just out of sight, she knew it. Come to inflict more torment.
Without a second thought, Eve plunged into the twisting maze of corridors after the echo—or ghost, or whatever it was—of her sister.
In no time, she’d reached the back of the hotel, and the sudden flood of sunlight made her wince.
A row of gallery windows stretched the length of the room, offering views of the mountain vista beyond.
A tiled checkerboard floor in black and white was visible beneath the dust, but the room itself was empty, its original purpose lost. Eve didn’t think she’d been here before, though, so clearly there was a part of the hotel she had missed.
She was out of breath, but the rabbit hopped rapidly ahead to the end of the room, where it stopped beside a doorway. An apple rolled through, mostly green with a faint blush of pink, a single leaf still attached to the stem.
Eve sucked in her breath. How annoying—no, infuriating—the apples and leaves had been that final summer.
Eve would be in the garden, trying to play with her sandpit or run about with her ball—the pink glittery one she’d adored—and Bella would be forever walking up to her with a leaf or an apple that she’d found on the lawn, thrusting it out in a chubby hand.
I don’t want it, Bella. I’m playing with my sandpit, Eve would say.
But the apples and leaves kept coming and coming, until there was a giant pile of them next to Eve. And if she didn’t stop what she was doing and take the apple from Bella, then sometimes her sister would throw it at her instead and it would bounce off her head and it would hurt.
She doesn’t understand, their mum would say. She’s only trying to give you a present because you’re her big sister and she loves you.
Guilt and grief and rage were powerful feelings on their own, but mixed together they set one another off like warring siblings.
Eve had grown better at controlling these three over the years, but you couldn’t be in control of all of them all of the time; you just couldn’t.
Nobody could. She glared at the apple, and her whole body trembled, and her voice now came out as a roar. “I! DON’T! WANT! IT!”
Any other rabbit would have fled at the first sign of shouting, but this was no ordinary rabbit and it only gazed at her, unperturbed, as if it had seen far worse, thought far worse, lived far worse.
Eve thought of the breathing exercises she had learned—tried to employ them now, to get the rage back under control.
Of course, there was no controlling it—not really.
The best you could hope for was to manage it, to trick it into going back to sleep, to try to pretend it wasn’t there.
Righteous anger would have been bad enough, but at least it would have been easier to live with.
Unmerited anger, though, was the worst feeling of all.
Eve knew she had no right to be angry—at herself, yes, obviously, but not at the rabbit, not at Bella, not at her mother, not at the gate, not at the world.
Eve was to blame. Everyone involved knew this.
She hadn’t meant for anything bad to happen to Bella.
Most of the time she was almost completely certain of this crucial fact, that there had been no intent whatsoever—but even now, after all those years, there were days when she was so intensely and viciously angry with Bella that she could barely see or think or breathe.
She was angry at her for going out through the gate, angry at her for dying, angry at her for the unfillable hole she’d left behind.
Even the window next to her seemed to be taunting her and she felt the fierce longing to put her fist through the glass, so she closed her eyes and concentrated on the box breathing.
The breathing helped a bit sometimes, and so did the mindfulness—and practicing yoga and having a hot bath, or going for a walk outside and so on and so on.
But those things only helped a bit, when the black feeling wasn’t too huge and powerful.
When the darkness was sleeping. But if it was awake and hungry, then doing some yoga was about as much use as trying to close a gate on a tsunami.
Did you close the gate?
She reached for Max Everly’s music instead, switching on the record player inside her head, letting the familiar notes wash through her until she could breathe again. And breathe. And breathe.