Chapter 41
Max looked at the trunk dubiously. “There’s not a chance I’m opening that.”
Eve supposed he preferred his unwanted baggage to stay locked away, but she was still smarting from his remarks about her cowardice, and it was impossible to resist the spiteful urge to poke her fingers into whatever old wounds Max was trying to keep hidden.
“Don’t!” he cried as she reached out, but it was too late.
Her fingers snapped open the latches and she threw back the lid. When she peered inside it was filled with paper, just like in her trunks, only these weren’t drawings, they were letters. Hundreds of them…
“Here, shift that out of the way, can’t you?” a voice grumbled. “I’m trying to practise this card trick.”
Eve turned around, but the luggage room was different.
There were sandbags pressed up against the walls and mud scattered over the floor in wet lumps.
And she and Max were no longer alone. There was a redheaded boy of about seventeen sprawled on the floor beside one of the armchairs, dressed in a dirt-splattered army uniform, using a trunk as a table to shuffle a deck of cards.
A bedraggled-looking duck sat by his side.
At the bar was a lanky man in his twenties wearing glasses and writing a letter.
And crouching on the ground nearby was a dark-haired teenager shuffling through a trunk full of records.
“There you are,” the dark-haired boy said, glancing up. “We were about to send out a search party. Have you seen my gramophone anywhere?”
He was looking straight at Max. Eve felt him stiffen beside her and saw his face drain of colour.
“I…” His voice was a croak. “I…No. I haven’t seen it.”
“Never mind about that,” the redhead said. “Come and have some trench cake. It arrived from Betty this morning.”
“I’ll get some tea on,” the man in the glasses said, standing up. Then he glanced at Max and went still. “Something wrong, old man?” he said quietly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Max remained silent.
The redheaded boy sighed. “Out with it then. Who’s dead now?”
When he took a step back, Max’s heel hit the trunk behind him. He turned to look down at the contents—casualty reports and letters to bereaved loved ones.
Dear Miss Thornton…regret to inform…your fiancé, Rupert Lawson…
Dear Mrs. Waugh…with deepest regrets…your son John…
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones…regret to tell you…your son, Thomas…
Died of his wounds…
Behaved most gallantly…
Killed in action…
“I say,” a voice said. “That’s not quite true, is it?”
The dark-haired boy was beside them, both hands pressed to his stomach, blood running through his fingers and splattering onto the papers. The side of his head was completely missing—just a mess of brain and bone.
“If you’re going to write to Mother and Father, then you could at least have the decency to tell the truth and say that you shot me.”
Max took a deep breath. “You’re not Thomas,” he said. “And you’re not here.”
“No thanks to you, old man.”
Eve slammed the trunk shut, hoping this would put an end to the awful scene.
To her relief, the ghosts in the room disappeared at once, but it took a little while for the echoes of it to fade.
She realised she could hear shells bursting and the sound seemed to rumble up through the floor, the vibrations so strong that they sent another trunk sliding from a shelf to burst open, spilling out dozens and dozens of paintings. The luggage label read Nikolas Roth.
The paintings were nothing like the sickly-sweet Bouguereaus upstairs.
They were like the ones she’d seen in the secret corridor—strange, twisted creations, dark, personal, and meaningful, clearly painted by someone in great pain.
Once again, there must have been many different artists contained within this box.
There was such a range of styles and subjects that they couldn’t possibly have all been produced by the same person.
Then Eve’s eye fell on a painting that was very like one she’d seen in the secret corridor before.
It depicted three hotel keys—for Room 27, Room 17, and Room 7.
Some paintings, she knew, could appear to change the longer you looked at them, but this painting really was changing.
The key in the middle, to Room 17, was becoming more and more distinct, glowing ever more golden than the others.
Eve stepped over and tried to touch the key, to grab it, to take it, but it was still too much a part of the art, still not quite real enough.
So she reached right into the painting for it, gasping a little at how freezing the ink was against her skin as her hand disappeared into the canvas.
She could feel it there, the key. She could feel it becoming more and more real, turning into cold metal beneath her touch.
She was just about to pull her hand back when small fingers brushed hers from within the canvas, fingers sticky with apple juice.
It was Bella—it had to be. Trying to get out into the real world.
Trying to snatch the key back. Eve tightened her grip around it, took a deep breath, and yanked it right out of the painting.
There was a sudden flash. Eve wasn’t sure whether it was from the shellfire she could still hear, or that photographer’s pop that had gone off inside her head before.
There wasn’t time to dwell on it because, one by one, the luggage trunks were disappearing and so were the paintings.
Fading from existence like a pencil sketch being rubbed out.
The next second, the bar and the furniture and the glowing neon sign were all gone too, leaving Eve and Max alone in an empty black room.
The key remained real and solid in Eve’s hand, though, and the cage lift was bathed in the golden glow of its lights.
There was nothing left for them in the basement, so they made their way towards the lift and soon they were back in the lobby.
For long moments, they stood in the silence without speaking.
“I’m sorry,” Eve finally said. “I shouldn’t have opened the trunk—”
“You shouldn’t be here at all!” Max exclaimed.
To Eve’s surprise, his hands wrapped around her bare shoulders and her skin tingled beneath his touch, and she liked it—liked the feel of his hands on her.
“Believe me,” he went on, “nothing good comes from poking old wounds. Put a stop to this, I’m begging you.
You could go back to your life, try to make something of it, try to find a little happiness for yourself.
Bella is dead and the dead should be left alone. ”
“I’m not leaving this hotel without the writing paper,” Eve replied. “I’ll burn the place to the ground first.”
Max sighed and stood back, shaking his head as he let her go. “So be it, then. We’ll see this thing through. I suppose we were always going to.”
Eve looked down at the key in her hand. Another time-travelling one, at last. Surely this must be how she got back to 1918. And perhaps the last octopus or one of the two remaining clocks was hiding there. Or perhaps they were in the Sugar Room. Either way, she had to look, to find out for herself.
“I need to go to Room Seventeen,” she said.
“It can’t wait until the morning?” Max asked. “If the room is occupied, the guest might be a bit startled by uninvited company arriving in the middle of the night.”
“I don’t care,” Eve replied. “But I don’t think there’s anyone there anyway. I’ve knocked several times and there’s never been an answer.”
They went to the first floor and were soon standing outside Room 17. Eve put the key in the lock and opened the door into a guest bedroom that looked much like her own.
“When I used my key to go back in time,” Eve said, “I had to use it from the inside to get to a different version of the room. Maybe this is the same thing.”
“Wait.” Max’s fingers brushed softly against her arm. “If you go back there, to 1918, you won’t like what you find. It would be immeasurably better if you did not go at all.”
Eve frowned at him. If he truly believed she had saved his life, then didn’t he care if he died?
“I don’t know where else to look for the last octopus,” she said. “Or the clocks or the Sugar Room.”
She put the key into the lock, but when she turned it, nothing happened and the corridor outside remained the same.
She felt a wave of frustration. Why was this key hidden if it didn’t do anything?
Was it all just a game, with no real prize at the end of it?
Were they simply rats in a maze? She looked at Max and then back at the key.
The only thing different from how it had worked in Room 27 was that this time, she wasn’t alone.
“Step outside,” she said.
Max immediately looked suspicious. “Why?”
“I want to try something.”
He walked out and Eve put the key back into the lock.
Slowly, she turned it, and at once, a bright white light exploded inside her head.
The room around her vanished and she was falling, falling, falling.
And then she was lying on the floor—or was it the ceiling?
And there was that same sense of not quite being able to work out how her body functioned.
Finally, though, she sat up. She was still in Room 17, but the art deco beauty was gone.
It was far more basic now, with an ancient rug upon the wooden floor, and a simple single bed, and a washstand in the corner.
And it was morning. Sunlight filtered in through the faded lace curtains.