Chapter 39
As she went downstairs, she was aware of some of the guests pointing it out to one another and exclaiming in surprise, but no one seemed particularly bothered.
There were far stranger things, after all, in this hotel.
When she joined Max in the restaurant, he couldn’t fail to notice the tattoo, now on her shoulder, and, to her surprise, he blushed.
“Why are you blushing?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“I’m not blushing,” he returned, picking up his napkin and laying it across his lap. “I’ve never blushed in my life. And certainly not at an octopus.”
She shrugged. There was something liberating about having the tattoo on display like this, instead of being wrapped up in her usual black turtleneck.
The green lace was so soft against her skin that it practically felt as if she wasn’t wearing anything at all.
It would be difficult, at home, to go back to hiding.
But, of course, when she checked out, she would forget she’d ever done anything different.
And if she succeeded in winning the writing paper, then she would have a different life and no tattoo at all.
After dinner, Eve and Max searched the hotel for several more hours but found no further octopuses.
It was approaching midnight by the time they returned to the Smoking Room.
The thin guest from before was there, sprawled half-asleep in one of the armchairs, but most people had already retired for the night.
Eve lowered her voice and said, “What about the basement? Didn’t that guest say there were forbidden objects in there?”
“There isn’t a basement,” Max replied.
“How do you know?”
“We’ve been over every inch of this place, and I haven’t seen any stairways going underground, have you? There’s no button on the lift either.”
Eve glanced back at the guest as he got up from his chair and stared into the mirror.
“He was right about the octopus in the wall,” she pointed out.
“Well, even a broken clock—” Max began.
Before he could go on, the other guest let out a cry as his reflection suddenly lunged right out of the mirror and clamped both hands around his throat.
The guest immediately jerked back, stumbling out of the reflection’s grip.
In the mirror, the reflection smiled—a cold and oddly vacant expression—before merging back into mimicking the guest, who had whirled around to grab a nearby humidor.
He hurled it straight at the mirror, shattering the glass, which fell to the ground in dagger-sharp pieces.
“That’s seven years bad luck, Mr. Morton,” said a voice from the doorway.
Anna stood there holding her rabbit in her arms, cradled against the scarlet silk of her gown.
“I was about to be killed,” the guest replied, his voice a screech. “He was going to kill me!”
“I doubt it,” Anna said. “The mirror has never murdered anyone, to my knowledge.”
“It’s happened to you before anyway, hasn’t it?” Max said, his eyes fixed upon the guest. “You told us your reflection tried to strangle you just the other day.”
The guest goggled at him. “That’s—Of course it’s never happened before, you fool! I only said that because she told me to.”
“Who?”
“Her!” He pointed with a trembling finger at Anna. “Annabella Roth!”
Eve’s breath stuck in her throat. Annabella? Her mind flew back to the napkin, lavender grey, with an octopus motif and a list of names. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. It didn’t. Her mother had crossed out “Annabella.”
“I think you have become a little overwhelmed, Mr. Morton,” Anna said. “Perhaps a shot of whiskey or some smelling salts might—”
“You’re deranged if you think I’m staying here!” the guest snarled. “I’m leaving and don’t any of you try to stop me! I won’t remain another second!”
“No one is keeping you here, sir,” Anna said pleasantly. “The lake has frozen, but I will gladly summon a sleigh to escort you to the other side.”
Without another word, she turned and left the room. The guest hurried after her, glancing fearfully into shadows as he went, as though he expected clutching hands to reach out of the walls for him.
“We could follow him,” Max said quietly. “We could leave this place too.”
“You should,” Eve said.
“But you won’t?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t check out to a time that’s not my own. Why did he call her Annabella?”
“That’s her full name, I believe,” Max replied. “Why, what does it matter?”
“My sister,” Eve replied. “Her name was Bella….”
But was it, really? For the first time, it occurred to Eve that her sister’s given name might actually have been something else, even if they had all called her Bella.
Perhaps her mother had reconsidered that crossed-out name on the napkin.
It wasn’t as if Eve had ever seen Bella’s birth certificate or any formal documents.
Max looked puzzled. “And?”
Eve shook her head. She was surely creating connections where there weren’t any. And yet. Anna had those same cheek dimples. She even had a rabbit. And Jane’s words from the night of the Sunset Room party rang in her ears.
You look so alike….
“Do you think that guest was telling the truth about Anna?” she asked. “That she told him to say those things?”
“Yes, I believe him,” Max replied. “When he came in here the other day talking about that octopus in the walls and the mirror, it was too casual. He wasn’t scared—not like he was just then. He was reciting lines.”
“But why would Anna tell him to say something like that?”
“I don’t know. The magic might be real, but some of this is still a performance, a setup. And if we don’t know what game we’re playing, then we’re not going to be able to win.”
“I am going to win,” Eve said. “I’ve got to.”
“You told me once that we have to make peace with the past and you were right.”
Eve looked down at the broken mirror. Every shard reflected back a rabbit. She saw a long ear in one, a bright eye in another.
“The past refuses to make peace with me,” she said.
Behind them, the telephone began to ring, loud and shrill and insistent. Eve shuddered, wondering if the call was for her or for Max, but the next second there was a thud as something hit the floorboards and rolled, coming to rest beside her shoe—a single perfect red apple.
Thud.
Thud, thud.
Thud, thud, thud.
Several more apples rolled across the floor towards them.
“Where are they coming from?” Max exclaimed.
“The painting.”
Eve forced herself to look at the Bouguereau artwork over the fireplace—the little girl with the apples in her hands.
The apples were supposed to be green. They had been green before.
But now they were a vibrant, fairy-tale, poisonous red.
As Eve watched, one of the painted apples in the girl’s hands swelled and morphed into something real that dropped right out of the canvas to roll across the floor and join the others.
They were coming out with alarming speed now, dozens and dozens of them.
“Let’s go.”
Eve couldn’t bear the sweet, cherubic expression on the painted girl’s face as she gazed from the painting.
She had the sudden notion that if she kept looking at her, then the girl might become real too, climb right out of the canvas and try to hold her hand.
The thought made her sick. She could feel those painted eyes on her as she strode from the room.
Max followed and Eve slammed the door closed, leaning her back against it the moment they were out in the corridor.
“What was that?” Max demanded.
“How should I know?”
“You’re white.” He took a step closer. “Why do apples scare you more than being dragged through the walls by an octopus?”
Eve took a breath, tried to steady herself. “The apples are…they’re one of the ways my sister haunts me. Apples and rabbits.”
“Your sister?”
“I killed her.” The words tumbled out. “It was my fourth birthday and I wanted to see the balloons my mum had tied to the gate. I didn’t close it behind me, and Bella got out and was killed by a car. She wasn’t even two yet.”
Her sentence ended in a bit of a choke. It still shocked her, even now, hearing it said out loud.
How could such a thing have happened? It was so wrong, so grotesque, that it must be undone, no matter the cost. She felt the thud of several more apples rolling into the door and cringed.
Within the room, the telephone continued to ring and ring and ring.
“Well,” Max said. “I am truly sorry. That is a very great weight for any child to bear.”
“Don’t waste pity on me,” Eve snapped. “I can’t stand it. And I don’t deserve it. I meant to leave the gate open. Everyone assumed afterwards that I’d forgotten my mum’s warning, but I didn’t.”
There. She’d finally said it—the words that could never be unsaid. She’d spoken the truth aloud—a truth she’d never admitted to a single soul.
“I did it on purpose,” she whispered. “I looked at that gate and I thought, So what if Bella gets out? At least she won’t get in the way of my party. I remember thinking it so clearly. It wasn’t an accident.”
Max was silent for a moment. “It was an accident,” he said at last. “In every sense that matters. You could not possibly have foreseen the consequences of your actions.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eve replied. “I am to blame. She’d still be here if it wasn’t for me.”
“That is true,” Max replied with a sigh. “And there’s no escaping the truth, not for any of us.”
Eve felt the knot in her chest loosen just slightly. She was glad Max hadn’t tried to tell her that what she’d done wasn’t monstrous or that it wasn’t her fault. Perhaps he did understand what it was like.
“But you’re mistaken if you think I pity you,” he went on.
“Perhaps you can’t comprehend how many men I’ve killed.
And not just men. Boys too.” He paused. “Friends. One of my fellow officers, Thomas, was injured in no-man’s-land.
A fatal injury, but it would have taken a long time for him to die.
” His breath caught. “Such a very long time. He stumbled over to me, through the mud, and begged me to help.”
“And?” Eve asked when he fell silent.
“And,” Max said, “I shot him in the head. I still believe it was the only thing I could have done in that moment, but there’s no forgiveness for that, no coming back from it.
Our nightmares will never go away. Sometimes the world sets us up to fail, that’s all, and there’s no good way of playing the hand you were dealt.
But I suppose that explains why you’re so fixated on the scavenger hunt. You’re after the writing paper.”
Eve nodded. The apples were still rolling into the other side of the door; she could hear them. “Maybe this isn’t a performance at all,” she said. “Maybe it’s a punishment. Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that Annabella Roth has a name very much like my sister’s?”
“But wasn’t her name just Bella—?”
“We always called her Bella. But for all I know, that was a pet name, and she was actually christened Annabella. But even if she was only ever Bella, it’s too close, too much of a coincidence.
You must have noticed that she looks like me?
And she has the same eye and hair colour as my sister, the same dimples.
There’s even a rabbit. It makes me wonder…
whether she is Bella. The woman she would have been if she’d grown up. ”
Max paused. “Anything is possible in this place. And she certainly does look a lot like you. But Anna was alive in the world years before your sister was even born. I don’t see how they can be the same person.”
He was right, and yet Eve found it impossible to dismiss the thought. “Maybe not the same person then,” she said. “But the same soul. Maybe Annabella Roth is the person she was before she was born as Bella Shaw.”
“Reincarnation?”
Eve shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t go back there.
To my old life. I can’t. I won’t.” Her gaze flicked back to Max.
“If I manage to undo the past, then I’d never come to this hotel in the first place.
You and I wouldn’t meet, here or in 1918.
So I understand if you don’t want to help, I’d even understand if you tried to stop me.
You wouldn’t be able to, by the way. But I would understand. ”
Max shook his head and looked away. “I should have died in the trenches with the others. It’s ludicrous to have made it out alive in the first place.
And then I ought to have died here again at the hotel in 1918.
And I don’t believe in God, not anymore, but sometimes it feels as though the universe, or fate, or whatever you want to call it, made a mistake.
They let me get through and survive when I wasn’t supposed to.
Some higher power wasn’t paying attention, and if time needs to snap back like an elastic band in order to get everything in its rightful place, well, I would still have had more time than I’m due, so I can hardly complain.
” He looked at her. “I’ll help you any way I can. ”
“All right,” Eve replied. She didn’t feel good about this, she realised, but deep down she thought—hoped—that perhaps Max was wrong. Perhaps she hadn’t saved his life at all. Perhaps he would be fine on his own.
“So what next?” Max asked.
“I’m going to look for this basement.”