Chapter 32
This was, Eve supposed, the moment when she ought to feel afraid.
She had never been pulled through a wall before, and this was hardly the type of thing that happened to normal people.
She was not particularly startled by the tentacle itself.
After all, it was an old friend, but it normally only held her for a moment or two—just long enough to let her know she wasn’t entirely alone.
Then it would vanish back into the sketchbook.
Now it disappeared through the floor with a flick of its black tip, leaving Eve to assess her surroundings.
On the other side of the wall was no dusty cavity, but another corridor—a mirror of the one she had just left.
Except this one was decorated, entirely, in ink.
Black ink that glistened beneath her shoes and shimmered on the walls around her.
And here, at last, were paintings. Not the vapid, saccharine Bouguereau she’d spotted downstairs.
There were no rosy cheeks or sweet smiles here.
No, these were dark and despairing. These were paintings worth looking at.
The corridor stretching before Eve seemed impossibly long, and there were paintings hung on either side, like a gallery.
Down the walls, she saw monsters of every description, barbed wire and black clouds, skeletons and sin.
She ought to have screamed, perhaps, or run.
Instead, she turned to look at the nearest painting.
It portrayed a woman staring into a mirror, at a reflection that had no face.
The painting drew Eve like a magnet; they all did.
She gazed at the canvas and felt…better.
Lighter. The paintings were all disturbing in some way, and yet she was comforted by them.
She recalled what Mrs. Roth had told her about the time-travelling guests—the sevens—and that there were three rooms. She already knew her mother had had one of the other two keys when she’d visited.
But who had the other one? Or had Mrs. Roth said something about it being lost?
Eve went to touch the canvas, but then something happened to the keys.
She thought they’d turned to ice at first, but when the grains began to pour through her hands, she realised they were sugar.
Before long, the keys were gone and the frame was empty, only a sparkling pile of sugar remaining upon the floor.
She tried to brush the stickiness from her fingers as she continued down the corridor.
But no matter how far she walked, she never seemed to reach the end of it.
She started to wonder how long she’d been there and whether she would ever leave.
There were worse places, she supposed. At least it was calm here and peaceful.
And there was music too. She could hear it playing—softly to begin with, but getting louder and more distinct, until she came upon a painting of a gramophone.
There was a record propped up beside it and the words on the front spelled “Frog Legs Rag.” The music spilled straight from the canvas.
Eve stood and looked at it for some time before moving on, the music becoming fainter and fainter behind her.
She walked and walked, but still the end of the corridor never got any closer and perhaps there simply wasn’t an end at all.
Time passed and Eve couldn’t tell whether it was minutes or hours, but eventually she found herself back at the place where she’d started, in front of the painting of the woman whose reflection had no face.
There was no signature, she realised. In fact, there had been no signatures on any of the paintings she’d seen.
Could they be Roth’s missing artworks? Yet, these paintings couldn’t possibly all have been produced by the same person; there were too many styles and mediums.
She reached out to take the painting down from its hook, thinking that if she removed the canvas from the frame, then perhaps there might be some clue as to its ownership written on the back.
But when she removed it, she found another painting hidden on the wall behind it—a different painting of a glossy black bird.
She removed this one as well, only to reveal another painting, and another, and another, until there were dozens of paintings spread across the floor by her feet.
The newest painting revealed upon the wall showed a rooftop.
Eve took a step closer, feeling her skin burn as her octopus tattoo made its way to the back of her hand.
It was a nighttime painting of the hotel’s rooftop, hundreds of stars glittering in the sky above the faint silhouette of mountain peaks.
Two people stood on the low wall, perilously close to the edge.
It was hard to tell much about them since they had their backs to the painter, but one was a woman in a fur coat and the other was a barefoot man in pyjamas.
They were almost, but not quite, holding hands, and Eve had the strong sense that they meant to jump.
It would be death, from that height. Death and broken bones and blood freezing on flagstones.
The painted shadows around the two people seemed birdlike—an explosion of dark wings disappearing into some unknowable place.
Eve shivered. But when she reached out to remove this painting from the wall, her octopus tattoo unfurled its tentacles too, right out of her skin and into the canvas, which dissolved into black feathers of ink, and then the tentacles were pulling her through the frame, and through the wall, and the air was suddenly freezing as she staggered out onto a daylight rooftop.
“Would you stop that?” Eve snapped. “I’m not a doll to be moved about a doll’s house!”
The tentacles flailed around her for a moment before withdrawing into her skin and lying still, and Eve picked herself up in a disgruntled fashion.
Unlike the dark nighttime roof she had just viewed, the sun was high in the sky.
She could hear the chatter of guests floating up from the grounds, and the air was filled with the promise of snow.
It was far too cold to be outside without a coat and she thought longingly of the glossy sable fur in the cloakroom downstairs.
She looked down at herself with a grimace, seeing that she was covered in ink.
It dripped from her hair, and stained her dress in splatters, and was sticky against her skin.
Ink blots and smudges were the reason she always wore black at home, but she’d never been so thoroughly coated in ink as this.
Someone coughed behind her, and she spun around to see that she wasn’t alone on the roof, after all.
Max was there, staring as all the colour drained from his face.
“Ah.” Eve lifted her hands in what she hoped was an appeasing gesture. “Please don’t scream.”
Strangely, he didn’t seem afraid. There was a different emotion in his expression. He took a step closer, looking at Eve as if this was the first time he was actually seeing her. “Good God,” he said. “It is you.”