Chapter 21
Eve stood in the room of fountains and frowned. “My name is Eve Shaw.”
Max narrowed his eyes. “What new folly is this? A joke or a parlour trick? Either way, it’s in exceptionally poor taste.”
“But my name is—”
“You know, my mother once told me that someone with a palindrome name was probably a witch.”
“A palindrome?”
“A name that’s spelled the same backwards as it is forwards.
I do not believe in witches, however, and so you cannot possibly be the woman I’m searching for.
Eve was in her twenties when I knew her, so she’d be in her midforties by now.
How did you come to be at the hotel?” Max demanded. “What brought you here?”
There was no friendliness or warmth in his gaze now, only suspicion. And suddenly anger too.
Eve hesitated. She saw Max as he would be many years from now, as a very old man, struggling out of the taxi, slowly battling his way up the steps of the auction house, shuffling carefully into her office.
Hello, Eve…
But would he believe her if she told him this? It seemed fantastical even to her.
“I…I heard about the White Octopus from a friend,” she said.
“I don’t believe you,” Max replied at once, his tone blunt. “I can tell when someone is lying to me. And if you’re lying about why you’re here, then I can only assume you’re working with them for some reason.”
“All right.” Eve shrugged. She could feel her octopus tingling its way across the small of her back, in plain sight now if anyone should happen to see her from behind. “You asked for the truth, so here it is: I came to this hotel because you told me to.”
“I told you to?” Max raised an eyebrow. “Madam, I have never laid eyes on you before tonight.”
“One of the rooms in this hotel has a key that allowed me to travel here from another time.”
“Ah, so we’re delving into the realms of H.
G. Wells, are we?” Max’s lip curled in contempt.
“How fascinating. The main characters in The Time Machine were all unnamed, as I recall; we were only permitted to know them as the Scientist or the Very Young Man and so on and so forth. What ought I to call you then? The Mysterious Woman? The Femme Fatale?”
Miss Scarlett.
The Black Widow.
“I’ve been called worse,” Eve replied. “But I’m telling you the truth. If you believe in the other magical objects here at the hotel, then why is it so impossible to believe in a time-travelling key?”
“I do not believe in magical objects. Look, I’ve heard people here talking about a music box that plays the most beautiful music in the world, but it doesn’t exist; it can’t.
Music doesn’t work like that. Since checking in yesterday I’ve asked several times to see this incredible object, but conveniently it is never available. ”
“You wanted to ask the barman your questions when the Eavesdropper was behind the curtain,” Eve pointed out. “Why was that if you didn’t believe his coughing meant lies were being spoken?”
“The Eavesdropper is different,” Max replied. “He’s not an object, he’s a person. Or a ghost, more likely. He’s…” He shook his head. “That cough. No actor—no one entirely human—could produce a sound like that.”
“What about the jellyfish in the Sunset Room?” Eve asked. “What do you make of those?”
Max laughed, a short, mirthless sound. “Parlour tricks. Impressive ones, I will grant you, but parlour tricks nonetheless. In my own humble way, I’m something of a magician, and I’m familiar with illusions far more spectacular than that.
I’ve seen Howard Thurston perform onstage at the Egyptian Hall in London.
He sawed a woman in half, made a horse disappear, and caught a bullet fired from a gun with his bare hands.
The gullible amongst the audience were so impressed that they concluded he really must have magical abilities, but the truth is that these tricks simply require a lot of skill, a lot of practice, and a lot of preparation.
The truth is that Thurston needed eight train carriages to transport forty tons of equipment.
The truth is that nobody can catch a bullet in their hands.
Just because people want a thing to be true, it doesn’t make it so. Anyone with half a mind knows this.”
Before Eve could reply, a musical note rang out—clear and pure and perfectly beautiful, played by an instrument she couldn’t identify.
A flurry of other notes followed, and she immediately recognised the opening bars of one of her favourites of Max Everly’s songs, a piece called “No Man’s Nightingale.
” Max clearly recognised it too and froze.
Eve stared around, looking for the source of the music.
Then she saw it wasn’t an instrument playing Max’s music at all; it was water.
One by one, musical notes were rising up from the fountains around them.
The size of pennies, they sparkled and shimmered in the air, ringing clearer than any bell as they danced throughout the room, playing that tune Eve knew so well.
Movement blurred at the windows, and she thought it must be the last partygoers peering in to marvel at the spectacle, but when she turned to look there was no one there.
Nothing outside at all except for the mountains and the silence and the steam baths and the stars.
She returned her attention to the music sparkling in the air, felt it press into all those places of her soul that were tender and raw, and it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, but there was something purifying about it too, something healing.
Then there was that movement again at the windows, and when she looked this time there was a horse.
A grey horse staring at her through the cold glass with warm, dark eyes.
For an instant those eyes were the only thing that existed in the world, along with the music.
The eyes and the music. The music and the eyes.
And the hand holding hers in the dark. And the voice.
Today will be very hard….
People go sometimes. They just go and there’s nothing at all we can do about it….
You can do hard things, Eve….
The music came to an end, the horse vanished, and the musical notes fell like rain.
Eve stood surrounded by it, but not a single drop landed on her skin or dress or hair.
Yet Max gasped aloud as he was soaked from head to foot in a deluge so tremendous that a wave of water rushed away from him towards the door.
And for a moment—just a blink of a moment—it looked to Eve as if the remaining water drops in the air came together to form the shape of a thrashing tentacle, the tip of which flicked towards Max, knocking the hat from his head and straight into Eve’s hands.
And then it was over, and the room was quiet, without even the splish-splash of water since the fountains had all been emptied out upon the floor.
The only sound was the drip, drip of droplets falling from Max’s hair and nose and the tips of his fingers.
He looked like he had leapt into a swimming pool fully clothed.
Eve glanced at the window again, but there was no horse.
Had it been real? Had any of it been real?
Those words she had heard inside her head.
She racked her brain but couldn’t remember anyone in her life ever telling her that she could do hard things.
It was true—completely and utterly, painfully true—but she didn’t remember anyone ever saying it to her.
“Might I trouble you for my hat?” Max asked, holding out his hand.
Eve passed it over. She realised then that her fingers were trembling, and unfortunately Max noticed too.
“Something wrong?” he asked with a frown.
She swallowed hard. “No. It’s only that music can…it can make you feel a lot of things at once.”
“That is true.”
“That piece is extraordinary,” she added, her eyes flicking towards the windows. Just black sky and white stars. There were no words to explain what that song had meant to her over the years—how it had helped and healed, even when it had hurt as well.
“How nice that you think so,” Max snapped, gripping the end of his shirt and wringing it out between his hands. “But I would have preferred that Eve Shaw—the real one, I mean—had been the first to hear it, since she was the one I composed it for.”
He left the room without another word to her, squelching with each step.
Bella had melted away too, so Eve was left alone with the fountains and her tangle of confused thoughts.
Could another version of herself have been here at the hotel almost twenty years ago?
Mrs. Roth had told her that there were three time-travelling keys.
Perhaps one of them took a person back to the time of the First World War?
But if Eve was successful in finding a sheet of writing paper and preventing Bella’s death, then she would never have come to the White Octopus Hotel in the first place.
She would be a different person—entirely ordinary.
No time travelling, no octopuses, and no rabbits.
If Max was telling the truth, then did this mean she had already failed?
Or was it yet another thread of her current life that would be unravelled if she succeeded?
“No Man’s Nightingale” was such astonishing music and the thought that it could have been written for her—even a different version of her current self—was enough to make her tingle all the way down to her toes.
Yet at the same time, there was that ever-present, creeping prickle of shame. It wasn’t right. Music like that didn’t get written for people like Eve.