Chapter 30
Max couldn’t sleep. His chest was on fire, and he couldn’t lie still, and he couldn’t battle his memories, and he couldn’t stand it.
His thoughts kept trying to return to plans of escape in the spring, but there was nothing to escape back to anymore.
Finally, he struggled out of bed and slipped into the corridor, limping up and down the maze of hallways until he found himself out on the rooftop terrace.
The servicemen came up here when the sun was shining sometimes, to rest on the loungers, or read books, or paint.
The hotel staff had provided them with art materials, and some of the men had dabbled with paintbrushes to while away the time.
Max had never been up here at night before, though.
It was clear and moonbright and he supposed it must be extraordinarily cold, yet he couldn’t feel it.
The outline of mountains rose in the distance, their pitiless peaks piercing the very top of the world.
The moon had tumbled down from the sky and drowned in the lake, the orb shining from beneath the black water.
Snow lay all over the roof, glowing almost pale pink in the night.
He knew something must have broken inside his head because he didn’t feel real.
He wasn’t a person. He was a flock of black birds that were all flying in different directions, scattering towards the snowy peaks in the distance.
He was here and not here. Already gone. Finished, at last.
As Max walked barefoot over the roof, he didn’t feel the cold of the snow underfoot.
When he reached the balcony, he climbed up onto the low stone wall, sparkling and slippery with ice, and stared down at the long, long drop to the flagstones below.
He must have been six or seven floors up.
It’d probably be a quick death. One step; that’s all it would take.
There was an icy breeze, but it didn’t touch him because he was already a ghost, just like the others.
A man climbed up onto the wall to his right; Max could see his coat out of the corner of his eye and guessed it was Thomas, come to be with him at the end. They stood side by side for a while, regarding the drop below, but then a woman’s voice said, “Bit cold for a walk, isn’t it?”
Max looked around and it wasn’t Thomas beside him at all, but Eve. For a moment, he thought he must be imagining her. But she didn’t melt away as he stared at her, just calmly held his gaze with her different-coloured eyes.
“What are you doing?” he croaked.
“What are you doing?” she countered.
“I’m…” His gaze slid to the drop again. His foot crept a tiny bit closer to the edge. “Well, I’m…I just don’t see any point, that’s all. To any of this. I feel so damned strange, and I can’t find my way back to how I was before. I’ve…I’ve only got half a soul left.”
Eve was silent for a moment. Then she carefully reached for his hand, brushing his fingertips with hers. “Thomas knew you,” she said quietly. “The real you. What would he say?”
“What?”
“Thomas. If he was here with us now, what would he say to you?”
“He would…well, he’d say…”
“Get down from there, you blasted fool!”
Max heard the words clearly and realised that Thomas was there after all, leaning against the balcony beside Eve, the tip of his cigarette glowing red in the dark as he looked right at Max and shook his head with an expression of utter contempt.
Max stared, but Thomas quickly vanished, leaving just a twist of smoke to mark where he had been.
But his presence had shaken Max out of his own head and made him feel a tiny bit more like himself—or, at least, the man he used to be.
“Climb down,” he said to Eve beside him, horrified to see how close to the edge she was. One wrong move, one slip upon the ice, and they would both go over.
To his relief, she stepped down at once, offering her hand to help Max too.
He took it, but then his heel slid on the icy stone and he felt himself fall towards the abyss that had seemed so welcoming a moment ago but now seemed wrong, all wrong.
And worse, he was pulling Eve with him. He tried to let go, but she tightened her grip, and she was stronger than she looked, grinding the bones of his hand together, and then there were tentacles, eight of them, bursting from her chest to curl around him, twisting into his clothes, wrapping around his limbs.
Eve and the octopus dragged him bodily from the wall.
He landed in a crumpled heap beside her and now he could feel the cold at last. The snow was soaking through his pyjamas and the air was freezing, sharp as bayonets in the dark.
The tentacles were gone but he saw that Eve was bleeding, scarlet drops splattering onto the snow.
And there was ink, too—on the snow, and on his pyjamas, and glistening upon the stone balustrades.
“What are you?” he gasped.
“A monster, I suppose.”
He wanted to deny it, but the words faltered in his throat. Ordinary women didn’t have tentacles. His head throbbed so badly that even his eyes ached.
“The tentacles…” he began.
“There isn’t a name for whatever I am,” Eve said.
“You’re bleeding—”
“It’ll be all right.”
She pulled a scarf from her pocket and used it to stop the bleeding.
They were sat up now with their backs against the wall, and for the first time, Max noticed that the inky sky above was filled with an impossible number of impossibly bright stars.
Part of him wished she had just let him go.
It would have been easy to take one last step into the night, whereas the road ahead, back to normal life, was long and hard and his soul ached at the thought of attempting it.
“I don’t think I will ever be happy again,” he whispered, hardly realising that he was speaking out loud.
“Someone once told me that striving for happiness is a burden,” Eve said. “And that you should look for moments of contentedness in a life of quiet sadness instead.”
“Good advice,” Max muttered.
“It was terrible advice,” Eve replied. “Listen, quiet sadness is no good. It’s not enough. You should not aim for that. You should never aim for that. You should pursue a life of the fiercest happiness instead. With everything you’ve got.”
“I’m afraid of being happy,” he said. “Aren’t you? Isn’t anyone with any sense? Why do you care anyway? What’s one more broken serviceman to you?”
Eve was silent for a moment, then she said, “You are not broken. Don’t say that. And don’t think it.” She stood up. “Come on. Come back to bed.”
His head was such a tangled mess that for a wild moment he thought she meant her bed.
And for an even wilder moment, it felt normal, and right, and like something she had said to him dozens—no, hundreds—of times before.
Like they were a couple and had been for decades.
He could almost feel pale, ghostly tentacles winding their way into all the dark corners of his soul, all those parts that were broken and bruised, and he wondered if Eve could be a witch, if that could be the explanation, if it was the only one that made any sense.
He realised suddenly that he was the one now wearing the coat, that she must have slipped it around his shoulders at some point and that she was shivering in the night.
And he also realised, as he followed her from the roof, that he had not thanked her for saving his life.
He wondered if he should do so now. He wanted to give back the coat, but she was walking so quickly that he almost struggled to keep up.
Soon they were back inside, in one of the bathrooms, and he was scrubbing the ink from his skin while Eve went to fetch him some spare clothes.
She seemed to be gone a curiously long while, and he was shivering again with the cold by the time she passed a clean set of hospital blues through the door.
When he finally got back to his bed, he wanted only to close his eyes and not think about anything at all.