Chapter 46
Upon checking out, all guests must return to the time they’re originally from. Should any guest attempt time travel without a key, the results would be…distressing….
The apples on the tiles were still apples, but they were no longer three-dimensional.
They were shiny, flat discs of paint. When Eve went to pick one up, it immediately began to wither and decay, painted maggots writhing from the flesh before the entire thing dissolved into tiny flakes of paint that stuck to her skin.
She brushed them off, and the small movement of air caused the other apples to rot into little piles too.
She stood up, relieved to have escaped the room in one piece.
She wondered how much time had passed since she’d been gone.
Darkness pressed up against the windows, so it was still the middle of the night, but she had no idea which night.
Had she been gone for seconds? Hours? Days?
Perhaps a week had passed, and the hotel had already thrown its last party, evicted its guests, and closed its doors for good.
It certainly seemed silent enough. She tried not to panic.
Surely she wasn’t too late, not after finally finding the last octopus on the music box.
She was so close. Only two more clocks to find… .
She pulled the scavenger hunt card from her pocket and tried to write the music box octopus into the bottom space.
But as soon as she penned in the words, they faded away into nothing.
She stared at the card and tried again but the same thing happened.
Perhaps this octopus didn’t count because the music box vanished?
Or perhaps it wasn’t working because the scavenger hunt was over and someone else had already won the prize… .
Eve was about to take the stairs down to the lower floor when a bell rang and, to her surprise, the lift arrived.
The lights were on, but when the grille slid back, it was unoccupied.
She walked over and stepped inside. The buttons included no B like there’d been before.
Instead, there was an entirely new button—a gleaming P.
She pressed it and the lift began to travel up.
Finally, it stopped, and discharged her onto a small landing with a single door sporting a brass P. Eve raised her hand to knock, but then the door opened, and a man stood on the other side. He was very young—no more than nineteen—and for a confused moment Eve thought it must be one of her POWs.
“Lieutenant?” she asked, squinting at him.
“No, miss. It’s Luca,” he replied. “Won’t you come in?”
Her head ached unbearably. “What is this place?”
Luca looped his arm through hers and led her inside. “This is the Sugar Room.”
The Sugar Room only appears at certain times for certain reasons to certain people, Mrs. Roth’s voice echoed in her head. Some say it only appears for soulmates….
“You’ve missed the Moonlight Tea, I’m afraid,” Luca said. “That was served at midnight, but you’re just in time for the Afternight Tea, and that’s always been my personal favourite.”
Eve sat down in the chair Luca showed her to and desperately tried to clear her thoughts.
The Sugar Room was like the inside of a jewel box.
The floor and the tables were all made from jade marble.
Lights hung from the ceiling in elegant glass teardrops that contrasted with the creamy stucco walls.
The chairs were upholstered in ivory velvet, brushed through with swirls of pistachio green.
A long marble counter filled the space at the other end, and on this, carefully placed beneath gleaming glass domes, were the most extraordinarily beautiful delicacies.
One shelf was filled with Paris-Brest cream cakes and light-as-air chouquettes sprinkled with pearl sugar.
Another held strawberry chocolate mirror-glaze cakes and layered dacquoises topped with jewelled raspberries.
The air smelled of melting chocolate and brown sugar, warm honey and salty pretzels.
And there was another clock. Constructed from pink mirror glass and golden brass, it did not have a single number upon its face, but words instead.
Most of these were food items, such as Croissants, Gateaux de Voyage, or White Chocolate Octopus.
But there were other words upon the clock face too, such as Truth, Conversation, and Revelations.
There were no windows in the Sugar Room, so it was impossible to know what time it was.
Eve took the scavenger hunt card from her pocket and wrote in the clock, waiting to see if the words disappeared.
This time, though, they stayed right where they were.
There was only one more clock to find. And one more octopus, apparently.
“What time is it?” Eve asked Luca.
“Time for champagne,” he replied, nodding towards the clock.
Both clock hands were pointing to Champagne and Luca was carrying a silver tray in his hands with two crystal coupes. The sight of them led Eve to recall the ruins of the ballroom she’d visited back in 2016 and the broken glasses crushed upon the floor, which made her head spin worse than ever.
“Champagne will help,” Luca said, placing the glasses in front of her. “That’s what my grandfather always said when it came to time travel.”
“Why are there two glasses?” Eve asked.
Luca raised an eyebrow. “I’ve got you down as a reservation for two.”
“Got me down where?” Eve replied. “I didn’t make a reservation.”
Just then there was a frantic banging on the door outside, so loud and sudden that she almost knocked over the champagne.
“Eve?” Max’s voice called. “Are you in there?”
Luca swiftly crossed to the door and opened it to reveal Max on the other side.
“Welcome to the Sugar Room, Mr. Everly,” Luca said.