Chapter 24
The two gentlemen guests who’d been enjoying their cigars rose swiftly to their feet and fled the room, leaving only Max and Eve with the staff member.
She stared at the ringing phone, her skin prickling at the thought of the dead trying to get through.
What would she hear on the other end if she answered it?
Bella’s incoherent baby gabble? The idea was horrible, and she shuddered, suddenly cold.
When she looked at Max, he appeared similarly appalled.
His mouth was a grim line as he took a step towards it, and Eve had the sense that he didn’t intend to answer the call, but to throw the phone straight out of a window instead.
Before he could do so, it abruptly stopped ringing and the room fell quiet once more.
Eve walked over and yanked open the drawer of the telephone table, half hoping that it might contain some writing paper, but there was nothing inside but cobwebs.
“You’ve missed one,” Max said. He was looking over her shoulder at the scavenger list still in her hand.
“Where?”
He pointed to the fan-shaped mirror on the other side of the room. “There.”
She looked into the glass and immediately saw the black clock reflected on the wall. It ought to have been hanging directly above her head, but when she glanced around, there was nothing there; it only existed inside the mirror.
“They call it the ghost clock, I believe,” Max said.
Before Eve could reply, another guest burst into the room—a young man in his early twenties, with a pencil-thin moustache and a great deal of styling cream in his hair.
“What does a fellow have to do to get a smoke around here?” he demanded.
“I will happily walk you through the selection in our humidors, sir,” the staff member said politely.
Moments later the guest was sprawled in one of the armchairs, puffing away at a cigar in an agitated fashion. “Take my advice,” he announced, looking at Max and Eve. “Don’t go anywhere near the sixth floor.”
“Why’s that?” Eve asked. She hadn’t been up there yet herself but had heard one of the other guests remark that there was nothing on that floor except staff quarters.
Most of the staff lived in, due to the hotel’s remoteness.
Still, she meant to check for herself, just in case the elusive Sugar Room was up there.
The guest scowled and took a deep drag on the cigar. “There’s an octopus. A real one, I mean. In the walls. Damn thing almost throttled me with its tentacles. No scavenger hunt is worth a chap’s life.”
Eve looked the guest up and down but could see no sucker marks on his throat, no indication of any ink on his clothes.
“If the lift hadn’t arrived right when it did,” he went on, “well, I shudder to think.”
“And yet you are still gracing us with your presence all the same,” Max remarked. “Not in any hurry to leave after your fearsome encounter?”
The guest looked affronted. “Don’t be so sure,” he said. “I may well pack my bags and check out this very night. Why, just the other day my reflection reached out of that mirror and tried to strangle me. No scavenger hunt is worth a chap’s life.”
“You said that already,” Max said.
He was looking intently at the guest. Perhaps, like Eve, he suspected that something wasn’t right.
It didn’t seem as if the man’s fear was quite real.
Sprawled in his armchair, puffing away on his cigar, the guest didn’t look particularly concerned.
And why would he come back to this room at all if his reflection had actually tried to strangle him?
When Eve glanced at the mirror, she saw that the guest in the reflection wore a different expression altogether; he was smirking.
She suspected he was just trying to keep fellow competitors away from the sixth floor, probably to put them off the scent of whatever clocks and octopuses were up there.
She decided she would visit the sixth floor next, but just then the clock in the mirror chimed the hour for three o’clock and Eve realised she was late for her afternoon tea with Mrs. Roth.