Chapter 40
Within the hour they’d checked several staircases, but there were no hidden entrances leading to a lower floor.
When they arrived at the final staircase, Eve recognised it from the photo of the wounded servicemen.
This part of the hotel was still lit with gas lamps, and she looked up at the landing above through their flickering glow.
The feeling of déjà vu came sweeping over her once again, a crashing wave. Her gaze slid to Max, beside her in the shadows, and she felt even more strongly than before that sense that she’d known him in some other life.
“Well, this is the last staircase,” he said. “There is no basement.”
He was probably right. It was late and Eve was tired and yet, and yet…she had the strongest feeling that there was a basement. She could sense it down there, hidden beneath the stones.
“The lift,” she said. “We haven’t checked that.”
“I looked earlier,” Max replied. “There’s no button for any basement.”
“I know, but we haven’t looked after dark,” Eve replied. “Perhaps it only appears then, like the night octopuses.”
They returned to the lobby, which was hushed and quiet. The lift was no longer in operation and the lift attendant had gone for the evening.
“It’s locked,” Max said, pointing out the padlock.
Eve looked across the room at the reception desk with its wall of cubbyholes.
But when she examined them, they only contained keys for the guest bedrooms. She turned her attention to the desk instead, quickly rummaging through the drawers, but there was nothing there either.
She was just wondering whether it might be possible to use the letter opener to break the lock on the lift when there was a metallic clanging sound behind her, as if an object had suddenly fallen from a height.
She turned around in time to see a white tentacle disappearing back into the wall.
A single key shone upon the floor. Like the others, this one had a White Octopus fob, but instead of containing a room number it was stamped with a word: Lift.
“How many octopuses are hiding in the walls, do you imagine?” Max asked, frowning at the marble.
“I think it’s just one,” Eve replied.
It was her octopus. And she didn’t know how it had found its way here, but she was certain it was trying to help. She slipped the key into the lock, and it turned with a thunk. When they stepped into the cage of the lift, Eve looked at the numbers on the brass plaque and smiled.
“There,” she said, pointing.
A single B-for-“basement” button that hadn’t been there before. And another octopus to tick off the list too, because there was a small, dark silhouette of the creature wound around the letter. Now there was only one more still to find. Along with the two clocks.
“Are you sure about this?” Max asked as they both stared at the button. “If the Roths are happy to have a mirror that strangles people out in the open, then how bad would an object have to be in order to be banned?”
“I’m sure.”
Eve pressed the button, which immediately lit up.
And then the lift began to descend. She had no idea what she really expected to find down there.
She’d never been in a basement before but had the vague image of a place filled with various disused and unwanted items. There would be dust and darkness, perhaps the scent of damp and decay.
Rather like the hotel she’d left behind in 2016.
“We should have brought a lamp,” Max muttered.
But then the basement came into view, and it wasn’t dark like they’d been expecting.
The lift clanked to a halt, Eve slid back the grille, and they stepped out.
A neon sign on the wall cast a green glow over the room and spelled out The Luggage Room Bar.
The walls were panelled with gleaming wood and fixed with lamps.
Rows of steamer trunks were lined up upon the checkerboard tiled floor and stacked on racks.
One end of the room was taken up with a small bar and a row of bar stools.
The shelf behind it was filled with bottles of gin, dry vermouth, and absinthe, while the shelf above contained a neat line of identical crystal coupes.
An attractive black-and-gold drinks menu was propped up against the bar, but Eve saw that it only contained one cocktail:
The Obituary. To toast unwanted baggage.
She walked over to a large wooden steamer trunk covered in stickers depicting far-off locations. When she flipped over the label tied to the trunk, she was startled by the sight of her own name printed there.
“Look.” Max indicated the suitcase next to it. “This one has your name on it too. And so does this one here. In fact…are all of these trunks yours?”
Eve shook her head. “But I didn’t bring anything like this with me.”
She reached for the nearest one, unfastened the clasps, and threw back the lid. An abundance of paper exploded from within, each covered in drawings she recognised from her sketchbooks back home. When they opened the other trunks, they found more and more paper in those too.
“These can’t be here,” Eve said. “They’re back in my apartment.”
Max picked up a sketch and frowned at it. “Why are these all hidden away?” He looked irritated. “No one creates art to put it in a box. Isn’t the point to send it out in search of those people who might hear it, or see it, and feel something worth feeling?”
Eve shrugged. They were her drawings. It was up to her what she did with them.
“Huh,” Max grunted.
“What?”
“Nothing. I didn’t have you pegged for a coward, that’s all.”
Eve gave him an icy look. “My octopuses come alive sometimes,” she reminded him. “They splatter ink around too. That would be a difficult thing to explain to an art gallery.”
“So what? If you wanted to find a way to display your art, you would.”
“Why would I ever display it?” Eve snapped. “People wouldn’t like my octopuses. They’d be horrified.”
Frightened, even. Sickened…
“In my experience,” Max replied, “it’s better to allow people to make up their own minds.”
Eve could feel herself bristling. He made it sound so easy, and she was glad when a tentacle suddenly flailed out from one of the pages, followed by another and another.
As always, they were huge and white and thick with muscle, a real-life monster.
But to her intense annoyance, Max didn’t flinch, not even when one of the tentacles wrapped itself around him briefly, trailing over his chest and around his shoulders in a way that was almost…
intimate. He flashed a smile at her. “Extraordinary. Anyone with any sense at all would think so. And damn the rest of them.”
She felt the first, faintest flicker of doubt. Could it be possible that not all people would be horrified, after all? The idea was inconceivable. The tentacles whipped back into the drawing so fast that they stirred up the loose pages again, and one of them practically fluttered into Max’s hand.
To her dismay it was one of the drawings she’d done of Max himself, using a photo she’d found online. It was a sketch she’d taken great care over and now that she saw it in his hands, she felt compelled to offer an explanation.
“It wasn’t about you,” she hurried to say.
It would be more humiliation than she could stand if he ever found out about the crush she’d had on him, that strange tug she still had towards him, that yearning to pull him close and never let him go.
“It was your music. It…It lifted me up from such blackness.”
He gave her a sharp look before fixing his eyes back on the drawing. “Well,” he said. “You lifted me up first.”
Eve’s face was burning. “I’m going to check the other trunks.”
There had to be something useful down here, or else why would the octopus have helped her find the basement? She turned to another big steamer trunk on the floor, but when she examined it, she saw that the name on the luggage label wasn’t hers. It read Lieutenant Max Everly.